In case you were wondering, here is your comprehensive assessment of Gabriel's mental health. As someone who has endured him for many years, I believe I can continue to do so. The muscles in his face seem to tighten less often. The only real trouble with his pharmaceutically enforced zen is that I feel much, much crazier by comparison.
I was trying to put in a new faucet all weekend, a process that - even once I am completely dry - won't be attempted again anytime soon. On a walk with my mom up to the plumbing store for the fifth time to purchase a fixture that doesn't actually exist, she spied a small hole in the edge of the sidewalk deep enough that light couldn't reach in.
She stopped.
She stopped in the middle of the road, which necessitated the kind of tugging and goading we usually associate with livestock. "That was really weird," she said, and laughed. "That hole would be a good place for a Bombchu."
She had purchased a copy of Bratz for one of her grandkids, and was enraged (well, maybe just displeased) with the game's insipid gameplay and lack of visual prowess. She's unhappy with my progress in Zelda, which I thought was a radical new avenue of maternal complaint. I don't know who this woman is.
She's probably not the best barometer of the culture at large, because she has a denim cap with the word "Penny-Arcade.Mom" stitched in. But the universe that Steve Gaynor describes as impossible in his much publicized "wager" is pretty much my day to day life. When we talk about how normal people could never understand this medium, we need to understand how divisive and narcissistic such statements are.
Our Super Smash Brothers Brawl import just arrived. If you'll excuse me, I need to go discourse with it. Culturally.
(CW)TB out.