Have you heard of blark?
There’s this guy I know named blark. Well, that’s not their real name: that’s Mark Conway. If you Google ‘Mark Conway’ at this very moment you’ll find some very strange Linkedin people—the second image that popped up was of a fat-ish man that had a pulled in face and too narrow mouth that properly belonged to a slimmer man. The Mark I know doesn’t look anything like that. He wears his hair long, maybe a bit above shoulder length, and always wears a beanie. When he runs RPGs online he paces back and forth and, maybe it’s the electric fireplace I sometimes see behind him or the big sweaters he wears, it always looks like he’s a little cold. I’ve never seen him in the summer. Mark goes by they/he pronouns, so you’ll just have to keep up when I swap one for the other willy-nilly.
blark designs RPG systems and adventures. I’ve experienced a few of blark’s works as a player in their campaign, or in games run by my friend Mr. Mann. Even when I’ve read through their published materials, it’s always felt like I looked at each piece through slatted window blinds. Each is divided, essence frustratingly deferred. There’s just no helping this gap—Mark and I are different people.
One of Mark’s games, Meatheads, fascinates me deeply. When I first scrolled through the pdf, I smiled ear to ear. Much of the art is made up of photobashes of old school bodybuilders combined with knights, or other sword and sandals staples. Steve Reeves, John Grimek, Sigmund Klein, Leroy Colbert—I recognized the physiques of each bodybuilder in an instant. I loved it, I wanted to play immediately. While the rules excited me because they seemed to facilitate a very action packed kind of gameplay good for an up-tempo dungeon game, it was the attention paid to the vibes of the hallowed Golden Age of bodybuilding that hooked me. For instance, hirelings in the game are instead called ‘toadies’ who are drawn to adventure by the muscular bulk of the Meatheads instead of want of coin. It’s absolutely pitch perfect for the kind of cheesy machismo that defined the old school beach bum bodybuilder. The text conjures the chillaxitude of peak Dave Draper, him an easy behemoth that took one day at a time in his prime. This chillness, combined with writing inspired by the copy of muscle mags, captured something real to my eye. As sung in the theme of Pumping Iron:
Everybody wants to be a hero
Every man wants to be bigger than dad
It’s very hard to understand
Been that way since Piltdown man
Pumping up, pumping iron
None of that is what really interests me. Instead, I wonder how blark, himself a somewhat shrimply figure, came to perfectly capture an essence I’ve loved since my boy years. I read Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding until the spine broke, have gone cover to cover in McCallum’s keys to progress more times than I have discrete muscles in my triceps, and used to watch Pumping Iron everyday—that’s no exaggeration, I had a spare period during the first semester of 11th grade and watched the documentary every single day on a computer in Mr. Buck’s room. blark captured a voice I’ve been in love with for decades. When I played in my first Meatheads game it felt like coming home.
Leathers, another blark game, goes some way toward explaining how they managed to nail Meatheads. Every “erotic RPG” I had read before Leathers had failed at the level of text, so I was curious about how blark would approach the subject matter. Leathers describes itself as a “casual game depicting the slice of life activities of people in a rough and tumble queer community.” Sex is woven into the fabric of everyday life, clinging like the “smell of pomade on pillows", and it’s the casualness of the implied play loop that shows a real respect for kink—it’s not fetishized, but still underpins the social conflicts that the game is designed to adjudicate. There is an eroticism here, but it’s a game I could imagine playing with real people, or even my mom. It’s a wonderful text that implies a game where the laws of love and lust move mankind. That same eros, a love of life, is the lifter’s creed. “It’s as satisfying to me as cumming,” Arnold famously said of reaching a pump in the muscles. “So can you believe how much I’m in heaven?”
But the heaven of lifting was never really in the gym, just like sex has never been in the climax. Machines can climax, and it is possible to reduce sex to mere mechanical friction—it can become an itch, a terrible itch. Love is between people, it is during the day that comes before night; it is stuck under concrete and pounded beneath the surface by so many pairs of leather boots. Above all it exists in the moments where you believe you can understand another person. I would give anything to understand my wife, I would cut myself up to pieces and offer me up an alter—I would not fear the oblivion of the old gods if only I could understand them. Instead we share each other always at a distance, stopped by impossible walls of flesh—”I love you,” I say again and again, because I’m afraid of what would happen if I said nothing.
It is the same for lifters—it is Arnold and Franco, working construction to pay for a cheap apartment not far from the beach, that made the Golden Age. It was never Mr. Olympia, it was the games of chess, the many feuds like the one between Arnold and Mentzer, the sweat caked memory trapped in the old blue leather of an incline bench shared by hundreds of men. There lives the Golden Age, there the pleasures of bodybuilding. It wasn’t long ago that bodybuilders were considered freaks—they still are freaks, driven by a vain compulsion. The search for the pump is the search for the Godhead is the search for the moment of connection embedded in sexual encounters. A part of me hates the leagues of people who, convinced this of all things is the way to preserve their health, lift weights for purely practical reasons: this was once the domain of clowns and itinerants, of strange men and women who could and would do nothing else. Once upon a time, the overlap between physique training and the gay culture of the west coast was closer than modern lifting culture—dominated as it is by far right or adjacent voices—would like to admit.
Why can’t people be honest with each other? I wondered this while cooking the peasant stew I eat near daily and listening to one of my favourite Springsteen songs, Incident on 57th Street. If I could really know blark I had the feeling we would be great friends. We’d play video games on the PS2, they’d go out for dinner with my wife and I, they’d pet my enormously fat cat. One day we’d sit with some others around a fire, idly sip beer or smoke and air out vituperations for those in the world we hate most.
One time, blark and I went shopping for records. It was such a windy day that, walking through a wind tunnel that roared between condo and office tower we had to lean forward to avoid being blown away. I’m built somewhat like a big meatball, so it wasn’t too bad for me, but I feared Mark would be lifted into the sky like a kite, subjected to the disinterested gaze of workers forced back to the office and made to toil in the buildings above. Or maybe the buildings were just empty, and no one would see blark fly above the clouds.
About four years ago I had gotten my hands on a record player, a terribly large and clumsy thing that was really a table with a record player built into it. Because I lacked space in my apartment it had just become another horizontal surface that stored mugs, coasters, a pack of unused poker chips, and two loose pens. More damning still was a complete lack of worthwhile music: instead of labouring to find great records, I had a bad habit of picking the first thing I saw with a funny name or funny art because I didn’t have the wherewithal to sift through endless mediocrity to find the OG hits. You play Mystic Moods for a laugh once or twice, then never again. blark frequently trawls stores for used electronics, old video games, films, and has a keen sense for the best places downtown to find the good stuff.
“It’s like a treasure hunt,” blark told me. “You just need to keep at it.”
When he’d approach the rows and rows of records, he handled even the pieces of shit with care, and bit his lip in concentration. It wasn’t that the search demanded his focus, instead there was a kind of nervous excitement that spilled out in little vocal exclamations, or clicks of the tongue, that betrayed a sort of fidgetiness. There was something hiding behind the simple fun of record shopping, some subtext that I couldn’t read that haunted him like a ghost.
By that point we’d been out for hours, and blark had found some good records for me to take home. I looked forward to clearing off the record player and listening to them with my wife. He’d grabbed me some sick old metal, stuff I’d never heard of. I ended up liking Glacier, a short and snappy EP with an evocative image of an hourglass in a dungeon window on the front cover. One hand held the top rim of the hourglass while another, chained to a wall, reached for it in vain. The album sounded to my untrained ear like power metal, but was much better than the stuff I was used to, which always ended up sounding like a shitty Dragonforce rip-off.
We were both wiped, so we swung by a pho joint to have a bite and rest our feet a while. There’s a good place I know that doesn’t charge taxes if you pay in cash, and has a very flavourful broth. Our conversation had slowed. It wasn’t that we lacked rapport, I felt that they, like me, were tired, and there comes a point where you just run out of things to say. That’s why people need distance from each other, so they can come back and report the things they’d seen and felt; this, by the way, is the only worthwhile thought Henry David Thoreau had ever written down among a slew of utter horseshit. I wanted to ask blark about the ghost I saw, if there was really something there. Between sips of soup I thought about how I’d probe the question.
blark and I parted ways and agreed to meet with some others next week. Because things had gotten so expensive, we planned to hang at a buddy’s house and maybe play an RPG or boardgame. I wasn’t able to ask them if they were haunted, and that whole day out we talked about nothing of significance. Still, I felt I understood them a little bit better. That nervousness I sensed when he looked through the records disappeared anytime we were walking. He’d always be a little ahead of me, and I had to lengthen my stride at regular intervals to keep up. While we walked I watched him turn his head here and there, eyes darting like a pigeon’s, to take in the surroundings: he’d look at the people, the cars, the buildings, and sometimes glance up at the sky. When he saw something neat he’d point it out to me, maybe an old car or a guy with an incredibly large head. It was nice, the way he noticed things.
That night, I talked for a while with my wife while we laid in bed. “One day,” I said to Shania, “blark might be changed. If that happened, the world would become a little worse.”