#I spent an hour mowing the lawn and thinking about what my relatives would say about how it doesn't look perfect anymore

[alatus-k]

Y’know sometimes I’m happy my family is gone/not a part of my life, lol- I feel like I absolutely dodged how guilty they’d make me feel for leaving things messy or undone sometimes.

[cravingcrazewriting]

Older And Wiser (but not really)

Trigger Warning- VERY small mention of desire to end one's own life. Plus transgender Evan because I love him

Thanksgiving was always a roll of the dice for Evan.

Some Thanksgivings he got to spend with his mom. Others he spent with Jared and his family. When they were both gone, Heidi would celebrate the next day when she was off.

Ironically though, both of these situations were going underway, leaving Evan alone for Thanksgiving. Although it hurt to be alone, he knew it wasn't really anyone's fault. Thanksgiving was a time for family and friends, so naturally people had to leave to go see other relatives out of state (Alana was going with her dad's to visit her grandparents, if he wasn't mistaken).

The only person that was still around was Connor, who's family hosted hosted a big Thanksgiving meal. Evan thought it was sweet since it was usually just him and his mom. It wasn't that they didn't have any family, but rather working as a nurse and the unforeseeable weather that almost always brought about a snow storm, so it was nearly impossible to see relatives until Hanukkah.

Evan pulled out an box that had differently colored leafs scattered across the wrapping he had dressed around it. He decided against putting a bow on it and went to set it out on the table. It was a gift for Connor, for a Thanksgiving gift exchange. It was something he and Heidi always did, so Evan decided to let Connor join in on the fun.

He'd saved some money from doing work with the neighbors, part of it for his top surgery, and the other half for holiday shopping. The tasks they asked were simple, such as vacuuming, dusting, or cleaning (in the fall, he mowed lawns).

He'd already had made a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, since pretty much everything was closed for the holiday, he couldn't order out. Currently his binder was off and in his room, as he'd already worn it for eight hours, and needed to remove it. It was god awful, but wearing it for too long could fracture his ribs, and he did not want to be responsible for a hospital bill. Still, an oversized shirt he stole from Connor helped out a little bit with how unsettled he felt.

He gently set the box down on the dining table, and went to make a box of Mac and Cheese, as he was okay with spoiling himself just a little bit for the holiday. While he was filling up a pot with water, his phone vibrated. Evan pulled out his phone to read it.

Connor <3: Dinner just finished up. Can I go to your place? Don't think I can stay another minute at home

Evan: Sure! We can share Mac and Cheese!

Although he was trying to hold back enthusiasm, he was really happy that Connor was coming. He'd spent a lot of lonely days with Connor either cuddling, talking, making jokes, watching random shit on Netflix, or a mix of all of that (with a fair share of kisses, as well).

Evan made sure to keep an eye on the time as the water boiled, practically checking his phone almost every thirty seconds, not wanting to keep Connor waiting outside very long.

Ultimately the doorbell rang later, which made Evan practically run to the door and swung it open from being in a rush. It could've been worse. At least he didn't accidentally dent the wall.

Outside, Connor was holding an envelope and a box wrapped in plain orange wrapping paper. Underneath was some food in long, plastic and portable boxes, with a bottle that looked like alcohol. He was wearing his jacket and trench coat, ripped jeans, and black thin looking gloves. He was smiling at how fast Evan answered the door.

"Please tell me you— you didn't bring alcohol," Evan held the door open, watching Connor step inside and set his things down on the coffee table.

"You have no faith in me?" He asked innocently, picking up what revealed to be sparkling grape juice.

Evan snorted, "Okay, faith restored. Er, did you want me to... t-take your coat?"

Connor shrugged off the trench coat with ease. "Nah, you're just gonna steal it later," he teased him, before looking at the kitchen. "Besides, I know where to put it. It looks like you've got something cooking."

"I need to stir my Mac and Cheese!" Evan fretted, running into the kitchen, leaving behind a laughing Connor.

He gave the pot a quirk stir, watching a few remains of butter slip around inside. He set the wooden spoon down, and felt a pair of arms wrap around his upper chest and a chin rest itself on his head.

"Um. Can you m-move your arms?" Evan grabbed his forearms gently, and pulled them down.

"Hmm? Oh yeah, sorry," Connor realized his binder was off in that moment, so he slid his arms down to his waist to hold him there loosely and gently. He dropped his head to Evan's shoulder. "That looks good."

"It's just cheese and noodles," Evan giggled, rolling his eyes.

"They're good cheesy noodles," he muttered begrudgingly, nestling his face into the crook of Evan's neck.

The two stayed like that, happily finishing up the Mac and Cheese, before putting them into bowls, and piled onto the couch to eat. Evan had to resist the urge to climb onto Connor's lap, tackle him on the couch, or anything because they were just starting to eat, and he had to have a little self control. So, he settled Connor's legs on his lap as they began to talk about everything and nothing.

"My big shot cousin was there, making a big deal about his business, and how much money he was making, which lead to the 'You see Connor, you can be like your cousin Jack over there' talk with Larry. He isn't thrilled about the fact I'm getting a tattoo," Connor explained in between bites.

Evan was eating a little slow, as he didn't want to eat too fast. "Um— what tattoo did you w-wanna get?"

"A semi colon on my wrist," Connor gestured to his right wrist. "It means that at one point I wanted to end my life, but I kept going."

Evan couldn't help but smile. "You're so strong."

"You are too," Connor punched his arm lightly, in a playful manner. "You've been on testosterone for like— a year now, you're binding, hell, it must've been hard coming out to your mom."

He laughed lightly. "Well, I'd ask to go to the men's clothing in the mall, and if she'd ask why, I'd just say 'oh, their jeans actually have pockets'. Then she'd laugh and let me go, but I think she saw through that."

Connor snorted, "I think I love you even more just from that. Anyways, you want some turkey sandwiches? I brought like, four."

"Um, yes, because it wouldn't be Thanksgiving without a turkey," he grinned, opening up the container and pulled one out.

Connor opened the sparkling grape juice, and poured it into the cups Evan had grabbed. "And pretending we can drink by using special cups and bottles."

Evan took his cup once he was done. "It makes me feel fancy," he said with a laugh, before taking a sip.

"When's your mom getting home?" Connor opened another container that contained biscuits and a few pieces of apple pie.

"Late tonight. We're celebrating tomorrow, didn't I tell you that?" Evan grabbed a biscuit.

"Well you did, and today I realized you were all by yourself. Didn't want to deal with my uptight relatives, and didn't want you being all lonely. It's a win-win," the latter shrugged. "Anyways, when'd you wanna open your present?"

"After we're done eating," Evan swallowed. "This stuff you brought is too good."

The two young boys continued to eat and chat away happy, and at one point, Evan had grabbed Connor's trench coat, and had it draped around his shoulders happy. Connor snuck a few photos of him with the oversized coat on as payback.

"Okay, open it," Evan set Connor's gift in his lap, excited for the other,

"I get to go first?" Connor began taking off the wrapping. "Isn't this your tradition? And your house?"

"Well you're the guest, so you go first," Evan responded, smiling.

With the wrapping off, Connor carefully undid the box lid and looked inside. Within the box was a purple beanie, a sketchbook, and some colored pencils.

"Ev... this is so sweet," Connor gushed, and gave him a big kiss on the cheek. "Thank you..." He was blushing slightly.

Evan was red from the small sign of affection. "Oh um, it wasn't a problem." He replied, watching as Connor set a box on his lap next.

Being very delicate, he removed the wrapping paper, and looked at what was inside. There was a dark green sweater, a scented candle that smelt like candy canes, and a rather adorable looking T-Rex plushie.

Evan set the box beside him, and was about to thank him, when Connor held his hand out, and handed him the envelope.

"Read it first," he'd said ever so softly.

Evan couldn't help but oblige, curious as to what it was Connor obviously wanted him to see. He peeled open the lid as neatly as he could (which wasn't that neat) and pulled out a card.

Connor had drawn a cartoon turkey on the front, with the words "Happy Turkey Day to not just my boyfriend, but to my best friend". When he opened to the inside, there was a small stack of money and a large margin on the left side. "Evan, I know you've been working really hard on getting money for your top surgery, but with Hanukkah coming up, I thought you'd need a little boost. I love you, and I hope it helps.- Connor". The stack had fifty dollars, which was held in place with a rubber band.

"I know you wanted to do this by yourself, but you've... you've done a lot for me, and you deserve this," Connor twisted his ring, and smiled.

"It's just enough! Thank you!" Evan enthusiastically threw his arms around him, holding him close.

Connor chuckled, hugging him back. "You're welcome, Ev.."

And when Heidi saw Evan the next time, well, it was the happiest he'd ever been.

[argentconflagration]

It might be said that the postal service is the backbone of a nation (or, more precisely, its nervous system). Countless devoted civil servants work tirelessly through rain and hail, fog and sleet, and recently even death itself, to ensure the mail reaches its destination on time, intact, and untampered with.

Carla Wright was not one of those people. Carla Wright was the kind of civil servant who read people's personal letters when she was bored. She knew the pen-under-the-flap trick, and a dozen others besides. She told herself she wasn't hurting anyone, that these were only strangers' letters and they'd never know. And truly, in the great reckoning of all human evil, it was a relatively harmless vice. Nobody's perfect.

The front of today's most promising envelope said "Anthony J. Crowley" in beautiful calligraphy, and below that was an address in Mayfair written so neatly it seemed typed, though it clearly wasn't. The return address was simply a bookshop.

Carla unfolded the letter to see the same beautiful script written without the slightest flaw, as if the author was very practiced at handwriting, or had rewritten this letter many times until they could do it without error. There was a return address and inside address at the top, like a business letter, but entirely handwritten.

The letter read:

My dearest Crowley,

I know you'll think me hopelessly old-fashioned for this, but I felt I had to do this properly. I know if I tried to say these things to your face I'd seize up and be unable to find the words, and you deserve to know beyond all doubt that this is how I truly feel. Surely you can indulge me, just this once.

I love you. I know you know this, but I think I ought to say it plainly, when I have done everything but say it plainly for centuries. I didn't always realize it myself, but nothing makes sense without my love for you. I have loved you for so long, burning so bright and hot that I feared it would consume the both of us.

[Read more on AO3]

Please forgive the times I've hurt you, when I've let the fear overtake me. I have been so afraid, and I've said things that are unforgivable. I wanted to protect you, and I thought that if I were good enough, I could keep both of us safe. I had a hope, a foolish one, that God would see what I see: that you're more deserving of Her love and grace than most angels. I wished for Her to welcome you back in, and that nothing would have to be complicated. But I need you to know it was never because I despise any part of you. I don't want the kind of angel who would fit into Heaven, I want you. Forgive me, all the same.

When you look at me, I'm worth something. When I look at you, I'm home. You understand me, you see me, you know me. There's a piece of me that will always be lonely as long as we're apart. You told me once— I don't know if you remember, you were very drunk at the time— that you ruin everything you touch. That lie was painful to hear. Every time you've touched me, I've felt more loved and more free than I ever did in millennia spent in Heaven. If you've ruined me, it's only that you've ruined me for anyone else but you.

My love, we've been through fire. We have passed the test, and now I want nothing more than to take you in my arms and show you how much I love you, in all the ways I've wanted to and a thousand other ways I've not yet thought of. You've waited so long for me, and I'm so grateful. I want to tell you I love you in every tongue that's ever been spoken. I want to tell Heaven and Hell and every kingdom of the Earth how much I love you, until you never again have a reason to doubt.

Everything I was afraid of, we've survived, together. We're at the end of our journey, and, I hope, the beginning of a new one. My heart is in your hands. All my faith is in you, and so is my redemption.

Yours, eternally,

And here was written a symbol that Carla immediately knew wasn't from any language on Earth. Underneath was written, "Aziraphale".

Carla's eyes watered as she folded the letter, and the tears started to fall as she slipped it back into its envelope. She wasn't sad. She was experiencing a feeling of love so tangible that her only possible response was to weep. She was blessed.

Before she arrived home that day, she knocked on her neighbor's door and offered to walk their dog. Then she mowed their lawn, swept their house, and made them a boxed lunch for the next day with sandwiches cut into little flowers. When she finally got home, she called up her best friend, and told her how much she loved her.

The next day, she rang the doorbell at that address in Mayfair, the envelope in her right hand and a bouquet of fresh roses in her left. The person who answered the door was in his pajamas, still rubbing sleep from his eyes. He mumbled something that was probably, "What's all this about?", given the circumstances.

"Letter for you, sir!" said Carla, with the kind of warm smile you'd give an old friend you hadn't seen in a while.

"Thanks," he mumbled, and took the items. He gave her a confused wave before retreating back inside.

Carla headed back to her truck, humming an old love song that she'd never heard before.

Who's to say what happened after that? If a demon sat in bed and cried from the love that overwhelmed him, let us leave that to his privacy. If he phoned an angel a few hours later, and words were exchanged that they'd wanted to say for millennia, we may never know what those words were.

After all, the confidentiality of the post is a sacred thing.

[avoutput]

Final Fantasy VII Legacy || Memories of a Great Storm

Legacies take shape before you, around you, through you, and beyond you. As incredible as it might be to be the subject of a legacy, the true strength of a legacy is how it builds you up. When you are young and finding yourself, the building process is a ride, a rumbling beneath your feet, wet clouds in the sky above your head. When a legacy is forming, there are signs that you are still too young to see, but you can feel it. It beckons to you, wanting you to be a part of it. You want to stand at the shore of its coming alongside all the others who want to feel the waves at their feet. Like all storms, everything has to be just right. And like a tree falling in the woods, someone has to be there to witness it, to tell its tale, and in doing so, this tale becomes woven into you. Because it isn’t just the storm, the waves, the quaking that makes the legacy, it’s the people who survive that keep it alive. Final Fantasy VII was for me, this great storm.

The first time I played Final Fantasy VII was on the floor of my cousin’s room on Christmas day. Every tsunami starts as a ripple. I didn’t have a Playstation. In fact, despite reading multiple gaming magazines, I must have glazed past it, because I had never even heard of it. I was too blinded by the Nintendo 64 and its legacy. I went from a Nintendo baby to a Sega kid between console generations, and I missed out on a lot of the SNES until the end of its life cycle. I didn’t want to miss out again, so I put on blinders and put in a parental request for the N64. You can imagine my surprise when FF7’s opening cinematic played out on a tiny tube tv. The ripples became waves and the ocean began to move. When I started playing, I wasn’t even sure what was happening, who anyone was, and how there could have been 6 other games I had never played. My cousin was trying to explain the concept to me, but I couldn’t hear him. I just wanted more. But, it was Christmas day, and in my family, that meant family time. Work. Maybe a slightly unique aspect of my family, but Christmas presents were opened at night around the entire extended family. The middle-kids were responsible for passing out all of the gifts to every other member of the family, and this was a long and painful process, especially for an 11 year old. Once everyone was finished, the middle kids opened their gifts in front of everyone. And even though I hadn’t asked for it, all I could think of was how much I wanted one of those boxes to be a Playstation. Not only did I not have any luck with that, I also didn’t get longer than 30 minutes with the game. Instead, every moment was punctuated by familial obligation. I went home unhappy, unsatisfied, my mind never left Midgar. I took a step further from the shore, deeper into the water.

The internet was still young and so was I. The best I could do, the best I could find, was fan pages and old magazines with little information. I absorbed as much as I could, but color pages and chibi gif animations of the FF7 crew just couldn’t cut it. But in all of the noise, there was some news. They were making a PC port of FF7. Alarm bells. Surely my 2 year-old desktop would be too far behind to play the game. My dreams felt again dashed. Through all of this, my obsession made my mother vaguely happy in a roundabout way. The desktop background of the living room PC was Tifa, and her big breasts helped my mother believe I wasn’t as gay as her earlier impressions, a conspiracy theory of her own making. To this day, she still makes jokes about Tifa. The only thing that would have only made her happier is if she was black. Anyway, the world had caught on to Final Fantasy, and I wanted to be a part of it. But when you’re 11, time is much more of a key to gaining something, it has to pass for anything to happen. As an adult, you can make things happen, but kids, they need an angle. A hard angle. That usually means you need the parents to come through, but they need to be unwitting participants in your obsession, pawns in your game.

Luckily, my dad was KING PAWN. My father, always the type to want to be on the cutting edge, bought us (himself) a laptop. This was out of nowhere, no prodding or manipulation, and while his claims for having bought the machine for work and school were dubious at best, I went with it. And with that came the specs I would need to play the PC version. But there was a catch. Christmas had passed and my birthday was in the fall, months from our current Spring. There wasn’t a free pass in sight. No amount of chores would fill my coffers and quell the storm in my heart. I need another rube. But with Spring came green. Money right out of the ground. My best friend had a lawn mower and I had a plan. Get this, what if we mowed lawns… for money? Bam! Winning ticket. There were one million old ladies and lads dying to give money to cute kids dragging a lawnmower from house to house. After mowing what felt like one thousand lawns, I was able to buy a copy. The storm was becoming a hurricane.

It was time to monopolize my dad’s new toy. Like most of his new toys, if it wasn’t a paperback book, he spent barely any time with it after a few weeks, so it worked in my favor. As fast as childhood actually passes, to children, the relative perception of time’s passing is slower than an adult’s. The more they want something, the longer it takes to manifest. Mix that with a negatively polarized Murphy’s Law, and you get your worst scenario; a computer that can run the first few hours, but crashes during certain enemy moves. This is where we meet the eye of the storm. My resolve is broken, my will shattered. How will I ever play this game? A million years passed (about a week), and that is when I realized my closest friend had gotten a new computer that last Christmas. A proper desktop model, in his own bedroom. It hadn’t occurred to me to bring the game to his house because PC games required an install and I couldn’t just bring the game home and continue my save file whenever I felt like it. Still, that next weekend, like every weekend, we had a sleepover, and for the third time, I started the game over. I took the game as slowly and methodically this time as I had before. The eye of the storm was slipping past. I was able to pass the Sector 5 Slum to Sector 6 tunnel I had gotten stuck in at home. By that time, I was the only one left awake. As I neared the top of the Shinra building, I could feel the storm in my heart reaching a fever pitch. I was so close. I saved Aeris, met Red XIII, beat Rufus, and sat in awe as Cloud rolled down the stairs on a thundering motorcycle. My heart was racing as I took out enemies to save my allies until there was no more road left. I was so excited, I was at the edge of Midgar. As I punished the highway monstrosity between me and my escape, the storm was beginning to calm, and then, turning red, he melted down and exploded in Final Fantasy fashion. And I had done it. My characters were free. The game was over. To be continued in Final Fantasy 8. RIght?

The hurricane died down, the characters begin to discuss their next steps. At this point, I have been playing around 9 hours straight. It was about 2 or 3 AM. I was just beginning to resign myself to take to a pillow and pad on the floor. But then the earth beneath the sea began to move and the waves began to take shape once again. And then, suddenly and with no provocation, the city of Midgar became a mere fraction of its size and Cloud became a giant. The world had shrunk and in the distance the curvature of the world could be seen. I began to move around and enemies appeared on my path. The waves miles of shore had become the size of skyscrapers. All at once I realized that it wasn’t the end. There was more. So much more. It wouldn’t be Final Fantasy 8 until I beat Sephiroth. There were 2 other discs. What was I thinking? Of course there was more. But why did it take so long to get here, to find more. I was bamboozled by the sights and sounds of Midgar, sung a sirens song by Avalanche and Shinra, and believed my mission would take shape and be completed inside the walls of some slums in some city that surely didn’t make up the entire world. Sephiroth and Shinra were a threat to the world, not just the people of this city. That was when the tidal wave met the shore. A tsunami of realization. A whole new identity was consuming me.

In the calm of the wave that had consumed me, weightless in my memories, my brain started making connections. My cousin introduced me to manga like Dragon Ball and Akira. I had grown up on a steady diet of Mario Bros, Sailor Moon, Sonic the Hedgehog, not to mention the growing phenom Pokemon. He told me all these animated dreamscapes came from Japan. A friend of mine showed me Final Fantasy III on his SNES, but it didn’t excite me like Link to the Past or Mario Kart. Cloud was not in Final Fantasy III as far as I could remember, but I had missed the other installments in between. And the world didn’t look at all similar. Who made this game? Squaresoft? I’ve never played a genuine Nintendo game on a computer before. But this came out on Playstation. What is happening? Oh, Sephiroth put a tree through a snake. Maybe all of these things are Japanese? My cousin told me Sega and Nintendo were from Japan. Wow, that is a big cannon and now I have to march and get on a boat? How much longer could this game be? I could feel myself getting tired. This is a nice beach town. What time is it? I have to get to the Golden Saucer next. A tap on my shoulder, sun in my eyes, my friend says, “Dude, you are still awake? Did you play all night?”

My eyes were open. The tidal wave had passed and I was baptised a whole new person. I was awake floating on a sea of my own consciousness. The next 10 years of my life would be shaped by RPG’s, Anime, Manga, Computers, D&D, and Cinema. Nerd Culture. I found a whole new person after playing Final Fantasy VII. It put together pieces that had been lying scattered, shaping a fan, a creative, and a more curious soul. I would challenge peers to try these new experiences, hoping it would awaken them the way it had me. I hadn’t realized that what awoke me was the perfect storm yet and that for most people, they wouldn’t be able to experience it the same way I had. I was able to find comradery in my closest friends and all of these cultural touchstones bound us even to this day. Final Fantasy VII’s legacy, maybe all legacies, aren’t just the collective experiences of having been a part of its success, but in the lives that were shaped around it; we are the base at which the monument stands. It’s legacy is strengthened by those who survived the storm and it continues to thrive because it was the perfect storm. A storm that still draws people in. A great storm that never died. A story we all still tell.

[stompsite]

Autopsy: Mass Effect Andromeda

Games are like dogs. You want to call all of them “good boy” and pat them on the head and tell them how wonderful they are all the time, because everyone’s a lot happier when you do, but some games are bad dogs, and you’ve got to take them out back behind the barn and shoot them in the head.

Games are difficult to make. Unlike a film, where you’re photographing what already exists, or a book, where you only have to use words to make things happen, a game requires loads of people to work extremely hard to build an entire reality. As a developer, you have to create spaces. You have to create physics. You have to control lighting. When two objects touch each other, you, the developer, have to ensure that they don’t simply clip through each other. As a developer, you might slave away for years of your life, working impossible hours alongside dozens, even hundreds, of other people, to ship an entire hand-crafted universe.

Games are places you get lost in, and places you call home. Only in games can you travel places, talk to people, and live the impossible. It’s why you mow lawns in the summer, saving up enough cash to buy that new graphics card so you can run the biggest hit. It’s why you wait, shivering in the midnight cold, outside a tacky GameStop to pick up the sequel you’ve been waiting years for. It’s why you draw fanart and write fan fiction of your favorite characters. It’s why you part with your hard-earned cash. You want to go there. You want to live that. You want to experience something new.

Mass Effect Andromeda is a bad dog, and I hate that I have to say that. Hundreds of people  put five years of their lives into Andromeda, but the end result was a disappointment. Due to a lot of complicating factors, they weren’t able to make the game they wanted to make. There’s a tendency among gamers to criticize bad games harshly--when you’re eating ramen every day in college, you want an escape. You save up. You budget. If the game is bad, you have no recourse. Good reviews don’t necessarily mean you’re happy with what you got; after all, there’s often a big disconnect between reviewer tastes and player interests.

So it makes sense to lash out. It makes sense to want to have some fun at the expense of the game that caused you so much trouble. It makes sense to want to joke and mock and scream about just how bad it is, and how mad you are that you wasted your time on a game that the publisher spent years promising you was amazing as fuck.

The Witcher 3 is one of my favorite games. It was so good, I found myself swimming around the game’s oceans, just trying to lose myself in the world, performing every task, no matter how repetitive or mundane, so I wouldn’t have to leave. I didn’t want it to be over. With Andromeda, I finally gave up on the side quests, focused on the critical path, and installed as quickly as I could after the credits rolled.

Developers have a tendency to be defensive, and it’s completely understandable. No one wants to feel like their time was wasted. The secrecy of development mean a lot of myths arise. Sometimes leadership makes poor decision, technology doesn’t work like it ought to, pressures to hit deadlines lead to compromised work. You, the individual developer, do not have nearly as much power to make or break a game as players think you do. It’s a miracle any game gets made. Even something like “opening a door” is incredibly complex. And there’s no guidebook, no science behind it, no easy way to simply have an idea and make it work.

I say all this because I want set the ground rules. We’re here to talk about why a game didn’t work. We’re not here to vent our frustrations, as justifiable as that may be, and we’re not here to complain about the developers. It’s human nature to want to blame someone for something bad, and it’s just as human to want to avoid the blame. I’m going to avoid human nature, cut through the bullshit entirely, and try to diagnose the product.

Andromeda had a metascore of 72. It sold so poorly that it went on sale today for $15--that’s 75% off in less than six months after its release, something that only happens for games that sell poorly. If you’re one of the two people I know who loved the game, I’m not asking you to stop loving it, but I am asking you to acknowledge that the game didn’t work for most people. I think we ought to find out why.

This is not a review, this is an autopsy. I am not here to tell you whether or not you should buy the game. I’m here to explore why it failed. In order to be clear and informative, I’m working on the assumption you haven’t played the game, but I won’t be avoiding spoilers either.

So, now that we’ve set the stage, let’s look at the game.

1. Narrative

Mass Effect Andromeda is a clean break from the Mass Effect series. There’s some overlap in the lore--little references here and there--but for the most part, it’s completely its own thing. You, a human, and a bunch of aliens from the Milky Way have flown to the Andromeda galaxy in search of a new home. It took 600 years for your ships to get there.

Somehow, the Andromeda Initiative--that’s the organization running everything--had the ability to see what the Andromeda galaxy looked like at that point in time, despite the fact that light takes about two million years to travel between the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies. At some point between the time you set off and the time you got there, a catastrophe occurred, and some weird, uh… like… energy coral spread throughout space.

On one hand, it’s sci-fi, so we don’t need everything to be perfect. On the other hand, Mass Effect has always leaned a bit more towards hard sci-fi than most games. They acknowledge relativity frequently throughout the series--ships can’t travel between worlds without using these big ‘mass relays’ that were seeded throughout the galaxy millions of years before the story starts. Bioware created an element, Element Zero, to explain how how a lot of the tech in their universe functions. It was internally consistent.

Andromeda suddenly decides that ships can fly at something like 4200 times the speed of light, we can see a galaxy in real-time somehow (but only looked once), but we can’t use quantum entanglement to communicate with Earth any more, even though that’s a technology that’s been in the series since the first game. Andromeda breaks a lot of the series’ own rules to get to where it is.

This alone does not make Andromeda a bad game, but it does do a good job of illustrating a big problem: everything feels thoughtless. I’m not sure how a game spends five years in development and has a script that seems so… careless. Nothing in Andromeda feels logical or natural. In writing, there’s this idea called the ‘idiot ball.’ It comes from the writer’s room for The Simpsons, where one character would get to hold the ‘idiot ball’ one week, making bad choices that lead to the story’s drama. It works in a comedy. Not so much in a game that wants us to take its narrative seriously.

The idiot ball is why the crew of an Andromeda Initiative Ark, the Hyperion, wakes up next to a planet that wasn’t inhabited 600 years ago to discover that the planet is now uninhabitable and the aforementioned weird energy coral thing nearly destroys their ship.

Scientists are generally pretty careful. Don’t get me wrong, they take risks, and they occasionally do stupid things like licking test samples, but you’d think that the Andromeda Initiative might have done some recon first. Maybe, I don’t know, stopping just outside the galaxy, using their recon tech to see if anything had changed in six hundred years? Heck, why not stop outside the solar system to see if it had been colonized, or situations had changed? Of course they end up in a bad situation, because everyone in the game holds the idiot ball.

This isn’t a new problem for the series--remember when a giant robot attacked the Citadel and destroyed most of the Council fleet, and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, on the Citadel saw it and the robots murder lots of people… and then pretended the giant robot threat wasn’t real? Mass Effect, starting with 2, has always had stupid people making stupid decisions that make no logical sense.

But--and this is incredibly important--they still worked, because they created dramatic moments.

Drama is the tension created by the conflict between a character, their goal, and the thing keeping them from attaining that goal. It’s difficult in the best of conditions to maintain the right amount of tension; a player who is constantly being told they’re the savior of the universe while only being tasked with hunting for wolf pelts is going to feel that the experience doesn’t match the premise. Great drama has stakes that feel important and make sense. Characters who constantly make poor decisions lose sympathy, which reduces dramatic tension, and we, the audience, stop caring.

The Council’s ignorance in Mass Effect 2 is awful writing, which isn’t surprising, since the entire game is a terribly-written mess. But at least it rings true! We can believe the government would ignore an imminent threat to our lives (see: global warming), and it makes us feel like we want to take action. Mass Effect 2’s “Oh yeah? You don’t believe in an alien menace? Well, I’m gonna prove it to you!” is exactly what makes a game work, even if the setup is poorly done. As long as it delivers its dramatic payload, it works.

Andromeda has nothing like that. Everything is twee. There’s some guy on one planet, named The Charlatan, and it’s obvious who he is as soon as you meet him, even though he plays it coy. This Charlatan fellow vies for control over a tiny little spaceport on an uninhabitable planet. He’s trying to wrest control away from a forgettable evil space pirate lady who spouts cliche lines in the vein of “guards! Seize them!” I don’t remember why I cared. I can remember every quest, every reason for doing anything in the first Mass Effect (Saren bad, Protheans cryptic, learn more about protheans, find Saren’s base, interrogate Saren’s sidekick), but in Andromeda, uh…

Yeah. I just finished the game and I’ve forgotten why I did anything. This is because the game never did a good job of making me care about things. Don’t get me wrong, it had situations that I ought to care about, but it made the Bioware Mistake.

What’s the Bioware Mistake? Okay, imagine that some guy walks up to you and says “hey, it’s me, your brother! I’m being chased by ninja assassins, and I need your help!” You wouldn’t believe him. It’s a case of someone telling you that they’re important, rather than the person actually being important to you. I felt nothing saving the Earth. I felt a lot more when I lost Mordin Solus in Mass Effect 3. Bioware makes this mistake frequently in its A-plots, but it usually makes its character interactions matter so much more in the B-plots that we can overlook the main plot shortcomings.

Andromeda does the A-plot thing: everyone’s lives are at risk unless you, the single most important human in the story, save them all. It just forgets to do the B-plot thing. There are nice little conversations between characters on the ship and in your party, as you might expect, but conversations with the characters are a drag.

It’s a problem with the game’s dialog on the whole. When you talk to anyone, they… well, they remind me a lot of that great liartownusa photoshop of a fake Netflix movie, “The Malediction Prophecy.”

“It's been 3,000 years since the Malediction, the spirit-plague created by The Order, a fabled army of immortals seeking to unravel the genome of the were-shaman Erasmus Nugent, who seeks to rebuild La Cienega, a bio-weapon capable of stopping Honcho, the deathless vampire king who sseeks to conquer the Fontanelle, the mythical fortress of demon hybrid Gary Shadowburn, who seeks to unleash angel-killer Larry Wendigo Jr., who seeks to release the Bloodfroth, a terrifying evil that seeks ot return the world to darkness.”

People don’t talk like people talk. They talk like fanfiction writers write. Have you ever seen one of those cringe-inducing tumblr story ideas that is just so bad, because everyone’s got these cutesy nicknames and the premise is super goofy and very “I’ve only ever read YA fiction in my entire life”?

Andromeda’s like that. People talk weird. They say things like “excuse me, my face is tired,” and make jokes without charisma. I have this urge to be really critical of the writing team, because they had, I presume, five full years on this game, and they work at a company that is literally built to make story-driven games, and the end result is an experience worse than Dragon Age 2, a game that was rushed through development in 18 months.

I don’t know how this script made it through editing.

This is the kind of writing we tore apart in our sophomore screenwriting classes back in the day. I can understand narratives not working on a larger, more plot-based level, because that requires a lot of coordination between a lot of teams. But basic dialog? How is it so bad?

Seriously, what is this? How did someone write this scene and go “yeah, yeah, this is good stuff.” How did this make it past animators and editors and marketing? How did this scene make it into the final game?

When your father sacrifices his life for you in the opening of the game, bestowing his role as Most Important Person to you, a character, apparently his friend, demands answers. She looks like Marge in that episode of the Simpsons where Homer uses a shotgun to apply makeup to her face. She asks you “what happened?” Your character, for some unknown reason, replies “to who?” Addison responds “it’s ‘to whom, and your goddamn father.”

I cannot envision a world where someone would: A) not understand that The Most Important Guy’s Death is the topic, B) correct grammar, or C) say “your goddamn father” in that context. It reads like someone trying to write charming and badass, but the situation is “a dude we all care about just died.” It makes no sense. What emotion was the writing team striving for? Did the voice actor ever think to go “uh, this makes no sense”? What the hell happened? How did this make it into the game?

The game presents us with a myriad of unlikable characters who do nothing but screw things up--Tann, Addison, Kelly, and so on. I can understand that disaster can stress people, but I also know that, in the face of disaster, most animals, humans included, have a powerful tendency to stick together in order to face off against a greater threat. In the case of Andromeda, the vast majority of living beings you encounter in the game are Milky Way characters who chose to abandon the colony and become criminal scum in the process. That Sloane Kelly lady, whose name I only remember because I just looked it up? She was the chief security officer of the program. No one should be more highly vetted than she is, but no, after a few months, she cracks and starts a criminal empire.

Why is this story important? Game design is the art of getting players to perform specific tasks that bring about some form of emotional fulfillment. In other words, it’s about establishing motivation. When the premise is stupid, the stakes are meaningless, and the characters unbelievable, it’s hard to compel players to keep moving. What is there to enjoy? What do I gain by playing a game where everyone’s an idiot?

How does a game, from a studio known for its stories, suck this bad after five years of development time? How does that happen? I’m exasperated with the game. I feel insulted by the script. I genuinely want to know how this game got as far as it did, because so many core ideas feel rotten from the get-go.

2. Technology and Presentation

Much has been made of Andromeda’s many animation glitches and bugs.

So, uh, just watch this vid if you want to understand how the game ended up:

Personally, I struggle with Frostbite, as an engine. EA’s doubled down on it, pushing the tech across all their studios, and I think for the worse. It seems like EA’s development times have skyrocketed since switching from Unreal to Frostbite, and developers have complained at length about the engine. That Kotaku piece linked earlier indicated that wrestling with Frostbite was a big reason Andromeda took so long to develop.

On my computer, Frostbite games are among the buggiest, most unstable games I have. People complained about the load times in the Unity-powered ReCore, but I’ve yet to encounter a Frostbite game with shorter load times. It’s a big issue with the engine. The lighting seems to work really well in the hand of DICE artists, but nobody else seems to have the hang of it.

Suffice it to say, the technology has been called out by a lot of people by now. The animations--in a game that was in development for five years--look worse than they do in an Unreal Engine 3 game from last gen. From a technical perspective, Andromeda needed more time on the cooker. Maybe six months of crunch would have done it, but that team was crunching for a while as it was. The end result was a game that simply does not compete with any other AAA game on the market.

But then there’s the art.

Great fiction often relies on the power of its iconic imagery to engage the audience. Star Wars movies always feel like Star Wars movies. There’s nothing quite as distinctive as the Lord of the Rings movies. Studios like Bungie and Arkane thrive on creating visually distinct universes. Even Bioware’s first three Mass Effect games were fantastically realized.

Mass Effect Andromeda seems like generic sci-fi art you can find anywhere. The alien Kett have some really cool Geiger-influenced stuff, but I couldn’t begin to describe the other two alien species. One’s a robot race that has lots of squares and blocky shapes in their art design, and it feels like I’ve seen it a million times before. The other species, which looks like bad Farscape fan art, looks, uh… pretty normal. Nothing you haven’t seen before.

It’s all incredibly forgettable. If you played Dragon Age: Inquisition, then the vast desert worlds and limited selection of geographical oddities won’t surprise you. Seen the Giant’s Causeway? Someone at Bioware sure loves it. Hexagonal rock pillars are everywhere in Andromeda, some natural, some not.

Again, I don’t really understand how, in five years, the art design ends up looking like… well, this. You know how people made fun of the suit design in Bioware’s other sci-fi series, Anthem, for looking like the bad CG models you see on off-brand GPU boxes? Andromeda has the same problem. It’s weird going from a game like Destiny, where every location feels distinct and fresh, to Andromeda, where it feels like the art just doesn’t have any creativity put into it.

And it sucks to say this.

It sucks to be so harsh. I wanted this game to be great. They were saying the right things about trying to nail that sense of exploration, and early plans for the game, as mentioned in the article I linked earlier, make it sound like they were going for a much more ambitious, exciting game, but they were hamstrung by the technology. That doesn’t explain the writing or the art design, though.

As some of you may know, I’m working on an indie game codenamed G1. I created it, wrote the plot, did most of the design work, stuff like that. Anyways, I wanted to create a really cool, distinct sci-fi universe that sticks in players minds as strongly as Star Wars or Half-Life does. Being a volunteer-only project for the time being (I’d love to pay people, but I am so poor I literally went homeless this summer and am now staying with some family members who are in danger of losing their home as well!), we’ve seen some interesting people come and go. Way back in the day, we had some guys who really wanted to change the game’s entire setting to a much less interesting, more generic environment. Later, we had some guys who were big fans of Ghost in the Shell and wanted to make our character art reflect that instead.

My point is, I get that a lot of people want to do what seems and feels familiar, but I think, for a big, AAA video game, distinctive is what people remember, especially in sci-fi and fantasy. Nothing looks like The Witcher 3, or Dishonored, or Halo, or the original Mass Effect trilogy, Half Life, or… well, you get the idea, right? Distinctiveness rules. Sameyness drools. And for whatever reason, Andromeda is the least-inspired AAA video game I’ve seen in a long, long time.

3. Design.

This, for me, is the big one. I can deal with bad storytelling in a game, because almost all game storytelling is garbage. I can put up with bad technology, because I grew up gaming on the PC, where modding could often turn my games into an unbearable slideshow, and sometimes, I’ve found games that were fantastic despite their poor presentation. But if the design is bad… then we got a problem.

And the design is bad.

As much as I want to speculate on why the design is bad, the truth is, nothing productive can come of that. I don’t know why it’s bad. I don’t know who made what designs, or how much the technology is to blame, or anything like that. All I know is that the design is bad, and I’m going to tell you what makes it bad, so if you decide to develop a game in the future, you at least can be armed with the knowledge of what Andromeda got wrong, and hopefully avoid it yourself.

If you asked me to use one sentence to describe Andromeda, I’d probably call it “a waste of time.”

I mean this literally. I’ve never played a game that wasted more time than Andromeda. Like… holy crap. So much time wasting. People complained so much about certain time-wasting aspects of the game, Bioware patched some of it out.

Here’s an example, and I’m going to italicize it so you can skip reading the whole thing if it gets too boring. Because it is super boring.

If you want to go explore the planet of Kadara, you have to go to the star system, which involves an unskippable cutscene as you ‘fly’ from where you are to where you were. Then, in the star system, you click on the planet, and you fly over to it. You fly too close to it, then zoom back out (this happens every time you move between planets in the game; I have no idea why). Then you rotate the planet on your display until you can select the city, which is on the opposite side of the planet from you.

Now click on that landing zone. You must then verify your loadout, because the game won’t let you change it without seeking out a loadout station, rather than just letting you open your menu and swap gear. You will be faced with an unskippable cutscene showing you landing on the planet. Then you will spawn somewhere that’s nowhere near where you want to go. Turn around. Click on the machine behind you, and select the “go to slums” option.

You will now be around 100 yards away from the slums and the mouth of the cave. Run out of the cave. It’s a big, empty field, so this takes like 20 seconds to do. Jump over the fence. Run another 100 yards or so to a big terminal that lets you summon your car. Congratulations, you have finally spawned. Now spend ten minutes driving wherever you need to be around a planet that’s a pain to drive around.

Every planet is this bad. You’d think they might let you spawn wherever you’d like, and maybe even set up a few different spawn zones on the planet, but no, that’s not how it works in Andromeda. It takes way too long to do basic things. Fast travel points aren’t in convenient spots, but there’s nothing interesting to find other than some crates with trash you might as well break down. Any time you spawn in a base, you’re usually quite far from the person you actually want to talk to. You’re going to spend a time walking across flat surfaces to get to where you need to go.

Contrast that with a game like Destiny 2, which has multiple spawns on each planet, and keeps the social areas with vendors nice and small, so there’s not a lot of down time simply getting between points. Usually, these spawns take advantage of the game’s joyful movement system, as opposed to the flat, empty space in an Andromeda.

There are other ways it wastes your time as well. Consider the UI, which decides to put everything in a list. I do mean everything. There are something like 10 distinct tiers of weapon, for every single weapon in the game. Like the Dhan? Cool, your crafting list will include the Dhan I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and X, which is weird, because it’s a straight upgrade every time, so there’s literally no point to keep the Dhan I blueprint around when the Dhan X is craftable.

Chances are the Dhan X won’t be craftable, because there’s no reliable method of farming research (I did almost all the quests on all the planets and scanned as much as possible and couldn’t get beyond the Dhan VII), but still, it’s weird that they’d put literally all the guns and their ten variations in one gigantic list of the 20-30+ guns in the game. That’s like 300 something entries in your crafting menu, and you can’t sort between any of them.

Gun mods? Same thing. Rather than letting you, say, sort mods by location type (barrel, magazine, etc), you’re just stuck with a gigantic list, and for some reason, you have to carry them on you, even though the game only lets you swap them out at various stations. Wouldn’t it make more sense to store the mods in the stations themselves?

You end up wasting so much time just navigating menus, trying to find the one thing you want, or being forced into seeking out the physical locations in game that will let you access the menus, because you can’t swap items out at will… it’s frustrating.

There’s this weird fascination with diegetic UI in games, and it sucks. Seriously, there isn’t a single game that benefits from having you go somewhere to access basic menu options. I don’t want to have to go to a terminal to swap out my guns. I’d much rather just press a button, open a menu, and swap my loadout there. Destiny got it right. Fable 3 did not. For some reason, Mass Effect Andromeda wants to be like Fable 3, if Fable 3’s weird menu space had huge amounts of dead space where nothing interesting occurred between the menus.

It’s awful. And I don’t know how the game shipped like that.

But the worst thing of all is the mission design. If you've played Dragon Age: Inquisition, you know that the mission design was extremely repetitive. Every location you went to would have the same few basic missions, no matter where you went. It got predictable. Andromeda is the same way. Go to two big towers on the map, solve a puzzle, go to a vault, press a button, run to the end of the vault, voila, you’ve done it. Scan a bunch of corpses on a planet. Pick up some rocks and plants. Go find the glowing orbs on the planet, and you’ll be rewarded with a poorly written cutscene. Fight the exact same boss on every planet, but don’t look for the variety found in Inquisition, where every dragon had something unique going on that made it kinda cool.

On and on it goes. Every planet, the same thing. There’s a point in the game where you have to go to a place called Meridian, and you go to some ancient alien city, and it’s not actually Meridian, but you don’t know that until you get there. To proceed, you must go to two different towers, solve two puzzles, and then go to a third puzzle, and do a new thing. When you fight the final boss, you will have to engage two similar phases, followed by a third, more unique phase. Every single fucking quest in this game seems to be “do two things, and then the third thing will be different.”

Find out who did a thing? Talk to two colonist, then the third one will say something different. Get artifacts for a museum? Three things. Every quest. Every single quest. Do three things, then move on.

I don’t want to be the generic internet gamer type here and accuse the developers of laziness, but I can say that the end result feels lazy. I remember, years ago, a Bioware writer saying on their forums that Bioware had decided that three was the ‘perfect number’ or something, and so they did everything in threes. Well, sorry, dude, but you’re wrong. Doing everything with the rule of threes sucks.

You know why? Because it robs the player of dramatic tension. Yeah. It all comes back to that. When you teach your players that they’re going to do two meaningless things for every quest, the player stops giving a shit about your game. When you claim to be making a game about space exploration, but there’s settlers on every single planet you visit, and the quests are the same every time, it doesn’t feel like you’re exploring, it feels like you’re a space janitor.

The rule of three makes everything predictable. Great games don’t have it, unless they disguise it really well. Bad games wear it on their sleeves.

If players can predict what’s going to happen in your game, the tension is lost, and the desire to continue is dampened. Word of mouth dies, nobody recommends your game to their friends, and your sales dry up and you can’t even justify making DLC for your game.

Rule of three design is garbage. It is that simple. There is no case where it is great game design, ever.

I have no idea why Bioware decided to make a game with nothing but rule of three design, but they did. And even when they try to make it interesting, it’s not interesting. One quest had me go to a location, where a person told me “I need a thing,” giving me some absurd reason as to why I couldn’t help them another way. I went where they sent me. Turns out the thing wasn’t there. That’s two places where I wasted time not completing the objective. At the second place, I was told about some big bad gangster dude at the third place. I killed the big bad gangster dude without even realizing it at first. Got the part, went back to the first location, and ended the quest.

The stakes never matter in Andromeda. You’ll always be forced to do something pointless before you can do the thing that does matter. Once, I found a place on a map, but the door was locked, and I could not get in. I finally found the quest that let me in that location, but I had to go to someone’s office. I went there. I tried to interact with a crate that obviously had loot in it, but I could not. Scanning something else gave me a map marker to the original location. I returned there. The door was open. It wasn’t like I’d found a key or anything, the door was just open. Then a vendor from the other side of the map showed up. We had a conversation. The next quest step was to see her… all the way on the other side of the map. Couldn’t we have had the conversation while she was still at the first location? No? Anyways, it was only after this point that the chest became interactive, and I could sift through its contents.

Contrast this with Divinity: Original Sin 2, where my excessive exploration has got me into numerous areas I shouldn’t be in. Look at a game like Skyrim, where someone can say “yeah, take the reward, it’s in that box over there,” but you stole it hours ago while you were sneaking around.

The game forces you around empty and pointless maps for no real reason at all. At least Bethesda places its objectives far across the map as a means of taking you through interesting and distracting landscapes. That’s part of the reason that Bethesda is such a popular developer. Their worlds are easy to get lost in.

I’m not gonna lie, I’d love to sit down with some leads at Bioware and talk about how to make their games better, because right now, their games seem formulaic as hell--Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda are virtually identical games in their broad strokes, with the only real differences being the result of the setting.

If you’re a professional writer, you’re probably going “why is Doc using so many words to say things he could be saying much more simply?” Well, I’m being a dick and using this rhetorical device of wasting your time to give you the idea of what it’s like to play Andromeda.

It’s a waste of time, and it’s broken on the conceptual, writing, design, presentation, and technical levels. Nothing works here. Everything is broken. I don’t know how this game made it this far without being canceled. I don’t know how the writing standards for this game were so lax. I don’t know why anyone recommended this game to me, because it is quite literally the worst AAA gaming experience I have had in years.

Ultimately, it comes down to drama. Nothing Andromeda does is dramatic. It tries to use dramatic music and awful cliches to make things feel dramatic, but it doesn’t earn anything. The art isn’t inspiring, the stakes are rarely, if ever, high, the quests are so predictable that all tension is gone.

And it sucks that I feel this way. It especially sucks because the game actually starts out being interesting, making you curious, prompting you to ask lots of questions. By the second planet, you realize just how predictable it all is. By the end of the game, you’re wondering why you stuck with it this long. That 40-or-so gigs of hard drive space would be better off empty.

There are so many other problems with the game. Why do most mods either have negatives that outweigh their positives, or positives so miniscule there’s no point to using them? Does a 5% recharge timer in a 5 second timer really matter? Does a 3% damage boost on a gun with three shots have any perceivable effect? Nope. We could dive into the problems with dozens of quests, more specifics about the writing, and so many other things. There’s so little good to find in this game. It wastes all its time thinking it’s better than it is.

Drama is everything. Use your mechanics and your narrative to create drama. That’s what gets players playing and talking. That’s why they spend money. If you’re not going to do that, don’t bother making video games.

[kithalstead]

June 6, 2017: “A Stranger”

*Prompt provided by @rainyari-shoelessdante: “ Meeting that one relative your mom swears you’ve met but you have no memory of”*

Kaylee hadn’t even wanted to go this dinner. It was the first day of her spring break and she had plans to clean out her closet and donate all her old clothes. She wanted to finish painting the mural she’d started during winter break. She also wanted to fall into a small coma, just long enough to relax. Her senior year was going hellishly, to say the least. She hadn’t gotten a full night of sleep in months, staying up too late and waking up too early. She was never in her room except for late at night. She never saw her friends anymore, her weekends filled with papers and research. She had a permanent spot saved at the library in the quietest, sunniest spot in the tower, somewhere between the commerce and finance sections, a small desk set in the corner between two large windows, her books and papers spread across the whole top, inviting absolutely no one to sit with her.

She’d been so stressed recently that when she got home, she’d hoped for just one little sigh of relief.

Her mother, however, thought otherwise.

She drove home, the fresh April air blowing cool through her car, the sunshine streaming through her windshield and nearly blinding her. It was a two-hour drive that she loved making, her windows down, her music up, just her and her thoughts along for the ride. Sometimes, she would bring classmates home on her way through, but not this time. This time, it was just her and the quiet thump of her music rumbling through her body.

Her house looked the same every time she pulled up the long, twisting driveway. Except that it looked smaller with each return, the paint weathering extraordinarily quickly, the porch sagging under the weight of her expectations. Her mother waited on the porch steps, a cigarette dangling lit between her fingers. Kaylee could see the resemblances between them from her car, her mother’s amber hair reflected in her rearview, grey-green eyes staring at her from the mirror and from the porch. Kaylee parked, and stared up at the house instead.

It was a two-story home, painted a sunshine yellow, the shutters a deep brown they were almost black. Windows looked into a house full of clutter, memories filling shelves and cupboards alongside the overflowing books and knick-knacks. Kaylee wondered if the washer still made the whirring noise like dial-up internet, if her mother had fixed the window on the second floor near the staircase that let the seasonal breeze gust through into the hallway.

Kaylee unfolded herself from the car, leaning back in to grab her purse and her duffle.

“Hey Mom,” she called out. She crossed the grass, green fighting among a sea of a crinkling yellow. “Put that cigarette out right now.”

“Kaylee, please,” her mother pleaded, her lips turning down around her last drag. “Your grandma expects both of us at her house in the next fifteen minutes. Do not make me go there without a cigarette.”

“Mother.”

Her mother, Marie, stubbed the cigarette out on the stone path in front of the porch. She rose and tossed the butt into the tin can by the steps. She gestured her daughter forward and when she was in reach, pulled her into the tightest hug possible. Her mother’s hug was a campfire in the cool spring air. Kaylee tucked her head into Marie’s neck, Marie just a hair taller than her daughter.

“What is this thing, anyway?” Kaylee asked as she drew away. She led them both across the porch, heading into the house to drop off her belongings. “I thought Grandma hated family gatherings.”

“She does. This reeks of Gillian.”

Her aunt, Gillian, did have a way of engineering outcomes to her own gain.

“Okay, well, we’re going to be late because I need to change. I’m still wearing my midterm sweatpants.”

“Don’t make me later than we need to be, Kaylee Marie.”

“Okay then, Marie Kaylee.”

Marie laughed as Kaylee dropped her purse and duffle by the door, and headed up the stairs, taking them two at a time, towards her bedroom. Her mother called out hurriedly, repeatedly, prompting Kaylee to change faster, child, what are you even changing into, a full corset gown. Kaylee took her time changing out of her midterm sweatpants, searching through her drawers for something fresh and family-friendly. She decided on a light scoop neck sweater and a pair of dark, form fitting jeans, simple and not flashy but comfortable. Her family was traditional in some ways, insisting that girls be covered and modest at all times and that they must be virgins until their wedding night. Kaylee had other ideas, but kept them mostly to herself because of how wrong she thought they were about most things.

When she met Marie at the bottom of the stairs, she displayed her outfit.

“Perfect, let’s go.” Marie ushered her out of the house and into the car.

“You know, I’m not above slashing my own tires to avoid this family gathering.”

Marie rolled her eyes.

“Don’t be so dramatic, c’mon. Let’s go. Move it along.”

The drive to Kara’s house wasn’t far, less than five minutes of a drive, but it always felt longer and shorter at the same time, especially with Marie’s nerves infecting Kaylee’s. She didn’t mind her family, honestly. They were loud, and opinionated. If they knew what Kaylee got up to at college, they certainly wouldn’t let her hear the end of it, but that was why she kept her college life at college.

She thought of the girl she kissed that morning on her way out of the dorm, the golden hair she’d run her hands through as they stood in each other’s space, the taste of her sticky lip gloss that clung to her own now. She smiled. She’d like to bring that girl home someday, but she wasn’t hopeful of her family’s reactions. She would keep her secret for now, but it weighed too heavy inside her chest to keep forever. She wondered if she would feel lighter, if she would float away afterwards. She wondered. She didn’t know if she hoped. Maybe she did.

The driveway at her grandma’s house was full, fuller than Kaylee had ever seen it before. The house was usually cramped, but with the weather warming, the party had seemingly spilled into the yard. The smell of barbeque meant that Uncle Toby had arrived and started manning her grandfather’s grill. Kaylee could see the older women, her aunts and great-aunts sitting in the shade of a large red umbrella while small children, her cousins, ran through the tall grass that no one had gotten around to mowing yet.

She also guaranteed that it would be her mother, Marie, who would end up mowing the lawn.

“Let’s run away,” Marie offered.

“Let’s just get it over with.”

Kaylee unfolded herself from the car before Marie could change her mind. Marie followed.

“Kaylee, my favorite baby!” her grandmother, Kara called from the table with the rest of the ladies. “Come, my baby!”

Kaylee picked her way across the lawn and slid into the seat beside her grandmother. Kara wrapped herself around Kaylee in her warmest hug. Kaylee had been born to Marie before Marie had even finished high school, so the first years of her life were spent in Kara’s lap while Marie finished school, and then a bachelor’s degree in business. As the only, and oldest, child to the youngest of Kara’s children, Kaylee had always been favored, and it was obvious.

“Hello Grandma,” she murmured into Kara’s neck. “Missed you.”

“Oh, I missed you too, baby girl.”

Marie found a seat between her sister, Gillian, and a man that Kaylee had never seen before. He talked with Marie and Great Aunt Tina, who sat on his other side, as if they were old friends. Kaylee couldn’t find Kara’s face in his, nor her late grandfather, Tobias’ face. She knew every member of her family, especially Kara’s siblings who had doted equally on her as a child.

She had never seen this man in her entire life.

She didn’t ask to be introduced, instead choosing to answer Kara’s questions about school about her studies, her job, her internship, her thesis. Kara asked about her roommate, a girl who was never home as she was either studying or partying, and if Kaylee had snagged a boyfriend yet.

“No, I’m too busy for boys,” she laughed, unwilling to fully lie to Kara.

“Good, you have plenty of time for them after you get your degree.”

“Business, like your mother?” the unnamed man asked, pulling the conversation’s attention towards him. Kaylee met his eyes and felt cold. They were steel, almost unkind in their solid, unwavering gaze.

“No,” she answered. “I’m studying art, and art history.”

“And what are you planning on doing with that?”

“Well, first step after I graduate is more school; I’m going to graduate school to get a master’s in museum studies, and after that, I’m hoping to work at the Museum of Modern Art someday, maybe even be the curator.”

“Sounds promising,” he said. His voice made her heart skip beats, the way he paused between words sounding like a threat. She couldn’t imagine why Kara had invited him. “Well, I hope your excellent management skills get you exactly that, got those from your mother no doubt.”

Her eyes narrowed. Marie at his side blushed. Marie was a lot of things, but Kaylee never knew her to be shy or a blusher. She didn’t take compliments well. She was self-confident, and knew her own worth well enough that some man saying she had management skills wasn’t something that would make her blush.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I caught your name,” Kaylee said.

“Kaylee, you know him,” Marie said, almost taken aback. “This is my old friend, Thomas.”

“Are you sure?” she replied. “I honestly don’t know this man.”

Marie stood up and circled around the table to grab Kaylee’s arm. She shuffled her daughter away from the table and gently towards the house.

“Why are you acting like this?” Marie hissed.

“What do you mean? All I did was ask him his name.”

“He’s a family friend that you’ve known since you were a baby.”

“Literally never seen this man in my life.”

She dropped Kaylee’s arm with a surprising force, almost throwing it away from herself.

“Don’t embarrass me like this, not in front of him. I know he’s not your father, but-”

“Oh my god, this isn’t about Dad!” Kaylee snapped. Her father was absent, an artist who travelled from festival to festival to sell his paintings, and had been for most of her life. He dropped in every year around her birthday, and on Christmas if she were lucky. She loved him, but it was easy to love someone who wasn’t around that often. “This is about that stranger thinking he knows me.”

The stranger, Thomas, sauntered over with a small limp to his gait, a smile unnervingly wide on his angular face. Kaylee would call him handsome if there wasn’t something off about him. She couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t place exactly what it was that made her skin itch.

“Hey, I’m sorry if I said something wro-”

“This doesn’t involve you,” Kaylee cut him off, looking straight into his unending, steel eyes. He stared back at her. “This is between me and my mother.”

“Kaylee,” Marie started.

“No, no, it’s okay. College is stressful. She probably just needs a good night’s rest. Why don’t you go get something cold to drink, Marie, and I’ll talk to her.”

Marie stepped away, and before Kaylee could protest her leaving, headed towards the cooler.

“Now, now, Kaylee, I know-”

“You don’t know shit,” Kaylee spat, taking her own step from him. He merely smiled. “I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, or how you convinced my entire family that you’re their friend, but I know better. I don’t know you.”

He stepped back into her space and ducked down, a whole head taller than her. He caught her chin in a spindly hand, and opened his eyes as wide as they could go. Kaylee could swear they glimmered, a spark in the endless grey that couldn’t be attributed to the sunshine above.

“Don’t you remember?”

She stuttered for a moment, her world faltering. She shut her eyes tight, trying to concentrate. Trying to remember the summers with her mother and Kara when she was young, riding a bike down the drive and back up, smiling wide at Marie at one end and Kara at the other, the smell of the freshly baled hay blowing around them from the fields nearby. Trying to remember her father stopping every autumn with a new art technique he’d picked up, trying to remember the way he flirted with her mother every year, hoping that she might take him back. Trying to hold onto the feeling of golden hair tickling her face, falling around them both like a curtain, big green eyes stared down at her from above late at night when Kaylee’s reservations were weakest.

Trying to hold on.

Trying to hold.

Trying to.

Trying.

She opened her eyes and looked up at his face.

[drewkatchen]

L to R.: Family friend, my Pop and my Am circa mid-1990s.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On the morning of January 14, 1998 in New York City at around 8 a.m., three men in ski masks carried empty duffel bags into the north tower of One World Trade Center, according to a report in the New York Times. 

Naturally, the reason for their visit wasn’t social.

The men from Brooklyn and Staten Island had a distinct plan all too obvious, a scheme which led them to a passenger elevator bound for the the 11th floor, where they then boarded a freight elevator and confronted a Brinks guard delivering money to the Bank of America corporate currency exchange center. The money was handed over, and the three men escaped the tower with $1.6 million. No one was injured.

For a brief period before their capture, these guys existed in the city, fanning out individually with a lot of money in their bags and one big secret in tow.

----

There’s no aspect of my life that overlaps with the story above really; I was not in the World Trade area at the time and you should trust me on that. On that morning many years ago, I was just a 21-year-old kid waking up in my grandmother’s central New Jersey home -- a sturdy, wooden affair from the late ‘50s -- in a lumpy bed far too small for all the college weight I was carrying around at the time. I didn’t live in her home, but my grandfather’s recent death from Parkinson’s demanded I leave school in South Carolina and board the quickest flight to EWR to be there, to say goodbye to an elder. One moment I was hanging out with my roommate in our spacious and rundown university apartment as a new semester started up, and the next I was in a crush of family -- great aunts all the way down to cousins -- all at different stages of sadness and relief. I hadn’t seen some of them in over a decade, and a few still longed to pinch my cheeks and or ruffle my curly kid locks. Like a lot of people, I didn’t know my Pop well; he began deteriorating when I was still a boy, and because I lived nowhere near him for most of my youth. Pictures show me as a chubby kid smiling in his lap, but I don’t remember much about him really. I remember his sideburns, bushy and gray and smelling of cigarette smoke. I know he had a flair for natty suits and sipping martinis during the day and that he had a full head of white hair. I know my grandmother loved him more than anything, and while she was happy he was no longer in the locked, debilitating prison of his disease, her primary reason for living had now gone away with a whimper. There’s apparently a legendary picture of him mowing the lawn in formal attire. Everyone still talks about it. And that was him, a man who left Irvington to give his wife and three kids a solid middle-class Jewish existence in the burbs.

The house in Bound Brook is now gone. Sold to a young couple.

---

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about the process of coming out. What coming out in my younger years meant to me, how the art I found at the time taught me to be fearless in the face of people waiting to strike me down, what being outed by taunting high school students meant to my emotional development, how the support from friends and the punk community buoyed me and who I told and when and why and the tension and joy and happiness and sadness that all came with this thing that some of us in the world have to do in order to break through to a new stage of living and truth. It honestly feels like a blur and then it also feels like I can call up every nanosecond, speck of dust and conversation from those times, because living through them was so arduous and exhilarating. I’m probably thinking about this now mostly because I just married and I’m old and boring now and I’m stricken with that thing people in their forties get when they maybe do too much reflecting, but it’s such a curious thing, this heavy soul-baring that has to pass your lips, and if you’re lucky this happens to you at a young age with little to no damage incurred. But it also means there’s a bold declaration you must make in order to be fully healthy, whether or not you want to make a bold declaration in order to be fully healthy. It’s not one a lot of the friends around you have to make, but it’s one you do.

I never came out to him, my Pop, and I don’t have any real feelings about it. I’m sure my Am -- a fervent and socially progressive Jewish woman until her dying breath -- holding onto his still hand as he sat in a chair in the nursing home, shared the news with my grandfather at some point before he passed.

At the time, death was still somewhat abstract to me, which is a luxury not everyone can claim, I know. Pap, the grandfather I had on my mother’s side, an irrepressible alcoholic, was mostly someone I didn’t know, and he died alone in his crumbling apartment in a nothing Pennsylvania town when I was still in high school. I got the call about that while at band practice, and I didn’t feel sad. One minute I was home, the next I was stuffed into a car with my mom, stepdad and two siblings headed to bid him goodbye. Later in 1998, I would find myself openly grieving with most of my community for Matthew Shepard, a complete stranger to me in life but who in essence was me and my friends, was any gay kid in America, really. At the time of his death he was 21 just like me, and his murder reminded me the unthinkable was still very much on the table. Yet I felt safe as an out college student in Columbia, but what did that really mean? What was I safe to do or not do? Safe from what?

---

On January 13, we buried my Pop next to his mother and father at a Jewish cemetery in Clifton, New Jersey -- the one behind the diner. My grandmother would join them all in just under ten years. I remember her in the limo ride back to her home; she was holding a relative’s hand and just staring out the window with a very small smile on her face as we drove south on the Garden State Parkway. For the moment, she wasn’t crying or saying anything. She just looked out the window as we drove past the neighborhood of her youth -- its current state of disrepair evident from the highway -- I don’t know if she ever went back to visit in her life. I wonder now what she saw looking out the window or if she could make out the day she met my grandfather as the blocks went by in a blur. I won’t ever know.

I only had a day left in Jersey before I left for home. Old friends and family were around sitting shiva and plying my grandmother and uncles with more lox, pastrami and matzo ball soup -- the usual elixirs -- than she knew what to do with. There were some things I wanted to do outside of the house, beyond the radius of sympathy flowers and bunched tissues deployed to fight the raw grief, and I set out to accomplish one of them.

There was a cafe in the West Village with my name on it; I just had to get myself there and experience it again for a few hours.

On that same night in the city as Port Authority police searched high and low for the men who made off with Bank of America’s money, the day after the funeral, I had my own little secret, one that came with me on the Manhattan-bound NJ Transit line from Bound Brook, New Jersey and into the mouth of Penn Station. Mine didn’t involve weapons or large sums of ill-gotten gains and police in hot pursuit, but it still felt like a weighty one a the time. I also had someone I wanted to share it with. Matt, who grew up down the street from my grandmother, came along, suspecting nothing more was up than a quick traipse around the city.

It’s not accurate to call Matt my best friend, whatever that means, even with three decades of a certain bond under our belts; the only times we’ve really spent together were my summer vacations and the holidays and by the time I was living in the north, he was long gone, first for a finance job in San Francisco and then permanently to Hong Kong for another finance job. Aside for the first few years of my life, we’ve never lived in the same town or close to one another. Yet I’ve known Matt since kindergarten, the longest I’ve known someone not in my blood family, and the fact that his home was just a few doors down from my grandmother and thus a refuge to a bored kid away from home helped a firm bond develop over toys and MTV. I can vividly recall us, complete first grade dweebs in short shorts, playing cards on his living room floor while Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger played on the turntable. And if Matt wasn’t my best friend, he was still someone who meant a lot to me, just because of the sheer longevity, and he deserved to know what was up with me.

He also still does matter to me even if I haven’t seen him in years.

---

For someone who enjoys getting lost in the land just beyond the tracks, an evening train ride to the city from Jersey is never as good as it could be; the blinding fluorescence inside the car at night turns the windows into mirrors. While everything outside is basic and flat, I sometimes cup my hands just to get a look at the row houses and sleepy towns. Just to see. I don’t remember anything about my ride with Matt into the city that night, but I’m sure there were nerves running through me as the towns rolled by me unnoticed.

By 21, I was just about totally out. I’d already had a boyfriend before moving on to a devastating grad school crush that about broke my heart into a million pieces. Maybe the more conservative elements in my family didn’t have confirmation but suspected it due to my lack of a girlfriend, but that wasn’t a concern of mine. Matt didn’t know either, a fact having more to do with geography and not wanting to bare my soul to him via a land line than anything else. He was a Catholic school jock though, so it could end up being not great. Had I heard him make gay jokes? Did he ever use the F word? Maybe it wouldn’t be alright, and if that ended up being true, I needed to prepare for the possibility. In the late nineties, coming out to the wrong person could still be a damning line in the sand, effectively ending relationships or familial bonds, and while I know that still applies in 2017, perhaps less frequently, I did feel the sting of rejection from a few people, people who really mattered. It was mostly temporary, but it still happened. Back then, sharing who you were even to a sympathetic ear still felt monumental. Just ask Ellen. I suspect for the person coming out now, either at 16 or at 80, it still feels that way.

--- 

The city always held an undeniable allure for all the obvious reasons: not far but seemingly unattainable and dangerous and exciting and where everything happened, from Gorilla Biscuits gigs to Keith Haring exhibits. I guess I reasoned that regardless of what happened, Matt still had to ride home with me, so he was basically stuck accepting it whether he liked it or not, and together we’d work through whatever stages of whatever he was feeling. And maybe more than that, it was perhaps a subconscious wish to connect myself to the activist community of the city, and to allow myself to be tethered to their stories and lives in the most superficial of ways, to have told someone within the confines of New York that I am out and gay, to feel the strength of the West Village at my back for a quick moment. To have a story of my own anchoring me to the fight for equality, even if mine were really small and mostly only significant to me. Back then I had no idea I would be spending most of my adult life working in and hovering around New York, so I imagined this might be the last time I would be in the area for some time.

Or maybe I just thought Matt needed a night in the gay part of town.

And if I knew what made the city famous culturally, I certainly knew nothing about getting around, and neither did Matt. At the time, the map of the city in my head looked something like “CBGB A7 ACT UP VENUS RECORDS CHRISTOPHER STREET AVENUE A BLEECKER STREET YOUTH OF TODAY RECONSTRUCTION RECORDS,” which isn’t really a map at all, or not a real one on paper. But having no working knowledge of the city then is what makes the night so memorable now, and it’s why in part I still reflect on it so much. Even now, whenever I’m in the Penn Station area, I can see Matt and me emerging from the escalator, still two dorks, and I can see the gears working in my head. I’d been to the West Village maybe twice prior to this night, but where it was on a map I didn’t know. The subway was out of the question because I’d never been on it and I didn’t know how to find it or where it went. The one thing I did know was I needed to get there, find this beacon in the night that was a cafe on Christopher Street, open my mouth a little and then somehow get back to Jersey unscathed.

The distance between Penn Station and Christopher Street isn’t really all that significant, but to a rookie kid without a map and with nothing more than a mere hunch, it may as well have been a thousand miles from one to the other. I don’t know what it’s like anymore to walk for twenty blocks wondering where the street I need is: I’ve been working in the city now for 13 years, so I know the basic lay of the land and even in the rare case now when I don’t, my phone does. All I remember of that walk is basically telling Matt every few blocks “It’s coming up soon; I promise.”

The things I remember about the night all this time later: Matt’s look of surprise when we got to the Factory Cafe and I sat him down and said what I had to say. He didn’t reject me or panic, and I’m sure it was no big surprise to his ears. But I remember he needed a minute to adjust, and he laughed a lot. Not at me, but as a response to new information.

“I remember that it really didn't matter, black, white, purple, bi, straight, gay,” Matt recalls over email. He lives in Hong Kong now, so it takes him a bit to respond. “You were already my friend and a close one at that.” 

All around us, couples were on dates and people were catching up with friends or were lost in books, and I felt plugged into something -- a confidence? a safety? -- I didn’t normally feel in South Carolina...or...anywhere else really. Maybe everyone thought we were a couple sharing coffee before heading out for the night.

There’s no big dramatic conclusion to this other than we eventually finished our coffee and ended up playing pool at Stonewall before catching the train back. I kept my friend, and I still have him. For all the unknowns, Matt rolled with it and only later admitted he was stunned at what I told him. There are a million reasons why coming out to Matt, and to anyone, mattered. This isn’t abstract to me. Like I said, he wasn’t my best or closest friend, but he was the closest thing I had to a brother my own age, someone who knew my history and his support was vital in a bigger sense.

I think about my night with Matt often as I walk past the old Factory Cafe, which is now a clothing store. When I pass those big windows, I think about a younger me (a me with a full head of hair), nervously fidgeting in his seat near the front, working up the nerve to tell my oldest friend something that was both weighty and trivial. Trivial because I was still me; I hadn’t changed. I see myself laughing once it left my mouth, and I see people next to us turning pages of their New Yorker or brushing the hair out of their spouse’s eyes. I obviously see the ghosts others all around me doing the same thing, with their declarations sometimes being met with mixed results.

It’s been a long time since I felt I had to come out to someone; I’ve been me for what feels like forever, and so has my husband. But for a kid from South Carolina, that night in the Village at Stonewall -- a place that still remains a vital gathering ground -- helps remind me I’ve always had people on my side and always will. I came out to many many people when I was young, but I only came out once in New York City, and that somehow feels important to me in a way I can’t fully quantify.

I’ll close with some further bits of Matt’s email to me, because they’re fun and illuminating and characteristic of his open jocularity: “I certainly didn't expect it, but it did clear some things up in my head. All my friends had always been into sports, girls; you never seemed bothered by that, and you never even tried to hide or fake it. Hell, I remember you drawing on your Dad's Playboys, I'm thinking ...’Is this dude nuts????? He drawing on Ms Novembers double DD's’”

I’m glad Matt’s still out there and that he’s still with me.

[raisingsupergirl]

A Country Boy Can't Survive Forever, and That's Okay

It always confuses me when I see people bragging about living in New York or Chicago or Hollywood. For example, I have a few friends who rock that quintessential city life. On a typical Saturday, they go to the zoo, grab dinner at a trendy Vietnamese place, catch a quick show at their favorite theater, and then finish off the night with a craft beer at the new microbrewery. They're always surrounded by walls of people, noise, and distraction. Or so it would seem. But then, when they ask me how I can live in a small town with nothing to do, I just laugh, because they couldn’t be more wrong.

You see, I've lived that city life before, both in college and for a couple of years afterward. It was horribly exciting. The fruits of man's labor were everywhere. The pinnacles of his expertise shone from every storefront. Craftsmen and artists and businessmen all scrambled with unwavering focus to climb to the top and be the best. And the results were impossible to ignore. But they could never be bothered to learn to do anything outside of their one passion. And after a while, when people would talk about all that there is to do in big cities, I started hearing them differently. I saw a swarm of people, each one focusing on doing their one thing, whatever it may be, and nothing else. Hyper-specialization and no self-reliance. If something else needed fixing or making or arranging, a specialist in that field was always just a phone call away. People don't live in the city so they have more to do. They live in the city because they don't want to have to do anything.

It's true that Farmington, MO doesn't have a city aquarium, a five-star Asian restaurant, a hipster microbrewery (though that one's not completely true….), or an extravagant theater. Instead, a typical Saturday for me would consist of hours cleaning my three fish tanks, more hours preparing venison stir-fry (from the doe I killed last fall), more hours editing stories for my publishing company, more hours practicing songs for the Sunday morning worship band, and still more hours brewing my own beer. And I can guarantee you I understand and appreciate all of those things more than someone who went out and merely enjoyed the fruits of someone else's expertise. But there's a flaw in all of my acquired skills, dedication, and gloating: I'm good at all of these things—I appreciate them because I know how they work—but I'm no expert. And I never will be. 

You see, people have a tendency to die. And it happens relatively quickly in the grand scheme of things. If I'm lucky, I'll live to see eighty. And that's not enough time to become a world-renowned aquarist, chef, writer, editor, musician, and brewmaster (along with all of the other things I dabble in). Not nearly enough time. And therein lies the great conundrum of humanity—is it better to specialize in one thing or generalize in all the things?

Growing up in the "country," it should be obvious where I stand. My kind always have a singular thought in the back of our minds, deep in our spirit: Will I be able to protect and provide for my family when the world inevitably goes down the crapper? Seriously, it's what we think about. Maybe it's leftover from the Westward Expansion and the Wild West. Who knows? But it's the reason why we keep spare ammo in our gun safe and why we plant our own gardens. We're independent. We don't need someone doing for us what we can do for ourselves. If you can't change your own tire, you shouldn't be driving. If you can't mow your own grass, you shouldn't have a yard. But there are obvious arguments against that. If a person earns, say, $50 per hour in a highly skilled and specialized job, what kind of sense would it make for him to mow his own lawn when he could pay someone to do it for $20 per hour? Time is money. And our limited time should be spent in whatever way earns the most money, right? Or, at least, in whatever way most efficiently earns money, that way, once the desired or required amount is earned, the rest of our time can be spent in enjoyable leisure. But, to me, that argument has a fatal flaw.

For me, most of the things I do are my leisure. I find deep satisfaction in creating, in enjoying my creations, and in sharing those creations with my family and friends. Sure, my hobbies are a huge time and money sink, and it would be much easier, cheaper, and quicker to just buy things from an "expert," but they wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable. Life is too complex, diverse, and beautiful for me to just take everyone else's word for it. But with that said, I thank God that not everyone thinks and acts like me. If they did, we'd never have made it out of the Dark Ages.

Yes, it's true. I'm not so narrow minded to believe that my way is the only way, or even the right way. Humanity cures diseases, creates technology, and explores space not by being prepared for anything, but by being prepared for one thing. Experts, specialists, virtuosos—call them what you will, but they're the ones who push humanity forward. There's a reason no one reads about the philosophies of farmers (even though I've heard some of the deepest, awe-inspiring lessons come from their mouths): they don't care if anyone hears them. They're worried about getting the field sown and reaped so they're prepared when the world inevitably goes down the crapper. They're not taking the great risk, relying on the unreliable, forsaking all else for one goal (though they are allowing others to do so by keeping them fed, which is a completely different—and equally important—topic). And so, I admire specialists. Sometimes, I even envy them. Though, as a physical therapist, I am a specialist, so I understand the lifestyle well enough to know I would go crazy if I immersed myself completely in just one thing. 

In the end, life is what we make of it. And we make it however we, ourselves, are made. There are very few wrong ways to go about it. Humanity is, and always will be, the sum of all our lives, experiences, and efforts. In that way, we guide our own, collective fate. That fate doesn't have to look exactly how every individual should see it. In fact, it shouldn't. Otherwise, we'd either all die with the first drought, or we'd be no better than ants. And ants didn't make it anywhere close to the Dark Ages. Though… it would be cool to see a little hive marching around with tiny swords and shields, battling dragons and…

Hmm. Well, gotta go. It appears that I have a story to write. Coming to a big-city theater near you! Feel free to Paypal me in advance so I can retire early and live a life of leisure. Yeah... like that’ll ever happen.

[torontohypnotherapist]

JULY 02 ― GEORGE GURDJIEFF QUOTES

I COULD NOT FORGET THE FORCE WITH WHICH HE HAD MADE ME PROMISE TO DO MY JOB

“As I remember, it was not until sometime on Monday afternoon — Mr. Gurdjieff had left Sunday evening — that the rumour that he had been in an automobile accident filtered down to the children at the school. We heard first that he had been killed, then that he had been seriously injured and was not expected to live. A formal announcement was made by someone in authority Monday evening. He was not dead, but he was seriously injured and near death in a hospital.

“It is difficult to describe the impact of such an announcement. The very existence of the "Institute" depended entirely on Gurdjieff's presence. It was he who assigned work to every individual — and up to that moment he had supervised, personally, every detail of the running of the school. Now, the imminent possibility of his death brought everything to a standstill. It was only thanks to the initiative of a few of the older students, most of whom had come with him from Russia, that we continued to eat regularly.

“While I did not know what was going to happen to me, personally, the one thing that was still vivid in my mind was the fact that he had told me that I was to mow the lawns "no matter what happened". It was a relief to me to have something concrete to do; a definite job that he had assigned to me. It was also the first time that I had any feeling that he was, perhaps, extraordinary. It was he who had said "no matter what happens", and his accident had happened. His injunction became that much stronger. I was convinced that he had known beforehand that "something" was going to happen, although not necessarily an automobile accident.

“I was not the only one who felt that his accident was, in a sense, foreordained. The fact that he had gone to Paris alone (I was told it was the first time he had done so) was sufficient proof for most of the students. My reaction, in any event, was that it had become absolutely essential to mow the grass; I was convinced that his life, at least in part, might depend on my dedication to the task he had given me.

“These feelings of mine assumed special importance when, a few days later, Mr. Gurdjieff was brought back to the Prieure^ to his room which overlooked "my" lawns, and we were told that he was in a coma and was being kept alive on oxygen. Doctors came and went at intervals; tanks of oxygen were delivered and removed; a hushed atmosphere descended over the place—it was as if we were all involved in permanent, silent prayer for him.

“It was not until a day or so after his return that I was told — probably by Madame de Hartmann — that the noise of the lawn-mower would have to stop. The decision I was forced to make then was a momentous one for me. Much as I respected Madame de Hartmann, I could not forget the force with which he had made me promise to do my job. We were standing at the edge of the lawn, directly beneath the windows of his room, when I had to give her my answer. I did not reflect for very long, as I recall, and I refused, with all the force in me. I was then told that his life might actually depend on my decision, and I still refused. What surprises me now is that I was not categorically forbidden to continue, or even forcibly restrained. The only explanation that I can find for this is that his power over his pupils was such that no single individual was willing to take the responsibility of totally denying my version of what he had told me. In any case, I was not restrained; I was simply forbidden to cut the grass. I continued to cut it.”

~ Fritz Peters “Boyhood With Gurdjieff” ...

TRAIN YOURSELF LITTLE BY LITTLE

Questioner: Yes, and I can say that what [the first questioner] has said seems to me that it was me who said it, because for some time there is something completely new in me and there is also the fear of seeing it disappear. Because in a general way, save in very rare moments, there was something in me that was not there previously and essentially something in my head, something that I felt in my head, on which I lean and which separates me from the rest, which is distinct from my body, from all that I am, from my sentiment.

Gurdjieff: You can say, perhaps, that you are one thing and your body is another thing. Before you could not say it very sincerely.

Questioner: It is a thing that one can maintain?

Gurdjieff: We have thirty-three qualities of liquid that I can give you. It is not necessary to understand; you have asked me if it is possible and I have said, yes. I said also that there are thirty-three qualities of fluid.

Questioner, You have made me feel accurately, in a moment, my attitude of today toward the work. It is when you remembered during the dinner, the anecdote of the Kurd. I have tried to do the exercise that you gave me. I try to do it always and, the more I do it, the more it becomes nearly impossible for me to do it, save in moments when I can join together the most favorable conditions. But the less I join together, the more I desire to join together and truly I could not want to abandon this exercise before having, in the end, a little better taste of what I have done. In the better moments of this exercise, not in the most favorable moments but in the moments when I work with the most intensity, that is to say in life, when I succeed in pursuing the exercise while continuing my ordinary occupations, I experience a taste which is entirely deceptive; I have the impression of living in a double dream. On the one hand, I pursue my external life as in a dream and I try to play a role in it, and, on the other hand, I do my work also as in a dream, and I have the impression of a role that I am going to play internally. By way of compensation, when I do this exercise only under comfortable conditions, brusquely it happens that I have a feeling of "I" which is stronger yet in the exercise of division; and I would like to recover, in my ordinary life, the taste which I had at that moment.

Gurdjieff: Continue this. You shall train yourself little by little. Make this feeling your property. One must have the feeling first. That is to say, you no longer have your associations. The feeling comes in you, it is your property but in a special state. That is to say, it cannot come in life. In a special state when you relax a little, you can remember this feeling and you must seize it.

Questioner: And, at the same time I feel that the true work is in ordinary life.

Mme de Sazlmann: But one must do it before this, in a special state, and little by little you shall arrive at it in ordinary life.

Questioner: The strongest feeling of division is when I do it under comfortable conditions.

Mme de Sazlmann: It is necessary for this to grow in you in these moments. After, little by little, you shall be able to make this state last.

~ George Gurdjieff "Paris/Wartime Meetings" ...

EVERY MAN DISLIKES SUFFERING, EVERY MAN WANTS TO BE QUIET. EVERY MAN CHOOSES WHAT IS EASIEST, LEAST DISTURBING

Question: Why was the horse not educated?

Gurdjieff: The grandfather and grandmother gradually forgot, and all the relatives forgot. Education needs time, needs suffering; life becomes less peaceful. At first they did not educate it through laziness, and later they forgot altogether. Here again, the law of three works. Between the positive and the negative principles there must be friction, suffering. Suffering leads to the third principle. It is a hundred times easier to be passive so that suffering and result happen outside and not inside you. Inner result is achieved when everything takes place inside you.

Sometimes we are active, at other times we are passive. For one hour we are active, for another hour passive. When we are active we are being spent, when we are passive we rest. But when everything is inside you, you cannot rest, the law acts always. Even if you do not suffer, you are not quiet.

Every man dislikes suffering, every man wants to be quiet. Every man chooses what is easiest, least disturbing, tries not to think too much. Little by little our grandfather and grandmother rested more and more. The first day, five minutes of rest; the next day, ten minutes; and so on. A moment came when half of the time was spent on rest. And the law is such that if one thing increases by a unit, another thing decreases by a unit. Where there is more it is added, where there is less it is reduced. Gradually your grandfather and grandmother forgot about educating the horse. And now no one remembers any more.

~ George Gurdjieff "Views From the Real World" ...

NO, NOT DESERVE

PINDAR: I feel I deserve this dish because once for three months when I was with the army I had only a plate of beans three times a day. So now I deserve this to make up for that time.

GURDJIEFF: No, not deserve. If once you unconsciously had such experience and then if you consciously again repeated experience, then you could tell you deserve.

~ "Gurdjieff and the Women of the Rope"

[isabellelambert1975]

How to create a beautiful mini meadow garden

Do you fancy a mini meadow garden?

I’ve seen several beautiful strips of wildflower meadow in show gardens this year. And also in friends’ gardens. Ever since the 2012 London Olympics, meadow gardens have been fashionably on trend.

Amanda and Julian Mannering’s town garden has a meadow in the centre, measuring about 30ft x 30ft square.

But a middle-sized garden doesn’t have half a mile to fill with meadow flowers and native grasses. So is a mini meadow viable?

Amanda and Julian Mannering have a square walled garden behind their terraced house (open today for Faversham Open Gardens & Garden Market Day). It’s about 50ft x 60ft – space for borders all round, but not quite enough space to break up in any other way. They had a standard square lawn in the middle, but they weren’t entirely happy with it.

One day a friend stood in the middle and asked ‘what’s this lawn for?’

A meadow garden breaks up the space

So Julian and Amanda decided to turn the middle of the lawn into a mini meadow.

At first, they just mowed out the shape (around 30ft x 30ft square), with a path diagonally through the middle. Then they simply stopped mowing that area.

The mini meadow breaks up the space in the centre of the garden, and is wonderful for wildlife.

Friends told them that would never work, and that they would have to remove the turf.

If you are someone who likes to do things properly, then a mini-meadow does take time and preparation. Consult the RHS or buy a book such as Making a Wildflower Meadow by Pam Lewis or Meadows at Great Dixter and Beyond by Christopher Lloyd and Fergus Garrett.

(Links to Amazon are affiliate links, which means I may get a small fee if you buy through them, but it doesn’t affect the price you pay.)

Or you can just let the grass grow…

I have about half a dozen friends with mini meadow gardens. None of them ‘did it properly.’ They all just let the grass grow. But it’s worth knowing that these are all perennial meadows. An annual meadow (see later on in this post) would need the soil to be cleared.

Artist Helen Kirwan just let her meadow grow out of lawn, mainly to reduce the upkeep of the garden.

When conceptual artist Helen Kirwan let her lawn grow long, she never added seeds or plug plants. Ox-eye daisies ‘came from nowhere,’ she says.

However Amanda and Julian did do some meadow planting over the years: ‘We added some wildflower seeds from Emorsgate Seeds, and watched it all grow up.’ Emorsgate Seeds sell a variety of different meadow seeds for various soil types.

The first year Amanda and Julian mainly saw cowslips and wild carrot emerge, but a wildflower meadow changes every year. The wild carrot seems to have almost disappeared.

You still have to weed a mini meadow garden

Some weeds are very invasive, such as medick, docks, thistles and dandelions.

You will have to weed them out of your meadow garden regularly or they will take over.

Medick spreads everywhere and stifles other plants. It seems particularly prevalent this year. You have to weed it out of meadow gardens.

Sow yellow rattle to weaken the grass

In the second year, Amanda and Julian sowed yellow rattle to weaken the grass, and this has proved to be very good advice. (They should really have sown it in the first year, but luckily nature doesn’t read instructions…)

Sarah Raven says that ‘sowing yellow rattle is the key to a mini meadow.’ That’s because it’s a parasitic plant, and will help reduce the amount of lawn grass you have. More wildflowers can establish themselves in the gaps.

Amanda’s sister-in-law also gave her half a dozen ox-eye daisies (Leucanthemum vulgare) from her own meadow lawn. These have since multiplied into thousands.

Half a dozen ox-eye daisy plants turned into this – in just two years.

You can get 25 plug plants online from Kiss-my-Grass (Boston Seeds) for £29.50+ delivery.

Amanda and Julian also sowed wild grass seeds, too, to make the original grass more diverse.

So is a meadow garden less work?

Julian and Amanda spend much less time mowing the lawn. ‘It takes about twenty minutes to mow the paths once a week,’ said Amanda. That’s much less time than they spent mowing when the whole garden was a traditional lawn.

But there’s also the weeding, plus – in the early days only – some planting of seeds or appropriate meadow plants.

And they scythe it once a year, usually some time between mid-July and mid-August. ‘We went on a scything course. It takes about half an hour to do, and it’s all fairly easy once you know how. Then you remove the scythed material – don’t leave it lying on the ground or it will add nutrients.’

‘I also rake it occasionally in the winter. Generally, it is a bit less work,’ assessed Amanda. ‘But it’s a different sort of work, and done at different times.’

Which meadow plants to choose

The RHS explains that you need to decide whether you are going to grow a perennial meadow, like Amanda and Julian, or an annual meadow, like my friends who sow seeds every year.

The perennial meadow needs a fairly poor soil, so don’t enrich it. Amanda and Julian’s lawn was well drained, in full sun and hadn’t been fertilised so it was ideal for a perennial meadow, which comes up year after year.

The gate into Amanda and Julian’s perennial meadow lawn, with its ox-eye daisies in June.

Perennial meadow plants include ox-eye daisies and cowslips.

Annual meadows need richer soil, so they are the right choice if you’re replacing a border with a meadow. Plants for annual meadows include cornflowers, corn poppy, corn marigold and corncockle.

Amanda has tried to establish cornflowers in her meadow lawn, but so far they’ve failed. She thinks that the slugs have eaten them, but it may be that the soil isn’t rich enough, because it’s a perennial meadow.

Annual poppies or Papaver rhoeas growing wild by the beach at Southwold. These are best in an annual meadow garden.

What about meadow gardens instead of flowers in borders?

Friends of mine grow wildflowers successfully in small raised beds. Former borders or raised beds are best for annual meadow plants because the soil is richer. You definitely need to start with clear, weeded soil, and an open sunny bed.

The results can be stunning – 3-4 months of changing colour, from an annual wildflower seed mix.

I hunted for annual wildflower and meadow seed mixes on Amazon. The most popular and best-reviewed was Plantworks 3 m Mini-meadow Easy Sow Wildflower Seed by Empathy. All the seeds are RHS approved ‘Perfect for Pollinators’.

And Empathy also make Rootgrow mycorrhizal fungi.  This is a powder (endorsed by the RHS) which you scatter into the planting hole and which helps roots get established, improving take-up of nutrients and water. I’ve used Rootgrow on all my plantings this year, and so far everything is looking super-healthy.

Should you buy plug plants?

Plug plants get your mini wildflower meadow off to a more definite start, as you can plan which plants to put in. The ones that do well in your area will do well, and others may not.

Hugh and Fiona Boucher let their lawn grass grow long, and added plug plants. Some other flowers have also seeded themselves in the meadow.

But at least the ones that do well will naturalise, so it should just be a one-off investment. Obviously, this is more expensive than seed.

Ox-eye daisies and long grasses in the Bouchers’ meadow lawn

However, in a small area, it’s relatively inexpensive and you’ll get a more instant effect.

You can get wildflower meadow plug plants from Plugplants.net, Wildflowers.co.uk   and Marshalls.

Or wildflower meadow mats?

‘Meadow turf mats’ take alot of the guesswork out of growing a meadow. I found several companies who do this, including  Turf Online and Wildflower Turf,

Can you plant a mini meadow anywhere?

The key is being in full sun and having well drained soil. Very shady corners aren’t suitable for a mini wildflower meadow.

There are meadow turf mats and wildflower seed mixes which will grow in dappled shade, but you have to specifically select them. For example, The Grass People have a shaded area meadow mix. You won’t be able to grow a meadow of any size in a very shady patch.

And Meadowmat have a Woodland Shade Wildflower Turf. It’s a pre-grown mat,  costing £42 a square metre, of wildflowers, and grasses that are happy to grow in partial or dappled shade.

There are also other options if you don’t want a conventional lawn.

The delightful Abbey Physic Garden is also in Faversham Open Gardens & Garden Market Day. It has just planted small sections of chamomile lawn by a new bench, and is cultivating a small patch of ‘grass-free lawn’ on the other side. There are lots of wonderful wildflower or eco-gardening ideas at the Abbey Physic and it’s a beautiful garden to visit.

The patch of green in the middle on the left, in front of the bench, is a newly planted chamomile lawn at the Abbey Physic Garden.

Wildflower and wildlife patch in the Abbey Physic Garden

Faversham Open Gardens & Garden Market Day 24th June

Amanda and Julian’s meadow garden and the Abbey Physic Garden are open for Faversham Open Gardens & Garden Market Day today.

My garden is also open, and here is a preview:

Pin for reference:

    The post How to create a beautiful mini meadow garden appeared first on The Middle-Sized Garden.

from The Middle-Sized Garden https://www.themiddlesizedgarden.co.uk/how-to-create-a-beautiful-mini-meadow-garden/

[robertpatrick8]

Why one man traded in his temporary gig for a long-term career

Rodney Creech turned his accidental lawn care business into a long-term, sustainable career.

Buy local Lawn Plus competes against national firms by “being better.”

Rodney Creech always thought he would be a farmer. After all, his family farm goes back four generations. So it was a surprise when after college he found himself knee deep in the green industry.

“I technically had a lawn care business and didn’t even know it,” says Creech, owner of Lawn Plus in West Alexandria, Ohio. “I was licensed and insured but I had no name, no business model—I was just working out of the back of my truck.”

With a “love and passion for corn and soy beans,” Creech went to Morehead State University in Morehead, Ky., to pursue an agronomy degree. One of Creech’s professors introduced him to turf science courses, during which he developed a strong interest in turf management. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in agronomy and turf science in 1999, Creech returned home and took a job in agronomy sales at a local crop store and spent his evenings providing lawn care for his clients.

“I fell in love with the industry,” Creech says. “Never did I dream I would have a lawn care business, but when I got home from college I started caring for the lawns of my parents, their friends and people from church.”

Over time, Creech noticed how many people ultimately have bad experiences with their lawn care providers, and he began to realize that his accidental career could turn into something real. He launched Lawn Plus in 2005, serving about 40 properties, with a mission to deliver high-quality service at affordable prices. He left the crop store to go full-time in lawn care in 2007, and his first employee (his dad) joined the company that year. By fall 2008 he was hiring part-time help. Today the $2.2-million company has 32 employees and offers 85 percent lawn health services and 15 percent pest control, tree and shrub care and athletic field renovations and installations to a 75 percent residential, 25 percent commercial clientele.

“Most of the lawns I cared for were only receiving three to four applications, and I kept hearing from local people that their lawn care company was doing six to eight applications, calling them all the time and showing up when not needed,” Creech says. “It came to me that many of these people were being taken advantage of and spending too much money on too many applications from large corporate companies.

“Our goal is for our customers to have amazing experiences and to change their thoughts about the lawn care industry,” he adds. “We really challenge and embed it in our guys to be better.”

Smart diversification

Creech is often asked why Lawn Plus doesn’t offer landscape maintenance services, but he knew from the start that he never wanted to mow lawns. He likes the knowledge and expertise that comes with providing specialized lawn care, and he knows that “a 16-year-old with a trailer and a mower” will never be his competition. Over the years, Creech has continued to think strategically about the services he offers. For years he had considered offering tree and shrub care, but knew he just didn’t understand the market well enough to dive in with confidence. Last year, Creech jumped on the opportunity to hire a tree care expert with 30 years of experience and a large existing client base. He says the new division was worth the wait.

The company’s athletic field renovation and installation division is another relatively new addition. While Lawn Plus had serviced athletic field turf for the past 10 years, three years ago the company invested in specialized equipment to allow it to do any job pertaining to improving the safety or aesthetics of athletic fields. Creech says there is very little competition in this market and believes he has a leg up on the two or three local companies that provide athletic field renovation as their “bread and butter.” Lawn Plus focuses on providing savings to schools and municipalities that maintain their fields under strict budgets, and the company recently hired a full-time salesperson, a former baseball coach, to grow the department.

Diversify Seeding, renovation and athletic fields are just a few ways Lawn Plus has branched out

To Creech, focusing more seriously on the athletic field market not only made sense strategically, but was also an important step toward diversification. As more and more state and local governments pass laws on pesticide and fertilizer use, Creech says restrictions are always in the back of his mind. He now knows Lawn Plus will have a solid business unit that will survive should chemical restrictions impact the status quo.

“I don’t know what the future holds in terms of pesticide use,” Creech says. “But we wanted to add a service to reduce our risk and give us options if one day we decide not to go the pesticide route anymore.”

Reallocating responsibilities

All of Creech’s growth and success did not come without challenges. After about six years of running multiple businesses, he began to feel the burnout that small business owners often face. Too many long days of acting as “accounts payable and receivable, collections, technician, assessments – everything,” and Creech knew he needed help if the business was going to survive. In 2011 he hired a family friend, Bob Brower, as general manager. Since then, Creech says Brower’s personality, honesty and strong work ethic have taken the business to a whole new level.

“I had to give something up and lawn care can be stressful,” he says. “But instead I decided to hire the most amazing person ever. If you can hire someone who cares about the business as much as—or even more than—you do, do it.”

This reallocation of the company’s day-to-day responsibilities has allowed Creech the opportunity to step away from the business and focus on other endeavors. Following in the footsteps of his grandfather, Creech has become active in local and regional politics. He served for several years as a township trustee and is currently a county commissioner in Preble County, Ohio. His goal is to serve in the Ohio state legislature by 2022.

“I’ve been bitten by the political bug,” Creech says. “The freedom I have from Lawn Plus has allowed me to do something I love.”

Because of his “great team that is moving in the same direction,” Creech now spends less than two hours a week involved with Lawn Plus. But he is still passionate about the business and its path forward. He describes the company as a “well-oiled machine” and cites the changing millennial workforce—whose members are not as keen as past generations on working overtime and on weekends—as its biggest challenge. It’s a challenge, like all the others, the company is ready to face head-on. “Our biggest challenge is the younger workforce—they are great, hardworking guys but they are not putting in a ton of extra hours,” Creech says. “But instead of having 25 employees working 60 hours a week, we just have more people working 40 hours a week, which we are OK with.

“We are constantly trying to improve and learn and adapt,” Creech adds. “Really, the hard work is done—we have everything in place. We’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing and improve upon it.”

Photos: Lawn Plus

from Gardening Resource http://landscapemanagement.net/why-one-man-traded-in-his-temporary-gig-for-a-long-term-career/

[williamharis98]

Why one man traded in his temporary gig for a long-term career

Rodney Creech turned his accidental lawn care business into a long-term, sustainable career.

Buy local Lawn Plus competes against national firms by “being better.”

Rodney Creech always thought he would be a farmer. After all, his family farm goes back four generations. So it was a surprise when after college he found himself knee deep in the green industry.

“I technically had a lawn care business and didn’t even know it,” says Creech, owner of Lawn Plus in West Alexandria, Ohio. “I was licensed and insured but I had no name, no business model—I was just working out of the back of my truck.”

With a “love and passion for corn and soy beans,” Creech went to Morehead State University in Morehead, Ky., to pursue an agronomy degree. One of Creech’s professors introduced him to turf science courses, during which he developed a strong interest in turf management. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in agronomy and turf science in 1999, Creech returned home and took a job in agronomy sales at a local crop store and spent his evenings providing lawn care for his clients.

“I fell in love with the industry,” Creech says. “Never did I dream I would have a lawn care business, but when I got home from college I started caring for the lawns of my parents, their friends and people from church.”

Over time, Creech noticed how many people ultimately have bad experiences with their lawn care providers, and he began to realize that his accidental career could turn into something real. He launched Lawn Plus in 2005, serving about 40 properties, with a mission to deliver high-quality service at affordable prices. He left the crop store to go full-time in lawn care in 2007, and his first employee (his dad) joined the company that year. By fall 2008 he was hiring part-time help. Today the $2.2-million company has 32 employees and offers 85 percent lawn health services and 15 percent pest control, tree and shrub care and athletic field renovations and installations to a 75 percent residential, 25 percent commercial clientele.

“Most of the lawns I cared for were only receiving three to four applications, and I kept hearing from local people that their lawn care company was doing six to eight applications, calling them all the time and showing up when not needed,” Creech says. “It came to me that many of these people were being taken advantage of and spending too much money on too many applications from large corporate companies.

“Our goal is for our customers to have amazing experiences and to change their thoughts about the lawn care industry,” he adds. “We really challenge and embed it in our guys to be better.”

Smart diversification

Creech is often asked why Lawn Plus doesn’t offer landscape maintenance services, but he knew from the start that he never wanted to mow lawns. He likes the knowledge and expertise that comes with providing specialized lawn care, and he knows that “a 16-year-old with a trailer and a mower” will never be his competition. Over the years, Creech has continued to think strategically about the services he offers. For years he had considered offering tree and shrub care, but knew he just didn’t understand the market well enough to dive in with confidence. Last year, Creech jumped on the opportunity to hire a tree care expert with 30 years of experience and a large existing client base. He says the new division was worth the wait.

The company’s athletic field renovation and installation division is another relatively new addition. While Lawn Plus had serviced athletic field turf for the past 10 years, three years ago the company invested in specialized equipment to allow it to do any job pertaining to improving the safety or aesthetics of athletic fields. Creech says there is very little competition in this market and believes he has a leg up on the two or three local companies that provide athletic field renovation as their “bread and butter.” Lawn Plus focuses on providing savings to schools and municipalities that maintain their fields under strict budgets, and the company recently hired a full-time salesperson, a former baseball coach, to grow the department.

Diversify Seeding, renovation and athletic fields are just a few ways Lawn Plus has branched out

To Creech, focusing more seriously on the athletic field market not only made sense strategically, but was also an important step toward diversification. As more and more state and local governments pass laws on pesticide and fertilizer use, Creech says restrictions are always in the back of his mind. He now knows Lawn Plus will have a solid business unit that will survive should chemical restrictions impact the status quo.

“I don’t know what the future holds in terms of pesticide use,” Creech says. “But we wanted to add a service to reduce our risk and give us options if one day we decide not to go the pesticide route anymore.”

Reallocating responsibilities

All of Creech’s growth and success did not come without challenges. After about six years of running multiple businesses, he began to feel the burnout that small business owners often face. Too many long days of acting as “accounts payable and receivable, collections, technician, assessments – everything,” and Creech knew he needed help if the business was going to survive. In 2011 he hired a family friend, Bob Brower, as general manager. Since then, Creech says Brower’s personality, honesty and strong work ethic have taken the business to a whole new level.

“I had to give something up and lawn care can be stressful,” he says. “But instead I decided to hire the most amazing person ever. If you can hire someone who cares about the business as much as—or even more than—you do, do it.”

This reallocation of the company’s day-to-day responsibilities has allowed Creech the opportunity to step away from the business and focus on other endeavors. Following in the footsteps of his grandfather, Creech has become active in local and regional politics. He served for several years as a township trustee and is currently a county commissioner in Preble County, Ohio. His goal is to serve in the Ohio state legislature by 2022.

“I’ve been bitten by the political bug,” Creech says. “The freedom I have from Lawn Plus has allowed me to do something I love.”

Because of his “great team that is moving in the same direction,” Creech now spends less than two hours a week involved with Lawn Plus. But he is still passionate about the business and its path forward. He describes the company as a “well-oiled machine” and cites the changing millennial workforce—whose members are not as keen as past generations on working overtime and on weekends—as its biggest challenge. It’s a challenge, like all the others, the company is ready to face head-on. “Our biggest challenge is the younger workforce—they are great, hardworking guys but they are not putting in a ton of extra hours,” Creech says. “But instead of having 25 employees working 60 hours a week, we just have more people working 40 hours a week, which we are OK with.

“We are constantly trying to improve and learn and adapt,” Creech adds. “Really, the hard work is done—we have everything in place. We’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing and improve upon it.”

Photos: Lawn Plus

from Gardening News http://landscapemanagement.net/why-one-man-traded-in-his-temporary-gig-for-a-long-term-career/