While Anne and I drove down the freeway today, Just Like Heaven came on the radio.
"This was my first CD," I said.
"I know," she said. "You tell me that every time we hear a song from it."
"And one day, you’ll hear it, and I won’t be here for some reason or another, and you’ll wish I was here to tell you."
While we both pondered the macabre nature of that particular thought, I realized that not only was this album forever linked to my first CD player, but it also gave me hypernostalgic memories of gaming with my group of friends in high school.
"I don’t know what it is," I said, "but lately, I’ve wanted to get together with geeks and do a weekend of serious nonstop gaming."
She glanced over at me. "Oh?"
"Yeah. But this is more than the usual ‘I want to play Car Wars’ thing. This is a serious –" I searched for the exact word to describe the overwhelming longing, approaching psychophysical need to play, and settled on, "Jones. Like an addict, you know?"
I wiggled around in my seat, and faced her, "It’s like there’s — hey, aren’t we taking the 110?"
"Whoops." She said, as she quickly changed lanes.
"It’s like there’s a monkey on my back. A gaming monkey, and he’s rattling dice in my ear."
"Like he’s shaking them in a Yahtzee cup?" She said.
"Gamers don’t use Yahtzee cups," I said, as patiently as I could. "It’s more like he’s holding a bag of dice in his hand." I held my hand up, and felt the invisible bag in my palm. "And he’s rattling the dice around."
"Is it your bag of dice?" she said.
"Yeah! It’s totally my bag of dice!" I paused for a moment, and added, "but he’s not opening it. Because if he opens it, and touches my dice, I will fucking kill that monkey."
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It’s sad that I still have the receipt from a Gaming Supply Store in Minneapolis from that time that I had to replace my dice while out on the road… and the ‘minimum replacement set’ cost, with tax, $6.66 — I still find it amusing.
Mostly because the person who gave us a lift was convinced that D&D was satanic.
Dice-ghosts echoing in your ears.
Which of the 3 monkeys is it? See-no-evil is great at bluffing and card games, but dice nah. Hear-no-evil, sure great at the dice if your gambling, but strategy was never it’s type of thing. Which only leaves speak-no-evil, always quite but obliterates all opponents.
Wil,
On being a student: If I were to cut away the safety net, I’d have to stop blogging, I think, and just focus full time on being a student of creative writing.
FWIW, I’ve been a full-time student of creative writing; got my BFA in it, and was in an MFA program for it. What you’ll get out of going into a creative writing program:
1, 2, 3, 7, and 8 are all things you have now. 4 is something you’re used to, but not for your personal writing. 5 can be simply gotten, though it’s time-consuming to do (and I highly recommend it; we learn by exposure and imitation). 6 is optional. So, you’ve got more tools in the toolbox than you might think, and you don’t need to be a full-time student of writing, in order to be a writer.
The most important thing I learned in my academic career was that writing wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was forcing myself to overcome my fears, sit down, and write about something that revealed who I was.
Second: Why can’t you take your own advice about writing?
I think I’ve recommended Stephen Pressfield’s book, The War of Art, before. Seriously, pick it up. It’s not a how-to book about writing techniques — it’s a how-to book for overcoming the Voice of Self-Doubt, which he calls Resistance. Notice how the Voice of Self-Doubt only crops up when you’re about to do something you really love? That’s because it’s what you most need to do for your own growth. It’s an indicator of aspiration; a pointer to what your calling is.
I’ll pass on something I learned that wasn’t specifically taught in my writing programs: wannabe creative people are insanely self-confident. The real ones are constantly scared to death.
One of these days, we’ll all be old and so very happy in some home somewhere with our ‘large print’ dice and character sheets. Until then we just have to feed the monkey a banana every so often while real life keeps us busy.
Get Team Fortress 2.
IndyGamers.com TF2 Pub
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