Good Afternoon Folks. This is going to be a bit of a trying week. Due to age and neglect… I have been dealing with a bunch of things all at once. When I made the radical decision around the start of the year to live my life, rather than simply waiting to die… that came with it a bunch of adult problems that I needed to deal with. Some of these were put in place well before now, for example last Friday I saw a Cardio doctor and while I will be doing a battery of tests in the coming weeks, was largely given a relatively clean bill of health other than high blood pressure. They made sweeping changes to my drug regimen and for the most part it seems to have wildly improved things. Today is the first day I am wearing some old man socks, aka compression socks in an attempt to combat one of the other residual effects that I had been dealing with. I would say not to get old… but the alternative is not great either. I think the better option is to not get old while fat and in relative disrepair.
Another thing that I have been dealing with this week is finally getting brave and going to the Dentist. It had been somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty years since I last went into the dentist for a routine cleaning. I’ve always been more than a little terrified of Dentists in general, and the longer I waited… the less opportune the end result was going to be. Bel luck prevailed however because apparently my teeth are still in pretty solid shape without yearly attention. However there are some problems that are going to have to be dealt with, like the fact that my lower front teeth have migrated all over the fucking place and should probably be aligned back up in some semblance of order. That will require some sort of dental appliance and time in order to get the desired results, and with that will come a heck of a lot of money I am sure.
The other big thing that I am dealing with this week… is another thing that was set in motion some time ago. I am going in for my first colonoscopy, and within a few hours I will be starting the prep work by consuming the first of two doses of what I have been told is truly vile liquid. After that I will become close personal friends with my toilet for a number of hours. Then I will have to get up in the morning and repeat the process. Once again… highly do not suggest this getting old thing. This is honestly what I am most terrified of, because I know they will be putting me under for it. In high school I had a sinus surgery and had some pretty negative effects of the anesthesia, so I guess I am sitting down to write this afternoon so that if something does happen you know what occurred. Since I keep my internet life and my real world life relatively separate, I have created some contacts for my folks to reach out to in the event of anything happening. They will I am sure get the broader word out.
I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but I also did not expect my spouse of thirty years to suddenly drop dead last year. That set me on this whole path of reconciling the sins of the past, and trying to take better care of myself. There is someone that I care about quite a bit, that is also part of the driving force of dealing with any lingering problems. I am hoping tomorrow goes quickly enough, and that nothing major is found. Given that my father has had a whole slew of digestive tract problems, I would not be shocked if I do as well. Hopefully they will all be things that can be mitigated, and nothing super serious. I am not the biggest fan of this whole aging thing, but I am trying to engage in better habits that will hopefully see me through for awhile. If I take after my Dad’s line, they seem to be pretty long lived… and with a bit of Bel Luck sprinkled in hopefully I will as well.
Basically I am writing today because I am not sure how much I will be able to write over the coming days. I have no clue how much of a toll this will take out of me. My dad was apparently loopy for over a day after getting out of his last colonoscopy. I know tomorrow morning I will be dealing with another round of prep, and then tomorrow night… I am probably going to be exhausted and hangry since I am on a liquid only diet currently. I sincerely doubt you will be hearing from me tomorrow, but I will attempt to make a post on social media when I am free and clear of it all. Thursday is a total crapshoot as of how I will be feeling. I am hoping I will bounce back quickly and will have things to talk about at that point. Regardless I feel the need to say that if anything happens to me, I have enjoyed our time together. It has been weird sharing my life with you all, at least in a limited fashion.
Hopefully I am remembered fondly, and hopefully all of this is viewed as being deeply dramatic. I would have rather said things and not needed to, than to have disappeared without a word. Yall have been a major part of my life for going on seventeen years at this point. Be kind to each other, because if nothing else I would like to be remembered as caring about so many of you.
Good Morning Folks! This week you are getting a bit of a bonus post, because it is extremely rare that I talk about anything on Saturdays. Generally speaking I blog Monday through Friday and then only by happenstance on Sundays because that is when I post the new episode of AggroChat. Today is a bit of a unique situation because last night we had our semi-monthly pen and paper play group. We are playing an Indie RPG system called Public Access, which is effectively an urban horror/found footage type gameplay experience. If you are a junkie for SCPs, Cryptids, or even The Secret World MMORPG then this might be a system for you. What sets it apart from the traditional D&D style “Roll-play” systems is that most of the game is storytelling. We the players paint the scenes by adding in little details, and we the players narrated both our successes and failures… which allows for some interesting situations like having “do-overs”. For example my character has an ability called “Come With Me If You Want to Live” where if I fail a roll and am in Grave harm…. I can narrate my way out of the situation and turn a failure into explaining how I narrowly escaped certain death and also saved my entire party at the same time.
Trigger Warning, I played around with the Adobe Photoshop Generative filters a bit during this post so you will see some of my homegrown AI slop as a result.
This is a session being run by “The Librarian” and I am very new to this group of people, but have seemingly blended with the group pretty quickly. Two of us are entirely new, two are regulars from other RP outings… and collectively we have created this internet age Scooby Doo Gang in the process. I am playing a burned out punk that used to be a little skater kid and now has a band… but the band never quite took off. The thing we have in common is that we all once lived in the town of Deep Lake, New Mexico and all were latchkey kids during the 80s and 90s. There is a cable access channel that no on in the town seems to remember, but we all do… and met up on a message board devoted to it. Over the summer we all agreed to meet up and investigate the town from a rental house, and as a result a Corporate Lawyer type, a Professional Athlete, a Burned Out Punk, and a Cryptid/Conspiracy Theorist all combined powers to try and solve the deep mysteries in this town.
My character shocking to no one, drives a white panel van… which has become the focus of some of the adventures so far. One of the really interesting things about this setting is that splitting the party is not a bad thing. In fact it allows for some really interesting mechanics. Last night for example we had three different scenes taking place at the same time, and while there may only be one set of characters active at a time… it does not mean that the rest of the players out out of the action. There is this phase called “setting the scene” where each player sort of “yes ands” their way through adding details to flesh out the uncanny nature of a lot of the vistas that we come across. For example we were presented with a wood lot, and were asked to explain what makes it look more evil than it might be. The detail I threw in is that the wind had blown through the lot, overturning the root system of the trees and making it both hard to move across it and at the same time giving the appearance of intestinal shapes snaking around the ground. Each player adds a little flavor to the world so we are all effectively building the lore, because in truth there are zero right or wrong answers… and the story is not written, only a set of guidelines for the person running the adventure to follow.
The Athlete and I have sort of developed this weird buddy cop movie thing that we are doing, and we have tag teamed investigating the desert scene. Essentailly there are rumors of these creatures coming at night and carrying people and livestock away, and we are trying to investigate what is happening. I narrated that I remembered this little old lady at the crossroads selling tamales out of an igloo cooler, and wanting to go out there and check out if she was still selling them. When we got out there we instead were introduced to her relative who now has a proper food truck, and introduced us to a series of clues… one of which required us to come back the next day. We also found a key to a hotel room, and in the room was an igloo cooler with a huge bag of blood marked with the Zodiac Taurus symbol on it. That is the Zodiac sign of my character the Burned out Punk. Last night… was our second campaign in this setting so we returned to visit the food truck again and were treated to a surreal wedding photo album, which unlocked additional clues about the scene. However while looking at the photo album, time passed faster than it should have… which required us to make a decision. Shelter someone for the night at the crossroads… either in a sketchy museum, the hotel room we discovered previously… or hop in the van and make a break for town.
The Athelete and I opted to make a break back for town… which created our Night Move for the evening. There are Day Moves which have relatively minor consequences… but Night Moves can end up in the permanent loss of characters. Since I had an escape card in the form of my “Come With Me If You Want To Live” ability… I decided to make the roll which was my Composure of 1 + 2D6. One of the interesting things about this system is that it is the players that determine what MIGHT happen if they fail the roll. So I talked about envisioning scenes in Vampire movies where parties are trying to get away and they swoop down on the roof of the van, trying to rip into it. “The Librarian” said that it was worse than that… they would not only attack the Van, but if I failed they would wreck it forcing us to be stranded out their with them. In my head I was preparing a way to narrate our narrow escape, preferably without losing my beloved panel van, but rolled an 8 which modified by my Composure became a 9, which was enough to get us safely back to town. However the entire time we were driving we were being chased by an ever growing flock of shadows… and just before reaching town some of them painted a Taurus symbol… aka the symbol of my character on the roof of the van in blood.
So what is really interesting about the whole concept of solving these mysteries… is that you collect clues and the clues serve as bonuses to your rolls. However there is no fixed mystery to solve, no correct answer that you have to arrive at. Instead the players decided that 1) they are going to attempt to solve a mystery and then 2) the Guide leaves the room and the players brainstorm a story that could match all of the clues that they have gotten, each clue again giving you a slightly better chance at making the roll. The brainstorming session was great, and the story that we arrived at was that the Food Truck owners family was part of a cult, but we were not sure if they were willing participants or being mind controlled by something darker. The Deep Lake Devils, aka the shadows that were following us are the harbingers of something worse, and the cult collects the blood of each zodiac sign as part of a sacrifice designed to close certain locks or enchantments and keep something far worse from coming into our world. The scene at the hotel room was us interrupting one of those murders and we ended up getting the bag of blood… which they need to replace and my character just happens to be the correct Zodiac Sign. So we solved the first part of the mystery, that states that the Deep Lake Devils are not of terrestrial origin, but now we have to figure out how to either banish them or cut our own bargain with them in future play sessions.
If you are curious, there are a lot of actual plays posted on YouTube for this game setting. I purposefully have not watched any of them, because I really want this to be a fresh expeirence for me. It has been a very long time since I have done anything pen and paper realted, but this reminds me a bit to our high school days playing the storyteller/white wolf system and the way in which we ran it. We were playing with a bunch of folks who were not necessarily seasononed mechanical TTRPG players, so we largely ran it as a story that we were all weaving together. I love the freeform nature of Public Access and how it is a narrative expeirence that we are all partaking in, instead of something that we are having done to us. I also really love this group of folks that I am playing with, and look forward to doing other games and other systems with them in the future. We are all technically local but to make it easier on the constraits of lives and families and such, we are playing over Discord. At some point thought I think we should all get together for dinner or something.
Anyways. It was a really fun night, and I find myself looking forward to these semi-monthly sessions quite a bit. Have you played Public Access? Have you played any systems like this that are way more storytelling driven? Drop me a line below.
Good Morning Folks. One of the unwritten promises of this blog is that I will be open with you all about my life and what is going on in it. I might not give you the totality of a story, with all of the names, dates, and places… but you can be sure that I will give you the general flow of the tale and all of the important bits of information. On the 4th I wrote a post called I Resolve to Live, and the crux of that is reaching some decisions about my life as I rebuild it after the death of my spouse. Most of it is making some decisions about who I am going to be going forward, but there was a small bit of it… where I admitted to you all that I had been in a fledgling chat-based relationship for a few weeks at that point, and things were starting to get a bit more serious.
im sorry i’m doing this early, i don’t think i can do this right now, it just feels a lot i’m sorry id love to stay friends bc we still know so so so much for each other i’m just so overwhelmed
Monday morning around 3 am I woke up as often happens because my bladder forced me to. As I was rolling over to go back to sleep… I had the misfortune of checking my phone and seeing the above message. Suffice to say I did not in fact go back to sleep as planned. In fact I was pretty much up from that moment on, and struggled through all of Monday in a sleep deprived and quite emotional stupor. I both apologize and praise everyone that talked to me on Mastodon and Bluesky that day, because I was certainly in my feels about what was happening. I’ve talked with “Ren” a few times after that statement and I think we maybe just got caught up in the whirlwind that a chat-based relationship can be.
So it is important to know that this is not new ground for me. I was a certified IRC Junkie during the mid 90s and that is ultimately how I met my first wife because we both were. Chat-based relationships can be so fast, because you end up furiously talking for as many moments as you can squeeze out of the day… staying up way too late just to see one more message from this other person. We used to say that a day on chat felt like a month in real-time anywhere else, and that is true… but it is a false sense of intimacy. You don’t really know that other person until you start trying to put motions in order to maybe begin to take it into the real world. As a result… chat-based relationships often implode like this at a moments notice and without much good reason. At least on some level… so much of it was intoxicating for me personally because it was caught up in the nostalgia of days gone by and a different version of myself.
Sometimes it is really important to have someone in your life that knows you from before the person you are now. “The Librarian” is that for me. We went to High School together, managed to somehow stay in contact throughout the years, and represents one of the few “men” in my life that I have ever been able to achieve a deep meaningful emotional bond with. They reminded me at length of all of the horrible and tragic relationships that I had prior to finding my spouse, and that it was a fools errand to even begin to contemplate that this first attempt out the gate was ever going to succeed. I also unburdened my soul with all of the specific details of this one in particular and they wanted to whack me upside the head. Taking all of the data into account… it was never going to work, not even close to ever working.
i’m sorry i just can’t handle it all at once and so much happened at once, and like i said i am uncomfortable with things that are good for me and you are
i just need a small break away honestly.. figure out exactly where i am and what i’m doing.. i can’t lie, a lot happened last night that made me really think about how i’m just not really ready for something long term right now.. and i know you’re wanting that eventually
So at the end of the day, I think I was just in a different place than she was. We’ve talked a few times off and on and I am genuine about attempting to be friend at some point in the future. It’s likely best that we do not talk for awhile, given the rapid growth and rapid disassembly of all of this. At first I got a version of “It’s Not You, It’s Me” that was thoroughly dissatisfying as that always ever is, but later I got the above more nuanced take. They know that at some point I want someone in my life that is going to be there for me, for the long haul, and they are not really sure they do. We had two different starting points, and two different endpoints… and since I was starting to develop feelings, I am not sure I could handle things moving forward on a purely casual basis. Like I said the other day, the fact that I felt anything is more of a gift than “Ren” will ever known, because I legitimately thought my heart was dead. I had not felt anything but pain in over six months. The fact that I realize I am capable of any sort of feeling is practically a miracle and going to be the thing that I really take away from this. The circumstances were wrong, and the person was wrong… but the plumbing and mechanical aptitude for feeling still exists.
So in all of the flailing around I did on social media… I made a move that is quite possibly the most egotistical thing that I have ever done. I posted the above message on both Bsky and Mastodon, because I have no clue who is into me… and this is a recurring theme in my life. As “The Librarian” reminded me… I spent plenty of time chasing folks who were of zero good for me… while ignoring people who genuinely cared for me. So with this hamfisted effort, I was just throwing it out there that if someone has secretly had designs on me for years… but never moved on it because of my marriage, that maybe right now was the time to tell me about it. I had all sorts of people boosting this… which is wild to me, but thank you very much for supporting my nonsense.
this could only happen to you
The above quote is verbatim from my sibling Ace when I told them that a Soft Kinky Nerd Girl did in fact come out of the woodwork. I was talking with a friend of mine yesterday and in the middle of a bunch of awkward discussion about the things I had been going through… she threw out that she almost responded to the message on Bsky that I posted on Monday, but didn’t have the bravery to do so. That she had a massive crush on me at various points through our chat history, but never moved on it because I was taken. We’ve been friends for around twenty years at this point, and talked off and on the entire time with various degrees of frequency. I know some of her past, she knows some of mine, because we were close enough friends to be open and honest with each other about the things that we were going through in our life. Like I have said before, I have very rarely bonded with men, but I often bond pretty strongly with the women friends in my life.
From this point forward I am going to use the code word “Erasure” for her, because I don’t want the added pressure of having prying eyes on our actions. This is someone that I interact with publicly from time to time and I want to do whatever I can to keep the pressure off us. She offhandedly said how much she liked the band Erasure, and normally I would use a profession based moniker… but she refers to herself as a “Babysitter” and that gives the wrong impression. We talked for a bit last night and it was shockingly comfortable, even though I was asking some awkward questions. Mostly I wanted to hear in her voice that the feelings she professed were genuine, or at least once were in this case. She lives a state away from me, within reasonable but not convenient driving distance. So at some point I am sure we will meet up and try and figure out if we feel anything for each other in person.
In the meantime I am going to be moving very slowly at getting to know her better. We’ve always been the sort of people that would talk very regularly for a few months, then life would get in the way and we would fade apart… and then one of us would get the nerve to ping the other and apologize for not talking more… and we would be back to normal like no time had ever passed. There is a very easy back and forth between our conversations, and I have always appreciated it. I know some of the struggles that she has gone through in the past, and I had a much easier lot in life. However we are both stable and functional adults, and neither of us needs saving. Things could start in a far worse place than having someone you already trust a heck of a lot, and have shared countless details of your life with over the years. My wife was someone that I knew for about a year before we got together, and I think it is probably more important that someone is my friend than any other trait when it comes to a long term relationship.
I know I am still really broken, and in truth…. in many ways they are too about various things. This is going to be a slow climb that we take together, and the most important thing to me is that we remain friends no matter what happens here. That is always the scary thing of taking something like this to the next level… is that you don’t want to damage this comfortable stable foundation that you have built up. The thing with “Ren” was that it was so new and fleeting, that I felt like I had to hold onto it with both hands for fear the wind would blow it away. “Erasure” is stable, and someone who has been a constant in my life for literal decades… I can walk away and take time for myself and know that she is not going anywhere. We’ve survived countless gaps in our communication just fine, and always… came back and started talking like zero time had passed. I don’t need to mind the ship to keep it from steering off into oblivion because the course is pretty straight and stable… we just have to decide if we really want to go down it.
No drastic changes… no fast movements. I just felt like I owed it to my readers who are not avid followers of social media to catch you up on what had transpired. The whole “one soft kinky nerd girl found” portion will be news to the social media folks as well. Ace curses me for once again “Bel Luck” playing a role here, because my dumb ass plea into the void should not have worked, but it seemingly did. We will see where things go from here with “Erasure” but I have always liked that band as well… so it might just work. I stole the title of the post from The Hearts Filthy Lesson by David Bowie, which comes off the concept album Outside… which I think I might be one of the only fans of. It just seemed fitting.
Good Morning Folks. I don’t normally write to you fine folks on a Sunday, other than to syndicate the weekly AggroChat Podcast. We did not record one of those for various holiday related reasons, and in truth the next big show we have… requires all seven of us. In theory we should return next week with our big two-parter Games of the Year show. This morning instead I am going to write a fairly personal an introspective post, the sort that I don’t normally syndicate widely and are just for the “real ones” who check my blog regardless of what fancy pictures might get posted on social media. So sit back and let me tell you a story.
Yesterday one of my friends asked me a very simple question, and I gave them quite possibly the heaviest answer that I have ever given to something so simple. Normally you say things like that you would like to lose some weight or exercise more, and both of those things are true… but I have a much more simple goal this year. Essentially it is my goal to start living life again. Since then death of my spouse I have been in a bit of a holding pattern, not entirely certain what to do with my life. Sure I went through the anguish and heartbreak… and still do from time to time, but replaced it more than anything was a growing sense of numbness. I have felt like I have been effectively sitting here waiting to die. Sure I did a few things to make that wait more comfortable… bought a new TV, organized the garage and set up a 3d printer out there, and even upgraded my gaming desktop. However in all cases they were more things to pass the time until I died myself, than anything resembling trying to do something specific with my life.
There is a kind of pain that no one will ever fully understand unless they have lost a spouse. You build this life with a person, and then they are suddenly gone… and it feels like most of you went along with them. I’ve told people that I died on July 2nd, 2025 and that is not necessarily hyperbole. The me that I was at that moment in time… did in fact die when my spouse passed away. I had a good life, and I got thirty years of it… but it felt like everything about that life was suddenly crashing down around me. In many ways I was wiped with a clean slate… not even really knowing who I was anymore. The me that existed before my wife… was such a fledgling thing. I think I was not really sure where to go from here. So much of what drove me, so much of what I did with myself… was in service of the life that I built with this other person and that is a life that is now gone.
There is something like a 90% increase in mortality for men who lose a spouse. In many cases this is exacerbated because in traditional relationships the woman is the caregiver, and the man… just does not have the survival skills to keep going. That was not the case for me, because in most ways I was the primary caregiver and I still technically have the skills required to keep going. The problem is… most of the time I didn’t really want to. I felt like I was a robot who had completed its task and was awaiting new orders, and as a result I just sat dusty in the back of some cabinet as my battery slowly drained. It is so easy to just give up. I did… for effectively the remainder of this year. I did not really care about much of anything other than the occasional bursts of phantom joy that I would get playing a game or talking to one of my friends.
I am not certain the exact moment… but in the time between Christmas and New Years I have decided that I am going to live. That seems like an odd statement, but it is something that I have had to consciously make. I am going to live my life and more importantly… I am going to move forward and move on past the death of my spouse. I’ve felt like on many levels the friends and family of my spouse have needed me to spend my life in contrite grief pining away for her… that somehow my wasting slowly as my battery runs out, helped them recover from the death more easily. I can’t be that person for them anymore. I am too fucking young and I have too much of my life in front of me. Best guess based on the how others in my family have gone, I probably have about forty years in front of me… and that is too long to slowly die. My grandfather died in his mid 90s and my Dad is still spry and kicking, so I can’t see that I will likely be much different. I need to make those forty years mean something.
One of the ways in which I have taken action, rather than letting actions happen… is I finally met up with my friend Aigie/Saracell for a meal. She has lived in Oklahoma for almost a decade at this point, but was always far enough way and the timing never seemed right… so we never actually met up. This is weird given, that this was a person that I used to talk to every single day without fail. Hell you can look at the first posts on this blog, and it was her commenting on them. We were great friends that time happened to… and we stopped playing the same games… and sort of faded apart. Thing is… someday never comes unless you make it happen. I always expected that eventually we would meet in person, but neither of us were making it happen so I did.
We met up for dinner yesterday and it was a lot of fun reminiscing about old times. The most hillarious thing is that prior to the meeting I was talking with my friend Tam, who was also in Late Night Raiders… and apparently he had zero clue that “Saracell” and “Aigie” were the same person. It makes sense, because really she did not come into her own until she became a healer and there was a massive boost in confidence that happened at the same time. Saracell the Warlock was somewhat quiet and composed and almost sheepish, but Aigie the braid twirling Dwarven Priest was a force to be reckoned with. I am not so certain about the place we met up to eat, but I am sure we will repeat the act of sharing a meal at some point in the future. It will take will and purpose to make that happen, and I will take that extra step to ensure that it does.
I’ve also been talking with someone new… that I met in the least likely of possible places. I’ve talked before by the thoroughly unlikely meeting of my wife and I and our introduction from a man in Belgium when we grew up 30 minutes apart… this one is almost as uncanny but only so because of the current state of the internet and how toxic it can be. I met a new friend on Reddit. I’ve hung out on Reddit for years, making random comments on random threads… and the algorithm fed me a thread and in that thread was a random person who made a sassy comment… and I responded. That led to chatting back and forth through the Reddit direct messaging system, and that sort of carried on for days… and then weeks. More recently we have transitioned to talking on Discord, removing another layer of anonymity from it. I don’t know where it is going, but it has been really nice… and I have spent an awful lot of the last couple of weeks watching the typing indicator with baited breath.
This may go nowhere… and that is okay. The important thing that happened though… is it taught me that I could in fact develop feelings for another person. I am not entirely certain what those feelings entail… but it isn’t the bleak numbness that I have felt since July. I can move on. I can potentially love again. I legitimately thought that side of me was dead. That I had lost the ability to feel anything anymore, and would effectively just sort of fumble through life from this point on like the shambling dead. The fact that I CAN feel anything… is a fucking miracle at this point. I am not going to push any pressure on this however, because things need to develop in their own course. They have asked nothing of me, and I am attempting to ask nothing of them. It is just really refreshing to have someone that I am nervous in the best possible ways to talk with each day.
I honestly was not sure if I would say anything here about it. We are going to call her “Ren” for the sake of this blog. She does not have the breadth of gaming experience that most of us do, and as such has never really had a fixed gaming handle to fall back upon. Nor does she really have much of a social media footprint either. She has used the name Ren before and it seems good enough for the sake of keeping things nice and anonymous. That is one thing I have always tried with my blog… is to boil a situation to the real elements but not share any of the hard details. I did this for decades as a safety mechanism to keep anything I did from blowing back on my teacher spouse. I will likely continue to do this thing, because it feels more comfortable to share the real emotions and thoughts of a moment, without necessarily all of the specific people.
This is a pretty heavy post I know. If you have made it to this point I applaud you. You are in fact one of the “real ones” as it were. I am going to live. Hopefully if I am lucky, I will love again. Regardless I am going to figure out who the hell I am, and how best to support that fledgling person left in the aftermath of my life. I appreciate all of you and how you have supported me over the years. Be gentle with me as I figure this out.
