But until then, I’d like to once again share this story about Christmas in my house. Here’s hoping your holidays are every bit as wonderful as they can be.

I grew up in a very large family: I’m the youngest of ten kids. Yeah, you read that right. I have five older sisters and four older brothers — an even 5/5 split. To make things even more surreal, there was an eight-year gap between my youngest sister and my youngest brother, so most of my siblings are at least ten years older than me, with the difference in age between me and my oldest brother clocking in at ten days short of an even twenty years. So even in my earliest memories, my siblings had significant others, and very shortly thereafter, kids. (I now have a niece and two nephews who are married. But I’m not a great-uncle, yet.)

In addition to that, my dad’s biological mother died shortly after he was born, and his father got remarried, which made for five separate and distinct branches of the family tree just two generations back, counting the families of my maternal grandmother and grandfather, paternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, and paternal step-grandmother. And many of them came from big families. (We’re talking about turn-of-the-century reproduction statistics here, mostly for recent immigrants to the country; this was not at all abnormal.)

Anyway, to sum up: we’re a big family. So the holidays were always a fairly substantial production.

While Thanksgiving and Christmas Day were reserved mainly for our immediate family (that is, the twelve of us plus, later, spouses and kids — I think we were up to forty-two attendees at the last count, including my late parents), there was one event each year that brought out the entire enormous clan: Wigilia.

Wigilia (pronounced vuh-GEE-lee-uh) is a Polish Christmas Eve celebration (Wigilia shares its root with “vigil,” as in waiting for the birth of Christ) that, in its traditional form, is celebrated with very specific foods and forms of preparation. Some of the observances include sprinkling straw under the tablecloths to signify the odd cradle choice at the Nativity, and setting an extra place at the table, to signify hospitality to travelers (I presume to make up for a certain Bethlehem innkeeper’s legendary faux pas), especially travelers of a divine nature. Some of the foods include pierogi (a type of savory stuffed pasta, similar to ravioli but much, much bigger and much, much more filling), baked apples, and probably some type of vile fermented cabbage that your parents force you to eat even though it quite literally makes you gag, and you tell them so but they think you’re just trying to get out of eating something you don’t like but someday you really will end up throwing up all over the table and then they’ll be sorry!

Sorry, where was I? Ah yes: Wigilia. We didn’t observe all the traditional foods or ceremonies. In our house (or, more specifically, in the sprawling, cavernous basement of our funeral home), Wigilia was about getting every damn distant relation we could find together for a night of entirely too much food, quite a bit of alcohol, Christmas carols, visits from Santa, games, moderately priced gifts, and oplatki.

(A word about oplatki. This is another Polish tradition in which a wafer — or in our case a truckload of wafers — having been blessed in a special Catholic ceremony, is distributed among all the attendees of Wigilia. Each person takes a wafer or wafer piece, and wanders around the room. When they encounter another person, they each break off a piece of the other’s oplatki and exchange a familial greeting appropriate to their relationship. This continues until every person at the gathering has either a.) exchanged oplatki with every other person at the gathering, or b.) run out of oplatki. Do the math on my family and you might assume that the length of this operation could be measured in hours. You would be correct.)

So: A huge space packed with probably a couple hundred relations, all making merry in age-appropriate fashion and stuffing themselves. It was great. As a child, I found this massive influx of people I barely knew just short of miraculous, a feeling only intensified when inevitably, in the middle of the evening, the sound of sleigh bells would herald the approach of Santa, who would take us young ones on his lap, ask if we’d been good, then reach into that giant garbage bag and pull out one — just one — small gift for each child, more than enough to tide us over until the next morning. He’d stay for one more Christmas carol and then ho! ho! ho! his way back up the basement stairs.

Somehow my dad always missed Santa coming by.

Now, Wigilia was a wonderful event in itself, but even more wonderful was the fact that on his way back up the chimney Santa would leave the rest of our gifts under the Christmas tree in the living room, two floors above.

(A word about the Christmas tree: It was magic. You see, every year my parents would put the Christmas tree stand on the floor and fill it with water, whereupon my youngest brother and I would drop in one of the magic Christmas tree seeds my mother kept in the kitchen, at the back of the top shelf to the right of the sink. The next morning, we’d wake to find a full-sized Christmas tree in our living room. It wasn’t until much later we noticed that the magic Christmas tree seeds bore a striking resemblance to whole peppercorns, and that the back steps always seemed to be freshly vacuumed the morning after a planting.)

Anyway, since everyone knows Santa won’t leave gifts if he’s observed, it was strictly forbidden for us to leave the basement under any circumstances during the course of Wigilia. In fact, we’d often leave for midnight mass at St. Josephat’s directly from the basement, thereby prolonging the revelation of the gift count that much longer. And trust me, even the most hyperactive child would struggle to maintain interest in anything other than sleep after a two-hour Christmas production in which everything is said twice: once in English and once in Polish.

But time passed, like it does, and us kids started getting older, like kids do, and one year — I was maybe eight or nine years old, I’d say — I worked up the courage to boldly disobey the prime directive of Wigilia and sneak up to the living room. After Santa had left, I let a reasonable time pass and then padded up the business stairs from the lesser-occupied new section of the basement, inched open the door marked “private” in the main parlor, and crept up the back stairs into the house. Even before I turned the corner I could see the soft, reddish glow coming from down the hall. With my heart climbing higher and higher in my throat, I tiptoed the last few steps into the living room. What I saw there I have not to this day forgotten, and I doubt I ever will.

Let’s go back to the math for a moment: There were twelve people in my immediate family at that point, plus spouses in a number I would have to have been paying better attention to remember. But since I was approaching double digits in age, that meant that many of my older brothers and sisters had already gotten out of college and started out on their own. That meant less mouths my parents had to feed, and less school tuitions they had to pay. And furthermore, the family business was continuing to improve thanks to the passion and caring of my dad and his employees. (Plus, you know what they say about funeral homes: people are just dying to get in. Ah, ha. Ah, ha, hah, ha. Ahem. Sorry.) So understand that this was an unusually good year in the Rybicki household.

Now, our living room was pretty huge. I’d estimate it was maybe fifteen feet deep by maybe forty feet wide. Big enough for our whole family to squeeze in, if that gives you any indication. Even factoring in a generously sized Christmas tree and a couple couches, there was a pretty good amount of free space in this huge room.

But not this night. The room was lit solely by the lights from the Christmas tree, two or three candles on the mantle, and a dying fire in the fireplace. That soft light glinted off of the wrapping paper of presents stacked carefully upon every available patch of floor. There were presents behind the TV. There were presents on top of the five-foot-long record player console thingy (there was a time when both TVs and stereos were furniture). There were presents on the coffee table, behind the couch, and damned if I don’t remember there being presents under my dad’s chair. There were presents leaning against the walls all the way around the room, I swear. It was ridiculous. It was magical. It was the manifestation of childhood holiday fantasies, the Platonic ideal of Christmasness encountered at just the right age for it to make an indelible impression.

And as I stood there, with the hi-fi murmuring carols softly in the corner, the golden light reflecting a thousand thousand times off of glitter and tinsel and ribbons, I wanted to cry. Sure, I wanted to dance, I wanted to sing, I wanted to laugh, I wanted to tear open presents and roll around in a pile of wrapping paper. Certainly. But I think most of all I wanted to cry. To this day I don’t know why; I would have thought I would have been too young to be overcome by complex emotion. But I wonder if some part of me knew that it wouldn’t be long before I outgrew some of that magic, before the simple wonder of the holiday started to wilt under the withering glare of crass commercialism.

I didn’t do any of the things I wanted to do at that moment. Instead I tiptoed back downstairs, closed the private door behind me, padded back into the basement and jumped into a game of statues with my cousins. Later, we went cross-town to midnight mass. And when we got home, I went to bed. Through all this, though, I was only half-present. A significant portion of my brain was still up in that glowing room, buzzing with anticipation, drugged by holiday atmosphere. From the moment I came back down those stairs, it was all I could do to sit still. I never slept easily as a child, but it must have taken literally hours for me to finally drift off that night.

And what did I get out of that enormous haul the next morning? What did Santa bring to reward my having been good all year (or at least all week)? What early-eighties toy craving was satisfied that day?

I haven’t the faintest idea. Can’t remember for the life of me. And honestly, I think it’s probably better that way. Because in the end, what’s under that wrapping paper doesn’t matter one tiny bit. The magic is what matters, and that will always be there, whether there’s a hundred presents under the tree or none at all.

So: from me to you, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas. Also: Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, and Happy Winter Solstice. Here’s hoping your winter holidays are every bit as magical as they should be. May they be filled with laughter, good food, good music, fine people, cherished memories, and all the pierogi you can shove in your face. Na zdrowie!

See, I love music games. I mean, I really love them. This is in part because I love music in an embarrassingly wide variety of genres, and in part because I’m a musician myself (I sing and play bass, guitar, and drums, in case you didn’t know). So these games sort of hit me right in the sweet spot.

Anyway, I’ve been spending the last few months putting this site together. This is a solo project; I’m doing all the writing, design, coding, PR, administration… Suddenly I’m very tired. Where was I? Oh yes: This site is all me. But I’m also hoping it’ll be useful to other fans of music games, who can keep up with the latest news and releases, and find lots of new music in The Vault.

So there it is, my Big Secret Project: Plastic Axe — Music games for music fans. Go have yourself a look around, and let me know what you think in the comments (over there rather than here, please).

Thou shalt post pictures of thy cats.

Clearly this is a profoundly impactful omission, which must be rectified immediately. And so, I give you: Fiona.

Now don’t we all feel better? Oh, fine, here’s one more to ensure that balance in the universe is maintained.

You’re welcome.

OK, I’ll give you a hint: It has something to do with plastic. And that’s all you’re getting.

Anyway, please bear with the lack of updates here for a little while longer, OK?

So please forgive me if this place goes dark for a bit. I expect to be back in the regular swing of things by mid-June.

Well, as regular as it gets around here.

People often ask me for recommendations for things like games and books and music and other things we humans need to survive. So a couple weeks back, I spent an afternoon putting together a huge collection of lists of my favorite games, music, movies, books, and even food…and then promptly forgot to mention it here on the main page.

So, hey, lookie there in the left-hand sidebar! It’s a Favorites page! It has all sorts of recommendations of stuff I happen to enjoy a whole lot. I hope you’ll find them useful. If not, feel free to leave a comment on that page. As long as you’re okay with me telling you how wrong you are.

If I were to estimate the amount of time I spent in that building…well, let’s do it now. I went to work there every day for almost four years. Call it 7500 normal working hours. Now add an extra 40 to 60 hours a month to account for deadlines, for around 44 months. Yeah, that’s about what I expected: ten thousand hours is a pretty fair estimate. To do that all at once you’d have to work for about 14 months straight. Without stopping to sleep.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining. Some of my fondest memories happened in and around that building. I made some dear friends. I learned some important lessons. I met my wife during this time. I laughed a lot. I ate some really spectacular take-out.

But you stay in any place long enough, you’re gonna get a little crazy.

WELCOME TO THE FUTURE
Last time I implied that the Lombard shenanigans didn’t stop with the move over to Oakbrook, and to a certain extent that’s true. But it’s also true that lots of things changed for the better. For example, I got a new computer. When I started at Ziff I was working on a Macintosh IIsi (OK, technically I was sharing a IIsi with Nelson Taruc), a machine that had already been discontinued for three years when I started using it. It had a blazing twenty-megahertz processor and a staggering one megabyte of RAM.

What it did not have was a CD drive. Or an Ethernet connection. Hey, I’m lucky it did color. So the new machine I got, which if memory serves was a PowerMac 6200, was a pretty big step up.

It was also right around that time — this is late 1998, remember — that we were allowed to use the Internet. This was a big plus because for the last year or so we had only inter-office e-mail — no Internet access whatsoever. And for my first year and a half or so we didn’t even have that. If you had something you needed to disseminate through the group you would print out a memo, walk around the office, and hand-deliver it to everybody.

Remember that this is the company that published PC Magazine, Computer Shopper, and about a bajillion other technology-focused magazines. Have we all meditated on the irony? Good.

Other things improved, too. The new office, having been custom-fitted for our use, boasted a few pretty sweet features. One was a full-time demo room, complete with 50-something-inch TV, surround sound, and tiered seating. Before this, game companies would demo games at whoever’s desk was available.

We got a tricked-out lunch room, with actual tables and chairs, and a refrigerated vending machine that I bought way too many Lunchables and microwave chicken sandwiches from. It had a solarium which led to a brick patio with picnic benches, where Gary Steinman and I would play chess and the smokers would congregate on warm summer deadline evenings.

We got a suite of arcade machines, from a new hybrid Blitz/Showtime machine to a pair of linked Hydro Thunder sit-down cabinets. (I believe I still had the high score on Ship Graveyard when we left that place.) We got a network, so we no longer had to tote SyQuest disks around the office on deadline. And we got swanky new cubes that, probably not coincidentally, could not be moved or otherwise resized.

And then we got an electric skateboard.

ZERO TO DISFIGURED IN HALF A SECOND
This was not the first wheeled transport we’d employed within the building. Earlier, as part of some questionable game tie-in, some company had sent over a bunch of Razor scooters. Since the office sprawled across a single level, these were actually legitimately useful as quick transportation; you could scoot over to the print area to grab proofs and then scoot back to your desk in record time. And if we occasionally built ramps to jump over people lying prone on the ground, or gathered up half a dozen scooter pilots to race laps around the building, well, who could blame us? What else did you expect us to do on deadline? Make magazines or something?

Anyway, at some point before the launch of the original Xbox, the guys at EGM went up to Microsoft to look at the system. The way I heard it told, someone in the Xbox division, someone fairly high up, if memory serves, used an electric skateboard to get around the Microsoft campus. And I guess the EGM guys were so obviously taken with this concept that as a gesture of appreciation Microsoft sent one over.

Now, understand that this was not a toy. This was a fairly massive device, probably about four feet long and heavy as all get-out — maybe 30 pounds or so. It was controlled by a handheld trigger device similar to those used to pilot high-end remote-controlled cars; stand on the board, squeeze the trigger, and the thing moves. Wait, let me change the emphasis there: Squeeze the trigger and the thing moves. It only did maybe 10 to 15 MPH or so — you could ride your bike faster — but it wasn’t about the speed, it was about the acceleration. See, this surprisingly heavy machine could hit top speed in about a fifth of a second.

Picture, if you will, standing perfectly still atop a fairly small device as it moves from a dead stop to 15 MPH forward in less than a second. It’s like having a rug yanked out from under you. By a motorcycle. Watching people try this thing out for the first time was like riding a candy cart down into a bottomless mine of amusement. Even if you were prepared for the controller’s sensitivity, it was very, very easy to squeeze the trigger hard enough to take your (or someone else’s) life into your hands. So for the first week or so that this thing was in the office, half the staff had bruised tailbones.

To everyone’s credit, up until this point we really had been doing a fine job of keeping the new office in good shape. I joked last time about whether a more professional environment makes people behave more professionally, but I do think it can. Working in that office, I think we all felt more like grownups and less like anarchic college students, and we were doing a pretty good job of keeping this place looking pretty nice.

But very quickly, marks and dents started showing up in walls. Tire marks started showing up in carpets. Cube walls near the open space in the EGM area — the space that was most often used to try out the skateboard — started to get a little wobbly from people running into them. We could have resisted, I suppose, but come on. It’s an electric skateboard. How do you not play with it?

Of course, I suppose we technically didn’t have to put Crispin in a football helmet and shoulderpads and ram him into the rows of metal chairs set up for a meeting. Maybe we didn’t really need to experiment with mounting chairs on the skateboard and tooling around the office in a recumbent position. I suppose it wasn’t strictly necessary to tow people around on wheeled office chairs. But, you know, you get a brilliant idea, you gotta try it out. If you don’t risk permanent disfigurement on an electric skateboard, you’ll never learn just how far your neck can bend without breaking, is what I always say.

Even so, one deadline evening things did get a little out of hand.

BLACKOUT IN THE RED ROOM
Toward the center of the office was a space we all called the Red Room. Picture the room in your office that has the copy machine and fax machine and office supplies, only lop off the walls at about six feet so the room opens to the industrial ceiling far above. Now stick it in the middle of a sea of beige cubicles and paint it blood red. I think someone thought it was stylish, but to me it always just seemed like an odd place to have to go to make copies.

Anyway, this room was one of the few places in our part of the office where The Suits could be relied upon to visit regularly. Normally they’d stick to Administrative Row and leave us to our videogames and scooter races, but everyone needs to make copies now and then. My point here is that there were places in the office where we could reasonably expect damage to go unnoticed by anyone who would care. This was not one of those places.

Which is why it caused such a stir when someone — someone who specifically requested I not name him here, so let’s call him Art — mounted the electric skateboard, yanked on the trigger, and fell on his ass while the metal beast smashed at pretty much full speed right into one of the corners of the Red Room.

In case I’ve not sufficiently related the power of this thing, I’ll describe the damage: horrific. The skateboard struck at just the right angle to tear the entire corner of the wall off like an overgenerous hunk of string cheese. The bottom three feet or so of the corner was demolished, down to the studs. You could peer into the interior of the wall. The skateboard had actually bent the metal in the stud.

Arty turned so pale I thought he might pass out. Here we were in this new-ish office, in a very central location, and he’d done some damage that contrasted very well with the bold colors of the walls. But then something interesting happened. Rather than abandoning poor Arty McArtguy to his likely fate of impending unemployment, the entire office (well, those of us who were there at that late hour) rallied around him. Plans were laid. Color samples were painstakingly assembled from the debris. A contingent was directed to head to Home Depot for a tub of spackle, some chicken wire, and paint.

Not long thereafter, we had assembled a work space around the blast zone. We molded chicken wire over the gaping hole. We slathered on spackle. We went and played Hydro Thunder for a couple hours while it dried. Then we painted.

It looked good. Not great, but good. The sharp edge of the corner had been restored, and it matched its mate on the other side of the wall. There was just one problem: We’d been in the office long enough that the walls had picked up a fairly significant and indelible coating of dust from the open ceilings. And here was this brand-new, blazing-red paint right on the corner everyone would walk by. It would be as obvious as a zit on prom night. So here’s what we did. I think this might have actually been my idea, and if so I’m pretty proud of myself: We took the remaining paint chips from the incident. We ground them up into a fairly fine powder. And then we blew the powder onto the wet paint. It instantly blended in with the older paint. Genius!

And how did we do? If you read the comments from my previous entry, you already know. Our receptionist Laura wrote, “I know about it…but never did find out where the repair was actually done.” Success!

LOOK NORTH, TURN LEFT
But all things must end. In June of 2002, I was getting ready to drive to Ohio for a week’s vacation with my girlfriend when I got an IM from my boss, John Davison. “I need you to be in the office on Tuesday,” he wrote. “For a meeting. It’s very important.” But he wouldn’t tell me why.

This was irregular. But John was not the type to make bizarre requests lightly. So I drove back from Ohio on a Tuesday morning and walked into an all-hands-on-deck meeting, where it was revealed that pretty much the whole damn office was being relocated to San Francisco.

San Francisco, the place I’ve wanted to live since I first visited at the age of 13. Sometimes things just have a way of coming together, you know?

But we’d be losing a lot. Many of our friends and colleagues couldn’t or wouldn’t make the move due to positions being eliminated, family obligations, and/or a simple desire not to leave the Midwest. We’d also be leaving behind the sprawling megaplex of office, which meant no more scooter races or electric skateboards or cavernous lunch room with en suite arcade.

Never again would I hear Stratty McStrategyguy try to impress the temp receptionist by talking about his run-ins with UFOs and his wrestling of alligators. Never again would Clueless Editorial Director Guy try to convince us that losing half the staff of EGM was like losing an arm, but that’s OK because “we’ll just grow another arm” (or, for that matter, call me into his office and give me such an odd talking to that I was convinced I was being fired, when in actuality I was getting a 15-percent raise). Never again would signs be posted warning of caustic urine disintigrating the walls in the bathroom; no more Hydro Thunder challenges would be issued; no more cowboy hats would be burnt out on the patio.

This was the trademark headwear of my first boss. He was…not a great boss.

But a new office awaited, in a new city. So one August day, my girlfriend and I squeezed ourself into her VW hatchback with our three cats and a bunch of suitcases, hit I-80, and drove west and west and west. A lot of really wonderful stuff was in front of us. In the next few years, we’d get married, I’d get promoted, we’d take many spectacular drives around the Bay Area. A lot of new faces would come through Ziff’s doors. And a lot of faces would leave — including mine. There was a lot to look forward to.

But damn do I wish I’d taken pictures of that skateboard crash.

Next time: Gambling and gluttony on the high seas, the Greatest Commute Ever, and the rise and fall of RadiOPM.

I was doing a search for statistics on the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises for my weekly music-game column over at Green Pixels, and for some reason stumbled on this article about late-’80s/early-’90s punk band Pennywise. I was pleased (if a bit surprised) to learn that the band is still together and performing, but the part of the article that really amused me goes like this:

The band’s punk credibility was boosted by some Sex Pistols-like antics. During an appearance on the syndicated call-in radio show “Loveline,” [guitarist Fletcher] Dragge intentionally vomited on strait-laced co-host Dr. Drew. The interview took place at alternative rock station KROQ-FM in Los Angeles in 1995.

What the article does not tell you is that a day or two later the band played a show at Peabody’s Down Under in Cleveland, Ohio. I happened to be in Peabody’s legendary green room while they were telling the story to a friend of mine — it’s possible my band was actually opening that night, but I honestly don’t remember — and was as aghast as you probably were the first time you heard this story. But then Fletcher did something that in some ways is even worse.

Apparently, after the appearance on Loveline, he had been smoking a cigar. And apparently, he decided it would be a good idea to put the cigar out on the back of his own hand. (I cannot see Fight Club without thinking of this story.) And apparently, before going on that night, he decided it would be a good idea to pick the scab off the burn and draw the Pennywise logo on the wall of the room.

In his own blood.

And make it three feet high.

But this was just one contribution to the art on the wall, which included a nearly mural-sized bit of abstract art courtesy of Natalie Merchant, and another large drawing from Eddie Vedder. Lemme tell you, Peabody’s back in the ’90s was the shit. They had this spectacular booking agent who had an almost scary sense of when a band was about to get really big. Nirvana and Pearl Jam both played there right before grunge exploded. Jane’s Addiction played there when nobody had any idea who they were. The Offspring played there right as “Come Out and Play” was hitting the radio. It was uncanny. Maybe it was the size of the club — big but intimate, I think the capacity was around 450, which is just right if you ask me. Maybe it was the great sound system and sound guy. Maybe it was the location in the Flats, Cleveland’s longstanding (but now largely tame) neighborhood of debauchery. But this place was something special.

Technically there is still a place in Cleveland called Peabody’s, but it’s not remotely the same. (And a quick peek at their website indicates their days of booking interesting up-and-comers are pretty much over.) Luckily the memories aren’t going anywhere. I even have a nifty memento to mark my own experience with the club: On Ani Difranco’s live double-album Living In Clip, there’s a shot of her sitting on a battered couch in front of a wall with writing all over it. (I’ve tried to find a version online, but can’t seem to.) Above her head is the name of my band, and the bands of some of my good friends. That’s Peabody’s green room. It was legendary.

It’s gone now.

There’s just one problem: before a couple days ago, I’d only ever heard it mentioned once in my life. The person who talked about it came from the Detroit area, and I assumed this was something that was local to Michigan. But the other day, my wife, who grew up in Chicago, pointed out a sign on a donut shop advertising Pączki Day. “What’s that?” she asked.

“Oh, huh,” I replied with my customarily sage-like pith. “It’s a Michigan thing that must be making its way here.” And I didn’t think anything of it.

Until yesterday, when she brought a box home from the grocery store. We each had one for dessert. They were delicious. So I hopped onto Wikipedia to try to track the origin and progress of Pączki Day.

In Poland, they are eaten especially on Fat Thursday (the last Thursday before Lent). Many Polish Americans celebrate Paczki Day on Fat Tuesday (the day before Ash Wednesday). Traditionally, the reason for making pączki was to use up all the lard, sugar, eggs and fruit in the house, which are forbidden during Lent.

Ah, OK, makes sense.

In the large Polish community of Chicago, and other large cities across the Midwest, Paczki Day is also celebrated annually by immigrants and locals alike. In Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Hamtramck, Windsor, Milwaukee,Pulaski and South Bend, Paczki Day is more commonly celebrated on Fat Tuesday instead of Fat Thursday.

OK, wait a minute. I’ve lived in Cleveland and Chicago and I swear I’d –

[L]ines at bakeries can be seen up to 24 hours before the deep-fried delights go on sale Tuesday morning. This happens especially in Parma, Ohio at Europa Deli & Imports, Colozza’s Bakery and Rudy’s Strudel and Bakery.

What? I used to live right down the street –

The same thing happens also in Buffalo, NY, Cleveland or Garfield Heights, Ohio…

But Garfield Heights is where I grew up!

…outside the Charles Peters Bakery, which is near the border of both cities (at the triple intersection of Turney Road, Grand Division and Sladden Avenue).

That’s across the street from my house!

According to Garfield Heights police, one year 3,000 people waited for pączki. Police had to close Sladden Avenue, and Rybicki and Son Funeral Home had to delay funerals due to this.

OK, WHAT THE PIERDOLIĆ IS GOING ON HERE? I swear to God I have no knowledge of this. Can someone get me a nutritional anthropologist, stat? I need to know when this observance started in this area, because either it’s very recent, or I’ve stepped into an alternate dimension.

Or I’ve gone mad.

UPDATE: One of my grade-school classmates posted this on Facebook: “Sorry, Joe we have always had paczki today….. gram used to make ‘em every year…and they lived on Garfield Blvd for 40 some years…..” Can has new brain now pls?

But trying to hang these all together in some sort of coherent narrative would a.) take way too long, and b.) probably not make any sense anyway. There was a lot going on, as you’ll see, and if I were to try to hem everything up all pretty it would probably come off as some sort of fevered drug-dream. So instead, let’s peek in on some memorable moments, some iconic people, things, and events that represented that whole heady, smelly time.

Let’s start with the Cone of Violence. It’s as good a place to start as any. Now, enough has been said about this device that I’m not going to waste much time describing it except in the simplest terms: It was a full-size traffic cone, heavy as these things are, positioned appropriately next to the Blitz machine… Oh, I haven’t told you about the Blitz machine? Yeah, we had an NFL Blitz arcade machine in the office, positioned directly in front of the main door so that you couldn’t possibly miss it. “Oh, I was just heading down to the break room for a soda, but I guess I could squeeze in one game.” It’s a wonder we ever got any work done. Anyway, games of Blitz could get pretty heated, thanks largely to what has been variously called “CPU assist,” “rubberband AI,” and “bullshit.” See, what happened was, as soon as one player opened up a big lead, the game would start causing him to fumble the ball, throw interceptions, miss easy passes — pretty much do everything but trip over his own shoelaces. This made some people angry.

But it made Crispin Boyer positively livid. Now, Crispin is truly one of the nicest, mild-mannered fellows you could ever hope to meet. Honestly. The only exception I ever saw was when he was losing at games. And boy howdy, did he have a temper in those days. The Cone of Violence was really primarily for him. He’d lose a game of Blitz, and rather than rabbit-punching someone in the throat or throwing a chair through a window, he’d pick up this heavy rubber cone and slam it, repeatedly, upon the ground. This generally served to dissipate his wrath.

Except the one time. I remember watching Crispin lose an epic seesaw battle of Blitz by a hair’s breadth. He had built up a legendary lead, only to see it slowly whittled away thanks to CPU assist. In the end, he lost by maybe a single point. I mean, he got seriously, seriously screwed. And I remember him looking at the Cone of Violence and sneering, kicking it almost nonchalantly out of his path, walking over to the closet nearby — you know, the kind with the accordion doors? — and tearing the closet door clean off. Like tearing tissue paper.

It was awesome.

No, we had absolutely no respect for our environment in those days. The office had been occupied by EGM for long enough that it had built up a healthy amount of normal wear and tear — and it wasn’t exactly nice to begin with. Plus it was populated primarily withtwentysomething guys. This combination does not breed reverence for one’s surroundings.

You could see it in the way we staked our territorial claims. Walk into EGM in the mid-’90s and you’d see an environment I lovingly referred to as “the Shantytown.” See, a regular office has cubicles of a fairly standard size. But EGM’s cubes were separated by movable walls…which meant that every so often someone would try to annex new territory. After seven or so years of this, the layout had become almost entirely organic. One cube might be just big enough for a desk and a chair, while the one next door would be a palatial manor with fountains and servants’ quarters.

I remember someone — I think it was Shawn Smith — had a cube so small you literally had to turn sideways to get in. There was room for him to sit at his desk and maybe enough room for one other person to stand awkwardly close. But the funny thing was, to get from the main walkway into his cube — a distance of about three feet — you had to make two 90-degree turns.

Meanwhile, the guy next door had a full-sized Killer Instinct arcade cabinet in his cube. I shit you not.

In all the years in Lombard, though, I don’t know that anyone was ever more audacious about cube expansion than Shoe. When I started in 1996, just a couple months after he did, he had a small desk wedged into a corner between a real wall and movable cube-wall. (I remember this clearly because his desk was the place where I first saw Mario 64.) By the time we left Lombard in December of 1998, he had added three more wall sections, a full-sized bookshelf, and a couch. Not a love seat, a couch. I swear to God this is not an exaggeration.

(Something else comes to mind while we’re in this section of the building. The real wall that made up the west end of Shoe’s estate had the game closet on the other side. This was a room about the size of your average half-bath, filled with racks and racks of old games. It was always kept locked, and only a few people had the key. Which was why one enterprising strategy-guide editor, who happened to also sit adjacent to that wall, punched through it one night to grab handfuls of whatever he could reach. If memory serves, this was the same guy who prompted the institution of a no-shorts policy by showing up to work in cutoff sweatpants with nothing on underneath. That’s class!)

Anyway, this quest for territory manifested itself in different ways. In some cases, people would move the boundaries of their cubes in increments small enough to not be noticed. In other cases, guys would just spy an empty area and move in. That’s the route I took when the last mail guy left. See, the office got so many packages on a daily basis — most of them games — that it was originally deemed necessary to have a full-time employee sorting them out and distributing them to the editors. But when the third guy in a row was found to have been skimming free games from the FedEx haul, the position was permanently eliminated. Which meant a space had opened up — and not just any space, but a legitimate room. With a door. So one evening, I grabbed all my crap and moved in.

OK, sure, it was technically a kitchen. Yes, it had cabinets, countertops, and a sink. But by God it had a door. And really, you don’t realize until you have it how useful running water can be in an office.

Cabinets and counters, blessed darkness and quiet. (Not pictured: sink.)

By that time I was just happy to have a place to retreat from the insanity. Because sometime between 1996 and 1998, the stars aligned just right and we ended up with a group of very active, very rowdy guys. Many stories have already been told about the extracurricular activities that went on in that building, from Decapitato to creative re-signing. But did you know that at one point we started regular Lazer Tag games in the office? The rules were: Anywhere you could get to was fair game. Bathrooms, the offices upstairs — even the basement was technically in play. I still remember my sweetest kill. I’d noticed that one player had gotten into the habit of trying to surprise people by taking the elevator upstairs and camping out by the open stairway. So I hit the elevator button, got in, and let the doors close without selecting a floor. Shortly thereafter: Ding! Zap! Game over.

Have I mentioned we were a bunch of friggin geeks?

Anyway, this is all preamble, really, to the pinnacle of irresponsibility: The Last Night. See, in 1998, with the industry growing steadily in respectability, it was decided that the magazines would all be moved out of that stained craphole in Lombard and into a swank, newly redecorated office building a couple towns over. I think someone up the ladder hoped that in a more professional environment we’d all act more professional.

Oh, those poor, misguided people.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we entered the new office we had to leave the old one. And that meant that there would be a day when we would all walk out of that shanty town and never come back.

Did you think we were irresponsible before? You have no idea. I can honestly say I understand now how rioting starts. Understand me: I’m not saying what we did was anything close to rioting. It’s just that by the end of the night a group dynamic had taken hold that, had it turned in a different direction, could easily have gotten ugly. And I imagine that’s how things get started when the real shit goes down.

Fortunately, we were just a bunch of geeky kids, so the activities that went on that night were only mischievous, not malicious. Unfortunately, we had all recently been sent baseball bats as a game promotion.

Many things were destroyed that night. Mostly these were confined to bits of non-functional furniture and other things destined for the garbage dump. We played home-run derby with old game CDs. We tore apart sagging plastic desks. We flattened busted metal filing cabinets.

Oh hey, look at that slide in the lower-left — that’s how we used to get game screenshots from publishers. On photographic slides. Really!

You’d be amazed how satisfying this is. Also, note Shoe’s expanded cube in the background. Did you think I was joking? You can even see a corner of his orange couch peeking out.

But the destruction was really just the beginning. The night became a series of escalating dares. Oh, you’re going to flatten a filing cabinet? I bet you won’t slip this week-old pizza under the door of the office upstairs. Oh yeah? Well, I bet you won’t rearrange all the letters on the building directory. Oh yeah? Well, I bet you won’t set a remote-controlled car on fire and drive it around outside until it melts into a plastic puddle! Oh yeah? Well, I bet you won’t move this abandoned car from the parking lot into the lobby! (Turns out we actually couldn’t do that last one; it had sat there so long that the tires had fused to the pavement. We did try, though.) And I’m not one hundred percent certain, but I believe someone may have attempted to ride a wheeled office chair down the stairs.

No way did we get our security deposit back.

And in between these events, we sat around, drank beer, and traded stories about all the weird shit that had gone down in that building. And I’m not talking about our childish pranks, I’m talking about legitimate weirdness and/or profoundly unethical behavior that I was fortunate enough to never witness firsthand. But oh my, the stories: an editor and a copy editor discovered in flagrante delicto in an office…another editor rumored to be trading coverage for “happy endings”…many many bits of pricey schwag gone mysteriously missing…lawsuits and allegations, intraoffice adultery, suspicious hirings and firings, blackmail and hush money. Crazy times that I’m glad I missed most of.

I remember sitting in a circle around a mostly-empty twelve-pack. The mischief was winding down and most of the staff had gone home. We were surrounded by a wasteland of debris: smashed furniture, shattered discs, a carpet of old press releases. And in walks someone from administration, who’d been staying late packing up the important things we were actually taking with us to the new place. She looks at us, looks around, shakes her head, and walks away without a word.

That pretty much summed it up.

Next time: Do nicer offices instill a greater sense of responsibility? Do the words “midnight Home Depot run” give you any hints?

Look, I never claimed to be a trend-setter.

The thing is, I’ve noticed some gaps in others’ accounts. Some gaps that need filling. And by God, I’m just the man to do it.

Plus, I have pictures. Incriminating pictures.

And so, I present to you the first in a four-part series: A Ziff-trospective, Part I: The Lombardening.

–

Pretty much any story anyone tells about Lombard includes mention of it being the most suburbiest of suburbs. And oh dear lord, it is. (Or at least, it was the last time I was there.) But do you think that mattered to a 22-year-old kid, fresh out of college, new to Chicago, and starting his first day of work at a videogame magazine? No. No, it did not.

It was June 24, 1996. A bit more than a month previous, in anticipation of moving from my hometown of Cleveland to Chicago, I had answered an ad in the Chicago Tribune for “Writer / Game Player” with a resume (thin) and writing samples (laughable). Both, I learned later, had been promptly lost, but my cover letter had stuck around on someone’s desk long enough to make some sort of impression. So I got asked in for an interview, impressed the hell out of everyone by showing up in a tie, and found myself reporting for work at the offices of Sendai Media the following Monday.

Let me tell you what I saw the first time I walked into this place. You drive up on the outside to a very plain, very institutional-looking, brown-brick building. Three floors, darkish windows — pretty much the epitome of the anonymous late-20th-Century office building. (Come to think of it, here: see for yourself.) You open the doors into a modest, tiled lobby, facing a bit of ugly abstract art that’s inexplicably blocked off with velvet ropes. You go up an open stairway to the second floor. Straight ahead is Reception, but if we’re going to EGM (and we are), we’ll turn left. Swipe your card and open the door.

You walk into a long, low room, harshly lit in zombie fluorescent. You hear electronic noise, some laughter, more yelling. You smell something funny. Crammed into this room are somewhere around 30 videogame geeks, most in their early ’20s, some in their late teens. Many have not seen the inside of a shower in days. (Some have not seen the outside of this building in as long.) They’re scattered in an apparently random distribution, separated from one another by raggedly arranged temporary walls, carpeted in hideous light-blue fabric, chin-high and wobbling. The carpet is stained. The furniture is plastic.

A representative section of the EGM offices. (Though this is technically the OPM area.)

The entire office wasn’t quite this messy, but it wasn’t far off.

Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, this ain’t.

But then you notice that every desk has a TV. And every TV is surrounded by a scattering of game systems. And the break room has a Mortal Kombat machine. And as ridiculous as it may seem, you are about to begin a new career writing about videogames. You will be paid for this. (Given the hours, it comes out to less than minimum wage, but let’s not talk about that now.) You will be working alongside a group of passionate young adults every bit as geeky as you are. You will show up to work in jeans and a t-shirt. And when you’re there, you will play games.

Maybe Heaven smells better, but it ain’t as much fun.

So there I was on my first day, trying not to make an ass of myself in front of my new colleagues, whose names I still hadn’t quite gotten. Luckily, by the time lunch rolled around I was saved: Dan “Shoe” Hsu and Crispin Boyer, two other newish hires, took pity on me and dragged me along to lunch at their favorite deli, right down the street.

I was still in a daze, which may explain why I never told them about the enormous roach I saw burrowing through the salami.

Sorry guys. Now you know why, anytime you asked me to come along to the deli after that, I always had plans.

I don’t remember anything else about my first day. But tomorrow I’ll tell you about Day Two.

No no, I kid. I have no interest in walking you through each step of my career. I just wanted to set the stage a bit, give you a frame of reference for the stories that are to come. I hope I’ve been successful.

Next time: the truth behind the Cone of Violence, the claiming of territory, and photographic evidence of the Last Days of Lombard.

When I first got my phone, I was fairly new to this whole blog-aggregation thing. I’d dabbled a bit but hadn’t come to rely on it. But with Mobile Safari being slower (and more squintastic) than I’d like, I knew I’d need to get on the RSS train, and fast.

I looked for suggestions. I’d heard so many negative things about the free NetNewsWire that I skipped right over that one. A friend had recommended the not-free Feeds, but when I saw the awful green color I knew he must have meant Web Feeds, which also shows up on your phone as just “Feeds.” So I picked that one up and set up my feeds.

Let me be clear: Web Feeds is a very nice program. Slick and fast and constantly improving. But it was almost too good — that is to say, I started using RSS more and more for work purposes, to catch up quickly on important topics for the various columns and news items I’d been writing. And here’s the problem: Web Feeds didn’t have a way of sharing articles. At all. Which made it a little tough to track down the important things I’d found while away from my desk.*

So I tried out NetNewsWire, which syncs with Newsgator online and thereby allowed me to tag articles for later review. I used that for a couple weeks, before I realized that some blogs I read regularly had disappeared, as though they weren’t being updated…even though I knew they put up something like 40 posts a day. So that went right out.

Right around that time a bunch of readers popped up in the App Store that purported to sync with Google Reader. So I tried them. I tried them all. The verdict?

Byline: Slick layout, but updating takes forever and you can only view by “all items” or by folders — neither of which I use. (I prefer to read by individual feed. Apparently this makes me abnormal.)

Bolt Reader: Same problems as Byline, plus the font is head-splittingly tiny and, if memory serves, it also lacks story preview, meaning you just get the headline.

Google Reader: To be clear, there’s no app for this, but Google’s put together a very fast, very pretty iPhone-friendly site. And with the ability to save a bookmark as an icon on the home screen, I thought I was home free. Then I tried catching up on my reading while away from my home Wi-Fi. Ah…no.

I was getting very frustrated. Then I thought to take another look at the very first reader I’d seen, the one I’d been mistakenly directed to: Feeds. And you know what? This app does every damn thing I need. It syncs fully (and reasonably quickly) with Google Reader, allowing for starring and sharing of stories. A settings switch allows for viewing the original web page within the app. You can even customize the colors (though the current version has an odd bug where it always loads in the default puke-green color).

About the only thing I’d change, aside from speeding up the sync process, is to somehow fold the e-mail function into the app itself. I understand that this may be something of a pipe dream; the only other app I know of that lets you e-mail without switching over to the email app is Safari, so the functionality may not even be available to third-party app developers.

But that aside, Feeds is hands-down my personal winner for iPhone RSS reader. It’s not the prettiest or cleanest app I’ve ever seen, but so far I’ve found it the most reliable and robust reader in the App Store.

At least until the next one comes along.

*Incidentally, the designer of Web Feeds has recently put in a pretty clever e-mail function, which amalgamates tagged stories for a mass e-mail once you quit out. But it crashed one too many times on me, so I don’t find it functional enough for work purposes.

Me: Jacob and Samantha don’t like each other. He tries to mount her.

Matt: I can see how that would be a problem.

Me: It puts a strain on their relationship.

Matt: I don’t know why, it does wonders for mine.

Originally, this church was right next to Bosa’s Donuts, right down on 82, just east of Brecksville Rd. (It’s since moved to a newer, bigger location.) Occasionally, after setting everything up for the funeral, the gentlemen would duck out for a quick cup of coffee and a donut at Bosa’s.

One day, my dad and two employees headed over to refresh themselves. They all sat down at the counter, and the young, adorably cute waitress came up to take their orders.

“What will it be today, guys?” she asks.

“Hmm,” says the one employee. “I’ll take a cup of coffee, but I’m not really feeling like a donut today. What else do you have?”

“Well, we’ve got bagels, English muffins, and toast.”

“What kind of toast?”

“White, wheat, rye, raisin…”

“Oh, raisin toast. That sounds great. I haven’t had raisin toast since I don’t know when. I’ll take that.”

So this cute waitress turns to Employee Number Two. “How about you, honey?”

“You know,” he says, “raisin toast actually sounds really good. I’ll have that too.”

So this adorable waitress turns to my dad. “And what about you, sweetie? Is yours raisin too?”

And my dad, without skipping a beat, says, “No, but it’s quivering a little.”

–

Now, I first heard this story when my dad told it to my girlfriend, who later became my wife, on one of the first times he ever met her. He died shortly thereafter, so it’s sort of a defining moment in her memory of him — and I think that’s absolutely perfect. He was like that. Not all the time, of course, but when he was telling stupid stories and laughing way too much, I always got the sense that this was the true Robert Rybicki. (A feeling that was intensified when it was revealed that he — a spectacularly dedicated businessman — specifically requested that his tie be removed before he was buried.)

When he died, we all gathered at my mom’s house to work out the arrangements. It didn’t take long before we started swapping funny stories about my dad, who really was a very funny guy (although usually he was funniest when he thought he was funnier than he was, if you know what I’m saying). And I’m telling this story to some of my (older) nieces and nephews, reminding them that, like many of Dziadzi’s stories, it probably wasn’t entirely true, when my brother walks by.

“Mike,” I say, “did you ever hear Dad’s raisin bread story?”

“Hear it?” he says. “I was THERE. And it happened exactly as he tells it.” Turns out Mike was Employee Number Two.

That was my dad. Next Saturday would have been his 76th birthday. Happy birthday, Dad. Here’s hoping you’re raking every pot there at the Great Leather-Topped Poker Table in the Sky.

Drakan: The Ancients Gates When this game game out on PS2 shortly after launch, it was met with thunderous apathy. To this day I don’t understand why it didn’t become a hit. A free-roaming hack-n-slash RPG with really awesome dragon-riding elements? That is pure gold. I liked the game so much I had Greg Sewart write up a retrospective for OPM. I sure hope you got paid, Greg.

New Model Army This vastly underrated British folk-rock band has been making challenging, provocative, catchy, sometimes heart-wrenching music since 1979, and almost no one in this country has ever heard of them. It’s very, very hard to find lyrics with as much power and artistry anywhere else.

Turning Off the TV This one may seem like cheating, but I really do relish hitting the off switch on the electronic overseer. Don’t get me wrong, I like me a good program every now and then. (And of course, gaming doesn’t count.) But I probably watch less than three hours of TV a week…I just enjoy gaming or reading or feeding my brain with internet junk food so much more. There are definitely times when I find myself sinking into that TV stupor, just watching it because it’s on and I’m not even that interested in what’s showing. At those times, summoning the energy to turn it off and go do something else is particularly rewarding.

Cemeteries Even though I’ve had to see them a lot more than I’d like over the past few years, I still do find something so relaxing and soothing about being in a cemetery — particularly an old cemetery, with its gorgeous headstones, monuments, and mausoleums. Oh, that reminds me:

Harold and Maude My favorite movie ever. It’s about love, and death, and wealth, and freedom, and most importantly: happiness. It’s not a movie for everyone, but if quirky black romantic comedies strike your fancy, I have never seen a better one. There are few movies like it, but if you liked Garden State, for example, I have a feeling you’ll like Harold and Maude.

Your turn. Let me know five (or six, or ten!) things you like that no one else does, in comments or your own blog. (Drop a link in comments if you do it on your own blog, k?)

In addition to that, my dad’s biological mother died shortly after he was born, and his father got remarried, which made for five separate and distinct branches of the family tree just two generations back, counting the families of my maternal grandmother and grandfather, paternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, and paternal step-grandmother. And many of them came from big families. (We’re talking about turn-of-the-century reproduction statistics here, mostly for recent immigrants to the country; this was not at all abnormal.)

Anyway, to sum up: we’re a big family. So the holidays were always a fairly substantial production.

While Thanksgiving and Christmas Day were reserved mainly for our immediate family (that is, the twelve of us plus, later, spouses and kids — I think we were up to forty-two attendees at the last count, including my late parents), there was one event each year that brought out the entire enormous clan: Wigilia.

Wigilia (pronounced vuh-GEE-lee-uh) is a Polish Christmas Eve celebration (Wigilia shares its root with “vigil,” as in waiting for the birth of Christ) that, in its traditional form, is celebrated with very specific foods and forms of preparation. Some of the observances include sprinkling straw under the tablecloths to signify the odd cradle choice at the Nativity, and setting an extra place at the table, to signify hospitality to travelers (I presume to make up for a certain Bethlehem innkeeper’s legendary faux pas), especially travelers of a divine nature. Some of the foods include pierogi (a type of savory stuffed pasta, similar to ravioli but much, much bigger and much, much more filling), baked apples, and probably some type of vile fermented cabbage that your parents force you to eat even though it quite literally makes you gag, and you tell them so but they think you’re just trying to get out of eating something you don’t like but someday you really will end up throwing up all over the table and then they’ll be sorry!

Sorry, where was I? Ah yes: Wigilia. We didn’t observe all the traditional foods or ceremonies. In our house (or, more specifically, in the sprawling, cavernous basement of our funeral home), Wigilia was about getting every damn distant relation we could find together for a night of entirely too much food, quite a bit of alcohol, Christmas carols, visits from Santa, games, moderately priced gifts, and oplatki.

(A word about oplatki. This is another Polish tradition in which a wafer — or in our case a truckload of wafers — having been blessed in a special Catholic ceremony, is distributed among all the attendees of Wigilia. Each person takes a wafer or wafer piece, and wanders around the room. When they encounter another person, they each break off a piece of the other’s oplatki and exchange a familial greeting appropriate to their relationship. This continues until every person at the gathering has either a.) exchanged oplatki with every other person at the gathering, or b.) run out of oplatki. Do the math on my family and you might assume that the length of this operation could be measured in hours. You would be correct.)

So: A huge space packed with probably a couple hundred relations, all making merry in age-appropriate fashion and stuffing themselves. It was great. As a child, I found this massive influx of people I barely knew just short of miraculous, a feeling only intensified when inevitably, in the middle of the evening, the sound of sleigh bells would herald the approach of Santa, who would take us young ones on his lap, ask if we’d been good, then reach into that giant garbage bag and pull out one — just one — small gift for each child, more than enough to tide us over until the next morning. He’d stay for one more Christmas carol and then ho! ho! ho! his way back up the basement stairs.

Somehow my dad always missed Santa coming by.

Now, Wigilia was a wonderful event in itself, but even more wonderful was the fact that on his way back up the chimney Santa would leave the rest of our gifts under the Christmas tree in the living room, two floors above.

(A word about the Christmas tree: It was magic. You see, every year my parents would put the Christmas tree stand on the floor and fill it with water, whereupon my youngest brother and I would drop in one of the magic Christmas tree seeds my mother kept in the kitchen, at the back of the top shelf to the right of the sink. The next morning, we’d wake to find a full-sized Christmas tree in our living room. It wasn’t until much later we noticed that the magic Christmas tree seeds bore a striking resemblance to whole peppercorns, and that the back steps always seemed to be freshly vacuumed the morning after a planting.)

Anyway, since everyone knows Santa won’t leave gifts if he’s observed, it was strictly forbidden for us to leave the basement under any circumstances during the course of Wigilia. In fact, we’d often leave for midnight mass at St. Josephat’s directly from the basement, thereby prolonging the revelation of the gift count that much longer. And trust me, even the most hyperactive child would struggle to maintain interest in anything other than sleep after a two-hour Christmas production in which everything is said twice: once in English and once in Polish.

But time passed, like it does, and us kids started getting older, like kids do, and one year — I was maybe eight or nine years old, I’d say — I worked up the courage to boldly disobey the prime directive of Wigilia and sneak up to the living room. After Santa had left, I let a reasonable time pass and then padded up the business stairs from the lesser-occupied new section of the basement, inched open the door marked “private” in the main parlor, and crept up the back stairs into the house. Even before I turned the corner I could see the soft, reddish glow coming from down the hall. With my heart climbing higher and higher in my throat, I tiptoed the last few steps into the living room. What I saw there I have not to this day forgotten, and I doubt I ever will.

Let’s go back to the math for a moment: There were twelve people in my immediate family at that point, plus spouses in a number I would have to have been paying better attention to remember. But since I was approaching double digits in age, that meant that many of my older brothers and sisters had already gotten out of college and started out on their own. That meant less mouths my parents had to feed, and less school tuitions they had to pay. And furthermore, the family business was continuing to improve thanks to the passion and caring of my dad and his employees. (Plus, you know what they say about funeral homes: people are just dying to get in. Ah, ha. Ah, ha, hah, ha. Ahem. Sorry.) So understand that this was an unusually good year in the Rybicki household.

Now, our living room was pretty huge. I’d estimate it was maybe fifteen feet deep by maybe forty feet wide. Big enough for our whole family to squeeze in, if that gives you any indication. Even factoring in a generously sized Christmas tree and a couple couches, there was a pretty good amount of free space in this huge room.

But not this night. The room was lit solely by the lights from the Christmas tree, two or three candles on the mantle, and a dying fire in the fireplace. That soft light glinted off of the wrapping paper of presents stacked carefully upon every available patch of floor. There were presents behind the TV. There were presents on top of the five-foot-long record player console thingy (there was a time when both TVs and stereos were furniture). There were presents on the coffee table, behind the couch, and damned if I don’t remember there being presents under my dad’s chair. There were presents leaning against the walls all the way around the room, I swear. It was ridiculous. It was magical. It was the manifestation of childhood holiday fantasies, the Platonic ideal of Christmasness encountered at just the right age for it to make an indelible impression.

And as I stood there, with the hi-fi murmuring carols softly in the corner, the golden light reflecting a thousand thousand times off of glitter and tinsel and ribbons, I wanted to cry. Sure, I wanted to dance, I wanted to sing, I wanted to laugh, I wanted to tear open presents and roll around in a pile of wrapping paper. Certainly. But I think most of all I wanted to cry. To this day I don’t know why; I would have thought I would have been too young to be overcome by complex emotion. But I wonder if some part of me knew that it wouldn’t be long before I outgrew some of that magic, before the simple wonder of the holiday started to wilt under the withering glare of crass commercialism.

I didn’t do any of the things I wanted to do at that moment. Instead I tiptoed back downstairs, closed the private door behind me, padded back into the basement and jumped into a game of statues with my cousins. Later, we went cross-town to midnight mass. And when we got home, I went to bed. Through all this, though, I was only half-present. A significant portion of my brain was still up in that glowing room, buzzing with anticipation, drugged by holiday atmosphere. From the moment I came back down those stairs, it was all I could do to sit still. I never slept easily as a child, but it must have taken literally hours for me to finally drift off that night.

And what did I get out of that enormous haul the next morning? What did Santa bring to reward my having been good all year (or at least all week)? What early-eighties toy craving was satisfied that day?

I haven’t the faintest idea. Can’t remember for the life of me. And honestly, I think it’s probably better that way. Because in the end, what’s under that wrapping paper doesn’t matter one tiny bit. The magic is what matters, and that will always be there, whether there’s a hundred presents under the tree or none at all.

So: from me to you, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas. Also: Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, and Happy Winter Solstice. Here’s hoping your winter holidays are every bit as magical as they should be. May they be filled with laughter, good food, good music, fine people, cherished memories, and all the pierogi you can shove in your face. Na zdrowie!

On the Business World
When you start at a new job, you will be terrified. Ten years later, you will wonder what you were so worried about.

Learn how to do the things that aren’t strictly your job. You never know when it might come in handy.

Remember that it’s okay to say “no” sometimes. But if you spend more energy explaining why you can’t do something than you would have spent actually doing it, it’s time to look for a new job.

The business world is strange, and fickle, and strange. Weird things happen. Expect the weirdness and you’ll be fine.

My dad, the successful owner and manager of a small business, once told me, “Never ask an employee to do something that you wouldn’t be willing to do yourself.” Another way to put this is, “Never ask an employee to do something unless they know you’d be willing to do it yourself.” I have never been given better managerial advice.

On a related note, especially in the corporate world, remember that you never know when a subordinate may someday become a supervisor. So don’t be a dick.

And you never know when you might run into a former coworker later in life. Burning bridges is fun as hell, and I’m sure if you’re planning to move to Saskatchewan and raise caribou on a desolate farmstead there probably wouldn’t be many repercussions. But unless that’s your plan, you might want to think twice before sending that angry e-mail or submitting that angry blog post or leaving that angry voicemail. Yes, it might be very satisfying at the time. Don’t do it.

Remember that the most basic purpose of any business, pretty much by definition, is to make money. Expect the people in charge to make decisions with these factors in mind and you will be prepared for the strange, fickle weirdness.

Find the fun in your job. Every job has some. Just look for it. If you can’t find it, find a different job.

On Games
When was the last time you played the best-looking game on PS1? When was the last time you played Tetris (or something equivalently simple-looking)? Yeah, exactly. In the long run, graphics don’t mean shit.

Look into the stories of the people behind the games. They deserve more credit and recognition than they get.

You need to invite people over to play party games every once in a while. It nourishes the soul. Just don’t drink too much or you’ll break something.

Guitar Hero really is as good as everyone says. If you haven’t played it yet, do so.

Don’t ever, ever, take anything Jack Thompson says seriously. He’s an amusing, harmless hack. He deserves our pity, not our attention.

Remember that what you spend your money on this year dictates what kind of games come out next year. Write the game companies, sure, but don’t forget that your most powerful means of voting is your credit card.

Game publishers and console manufacturers are businesses. See above section for further details.

There is room in games for politics. There is room in games for art. There is room in games for satire, and humor, and social commentary. Is there room in your game collection?

Gamers are not a minority. We are not outsiders. We are not basement-dwellers or antisocial creeps or violent sociopaths. We are everyone. We are your grandmother and your bank teller. We’re the guy pumping your gas and the girl behind the counter at McDonald’s. Why we let ourselves be marginalized, I will never understand.

Systems come and systems go, but great games are forever.

On Life
Don’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia.

Make playlists for various occasions. The right music makes a pleasant time more pleasant.

Fer chrissakes, read a book once in awhile.

Turn off the ringer on your phone every now and then. It’s empowering.

Speaking of phones, if your cell phone rings in a restaurant, please select one of the following options: 1. Turn it immediately off; 2. Step outside to take the call; or 3. Answer quietly and immediately tell the caller you can’t talk right now and will call them back. If you do not choose one of these options, you are officially a self-absorbed asshole. Exceptions will be made if the caller is in the hospital, has just won the lottery, or is calling from beyond the grave. Maybe.

If your cell phone rings in a movie theater, please remember to turn it off next time. If you actually answer it, please head on out back and kill yourself.

Spend the time and effort to make your home a place people like to visit. Trust me on this one.

My mother always used to say, “Smile; you’ll feel better.” I hated that she said that, but damn it, Mom, you were so totally right.

-j. <–OUT

A few years back I got a letter from my mom. Amid the pleasantries and family updates was this particularly touching passage:

“‘Far be it from me to tell you what to do’…but I felt I must say something.

“I wish — I ask — I plead with you. Please try to do something to discourage those violent, antisocial videogames such as Grand Theft Auto. (I’ve read and heard more negative comments about this game in particular.)

“You have always cared about others — and cared deeply, I believe. I just can’t believe that you don’t care what effect these games have on other people — especially on kids and teens. I know you say they are for adults. Well, even if adults were the only ones to play them (and they aren’t), the game can influence adults who are not emotionally and morally mature — and can even affect those who are. This sort of thing is depressing, at the very least, and we all ought to try to be uplifting and encouraging, and most of all, responsible. We are our brothers’ keepers.

“You might think that you have no influence on the game designers, but I believe that you do. If you care, your voice could influence others to join you in protesting. And if you don’t make a difference at this time, your attempts could bring a change in the future — so that your children might live in a more peaceful world.”

Included in the letter was one of those alarmist news pieces we all remember from the days following GTA3′s smash success. You know what I’m talking about: those sweaty, feverish shock pieces that seemed to invariably imply (if not claim outright) that the point of the game is — let’s all say it together now — to pick up a hooker then kill her and take your money back.

I always meant to write Mom back and explain that those of us who have played games all our lives know very well that they don’t turn us into bat-wielding maniacs. I wanted to tell her about the therapeutic effects of releasing aggression in a harmless, virtual manner, and direct her to some of the writings of M.I.T. professor Henry Jenkins, who’s made a living debunking the media’s most sensational myths about games. Only one thing led to another, the letter got filed away, and I just plain forgot.

It wasn’t until I started doing this column that I remembered the letter, and was looking forward to printing it in this issue, inviting you folks to add your own comments — and also, you may notice, bringing her message to a much wider audience. (Look, I can’t disobey my mom, OK?) I planned to open the issue to this page and send it to her, with a note saying, “See? I didn’t forget.”

But three weeks ago, with almost no warning, my mom died. And you know something? Of all the things I regret not being able to share with her, of all the missed opportunities, this is one of the biggest. Isn’t that silly? I guess I feel like I disrespected her by not ever giving her a proper response.

So here you go, Mom: your answer at last. Sorry it’s so late. |

1. Headlined a punk rock show in a Masonic temple in Trenton, New Jersey. The opening band was a very young Less Than Jake, followed by a surprise appearance by Bobby Steele (formerly of the Misfits) and his band the Undead, who performed a 3-song set on our equipment. Their closing song was a freakin’ incredible rendition of “Last Caress” (which Steele wrote but Glenn Danzig stole and copyrighted under his own name) in which Steele paused before the final verse and slyly commented, “Often imitated, never duplicated.” \m/

2. Hosted an hour-long interview with Marilyn Manson and David Duchovny, where I got them to interview each other. (You can read it here.)

3. Raced full-tilt down a pier in Biloxi, Mississippi, to call 911, because I thought a homeless guy had drowned himself. Subsequently got into a heated argument with all the pot-smoking asshats on the pier who were pissed because the cops were coming. The guy turned out to be fine, just a bit drunk–and the water was only waist deep. Oops.

4. Spent the night in a train station in Norwich, England, after seeing New Model Army and subsequently learning that the last train left as the last song was playing.

5. Was called “a really great bass player” by the really great bassist from Rancid.

6. Scored 1460 on my SATs: 730 math, 730 verbal.

7. Assisted in an embalming, and helped dress my deceased father for his viewing (his funeral arrangements included a request for his five sons to do this honor). I grew up in a funeral home, which is our family’s business.

8. Watched a packed room of some 2000 people singing along to lyrics I wrote, at a show where my band opened for the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

9. Met and interviewed Police drummer Stewart Copeland, who told me, “Creativity isn’t like a resource, where the more you use it the less you have. It’s like a muscle: the more you use it, the stronger it gets.” This may be the best advice I’ve ever been given.

10. Had my name used for a character in a totally awesome sci-fi novel, and was thanked in the acknowledgements.

So let’s hear yours!