The Book of Ryan » Personal

2008 in Cities

Ryan — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 05:19:10 +0000

These are all the places I’ve stayed at least one night during 2008:

Ann Arbor, MI
Livonia, MI
Los Angeles, CA
Long Beach, CA
Austin, TX
Pentwater, MI
Cambria, CA
San Francisco, CA
Sonoma, CA
Pickford, MI

Happy new year!

My resolution: blog more, write more and lose weight. What’s yours?

Kali’s spot to sit (1000 lines, day 9 of 365)

Ryan — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:59:29 +0000

Kali’s spot to sit
is atop what I’m doing.
A coincidence?

Finally caught up to the real date!

Observant poet (1000 lines, day 8 of 365)

Ryan — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:59:33 +0000

Observant poet
wears a new shirt, wears it twice,
Takes off the price tag.

Passing stranger is (1000 lines, day 7 of 365)

Ryan — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:59:06 +0000

Passing stranger is
suddenly fascinated
by a blade of grass.

It’s something I never understood about cities, and something I miss terribly about home.

SoCal Winter (1000 lines, day 7 of 365)

Ryan — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:59:43 +0000

SoCal Winter:
Billowing mounds of hot tub foam,
drifts of windblown sand.

Apologies for gloating, but Detroit is having a huge blizzard right now. Me, a heatwave.

Fine layer of ash (1000 lines, day 6 of 365)

Ryan — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 06:59:36 +0000

Fine layer of ash
Red glowing mountains
Summer’s funeral pyre

Last year, the fires terrified me. Now I realize it’s just the way things are in Southern California.

Friday night haiku (1000 lines day 5/365)

Ryan — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:59:29 +0000

Friday night haiku:
just seventeen syllables
scrawled on a coaster.

I never said I was a purist!

My Fiancée is Magic

Ryan — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 08:10:12 +0000

Made with the Magic Set Editor.

I make Web sites, ergo

Ryan — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:58:25 +0000

Broken Promises

Ryan — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 08:57:11 +0000

He squinted at the man across the table from him—things were looking grim. He’d sworn never to go back, yet here he was and all those promises, what were they? Splutter? I didn’t matter; what mattered now the guy across the table planning to trounce him.

This guy had been pounding him ever since they started, and he’d not been able to offer much in defense—a jab he or there, but he’d mostly just thrown what he could in the path the onslaught. But he wasn’t out yet. He had cards left in his hand. Taking a deep breath, he made his draw, praying it was enough. “Tap your mana, Ryan,” he whispered to himself, “it’s time to make the Magic happen.”

After a twelve-year hiatus, my cousins dragged me kicking and screaming back into Magic: the Gathering. Of course, they weren’t the only reason. Already I’m in, whole-hog.

Gathering around a table with friends and strangers is sadly rare in our society. Looking for a Magic game is a great reason to meet new people and doesn’t require a backpack-full of apparatus like Dungeons and Dragons or Warhammer 40k. I’ve spent more money on it than I should and even built a Magic Game Tracker to keep track of scores on my phone.

In 1996 I forswore the game and money wasted. I sold my five-color, twelve dual-land deck of every flying creature in the game for $160 to a hobby shop and who in turn probably sold the rares for ten times that. The commons and lands I just threw away. Even chucked a Mahamoti Djinn I found a few years later because I was so sick of them.

But now I’m in a strange city and know few people. The ones I’ve met at the hobby shop are the most friendly and decent so far. In exchange for that, broken promises are but dust.