Wallowing

So.  Getting bloodwook done last week, I tested positive for cancer.  A couple things about that: the test isn't conclusive, I have to see a specialist, and I'm told there's a 1 in 100 chance that it's the real thing.  Still, I'm a D&D player, and I've seen many cases where players blew off a percentile check only to have a double-zero turn up and kill them.

It has to be understood that on some level, we all "have" cancer.  Something that emerged from improving mammogram technology in the 2000s was our ability to find cancer in virtually every subject; because most of the time, the cancer is there, but it's benign.  I'm not saying this to reassure myself, but because it's fact.  Unfortunately for me, my doctor is a hypochondriac, who likes to wax on about 1% chances when he feels his patients aren't panicking enough about results.  Literally, he told me the chance, and then spoke for five minutes about why I needed to be really concerned.  He's a happy fucking fun guy.

I'm 56 and I'm a white man living in Alberta, which is parallel to Texas if your perception of that state is red meat, eggs and potatoes for breakfast, with a chaser of fatty milk and heavily sugared coffee.  Coming out of that culture, you keep testing me and testing me, something is going to come up positive.  My LDL is high, too; I could go any time.  I thought long and hard about that during my five-mile walk home yesterday.

My father ate bacon every day, plus steak three times a week, up until Alzheimer's gripped him in 2016.  He died at 84.   He must have heard the same pronouncement from his doctor when he was around 56 — and judging by his habits, he must have ignored it.   I don't intend to ignore my doctor.  Still, I'm feeling mortal today.

Way too late last night, not sleeping, struggling for distraction, I stupidly went slumming on JB's blog roll, which is a very bad habit since it drags me through the mud of D&D bloggers — and JB has the elitist D&D blog roll in existence, judging by blog rolls further down the evolutionary scale.  And for reasons that passeth all understanding, I clicked moronically on the blog run by noisms, who is a pretentious fuck and yet lingers on as a writer I know not why.  Clearly, I was feeling masochistic and self-destructive.  There I found these statements coupled together with a bunch of masturbation surrounding football commentary:

" I've remarked before that regular play somehow correlates with a diminished need to think obsessively and write about gaming. This seems to be the pattern ... One thing you begin to notice after a while is the really absurd level of detail that is read into the tiniest and most trivial of events ..."

Naturally, this is followed by the obsessive qualifiers of someone who can't hold a firm opinion for more than five minutes; still, I take umbrage.

These two things seem to have taken hold in my mind, since I am a D&D writer who absolutely does examine D&D gameplay to a really absurd level, reading that into tiny and trivial events — like, for example, an affected prat writing a blog post.  This causes me to sit back and think, "Hm, maybe it is true, as noisms says in his post, that 'ultimately the game is the thing,' and not writing about it."  And maybe what he says about getting off your rump and running an online game is a good idea for the scads of D&D pundits drenching blog rolls of other blogs.  But then I think, oh wait, I started doing that in, what, 2009, 12 years ago, putting it up for everyone to see, and I don't think, one time, noisms has ever praised me for doing that.  Hm.

In any case, in my present state of mind, it's easy to explain my preoccupation with ephemera related to D&D, to an absurd level.  I like writing it and people like reading it.  In fact, people like reading it so much that they support me on Patreon, to an absurd degree, almost religiously, which suggests (just a guess here) that they like ephemera and absurd detail.  Could be that football commentors also do that on National TV to millions and millions of fans because they also like it.  Come to think of it, there just might be an argument to be made that liking something makes us want to examine it in positively excessive, dare I say fanciful, detail.  When I think of the many, many hours I've spent closely examining my wife's breasts, I must admit I cherish those moments as golden.

This doesn't make her breasts better, or more "breast like."  I'm quite sure her breasts remain unimproved from all the attention I've laved upon them.  And yet, for the record, I don't count this time as "wasted."

[I read this part out to my wife after writing it and she laughed and laughed ... I'm sure she gets something out of my impractical fact-finding missions]

More to the point — and I can't get around this — I'm going to be dead someday.  And when I am, there definitely won't be any more setting up games and playing.  When I'm dead, all that time spent selfishly in my gaming gratification will be only a memory in the thoughts of my players, and somewhat confused memories at that, since we were all flushed with those kinds of endorphins that makes time pass very quickly and in a very unexamined manner, at least in the moment.  In any case, those memories will, with the inevitable deaths of my players, pass into the Land of the Forgotten ... and what will be left of me personally will be left in the things I write; things that can be read by my grandson, for instance, when he reaches an age old enough to understand it and I've gone the way of too much really, really good pig meat.

As such, I think I'll continue to absurdly write about these tiny and trivial things I find so fascinating about D&D.  I'm quite certain — from experience, as it turns out — that "playing the game" and "talking about the game" are not mutually exclusive activities, and that it is entirely possible to do both in the time we have.  I'm just guessing here, because I don't watch football commentary, but I'll bet that the "pseudo-intellectual journalists who think about the sport [football] far too much," are actually reading copy that dozens of other persons have written, who do it because they're paid a better than living wage, because they know more about football than noisms could ever hope to know; and that these football pundits are actually only speaking for minutes out of their day, and that they probably don't go on thinking about football when the camera turns off.  Just as when I finish writing this post, I'll probably do one of a hundred things with the rest of my day that aren't actually about D&D — the day having so many minutes and hours in it, with so many chores to do, friends and family to talk to, the cry for needful planning, things to buy and love to make, etcetera, etcetera.

I understand that noisms thinks we all just "switch off" the moment we stop writing our blogs, but we don't.  We do lots of stuff.  And then we take a break from that stuff to goof around talking about D&D.  It's a multi-tasking thing.