Writing
Refocusing Creative Energy
Last Thursday, my regular D&D group of 25 years gathered on Zoom and I ran the last session of a long-running campaign. It was a relatively rare situation of us wrapping up a full start-to-finish campaign, and it was particularly notable for two reasons. First off, it is the last campaign that I will ever run in the bespoke game setting that I started building over 20 years ago. Second off, it was my last regular game session of any sort with that gaming group for at least six months. I’m taking an extended leave from running table-top RPGs and significantly limiting my participation in table-top RPGs until Autumn.
The bespoke setting. If you ever played a campaign in the setting that I cooked up, you’d recognize particular NPC names that appeared again and again. Time within the setting marched on between each adventure, and by the time of the most recent campaign, all but a few of those NPCs had passed away. That’s been one of the most interesting aspects of the setting for me - thinking about the legacies of people and events gone by; legacies that span hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of years.
But working within the framework of any story setting has inherent limitations. If I ever run another tabletop RPG, I want to start fresh. Tell a new story. So with gratitude I surrender Ymir, Idvalexi, Brother Helix, Black Molly Kithkani, Captain Braddock, the Lightwing, and all of Serkemir and the Five Realms to the void. Zola Shadowland, last of the Hell’s Footmen, has a reprieve until the end of the campaign where I play her as a PC - her origin story. Then she will join the others in the mists.
The extended hiatus. With the exception of the very infrequent campaign in which Zola Shadowland abides, I am taking a break from table-top RPGs completely. This decision has been driven by two main factors. The lesser factor is Zoom fatigue. I spend a lot of my working hours on Zoom, and weekly evening Zoom sessions were very difficult for me. I found it particularly challenging as a player of RPGs rather than the DM, because my focus was likely to wander often. The greater factor in this was how DJing got me reconsidering where and how I want to spend my creative energy.
Running a bespoke D&D campaign takes a fair amount of time and creativity. By tapping into an established setting, I reduced some of the work but not much. By making extensive use of D&D’s online tools, I reduced a fair amount of the bookkeeping. But what remained to be done was the raw creative work of telling a story, and that energy comes from the same place that all of my writing comes from. It has always been a tradeoff - run games, or write stories. This year I want to write stories and see where I can go with them.
There’s a side benefit as well. Thursday nights are apparently a big night for the local electronic music scene in Boston, and I want to see what kind of connections I can make there. Even though writing and DJing don’t require the same sort of energy from me, taking an extended break from my deeply established D&D hobby gives me more time and creative energy for both of those other pursuits. I’m not expecting to become an overnight success in either, but I am excited to see what I can do with the opportunity.
Goodbye, Dad
My father passed away yesterday. I’m still very numb about the whole thing, still processing, but I didn’t want this moment to go by without some writing. Going through old articles from a previous version of this blog, I found something I wrote about my dad on the occasion of his retirement from performing surgeries in 2008. I’m reposting it here for posterity. Rest in peace, Dad,
It’s Who You Are
[Originally published on May 6th, 2008]
Last Friday, my dad performed the last surgery of a career that has spanned over thirty years. By my conservative guess, based on a minimum of two scheduled surgeries per week plus countless emergency room calls, his total career count would have to be somewhere in the vicinity of 5000 operations. For the obvious reason that I have no place in an operating room, I never saw his work first hand, but I have looked over his shoulder at the never-ending x-rays of anonymous reconstructed knees, hips and hands. To me, they were bones and screws, plates and stitches. To him, they were his craft, his passion, his profound responsibility.
It is hard to understand, as a software engineer, what it means to be a surgeon. Most of the engineers I know weren’t required to pour their souls into their studies in order to make it. We may have pulled the odd all-nighter, but none of us had to endure multi-year residencies with 72-hour work shifts. We rarely (if ever) have to make life-and-death decisions, much less in a split-second.
So demanding is the training to become a surgeon that for those who achieve it, being a surgeon is truly who they are. Not too many software engineers are software engineers the way that surgeons are surgeons. This makes it all the more difficult to say that it is time to stop, because what are you if you are not toiling under the responsibility that your patients have entrusted you with? What are you if you are not working with the scalpel and the volumes of experience that you have amassed?
I believe that when you retire from surgical practice, you are yet a surgeon. My dad was born a surgeon and some day he will die a surgeon. He is and has been many other things–a dad to me and my sister first and foremost–but the fire that burns in his eyes was lit for the day when he earned the right and the awesome responsibilities of surgical practice and it will never be extinguished. For the rest of his life, memories of the sleepless nights and hardest cases will stay with him along with the faces of the thousands of people who put their trust in him and were better for it.
Today, on his birthday, his office staff gave him a huge, handmade quilt; each panel depicted a milestone from his entire medical career. A week from Friday, my dad is being honored as Surgeon of the Year by the Connecticut Orthopedic Society. After all of that, he’ll be back at his office practice and continuing his work as an independent medical examiner. Some day I imagine my dad might even decide to retire completely, but a part of his mind and his heart never will.
In my heart of hearts, one my dad’s grandchildren (Linnea, Solomon, or any of the ones to follow) will discover that like their grandpa, they were born a surgeon. I certainly won’t know what to do with them, but my dad will. He’ll give them a piece of that fire to carry on through the long, hard hours, the many years of school, and the most difficult split-second decisions.
And if all of this was no indication–I am incredibly proud to have a dad who has accomplished so much and who has helped so many people.
Frozen, Victorious
Bastion shook his head, and the ghastly images faded away. Glancing up, he could see that the others were watching him. No one was shocked or concerned; they wore their professional detachment like masks. He blinked, glanced up at the cold winter sun through the tree canopy, and then back to the dead forest floor. Signs, patterns, stories. Two people had come this way, one supporting the other. Bastion read their desperation and their determination in lurching footprints that broke the frozen carpet of leaves. He read it in the dried pools of blood. A cold sweat had sprung up on the back of Bastions neck, but he made a broad sweep of his hand and began walking again, deeper into the woods. Taking the cue, the others started walking as well, spread evenly in a line perpendicular to Bastions course.
If it were a rescue, they would have been calling out. They had been calling out for hours, but one hundred yards ago they had found the jackets, followed by gloves, followed by shirts. The garments were all cold. Too cold. At the top of a ridge, one of the others stopped the line. Bastion walked to him and glanced down the slope, sighting along his outstretched arm. âOkay. Radio it in. Iâll go take a look.â
With care he walked down, careful to stand clear of the tracks he had been following. One had fallen here and recovered with help from the other. More blood. More stumbling. Things breaking down; getting slower. At the foot of the ridge, they lay intertwined in the partial darkness under a grand elm. The man was frozen and still, eyes to the heavens, alabaster white skin except for the now blackened right thigh that had been torn in the car accidentâtwo days ago now? Three? Jeans and sneakers, no shirt. He lay in the lap of the woman, held in a loose embrace.
Her body rested easily against the trunk of the giant tree. Her frozen black hair framed a face that was at once serene and broken. Jeans and sneakers, tank top. The orbit of bone around her left eye and the eye itself had been crushed when her head hit the dashboard, but her clear, gray right eye stared through Bastion, defiant, beyond him into some other space. There was no fear here, no sadness and no sound except for the drone of the radio some ways behind.
Bastion remembered his training. âCold weather is a funny thing. Canât trust a frozen body. You ainât dead until youre warm and dead, ya catch me?â He stepped forward gingerly to take pulses on their necks and feel for breathing. He was glancing back into their eyes, looking for signs of something that wasnât there. Satisfied, Bastions muscles were poised to turn to leave, but his mind held him in check.
The visions would be with him again when he finally turned away; he wasnât ready for that yet. So he lingered for another moment, carefully backing away from what had become a crime scene but glancing around long enough to note the wristbands on their pale wrists. Long enough to register the tattoos on their bare arms. And it all slotted into placeâthe last part of a story that started four days ago with a missing car. The first part, really.
He felt stupid for the tears that were pricking his eyes. Come on Bastion. They arent sad about it. Got more than most of those poor bastards ever got. Most, but not all⊠Composing himself, he nodded to them, turned and made the trek back to the others. âWhy did they run, Bastion?â It had been a few minutes since he had rejoined them, but Bastions face still glistened with the cold sweat, and he was lost in a private terror for a moment before he could answer. Finally, he pushed the images aside and glanced up. They were patiently waiting, no expression other than that basic curiosity.
âWhy did they run from the crash?â Bastion drew a calming breath that brought him fully back to the present. He nodded down the ridge, wiped his brow, and willed a frozen breath to escape his lips. âThey escaped from Anderson Medical Center. The police didnât tell us thatâthey probably didnât know.â The others looked puzzled. Bastion knew they didnât get it. It didnât mean to them what it meant to him. Subconsciously scratching at the tattoo on his own arm through the parka and the wool, he glanced around again. âThey wanted to live for a while before they died.
The Hospital
The quiet evening stands still; a tapestry A history woven in sodium light A memory
Hospitals never used to bother me; I would follow my Dad to the nurses station Wait quietly for him to conduct his rounds and watch people get better.
You never got better here And I’m wearing this stupid yellow band Like it matters
I’m sure Lance is sorry for us
I’m sorry that I was never sad at funerals But they keep getting closer They hurt more now
It's who you are
I am watching something beautiful
(This post is about Elena. Shes not doing very well. I invite you to read this, but I don’t want you to have to.)
I am sitting on a couch. In the center of the room, my wife and her parents are gathered around Elena’s bed. Home and Garden television has been droning on for hours at one end of the room; we are all interior design experts now and we barely notice anymore. The sun outside is bright, but the breeze is surprisingly cold. Elena has been burning up for days, but today it is cool enough that we don’t need to run the AC in her window.
Last night, Elena’s meds were discontinued. She’s on morphine, now. She has a button that gives her more if she needs it, but she hasn’t been lucid enough to use it. Today was a quiet day. I spent my working hours in the next room. Two of Elena’s friends came by and spent some hours around her bed.
The drone of the television is lost under singing. Elena stirs long enough to watch my daughter singing to her. For a moment, the whole family is smiling, and just as quickly, Elena drifts back into her half-sleep. The smiles slowly fade, but Linnea is still signing. And I am still watching them as their gazes return to Elena. I am watching all of the love and prayers. Tears are streaming down my face and I quietly slip from the room.
Elena had no tolerance for visitors who wanted to sit in her room and sob and wring their hands over what is happening to her. She’d made her peace with the cancer and what it was going to do to her and didn’t need to dwell on it. I am standing in the hallway now. We’ll get brief glimpses of her in the next few days. We hope Maria will be back in the U.S. in time to see her. We hope that we can show her the baby that is yet to be born. Were all living hour to hour right now.
How we become our grandparents
Last weekend I had the privilege of DJing at the wedding of some friends. I’ve unofficially DJed a few parties, but never something as involved (and DJ-dependant) as a life-changing ceremony followed by several hours of dancing. Annika will tell you that I spent a lot of the preceeding week in a heightened state of, well, being nervous as hell.
Before I go much further, let me say that the DJing went well. The ceremony went smoothly, no worries with the random playlist through cocktail hour, and once we got into the post-dinner dancing portion of the evening, I really started to have a lot of fun. The bride and groom seemed happy, no one threatened me. Some of the other wedding guests, themselves veterans of many a sound check, helped me move audio equipment around as events dictated.
That’s not really what Im writing about, though. I was ready for all of that stuff–I’d practiced aspects of the whole set, I knew the (few) tricky sound cues. But what I didn’t realize during all of my preparations was that I was building a mental model of what people would want to dance to that was subtly incorrect. I had brought enough of the “right” kind of music to cover my mistake, but the more I reflect on the whole thing, the more I believe that I was being shown a basic truth about the way we become older.
Consider, for a minute, Rob Base’s seminal work “It Takes Two”. If you’re under thirty and you’re not familiar with this track, then think about Fergie’s “London Bridge” and imagine that it is still popular in 2024. Why 2024? Because that’s when “London Bridge” will be a song that is 18 years old, just like “It Takes Two” is right now. Let me say that again for those of you who are still thinking about Rob Base: “It Takes Two” was released in 1988. If you were on the dance floor last Saturday night at the wedding I DJed, then you probably first danced to “It Takes Two” at a high school prom. Or maybe you heard it coming out of the speakers of someone’s boom box.
For whatever reason, the song stuck with you. The repetitive scream that is part of the underlying breakbeat is no longer edgy and urban. Now it’s fun. It’s funky. You can dance to it. And you know, I love a fun old dance tune as much as the next wedding guest. But I had assumed that everyone’s tastes had followed an evolutionary line that also included fun new dance tunes as well as some of the other less mainstream style-descendants of Rob Base, Ini Kamoze (the Hotstepper), and Sir Mix-a-Lot.
Not so, dear reader. I don’t think the human brain works like that. People go to clubs to hear the hot new tracks, not weddings. Weddings are those times when the fondest old memories get fished out of the bin and strung together into newer fond old memories. You can add a wrinkle here or there, but you’ll never mix BTs “Circles” into a party based on the likes of “Groove is in the Heart” (16 years old), “O.P.P.” (15 years old), and “Push It” (20 years old). Now, in everyone’s defense, yes, newer songs were played and danced to with vigor. But the set wouldn’t have been right without the older songs. There’s something about them that adds context to the event. It says: “this is the fun for us”.
I know it wasnt the fun for the under-ten set at the wedding because I was repeatedly asked by some of the kids when I was going to play “something cool”. I shudder to think of what’s cool music to a ten year old boy. I’m pretty sure I was in full-on Weird Al worship at ten, and that’s just not a good avenue for a wedding DJ to follow.
This gets a little philosophical when you step back and think about how much of what you do can be fixed to a particular not-necessarily-recent point in time. All of the stupid ad jingles you’ve learned. All of the clothing trends that you can recall (though of course, you never dressed that way). Something finds its way into your brain and it stays there. Random happenstance occasionally pulls it up and suddenly on the dance floor youre letting out a primal yell because “Rock Lobster” (27 years old) is, like, totally your favorite song. (The system works. Writing “like, totally” got me thinking about Valley Girls.)
Right now, we’ve still got some choices–we can see that divide between Now and Then. But it gets a lot harder after your brain gets added to the “untrustworthy body parts” list. One of Annika’s grandfathers has repeatedly told me of a particular war-era adventure of his; he forgets that I know the story well. And whenever he tells me the story, I think about the fact that this particular adventure must have contained some of the greatest moments of his life, because he can’t always remember the names and faces of his family, but that story lives on the tip of his tongue. To me the real kicker is that he’s telling this to his second generation of offspring, and godwilling he’ll tell it to the third as well. How could his adventures be any more amazing that seeing a room filled with generations of people who can trace themselves back to him? What does the past possess that is so much more valuable than right now?
Happily, for the bride and groom at most modern, mutually-embarked-upon weddings, there is nothing but the Now. There’s so much Now for them that there isn’t room for anything else. If you do anything approaching a traditional wedding and reception these days, your wedding day is the longest Now you’ll ever have. But for everyone else, the Now is a little more lovely with a side order of Then.
I felt a little bad for the wedding guest who got really excited when I mixed in Steve Miller band. It was during a lull before the die hard hip-hop dance crowd layed seige to the dance floor. But in forty years, when Steve Miller and 50 Cent end up on the same “Greatest Hits of the Late 1900s” compilation, we’ll all be there doing the robot while the current hip generation shakes its head in pity. We’ll have a choice then, too, of course. We’ll choose between hobbling off the dance floor to reflect on how much more awesome our music was and staying on to catch a few measures of what the hip ones are listening to. And if the DJ takes that opportunity to pull out “Love Shack”… well, that’ll be okay, too :-)
The new lieutenant
Jane Immelheim leaned against the wall of the situation room, her face a picture of zen-like calm. Her hands were wrapped around a coffee mug, and the mug in turn was wrapped around a viscous, day-old sludge. She sipped absent mindedly as she watched the semi-organized chaos around her. After a few minutes more of the buzz of people and machinery, one man glanced up from his computer screen. “Got him. ST-7, near the midtown line.” Jane smiled.
“Black Tab and Montag go. User D stays on the com. Call Water & Sewer and get an emergency lockdown on 7.” The sound of receding boots was replaced by the dull hum of computers. The room was all but empty now, save for Jane, her junior com operator, and Janes new lieutenant. The latter was watching her with something approaching awe. “I’ll never be that relaxed, will I, captain?” It was a leading question. Jane sighed. “You got any military service, lieutenant?” “No ma’am.” “Not a problem, of course; not for what we do. It’s just that military people are more likely to encounter synthetics in their day-to-day. Makes working in the RCD a lot easier.” “Understood, ma’am.”
Jane shook her head and smiled. “Ackley, I hope you earn my respect sooner than later so that we can drop this ma’am crap. Now, the question I think you’re really asking me is if there’s some way to turn off the panic. And the answer is yes. Sure, I could turn it off–we’ve even got a name for it: ‘running dead’. Most of the synthetics in the military run dead when they’re on missions. But the problem is that we’re policemen here, not soldiers. Feeling anxious is part of what keeps us alive.”
Lieutenant Ackley nodded. Intuition resonated with him. Cops understood things like that. “The trick is, I still do my job. For officers there are more pieces on the board, but the game is ultimately the same. You’re ready to play the bigger game, too, Ackley. I know because otherwise they wouldn’t have promoted you and sent you to the RCD. Are we square, then?” Another nod from the Lieutenant, and the flicker of a smile. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Good, because I’m making this Viridian 9 your problem. You’ve got two operatives on their way to a locked down section of sewer. Inside you’ve got an old military synthetic that’s gone rogue. Your connection to them is the talented com operator to my left. Make your move, L.T.” Ackley hesitated, but only for a moment, before spinning to face User D at her seat by the com and starting to hand out orders. Jane smiled and resumed her supported position against the wall.
Aaron would have loved to see this, she thought to herself. She stared into space for a moment before breaking the spell and turning her eyes back towards the activities of the situation room. There were some feelings that couldn’t ever be turned off, and for that, Jane silently cursed her maker.