Jank
We all seek the way. To maximize expected value. To burn as brightly and for as long as odds allow. To go infinite. Join M'Ycell MacGyver for Episode 389 of The Ωmega Phi Podcast. You have been summoned.
JANK
“Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality.
But there is, unseen by most, an underworld, a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit.”
– George A. Romero, Tales from the Darkside (TV Intro, 1983)
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Greetings and salutations everyone! Welcome to the Ωmega Phi Podcast. I am your host, Michael MacGyver. For you new listeners, I spell Michael capital ‘M’ apostrophe, capital ‘Y’, ‘c-e-l-l’... but that’s immaterial. M’Ycell MacGyver is not my real name. It’s just a compound cultural cognomen. I am primarily of descent, not from an arbitrary animal bloodline, but from the pinnacle of socio-cultural constructs: 1980s prime-time television.
The alias reflects my heritage but pseudonymity is its primary use. Privacy is a dwindling resource in these dangerous times. I have to make it harder for future grievance culture zealots to link me to my inevitably problematic blasphemies. As we are all aware, things said without hate even ten years ago, are today grounds for total social death sentences.
Regarding that, I’d like to thank you for your deluge of feedback and offer this mea culpa. I apologize to anyone I’ve hurt recently and I accept full responsibility for any harm I have caused. I’ve deleted the offensive posts in the discussion thread for last week’s episode. I acknowledge my memes as having been careless and insensitive. I would ask that you please stop sharing images of those posts to cease the spread of the psychic pain I’ve inflicted.
I’m not attempting to deflect with that statement. I only hope that my admission of guilt can serve as an example so we all might learn from this teachable moment. I am 110% at fault. It was a moral failure on my part. I should have considered how big a role anime plays in most of your lives. Once again you have my deepest most sincerest apologies. I do not wish to make anyone sad, particularly those who I seek to empower and enlighten. The so-called-news is depressing enough. Though, I suppose that’s not exactly a new development.
We’ve been living in a ‘Post-Truth’ era for longer than there’s been a name for it. People have almost always spoken from their biases. The nature of perception makes that unavoidable. The depressing part is these days they speak to those personal truths without honor. Without even knowing what ‘Honor’ is.
I used to think Captain Jean-Luc Picard made a tactical error by joining Tuesday Night Poker with the other senior crew of the starship Enterprise NCC-1701D (see - TNG: Season 7, Episodes 25&26 - “All Good Things...”). My first impression was Picard would not have a chance against the other players. Data was an android with perfect recall and the ability to compute probabilities. La Forge, a cyborg who could see through cards. Troi, a telepath. Riker, a teacher of poker master classes with a smugness level over 9000. And Crusher had recently psychologically dominated Jean-Luc by leading him on for years then friend-zoning after his first romantic advance (see - TNG: Season 7, Episode 8 - "Attached").
On multiple levels he was at a disadvantage. However, when I considered Worf also had a seat at the table, my perspective changed. Worf, an adherent to the Klingon Honor Culture. Worf, son of Mogh, balanced that broken game on the strength of his honor. And I suppose, the fear of table flipping... but mostly, it was Honor.
And so I ask myself, what is ‘Honor’? I mean—beyond a dictionary definition—what is the experience of honor? Today’s episode is an attempt to delve into what ‘Honor’ means to me. The following diegesis will not make much sense except to those educated in The Way, but for those as-yet-uninitiated, may still serve as a good spot to dive in.
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As a statistically significant amount of adventures begin, it was Friday evening. Emmanuelle and I waded eastward into the city. The setting sun bathed the purple scraped sky in a magical golden hour glare. We squinted as reflections burned our retinas and the late November wind chilled our faces.
Emmanuelle and I are kindred spirits. Together, probing the depths of experience. I care a great deal for her. She showed talent, so I took her on as my protégé to begin her instruction in The Way. Mastering memory and mind-reading. Stoicism and statistics. The weirding of probabilities. The crafting of destiny. On this fateful Friday we were prepared for battle.
We cut north-east through DogShit Park. A loud-mouthed off-leash labradoodle fixated on an out of reach albino squirrel tauntingly flicking its tail atop the lowest limb of a gnarled Bitternut Hickory. Besides being a city squirrel and an albino, it was likely defective in other ways. There was already snow on the ground. If it had any sense at all, it would have been hibernating a week ago.
We traversed DogShit Park’s snow-covered land. Its distinctive scent had been suppressed, but the hot steam rising from the sewer lined streets suggested a similar sort of stink. Vehicles slopped slush, inching incrementally almost as slowly as our feet. Trolleys clanged by jam-packed with bundled, sweating, angry meat. As one of the weighty electric-powered disease vectors ka-chunked by us, I glanced at the anguished faces of the human sardines peering out from foggy frosted windows. Heavy hell on light-rail. Despite the cold wind, I celebrated my strategy of travelling by foot.
Walking and talking, our conversation drifted to chemical horror stories. I regaled Emm with the one about a gas that animated the dead. She distilled for me a tale about an addictive liquid that came in a little glass vial. She had a taste for the macabre, but also a green streak. Once her potential was realized, she would surely chart a course for herself between the Arts of Necromancy and the Forces of Nature. Lively dark rainbows and deathly sun showers. Emm was a rarity: a balanced goth-hippy hybrid.
She was tall, almost my height. Twice as loud. Early in our friendship she had informed me she was a lesbian. Which was fine with me because she wasn’t getting any of this jelly. No Sirree. I had long since distanced myself from distractions of the flesh. Frequent listeners know my interests lay in a less physical realm. Still, Emm being a lesbian was a bonus modifier to our friendship. Not being distracted by my intensely masculine appeal would help her focus on her training.
Upon learning of her orientation I remarked, “Goth, Hippy, Lesbian… what’s it like living the life of a Wiccan stereotype?”
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We arrived early to the temple. As we ascended the staircase to the arena, the nasal roar of battlemages rose. In the upper air, the thick, hot, scent of thought-sweat mingled with the smell of books. Tomes stacked on every wall, ceiling-high. A maze of manga and a myriad of supplemental material. We crossed the threshold into the arena.
Four times long as wide, the vast space stretched back hundreds of feet. Its floor filled with tables. Sacred altars, with one commandment:
THOU SHALT NOT DRINK FROM OPEN CONTAINERS -MGMT
The Master of Ceremonies greeted us, adding our names to the list of combatants. Smiling, Emm asked, “How many lambs to the slaughter this eve, good sir?”
The slovenly, neck-bearded, man deadpanned his repartee. “Including the two of you,” he paused with comedic timing, then continued “...so far we’ve got twenty-seven.”
He smiled as he collected our registration fees saying, “The tournament will soon begin.”
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