But...

As a social misanthrope, one of my deepest instincts is the will to speak freely regardless of the consequences. This grew into a compulsion with me at a young age through a repeated behaviour from my grandfather, my father and those bullies whom I went to school with, whose tactic was to silence me by lifting their fist and threatening me with it, and occasionally going the next step. As such, as I got older, and this is a thing that many find, the willingness to take a blow became stronger than the fear of getting it, so that I began in my late teens to respond to threats with, "Oh yeah? Well, go ahead, I'm going to say what I have to say."

The issue is that it requires a tremendous amount of anger and resentment to overcome the fear inherent in being struck, and especially dogpiled by more than one person, something I've also experienced. My friends were mostly those who had learned to speak in soft, controlled voices, whose habit was to look at their shoes when spoken to, who could not get dates with girls because they could not find the courage to overcome the possibility of their saying no. I had their choice as evidence of a solution that did not really work, but I don't think I ever weighed the rationale of being them or being myself. I was simply more volatile, more hot-blooded, more reactionary... and as such, in my teens, I became worrisome, frightening, even evidently irrational. The nature was "baked in," so to speak, in a way that was not only inherent, but extremely rare, as was evidenced in the way that teachers and other authority figures reacted to me, as I intimidated them.

And because I spent a lot of time alone, apart from taking part in sports (where, again, my volatility both served and handicapped me, depending on the situation), I read voraciously. The reading enhanced my vocabulary, the resource of my knowledge, my perspective, my understanding of what others would try to say or how they would say it... which led me into things like debate and public speaking... where, again, that volatility both served and handicapped me. It is one thing to have the will and the fearlessness to stand in front of 500 people at 18 and scream about the injustice of the cruise missile being placed inside Canada, which I did in 1982 during that controversy, but that same fearlessness does not benefit one in small rooms with people who have enough power that they're not intimidated. The sequence of events in play, therefore, put me in places that others have never gone, while not contributing to those things that would have benefitted me: an ability to kowtow when kowtowing was called for. I simply did not have that skill because it had been trained out of me.

Of course, the bullies disappeared... and when I was nineteen and stood in front of my father when he came at me to beat me again that "All right, let's fucking go," in a stance that said, yes, absolutely, I was ready to fucking go, then he backed down and that was the end of that. My grandfather was too old and too far away and I was not visiting him anymore as a boy dragged to Regina by my parents, so I did not have any scary enemies left to fight... and I did not go out looking for them, taking swings at cops and bouncers and anyone I could find, because I had become well-read and I had concepts of social justice and I believed in John Stuart Mills and Thomas Paine with regards to what justice was. So I didn't get a criminal record, I didn't become a social problem, I didn't act out against the state, I didn't break the law.

But the resentment with respect to being silenced has remained. The resentment against any injustice or any unfairness remains. And when I say "resentment," let me be perfectly clear. I may be not quite 62 now, just two months shy, but as I write this I feel a boiling white hot anger that is still recognisable, still there, and still boils up when someone starts talking about the wrongness of foreigners in the country or my province making noise about leaving Canada, or anything to do with persons in an LGBTQ frame, or pretty much anything where I see money and power railroad someone out of office without evidence, on hearsay, for reasons, and voices I trust suddenly start talking as though this is reasonable. My poor partner, who has learned to tolerate my outbursts on these subjects, when I simply cannot keep the lid on them any more, suffers the shouting and then hugs me when she feels I've settled. That's what living with me is like; not a person who is physically violent, but one whose violence remains intellectual, verbose, searing, confrontational and, yes, loud.

Age and maturity have, however, convinced me that all this anger is purposeless. It has no listener. There's no future in stepping into a political sphere to "change things" because I am not oblivious to what a political sphere is, or what it is there for. I quit my street marching days when I realised nothing was being accomplished and when, in private conversations, I learned that the leaders of such movements were doing it so they "could sleep at night." I wanted change, not a good night's sleep, but that wasn't going to happen, so I stopped. I turned to journalism, wrote editorials, made a lot of people mad and felt I was doing what I could. But even that, now, does not sustain me in the least way. I'm far too old a bunny, as I like to say, to indulge in such fantasies any more.

All this is to say, though, why it is so hard for me to let go of a bone when I have it in my teeth. It explains why it is so hard for me to sit and listen to someone spew unsupported, obviously emotionally derived garbage when actual, rational, supported, methodical arguments that demonstrate evidence find no ground to stand on. This blog has demonstrated, with examples and detailed accounts, wrongdoings related to D&D in a hundred different ways — which yes, is a strange hill to choose to die on, but hell, there's no one else here on this hill anyway — but to what purpose? Only to the occasional listener who finds themselves nodding their heads and accepting that someone, somewhere, finally, is going to say that thing. That is the sum total of this blog's value. It occasionally connects with someone.

Yet, it is certain that what's said here is not going to connect with a vastly larger audience, many of whom disagree with every word printed here. Some are going to find that my willingness to die on this hill is so absurd that this in itself demonstrates me to be a deluded, unreasoning, warped and even repulsive individual. And some are going to tell me, in various ways, that I'm wrong, or that I should shut up, or that I have picked the wrong word to make my argument, or any of a thousand what-is-seen-as-legitimate arguments to make, sustained by the fact that many thousands of people out there in the culture believe what they say, while I have merely dozens who can do more than "not agree with everything he says, but he's interesting." That is the sum total of the push-back here. I'm not exactly wrong... I'm just not really in a position to be right.

My tone is excessive, I am bitter, I am unfair, I misunderstand what people mean, I am technically correct but I've missed the spirit of the thing, I'm attacking people who are only trying to have fun, I'm making too much out of things that are trivial.

All of these things are, in essence, true.

It is my childhood, and not my training, not my love of D&D, not my self-interest, that urges me to answer every accusation rashly. Because my mind has embraced this idea that if someone does not actually address the subject at hand, the thing that's being discussed, the point of the article, then in a way it is them lifting a fist at me as if to say, "I've just made a semantic argument, so you'd better shut up now."

Consciously, I know the reader can distinguish between a good answer to my post and a bad one. Consciously, I know that my point is stronger if I don't back it up. I can recall my professor Dr. Barry Baldwin telling me, when people lost their shit at me about the editorials I wrote for the university paper, "Don't answer them; it makes them look weak and desperate, while you look indifferent and superior." I know it does not good to answer. I know it's the wrong approach.

But dammit, I still see that fist in my mind's eye and I still...

In 1971, an independent filmmaker who felt exactly as I do, before I was old enough to feel as I do, made a film about it. I did not see the film until I was fifteen and when I did, for a time, one scene was my bible. Most people remember the scene with the foot. That's the scene that fed the masculine male model... but in that scene, the character is smiling. He's contemptuous and he's silent. It's the scene that came before that spoke to me, because in the scene that came before, the character is speaking rationally through gritted teeth. He's speaking about anger. He's speaking about how overwhelming and unrelenting that anger gets when he sees cruelty and wrongheadedness and abuse. That is the scene I felt when I was in my middle of my adolescent, unrestrained, uneducated mind set. And watching that scene is like putting on a very familiar set of old clothes. It is a time machine.

https://youtu.be/-SlD4KqDDUM?si=TMOk9cBitf8XYnea

The problem is, see, is that the anger only appears irrational. It comes from an irrational place, an unwillingness and inability on the part of those in authority to be rational. But the anger itself, channelled, informed, cultivated, patiently reviewed again and again as I am doing here, without anger, in this post, which has no business being here in a D&D blog, is not, in fact, irrational. It is not irrational to expect people to respond to the context of a blog post as opposed to some frivolous detail that has nothing to do with the point, because they need to feel important enough to oppose something, for the sake of opposing it, in a place that is not theirs, simply for the sake of their ego. It is not irrational to call them to account for that. It is not irrational to say, "All right, aside from that bullshit, what did you think of the post?"

But... okay. Serenity to accept things I cannot change.

Like the man says, I try. I really try.

I've already soured my popularity with this blog in ways that can never be taken back... and it doesn't matter any more. I've come forward and said things about myself that nobody should say publicly. I dunno. Just the lot we get, I guess. We don't get to pick. We don't get to decide if we're rich or poor or volatile or what. I think the only thing any person can do is be honest. Say what they feel and let it be. In the end, it's all ashes anyhow.