Palm POWER!

My Visor Palmtop no works with my snap keyboard. Which means I can now take a computer with me to the pub. Or an additional computer on the plane if I JUST feel like writing. Its powered by AAA batteries...which means that I can just keep the thing going and going.

My world of information just became a whole lot larger. I can now script at will.

Vengeance in All Things by W. Bruce

They were dead. That's the end of the story.

It's also how the story begins.

They were dead. I could do nothing about it. I was young. Coins on the ground, glittering in the moon light. Silver beside crimson.

He had been brave. I know that. I will always remember his bravery. He went for the gun. He lunged for it, even as it was shoved into his heart. She fell backwards, dropping her purse. Silver beside crimson.

I cried beside them as they breathed their last. As their killer walked away. With a child's voice I swore revenge.

But a child cannot fight. A child cannot take vegeance. So I became a man.

***

When I was a child I read comic books. Superheroes in bright costumes. But in the real world the masks men wear are under their skin. Acts of justice must be cloaked in darkness, and the law is not so forgiving.

But I desired vengeance. And I learned to find it in everything.

Our world is full of injustice and evil. There are little evils, and there are great evils. Though I had become a man, I couldn't take on the great evils yet. But the first time I saw the man on the street, I knew he was one of those lesser evils.

He looked like any other man, but my eyes were full of vengeance and I knew that he was apart from them. The ways he moved. The way he walked. There was the swagger of crime in his walk. Every step was so sure of itself, but at the same time stalking. He was a predator among prey. They walked around him and past him, but never directly near him. I had seen any number of men like him, a thief perhaps. Or a drug dealer. Though his walk was a predator's, the look on his face was a guilty one. The way his eyes darted about, the way his mouth twitched.

All men wear masks under their skin. All men wear these masks, for good or ill. And I could recognize the man's guilty mask. To me he had not just become a mere criminal, he had become Evil.

But the act of evil is the act of crime, and so I waited. I stalked behind him. And he grabbed the woman's purse. He darted in behind her like a jackal, and he made off with it. And so I followed.

He didn't see me, for reasons I don't quite understand. Perhaps he was too enraptured with the thought of his ill gotten gains. Perhaps because I was not the sort of predator that he was, he did not see me becuase I blended with the crowds. And perhaps it is simply the nature of the prey not to realize the predator.

He entered an alleyway, and I followed. He opened the purse onto the ground to see what was inside. And silver poured onto the ground.

Coins on the ground, glittering in the moonlight. And I came at him. I didn't have a plan, I didn't have a weapon. So I hit him with a trash can. I threw it at him, and as he fell I tackled him. Then I was on him, and he was at me. In those early days I didn't know disciplined fighting. I didn't know how to throw a punch to knock a man down, or how to back him up with a glance. So I hit him, over and over. With all the fury of a boy without parents; with all the fury of a man sworn in the name of vengeance.

When I left he was still breathing. I didn't go to return the purse. At the time I did not think that I would right wrongs, only accomplish vengeance. That would change over time.

And so I made my first step towards finding vengeance in all things.

To the Land of the Union Jack

Well, the payments are made. The tickets are booked. The relatives have been contacted and are being finangled into letting me stay with them.

Ladies and gentlemen, in three weeks time I will be in England. I positivly shiver at the thought. Its been five long years, but I'm finally going back for 6 weeks. Four of those will be spent at Oxford.

...and two will be spent with family. One week in London, one week at the family farm in Preston. Should be right good fun.

I'm trying to figure out how to pack light. Packing for six weeks isn't going to be easy. Especially for books.

Now, I have a lot of ebooks, so I'm good for most of my primary gaming resources thanks to DriveThruRPG.com. But comics...I dunno. Bringing along Jinx, becuase its so damnably BIG. Also bringing Exalted: The Alchemicals becuase I've done little more than flip through it once in the two months that I've owned it. I need to bring some other trades as well. To keep me sane, and to give me some graphic stuff to look at. I'm thinking V for Vendetta, Planetary volumes 1 & 2, @thena Inc., and possibly something by Neil Gaiman. Also bringing along my scriptbooks for Buffy, Q&C, and Demo.

Its a real pity I won't be able to bring my cane along with me. Or my top hat. I doubt I'll even bring my fedora, as much as I want to. Something about it just screams "outcast"...but I dunno. Maybe.

I really, really wish I had a Portable Hole or a Bag of Holding (but not both, becuase that's bad). Those would be really damn useful right about now. Or just a top hat, a magic wand, and a Zatanna-level command of the mystic arts. Because "Kcap pu!" is one of the greatest incantations of all time.

...maybe I'll bring Zatanna: Everday Magic with me...

Spring cleaning

Dear god. I can see my floor.

I did a bunch of cleaning today. Well, not so much cleaning as organizing. Once and a while I like to get REALLY organized. So today I vaccumed my floor, and then went about doing just that.

My closet is now usable. Everything is neatly stacked towards the far end of my closet (my "closet is probably about a quarter of the size of my dorm room...though in terms of height thing Being John Malkovich...but at least it has low overheads), and I moved some stuff around so that everything fits in the three big boxes back there. I can finally get to the drawers in my book shelf/dresser there now.

Its amazing how much SPACE I've managed to get in here. I mean, the room itself is enormous. I've seen bachelor appartments that are smaller than this.

And it fits all my books. My THOUSANDS of books.

I also found my old Visor PalmPilot. Which I'm not trying to get to synch up to my laptop again so I can load the snap-n-type keyboard application onto it, thus allowing me to use it on the go, like when I go to Toronto for work, or when I go off on a day trip in England and can't bring my computer. I mean...its a useful little gadget, if I could just get the keyboard set up with it.

The Palm, combined with my USB pen (compliments of my father, with its 30MB storage capacity) and my iPod means that I have plenty of space to carry info around in England without directly bringing my laptop with me.

Word-Count

I'm actually succeeding. I'm about a day behind schedule due to how hectic Sunday was (got up, went to work, went to game, got home at 2am), but I've so far managed to pound out my Marvel submission letter, about a thousand+ words for the setting history for the Werewolf: the Forsaken domain stuff I'm working on, and I've written another few pages of Excelsior.

I'm really getting to enjoy writing Matt Noblem. He's great fun to play, and I think that the character has really developed from my original concept stuff that came up for AlexanderLambert's Wild Talents game a few years back. He's evolved from an angry, sullen teenager who'd rather write comics than live under his father's shadow to his own character. In fact, the Aberrant stuff completly eliminates the heroic legacy of Kyle "Nobilis" Noblem altogether, focusing on how Matt defines himself as an individual, as a writer, and as a nova.

The one problem that I'm having is timing and pacing. The first issue has a lot of talk, and not a lot of plot. Its just initial character development that starts off really fast paced, but slows down in the middle with a lot of heavy dialogue to set the stage for future issues. Or, more to the point, to give things that I won't have to explain in future stuff. The problem also rears its head in where to set the story in the Aberrant timeline. Matt is an N-Day+5 Nova. He erupted less than a week after Galatea, which means that I have to fast track the plot to even get somewhere remotely close to the base starting point of 2008 where the game's corebook begins. So I'm considering doing some Planetary style work and hopscotching around the timeline, or possibly just skipping large segments of history and using important points as storyarcs. Because I sure as hell am not going to try to put together some 120 issues, even assuming that each issue perfectly chronicles one month of Matt's life.

Once the first issue is done, I hope to push myself to finish it by week's end, I think I'll give it to a few friends to edit, and then post the final edit for mass consumption. Then either keep writing issues of it, or switch onto a project that I may be able to sell some day, like Ascent, PB, or even some sort of coherent script for the Phone-Booth Zombie.

Oh, and my suposition about writing was correct. I work much better in indirect sunlight, or some decent shade, than I do in my bunker of a room at night. My creativity is solar powered. Remind me to track down the perverse deity who gave me a photosynthetic muse.

Script Posted

Posted my script for "ABERRANT: FIREMAN" issue 0 to my Geocities site here. It was sort of my demonstration work to Ian Watson over at Continuing the Continuum that I could actually put a script together.

Take a look, read, whatever. Unlike PB, this isn't really saleable, given that the copyright is held by White Wolf and I'm just doing it as a fan piece.

The Origins of Neverwhere

Looking at maps of the London Underground, and at their odd, rather obtuse, and impossible to navigate website, I can now see where Neil Gaiman got the idea for Neverwhere from.

This will require a new level of insanity that I have not tapped into since Tokyo.

...it also turns out that my relatives live at the goddamned fringes of the tube lines. Hillingdon. The frelling penultimate stop on the Metropolitan and Piccadilly lines. They do this to torture me, I swear to god.

My new Promise To Myself

I'm going to write AT LEAST 1000 words each day until school starts in September. The blog does not count.

My hope is to force myself, by any means nessecary to break out of this current cube of writer's block that I'm in. Can't seem to shake it...though frankly I blame it on lack of sunlight. I can't seem to writer clever whilst in my bunker-like room in the basement. Must get thoughts elsewhere.

There are two and a half months left till September, that's roughly 70-80 days. I could write a fucking novel in that time period. I could write 6 or 7 full 22 page issues. I could write my goddamned submission letter to Marvel.

That sounds good. I'll do that one tomorrow...and then write something else.

Time to chase the muse in a race car.

The Dark Side of the Force

Saw Revenge of the Sith today. It's an OK movie, definitly better than episodes 1 and 2. But its still lacking that something-something that made New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.

Not sure what exactly to say about this movie, though. I mean...its OK, I guess. It was pretty good. The fight scenes seemed a bit too long, though, and there was a LOT of stuff sqashed into its 2+ hour run time.

I found that the evolution of Anakin was rushed to the point of being unrealistic. I honestly can't figure out how no one had realized previously that he was THIS unstable. Also, the naming of Vader was just too staged. I dunno.

This is a movie that tried to tie off all the lose ends that they hadn't bothered to tie off in the previous two, to the effect that a third of the movie was spent just getting ready for the original trilogy.

Two interesting things came out of this movie.

First off, its the only movie I think I've ever seen where I want to go see EVERY movie that had a trailer leading up to it. I was overjoyed to see that Sue Storms powers are now based on force field manipulation rathern than turning invisible AND forcefields. And the new Narnia movies look, whiel probably not very true to the books, quite neat.

The second is that I have decided that the Sith rock. Not becuase they're the bad guys, but because of the fact that they don't HAVE to be. The Sith and Jedi operate under the following basic dichtomy:
-The Jedi prize self control and ascetic discipline to enforce a selfless lifestyle. They value duty to a nebulous higher ideal and aschew all personal, social, and emotional attachments as clouding the path to that ideal. They acheive control over the force through self discipline, and having perfect self mastery and self knowledge. However, that self knowledge is used to know how to repress themselves so that they can dedicate their lifes to a higher ideal.
-The Sith prize individuality and expression of emotion. Each Sith worries about himself. They know themselves in the same way that the Jedi do, but embrace their passions rather than denying them. They seek power through personal release and expression rather than repression and rigorous self discipline. Sith do not follow a higher ideal espoused by a group, but rather follow their own ideals. What this means is that Sith don't have to be evil. They're selfish, yes, but they can see themselves as noble protectors as easily as heartless power mongering villains. The reason that so many Sith ARE villains is the fault of their masters, not the source of their power. The problem with the Sith master training is that it tends to emphasize personal ambition. And the Sith lords generally choose students who are already very ambitious...and then give this idiotic training exercise of murdering people to prove you're "worthy", so its only natural that the apprentice is going to chafe under them and slaughter them as soon as they get the chance.

Thus a Jedi will appreciate fine music becuase of the way it is composed and the skill with which it is played. He will deny that the music evokes any emotions in him. A Sith will enjoy the music because of how the composition makes him feel, and the pleasure he takes from a skillfull performance.

The problem arises when a Sith gets to like certain things. He doesn't have to be a villain...unless he decides that he really likes the taste of power over others, or murder. But the Sith have the option of tempering their emotions with logic and consideration, and thus it is not nessecary for them to completly surrender themselves. Being a Sith is about understanding and accepting, rather than repressing, your emotions...but it doesn't mean they have to be slaves to them.

This is mainly what Revenge of the Sith taught me. It also taught me that most of the Sith don't understand the logical point of their own philosophy, but rather justify it for a hedonistic lifestyle of pleasure, murder, and manipulation. I think that the Emperor understands it much better than Mal, Dooku, or Vader...but at the same time, even he falls to his own hubris.

ANd that's the main downside of the Dark Side of the Force: Hubris. With the full power of the Force at their disposal its only natural for the Sith to become prideful and overconfident over time without careful discipline. That's the one place where the Jedi have them: the Jedi training regime works to keep its students remembering that they're mortal. It means that Jedi are far more likely to consider a situation, its pros and its cons, before a Sith will. This is also why the Jedi are in charge: they're less prone to reactionary decisions and prideful actions.

And that's all I have to say about that.

The Bard's Photographic Art

Stardust

"When I came upon the child of god he was walking along the road, and when I asked him where he was going this he told me: He said 'I'm going down to Woodstock and I'm gonna join in a rock'n'roll band. I'm gonna live out off the land, I'm gonna set my soul free.'"-song who's name I can't remember by people whos names I can't remember
(This is one of my favourites. The setup just worked SO well. That's a road up near my family's cottage, and it just frames things perfectly.)

Sommerset

"And far away in Sommerset, God and the Devil are now playing chess! The Devil still cheats and wins more souls, and as for the Lord? He's just doing his best!"-Chris de Burgh, "Spanish Train"
(I think this picture would look a lot better if Keith WASN'T looking directly into the camera.)

The Duke in Exile

Not really sure what the explanation for this one is. But there's a humorous story behind it. This is actually from the second take of this photo. Becuase I forgot to load the goddamned film the first time. This was a problem throughout the day, and resulted in me missing several very amusing pictures that I thought I took. But other than that...its Ian, in the window of a Starbucks, in a business suit, wearing elf ears. We had to convince the Starbucks that this really was part of an OAC art project before they'd let us shoot through their window.
(This one's kind of grainy, unfortunatly, and the window did lots of weird things with the pictures...but you can just see the ears poking out, and Ian's hair gives him this weird, kind of unearthly look. I quite like this one.)

There'll be more over the next few days. I have to remember the names of some of them first, lol.

Photographic Art

Scanned in some of my black and white photographic art tonight. I say "photographic art" to differentiate it from the shots I take when I'm on vacation. These were staged shots where I got my friends to dress up and pose just right. Great thing about having decent looking friends with good costumes: I don't have to pay people to pose.

I'll be uploading and posting them tomorrow. I think Ian is actually in most of them. The man's one of my best friends. We're on such a close wavelength sometimes it ain't funny. Always great to hang around with, and totally supportive of me when I was doing my photography projects. Plus he has some great costumes that he wore.

So yes...on Saturday there will be photos and commentary. Huzzah.

"This Swiss Army Knife paid for by a grant from the Phoenix Foundation"

UPDATED: With the help of a pair of pliers and a jewler's screwdriver that I keep attached to my keychain, I have managed to remove the key fragment from the lock and installed the backup key onto my chain. Everything no works perfectly. I just know not to use the lock in the winter. I'm getting my own show. But I demand to keep the theme music to MacGyver...becuase that music is so retro and annoying. I also demand that the music go on for AT LEAST two mintues before any credits are actually listed. End transmission.

I have two bike locks. One is a standard U-lock, the ohter is steel cable under black plastic with a standard tooth-key lock. Thing is, the cable lock shrinks in the cold, so during the winter my key got pretty bent trying to open it. It is also the only lock I feel even remotely safe using in Toronto.

So anyway...bent key. As I tried to unlock it from the posts in the GO Train tonight whilst coming home from Toronto, they key broke off in the lock. I panicked. I was arriving in Oakville in 5 minutes...not nearly enought time to find one of the GO cops and see if they had bolt cutters.

So I actually said to myself "What would MacGyver do?" Which ended up with me using my Swiss Army Knife to push the broken key fully into the lock, and twist, unlocking it!

The locks now basically trashed. Gonna see if my father can fix it. If not I guess I'll have to shell out $14 for another one. But damn...

...MacGyver, eat your fucking heart out.

A good day with a hint of sadness

Overall it was a good day. Hung out with Ryon, and my passport arrived, and I attended a meeting for the Oxford trip. Sending off letters to relatives tomorrow.

But it had two shitty notes.

The lesser is the fact that, for some reason, there was a screwup with UfT over one of my first semester courses, and I'm recorded as having a diferred exam for it. No one knows why. Apparently the SDF (Special Differed Final) code is only given when you have a big, legitimate reason not to be at the exam (funeral for a member of immediate family, severe illness, etc.). There's just one catch: I wrote the exam. At the same time as everyone else. The Arts & Science registrar's office agrees with me: there is no logical reason that I should still not have my mark from that course. If it turns out that my exam was lost, I think I may kill someone, because there's no way in hell I'm taking it again if it was lost, and it was, by far, my best performance in the course because I'd done two weeks of constant, serious studying leading up to it. It was an easy exam! Dammit.

The nastier note is that I killed a pigeon today. Hah hah, laugh if you want. I try to stick to a creed not to kill. I'll eat meat, becuase in my own craven way I don't have a problem with other people killing it for me. But I try not to kill. Even insects. But a pigeon flew into my front wheel while I was riding through Nathan Phillips Square today. Its wing broke and got caught in the wheel, and it was flung under the back tire of my bike. Then it flapped around on the ground for a minute or two until some homeless guy in a Santa hat and no shirt picked it up, somehow calmed it down a bit, and handed it to me. We both knew the bird was going to die. I crushed at least one of its wings, if not its spine. There was no way this pigeon was going to live out more than another hour or two, and even those in intense pain.

So I killed it. I looked at the guy and I said, "I guess I should kill it, end its pain". So I gently took its head, and quickly twisted it a full 360 until I felt the neck snap. I remember the feathers. So soft, like down. Like a dog's ears, soft and pleasent. I could feel the life going out of it. I could almost feel its pain.

But I feel like shit now. Because I killed something. I broke the code I tried to hold myself to. Even if it was for mercy.

Yeah, I washed my hands immediatly afterwards. Soap and water as hot as the tap could put it out. Washed my keys as well, and I didn't touch the bike handle with the fingers I used to touch the bird.

I have no idea why I'm feeling so bad over one bird. There are thousands more like it all over the city. But looking at it there in the guy's hands, so small and fragile...dammit. It just didn't seem fair to it.

Ph34r my 1337 phi5k5 m0j0, y0!

::cough:: Apologies for leet speak title.

Got my marks for my second year of university in. First off, I managed to pull my GPA up from 2.45 to 2.71 (I had an annual GPA of 3.07). Not only that, but I got a fucking 81 in Physics! EIGHTY-ONE! In PHYSICS!

(ok, so it was physics with no math involved...whatever...EIGHTY-ONE!)

Damn straight. I am damnably good. I also got an 82 in Intro to Greek Culture. Both courses had a C+ average. I got an A-.

I also managed to pull my GPA up by a full .26 from my previous annual score. Hopefully I can achieve that mojo again next year and land myself comfortably around the 3.0 range.

This has been the best news I have heard all week. Hope is alive.

Nothing good can come of this

Things like this never end well.

They NEVER end well.

This will either annihilate the planet or unearth fell horrors from the bowels of the Earth which were never meant for the light of day. Have these people learned NOTHING from Pitch Black? Bad things live underground. Bad things as in...

...MASSIVE LUMLEYAN CTHONIC DEITIES FROM BEYOND!

While we're all screaming in the depths of our fiery demise, that smug British bastard Brian Lumley will be laughing at us and saying "I told you so".

Mark my words: Nothing good can come of this.

Bizarro Am Liking Bard Much

I got two of my letters published over at Superdickery.com. Apparently I am Bizarro's new friend.

With friends like these, who needs enemies? Next Gorilla Grodd will be asking to make friends after that beating I gave him as The Shroud. Or I'll be getting some White Martians trying to crash at my place after they get out of that Go'Haran prison that Kishar Sen put them in. And those fuckers don't clean up after themselves.

See, the real problem with Bizarro is that he often blows shit up without really realizing it. He's like Superman without the conscious thought of how much collateral damage he's causing. Plus...y'know...he tends to think that the proper place for a human heart is OUTSIDE the body.

...I should submit a Bizarro story to DC...

Learning to Enjoy Fantasy. Again.

Not a big fan of fantasy-fantasy. This as opposed to modern-fantasy and science-fantasy. I'm not a big fan of sword and sorcery, or really any medeival fantasy. I can enjoy the Wheel of Time becuase Mat and Perrin are truly amusing characters, and because "Aes Sedai" is just such a fun word to say. I vaugley enjoy the Valdemar novels becuase I can never really remember a time that I DIDN'T like them. They were my first introduction to big fantasy worlds. So I have a special place in my heart for them. That place is right next to my enjoyment of Romper Room; largley nostalgic, and somehow diminishing every time I partake of it. Though there IS something satisfying and final about Vanyel's habit of ending all problems with the magical equivilant of a tac-nuke, and the fact that the recurring villain of the series is the equivilant to a super-villain lineage: same schemes, same costume, different guy.

But damn...George RR Martin is teaching me to enjoy fantasy again. I first met the man through Wild Cards, and the fact that he's a gamer really caught me on. He has a very natural style of storytelling, and he created the Great and Powerful Turtle...how could I not learn to love his stuff?

So people have been hounding me for a few months now to put down The Wheel of Time and pick up A Game of Thrones. First it was Joel, who spent half an hour explaining the concept of the Night's Watch to me, and how this was a viable way of getting rid of the Changeling criminals of Winter's Discontent rather than throwing them into the Endless Trod, that hole in space time which has an annoying habit of spitting people back out, horribly insane and dreadfully more powerful than before. Then Ryon, one of my Winthrop Academy players, and the VST Requiem for my local Camarilla Domain, telling me about how he loved the books. And then there was the fact that a third of the fantasy conversations in the domain (especially when Joel is involved) revolve around the damn books.

So picking up the first book was inevitable. I put off reading it for a month or so while I read "The Fires of Heaven" (WoT Book 5), but once I finished that I decided to give Martin a try. It took me a few pages to get into it, but his style of storytelling is MUCH more natural than Jordan's, and he doesn't constantly perform the terrible offense that my good friend Fiona calls "info-dumping" (a crime of which I'm slowly breaking myself from the habit of performing). Martin's stuff flows, and it flows really smoothly.

The story is intriguing. Its a pretty stock setup: a noble family who are friends with the king who usurped the throne from the older, established monarchy because the old king was insane, and who are now being plotted against by the queen and her family who want to own the throne rather than being married to it, while the youngest children of the previous king are living in exile and plotting their revenge. Standard stuff, but Martin puts some nice twists on it. The Starks are a genuinly interesting family made up of individuals, rather than the more stock families in stuff like the Valdemar novels where there's typically a whole bunch of faceless clones and one black sheep. Presently I think my favourite characters are the direwolves, with Tylerion Lannister and Jon Snow coming in at a tied close second. Least favourite being Sarsa, who's primary use ought to be scullery maid to the more useful characters.

Now, I have to argue with Ryon on the point of character comprehension. He had me believing that the number of characters in this book was equivilant to War and Peace. Nah. This is no more complicated that Jordan, and just a bit more than Lackey. This is old hat.

But yes...I am enjoying the book. I shall purchase the other three for reading while in England. And I shall enjoy them.

Thank you, Mister Martin, for teaching me to enjoy fantasy again.

Segue from a Cook (part 5)

The Sandwhich

Possibly one of the greatest, and most common, foodstuffs in the world, the sandwhich is a plain, but greatly enjoyable dish. The Danish have a particularly nice lunch custom involving a large selection of breads, meats, and condiments, served open face. My Danish step-grandmother used to always greet my family on visits with a lunch like that. I remember pleasently sitting with a Coke while my grandparents and my parents drank beer, and listening to long conversations while the slow process of the meal went on. Eda doesn't make these spreads anymore, but my stepmother still occasionally lays them out.

While we don't make sandwhiches at Il Posto, I've taken to having a piece of baguette with some grilled veal scallopini, grilled zuchinni, honey mustard, and balsamic vinnagrette dressed greens for my lunch. At Sharkey's we have several sandwhiches, including a fairly pleasent clubhouse, and I'm ever enjoying the wide selection of panini served at a place by the lake called Stoney's.

I'm a little be enamoured with the sandwhich, not so much because I like the medium its on but there are so many nice things you can put between two slabs of bread. I think my particular favourites are a half dozen slices of bacon, microwaved until brittle and crispy, thrown on some bread with butter. Or a nice couple of English breakfast sausages, hot and greasy, slit open and rolled up in a piece of buttered white bread.

But by far, my absolute favourite is the clubhouse. A more magnificent, Scooby-Doo-esque tower of meat and bread has never been seen by man. A pair of hulking, perfect layers of tender chicken, crispy bacon, and whatever other trimmings you so see fit to place on those three pieces of bread.

I've got my own little recipe for the clubhouse. There's a secret to it. Its a simple secret: its all in the bacon and the mayo. You can put almost any kind of meat on a clubhouse, from tuna to turkey (but probably excluding headcheese), but if your mayo isn't right, and your bacon isn't perfect, its all gone to nought.

Bard's Clubhouse
3 slices of good, solid bread, preferably something multi-grainish and hearty
4 slices of bacon
1 small chicken breast
1 tbls mayonnaise
1 pinch of chili powder, paprika, dry dill weed, dry parsley
a couple pieces of lettuce
2 dill pickles
any other fixins (onions are nice, some folks like tomatoes)

1. Grill the chicken breast to 160F and let it cool. Slice it on a diagonal to get some nice thick pieces that cover a wide area.
2. Throw the bacon in the microwave, liberally covered top and bottom with paper towel, for about 6-9 minutes, until crispy, depending on your microwave.
3. Toast the bread and mix the mayo and the spices together.
4. Slice the pickles into nice thin slices, and cut some thin pieces of onion, tomato, whatever.
5. Build the sandwhich. The bottom slice and top slice both get a liberal helping of the mayo. From the bottom up, build: bread, mayo, onion, lettuce, tomato, bacon, bread, mayo, chicken, pickles, bread.
6. Slice on an angle. Put a toothpick in each slice, just to be safe, and serve with chips, or potato salad, or whatever. A good glass of milk or a nice cold beer go well with it, to.

But experiment! Throw things on bread! Mix spices with mayo and mustard and come up with fun spreads to thrown on. Try toasting, grilling, baking, broiling, and frying the things.

And remember: Eat good food. Enjoy good food. And, at some point, cook good food.