August 7, 2005

• My Wild
  Weekend

  As I typed that tagline, I almost laughed out loud remembering some of

  the wild weekends thirty to forty years ago when I ran with a much

  wilder crowd.  At the time, I valued excitement and
  novelty. 

  Novelty still  has some value for me, as long as it’s not too
  wild

  (bears and moose in my yard are not much fun), but in general now I

  favor peace and quiet.  There’s been a lot of noise and chaos
  here

  since about 1:20 AM Saturday, when Doug’s friends Matt and Sephiroth

  arrived for another weekend of gaming.

  Innumerable phone calls went into the planning of it, and the last few

  of them were a series of updates on how late they’d be and
  why. 

  The last call was from Matt’s cell just outside Willow, where they had

  been pulled over by a State Trooper for speeding.  I was
  reading

  in bed by the time they got here.  They played D&D in
  Doug’s

  room for a while, and were all sacked out in various places when I
  woke

  up yesterday morning.

  They moved their game into the front room yesterday, and I got my
  first

  extended exposure to their wrangling over rules and
  procedures. 

  The game wasn’t going well.  Eventually, they packed it
  in. 

  After pizza, they decided to take a walk.  It was when they

  returned that everything got so noisy and confused.  Watching
  and

  listening to the three of them engaged in their separate amusements

  together gave me cause to reflect on how these three boys (I’ve tried

  thinking of them as men, even young men, and it just doesn’t work for

  me), all loners, each with his own “social adjustment problems,” came

  together in school and found a bond in role-playing games.

  They introduced me to video RPGs years ago, and we spent some time

  yesterday talking about them, particularly the Final Fantasy

  series.  I, and my style of gaming, are a marvel to
  them. 

  They’re amazed that I can spend so much time in a single game,
  leveling

  up characters, creating superior weapons and equipment for
  them. 

  I’m semi-legendary among the young male gamers I know, for the time I

  spent in the Monster Arena in FFX, making rods for my mages that were

  capable of mugging Nemesis, the strongest boss monster, to
  death. 

  My propensity for stealing is another point of interest to the

  guys.  Doug says that in FF Tactics, where there are options
  to

  steal armor, steal weapon, etc., if there was a “steal underwear”

  option, I’d strip the characters bare.  What can I
  say?  It’s

  the best way to get the best equipment.

  Greyfox is in Anchorage this weekend, working a gun show.  He

  phoned in the evening after he got home.  Our conversation
  was

  interrupted by Doug:  “Mom!  Hilary has had her

  kittens!”  Sure enough, her abdomen was slim and soft, and she
  had

  a “milk belly.”  She had surprised us with the pregnancy when
  she

  was little more than a kitten herself, and then surprised us again
  with

  her kittens.

  I asked Doug where they were and he didn’t know.  I told him
  to

  keep an eye on Hilary and she’d lead him to them.  I was
  still

  talking to Greyfox when Doug came into the room with three gray
  kittens

  cupped in his hands.  We had assumed that the feral gray tabby
  who

  comes in through the open bathroom window to eat at the ladies’
  feeding

  station was the sire of Hilary’s litter, and it appears so. 
  All

  the kittens have tabby markings.  Hilary is the gray and white
  cat

  in the picture with Koji in yesterday’s blog.

  At one point last night, while Doug and Matt were watching anime in
  Japanese with English subtitles on the computer with the volume up and
  Seph sat down about seven feet away in the kitchen with his laptop and
  turned the volume up
  on his preferred anime to compete with the noise from Doug’s, I blew
  it.  Adding my noise to the cacophany, I yelled, “Doesn’t
  someone
  have HEADPHONES!?!”  The relative quiet was sudden, and the
  expressions were shocked.

  Seph
  muted his laptop, and after a few more episodes of Vandread, Matt fell
  asleep in Couch Potato Heaven hugging Seph’s Chee doll (or is it “Chi”,
  the Chobits character?).  Where Doug was sitting, both boys could
  see the monitor, but were out of each other’s line of sight.  I
  told Doug that Matt was asleep.  Since he’d already seen all the
  episodes of Vandread, probably more than once, he agreed to shut it
  down, and finally quiet descended.  I said it sounded wonderful,
  which got a surprised comment from Seph.  Apparently, to him
  silence isn’t a sound.  It’s my favorite.

  The guys woke up slow this morning.  I had some quiet time before
  Doug stumbled out of his room.  Then Matt woke up on the couch and
  finally Seph wandered in from his car where he’d been sleeping. 
  When all were assembled, I made breakfast.  I don’t know how they
  did it, but the PS2 never went idle as they ate.  Three guys, two
  controllers, and the odd one out plays the winner of the next
  round.  The current game is Street Fighter Alpha3: bash and crash
  sound effects and a high-pitched feminine voice repeating, “Cut it
  OUT!” over and over and over and…. 

  I hope they can overcome their differences over rules and procedures
  and get back to a quiet game of D&D.  That seems
  unlikely.  Doug was set yesterday to DM a game.  He’d ruled,
  “no evil characters,” but Matt apparently doesn’t do anything but
  evil.  I wonder if Doug set it up that way on purpose.  There
  was a telling moment here yesterday.  I was here at the
  keyboard.  They were playing noisy PS2 games a few feet
  away.  I said something to the effect that I’d like for them to
  get back to the D&D and let me use the PS2 (a pretext for some
  relative quiet).  That was before I understood that the D&D
  was stymied by their conflicts over “evil”. 

  Not long after that, Doug was in the kitchen talking to Seph and I
  overheard some reference to me, don’t recall exactly what was
  said.  The impression I got was that Doug was impatient for me to
  get off the computer and onto the PS2.  I told him he could have
  said something to me, instead of making me eavesdrop and pick up on his
  oblique references.  He said, “…and what kind of teenager would
  I be, then?”  Seph and I said, almost in unison, “a
  twenty-four-year-old teenager.”

  Just now, I confronted Doug, trying to get him to confront the
  issues.  It has led to an interesting and enlightening
  conversation, which I’m now going to give my full attention.
  

  • 4:21 pm
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