It is perhaps that I speak from the perspective of someone who is, presently, just 28 days from the age of 60, but the truth is that nearly everything about these abilities that one sees on display, with regards to maps, writing or designing some rule set, is a sort of fraud. It's supposed that I have these gifts, and that I use them to do these things, but it's all nonsense. I had one gift when I started with D&D away back, so many years ago. That is, I wanted to work on it. It's the wanting that's the gift. The gift I still have now, as I want to sit for an hour and write this post, when instead I could be out grinding away at a garden, or driving out to the mountains on this fine day to do some hiking or resting back and watching a football game. Instead, I want to do this. I want to write. Even if this post means nothing next to the hundreds of other posts that I've written. That doesn't matter. It just doesn't. It's the writing I enjoy, regardless of the end result, and when I want to do it, I just do.
So, the maps. I made maps when I was a kid. I made very poor maps when I was a kid. I had better maps as a guideline, however, and I could see the difference between my work and those maps. I spent endless hours sitting and staring at atlases ... and when I discovered the map drawers at the university, full of contour maps, survey maps, oil well maps, historical maps, I would go up there on a Saturday, wheedle the key from the map librarian, who became a friend, so that I could spend hours pulling the maps out of the drawers, one by one, just to stare. I could have played baseball. I could have rafted down the Bow River. I could have done drugs. But I stared at maps.
It's what we want that matters. If I had wanted to be a gardener, if I had wanted to grow my own roses and orchids, if I had wanted to spend the money on orangeries and hydroponics, assuming I still wanted to be a writer, then I'd be posting pictures of my flowers this month, detailing every aspect of their cultivation and sustenance, railing against the stupid information of other floriculturists. And I'd be doing that, because I would have started 54 years ago, as a 6 year old in my parent's garden, staring at the plants and physically watching them grow, because I wouldn't have been able to take my eyes off the leaves and little shoots and they came up. Not because I was an obsessive little kid ... but because that would have given me such pleasure, I would not have wanted to stop.
This is so easily misunderstood when we reach for words like "obsessive." An obsessive person cannot make a conscious choice about their actions. So it may seem like I'm being obsessive when I write another post. That is because others, who do not receive the sense of joy that I do in making maps, think to themselves, "I'd have to be obsessed before I could do something like that." Because, from their perspective that would not give them pleasure. Surely, anyone for whom that thing gives pleasure, must be crazy.
No. Just self-aware, with lots and lots of time spent. Aware enough not to handwave my earliest efforts as "good enough." I wanted to make better maps, so I tried to. I don't mean, I practiced at making better maps, I mean, I saw what I wanted to achieve, and tried to achieve that. And failed, and failed, and failed. I never thought, well, "try try again." I thought, "Well this part looks better, but not that part. This technique seems to work, but maybe if I tried ..." And so on.
Do that for 54 years? You're going to look like someone that's obsessive.
The downside, for me, comes when someone pisses on my joy. And when it happens, I must admit, I don't respond as well as I should. I don't hesitate before I lash out. This stuff is personal to me. How personal?
Imagine a total stranger, standing next to you and your child, who says, "Your kid has a big nose." Now, it happens that your child does have a big nose. It's something you've worried about, since he or she was just a few months old. What are the other children, when your child goes to school, going to say? How are they going to make your boy or girl feel? What are you going to say when he or she comes home and say, "The kids made fun of me about my nose!" You're going to feel awful. You hope the other kids don't care. You hope that if they tease, it won't make any difference. You hope that your child's going to grow up and that nose is going to develop into something with a lot of character, so that it becomes a positive characteristic. You know the nose in itself doesn't matter, but the world is stupid, vapid, abusive hole, full of people who think that things like a big nose do matter ... when what they ought to care about is the whole kid, not his or her nose.
Given all this, it doesn't matter if this stranger has said something that's true. It's the choice the stranger has made, among all the things that might possibly be said, to say this one specific thing. And hearing it, you're going to go off the rails. You're going to shout, "WHO THE FUCK ASKED YOU?" ... and the stranger is going to walk away, saying, "It's just a nose."
Joel, in his blog post, said exactly the kind of things that I want to hear said about my kids. But I've had others, who weren't inaccurate, displayed the sort of honest truthfulness about my maps that have made me livid with fury. They don't know the road that's gotten me here. They only know the "here." And that's not their fault.
But I have ripped and slashed and stabbed and belittled and abused people who have made comments on this site and elsewhere, because they made some little comment about my kid's nose. And they've gone away, certain they understand my motivation for this, certain that it's evidence of the monster I am, and certain that I haven't any perspective at all.
All I can say for those reading this, try to forget what I do, or what I am. I'm going to be dead soon, anyway. Me, the person writing this, isn't the thing of value here. I'm not what counts. What counts is the stuff I leave behind, whatever my motivation or my purpose for doing it. It doesn't really matter why Caesar conquered Gaul. We can go over the existant details to death, we can dig though archives and bits of whatever, and yet, in the end, what matters is that Gaul was conquered, which led to the changes in Gaul that led to the eventual development of the France we have today. All the personal shit, all the motivations, all the bits and pieces about what someone said or what may have encouraged them to do or create something, is just fantasy and immateriality. The facts of things are what counts. The maps I make exist. This is the only thing about the maps themselves that actually matter.
Personal opinions about the maps, why I made them, what they accomplish for any one individual person, none of these things amount to anything more than one stranger's opinion about one child's nose.
So pretend I just don't exist. Don't come here to know who I am, or what motivates me, or why I do these things or anything about me personally. Just take from the writing what you can, and move on with your own lives, doing those things that matter to you.
In the end, that's all that counts.
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