Bukkhead Creative Writing

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====== Tantra Flopp'n ======


So there's this kid who likes three things: dungeons and dragons, sitting under a blanket on the couch with his girlfriend and watching TV, and combinatorial mathematics.

So one day he and his girlfriend are under a blanket with each other on the couch watching TV, something like the reboot of Good Times starring Homicide: Life on the Street'ss Andre Brauer. And one of them says something about how they like to cuddle, and the other one says they like to snuggle too, and the one says do you mean in addition to cuddling you also like snuggling, or are you saying that you like cuddling as well as I do, but you're pronouning cuddle with snuggle? And this starts a discussion which leads to a heated discussion which leads to an argument leading to a heated argument that develops into fight that becomes a fight but now in the sense of physical violence and only ends when she's running out the door, ashamed at herself for throwing his Chandla Nalaar statue at him, not because it hit him in the head and drew blood and later a black eye which she only learned about later when a friend liked the photo he'd taken it of it and posted on Instagram with the caption I'm the other guy, but because she'd bought the figurine for him and so in a sense was perfectly justified in using it as a weapon even if not in the act of the throwing itself after he'd screamed something about what one of them had said about the proscriptive approach to calling the use of "pronoun" as the verb "pronouning" incorrecrt, rather, ashamed for how she knew she'd behave if they got into an argument about why she should be able to throw the statuette since she'd paid for it and even though she knew she couldn't she'd never admit it, how she'd scream a scream to match his scream and know that feeling bad for screaming because it stereotypes women's behavior is playing into the patriarchy and would make her feminist friends disapointed in her, most of whom were men.

They breakup (via Skype) and he's so messed up from it his channel his grief and rage and relief and major depression into an analysis. He considers the word 'cuddle' and the word 'snuggle' and takes out all their pieces, not the uh and the ull sounds, because that's where they're the same, but the sss and the nuh and the kuh and the duh and the guh, then he starts to recombine the sounds to make news words, like snuddle and cuggle, and guscle and duggle, then he builds a computer-simulated multi-dimensional matrix to put all of the created words in a well-ordered array, then he sells the software he developed to build the matrix and becomes fucking stupid rich, and then he has a breakdown, laughing at how he didn't need to build a multi-dimensional matrix at all because he could have gotten nearly the same thing by drawing [totally strange] a circle and then dots on the circumfrance for each of the sound-parts and then drawn lines between them all and labelled the lines with the sound combinations.

By the way, everyone thinks he goes to the loony bin because has a breakdown and out of self hatred for fucking everything tries to commit suicide because he found out his girlfriend didn't cheat on him and the guy who he got picked a fight with who kicked his ass wasn't the guy after all and if he'd only beleived his girlfriend when she'd told him that they'd still be together (like Romeo and Juliet but way WAY stupider). But they're wrong, he has no self-hatred, doesn't think he fucks everything up, didn't try to commit suicide, didn''t think his girlfriend was cheating on him. They just thought that because of his picture with the caption "I'm the other guy," thinking that it was a reference to infidelity. But what really meant to do was reference when someone says to someone who looks bad 'you look bad' and the response is 'you should see the other guy." That way, anyone who heard he and his girlfriend broke up and saw his shiner would understand that if she had suffered at all it was less than him. It's the kind of thing a guy who thinks he's a feminist but really isn't would do. 

After he gets out of the loony bin, he goes home and draws the circle with the dots on the circumference with the sound parts, and the collecting lines, and he labels the lines with the sound combinations, and the drawing makes him think of alignments in D&D, how you can build a matrix out of 'lawful' and 'neutral' and 'good' and 'chaotic' and 'natural' and 'evil,' and how he could create a new RPG where you take all the sound-parts of snuggle and cuddle and build a matrix and label the combinations and those are your alignments.

So does that, since he's rich, he has time to create a new RPG, and he finds an inner peace, because, whereas, before, his multi-dimensional matrix included words with the sound-combination 'kuh-nuh' (Cnuddle, Cnuggle, Ducnle, etc) which he found unsettling because those didn't sound like "words," but now, he can spell the word "C'nuddle" and the alignment called that in his new RPG would have connotations of Cthluhu. And having found his inner peace he gives all him money away, like you do.

As an aside: when I thought of all of this, before I started writing it, I thought Cthulhu was spelled with apostrophes, like C'th'lhu, but when I got to that part I looked it up and found out the truth. I had gotten to the C'nuddle part in my head and the apostrophe is what made me think of C'thl'hu. And at first I was worried about C'thl'hu having two apostrophes and C'nuddle only having one, but I got over that. Then when I looked it up and saw I was wrong about the spelling I worried that this would take away from the story, that no one would believe that anyone would think C'nuddle would make someone think of Cthluhu, but then I thought sure, that's possible, and then I was sad no-one would know the apostrophe-mistake thing, but then I got over my sadness. Then I told you about it anyway.

The kid, he's poor but he's happy, travelling around to RPG companies, pitching his idea, and companies started getting competitive about hearing his pitch, and he gets funding, and with every interview his valuation is going up and up. But here's the thing. As the kid gets richer and richer, he's less and less commiting time to fleshing out and finishing the RPG, (which is called "Tantra Flopp'n") and more time developing his brand identity, his own, not the RPG's, and the game itself never gets past the stage of describing the various so-called 'Apostrophe Alignments." (This never happens: since he never gets any further he doesn't think about what the suh-kuh alignments would be like, that they would be the water-related and sea-faring alignments, obviously.)

Eventually, his brand grows out of his control, a guy who gets into a fight with his girlfriend and has a figurine thrown at him, (a statuette of a character from Magic the Gathering, a game invented by Richard Garfield, who has a degree in combinatorial mathematics, which is 100% a coincidence and has nothing do with the guy's love of combinatorial mathematics, even though it does because that's how I, the one writing this, thought of it, except I didn't really, except I did but backwards, going not from Richard Garfield to combinatorial mathematics to the guy, but the other way, like how the guy went from the apostrophe in C'thuddle to Cthulhu, even though he didn't, he just thought his fans might not believe anyone would, putting in Chandra Nalaar in as an easter egg for people who know the combinatorial mathematics-Richard Garfield, which I'm explaining now for those people who didn't) and then they breakup and he gives people the wrong impression when he posts his black eye on instagram, builds software to build a multi-dimensional word-sound-part matrix, sells the software and gets rich, goes crazy when he realizes he didn't need the multi-dimensional matrix when a circle would have sufficed, draws the circle when he gets out of the loony bin, which inspires him to create an RPG, which resolves a conflict he had with worths that start with the kuh-nuh sound, bringing him peace, leading him to give away all of his money, followed by his pitching his game idea to companies, including Allspark, who don't make games but produce live-action films based on toys, such as Transformers, made by their parent company, Hasbron, which owns Wizards of the Coast, which owns Dungeons and Dragons, and also owns Magic the Gathering, the game invented by Richard Garfield.

His fans control his brand. He gives away all of his vaporwaresque RPG valuation money, and starts working on a documentary about people who play an RPG about people who develop gaming systems based on his circle-matrix. This doesn't happen, but it does in the fan-fiction-esque RPGs his fans create about his brand. Which is the documentary he pitches to Allspark in their fan-RPGs. Which would be impossible because Allspark only produces a) fictional films, and b) only films based on existing Hasbro properties. Which is resolved in some of the FRPGs by the kid pitching the idea to Allspark to work the backwards-causation chain, like the backwards of the apostrophe thing and how didn't know to spell Cthulhu without apostrophes.

He (in one of the FPGs) sells the completely-fleshed-out-and-written game, about himself (the FPG itself) and gets rich. He gives the money away, and becomes a tantric monk (which don't exist and which is why the game is called "Tantra Flopp'n) and finds inner peace. With this peace, he realizes the whole fight could have been avoided entirely if, instead of one of them saying "I like to cuddle," they had said "I love netflix and chill." And then after watching that reboot of Good Times with The Fantastic Four's Rise of the Silver Surfer's Andre Braugher they would have had sex. And maybe eventually got married, and had kids. One would grow up to write this story.

Except his love of sitting on the couch under a blanket with his girlfriend watching TV had nothing with sex. 

A couple of final things, unrelated to any of this:

The first time I typed the word "mathematics" in this story I typed it "methematics." I realized my mistake immediately, but liked it, and almost went a long tangent about what methatics would even be. But I decided not too. Or, how about this; combinatorial mathematics is methematics.

I originally thought Andre Braugher a) spelled it Brauer, and b) was in The Wire (which I've never seen). I have since corrected that to his correct spelling and that he was in "Homicide: Life on the Streets" (which I've also never seen). 

The first time I typed "circumference I spelled it 'circumfrance." I leave it as an exercise to explore that one on your own (I already have).

One more thing, related to all of this:

Turning a mistake into an otherwise purposeful thing is the way creativity works. In fact it's the only way creativity works. Also, if I were to write literally all of the tangents I did go down, in my mind, but didn't write out, this story would several hundred pages long.

So maybe I will.
Bukkhead Creative Writing

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