A New Beginning

It's been years since I sat down to write actively, and so much has happened since then. To be honest, this is something I should have started at the beginning of this whole pandemic-thing we're all going through. Instead, I hunkered down, started working from home, and life went on.

My family and I have been lucky given the state of things - when the pandemic hit, my wife was on long-term disability through her job and that simply continued through the end of 2020. Other things happened since then, but nothing that would derail us as a family, so rest assured.

Alas, I'm getting ahead of myself. It is late, after all, and it's been a long day involving kids going to dance, gymnastics, a friend's child's birthday party, and our normal Saturday gathering at our good and dear friend, Noah's house.

So I guess a little about me to get things started.

As of the writing of this, I am a 41-year-old man living in the Kansas City area with my wife and 2 1/2 kids. More about that later. I have four college degrees, a wonderful family, and a job I love, so one could say I'm living the American Dream - I have an "Atomic Family" and generally have a happy existence.

I was born at the end of 1979. One week before the end, to be exact - on Christmas Eve. I was a few weeks early and, I guess it could be said I really wanted to see the last week of the 70's. I grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas. Yes, Supernatural fans, that Lawrence, Kansas. Let me assure you, however, that the real Lawrence, Kansas has significantly less demon activity and mountainous Canadian countryside, and more to do with "Cruising the Square" and KU Basketball than anything else.

I have two loving parents, grew up with my older brother and sister, all of which I am still close with. My parents divorced in 1998, but I've maintained a good relationship with both my mother and father in that time. We're a close family, we love each other, and I'm truly a lucky guy (note I didn't say, "Blessed") to have them in my life.

My wife and I met at a gaming convention (more or less) twelve years ago, in 2009. To be more accurate, we met at my gaming convention - a convention I started with friends because 2009 was the first time in 13 years that I was not able to go to Gen Con - the largest and greatest tabletop gaming convention in the United States. I got it in my head I'd take the Bender approach and have my own convention, with blackjack and hookers, but forget the blackjack (and hookers, really). I can write more about that little thing called KantCon at another time, but I'm just giving the Cliff's Notes version of my secret origin story here.

Now, when my future wife and I met, she was dating someone else, and it would be another year-or-so before I would figure out that this girl liked me and I liked her back. We started dating, got engaged, I graduated from school, we got married, we got pregnant, we "adopted" her younger sister, she graduated from school, then we had a beautiful daughter. A year-and-a-half later we had my son as well.

My kids and my family are my life. My friends, too, but I really just count them as extended family at this point. I'm a walking cliche, I know - I'm a guy with two-and-a-half kids and a loving family who lives and grew up in Midwest Kansas as a vanilla, white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant, sheltered liberal.

Now I may go into further detail on this secret origin at another time, but suffice it to say, I'm a generally happy, nerdy, totally "normal" guy.

What is my goal here? To have an outlet. To put the proverbial pen-to-paper and spew forth things into the void for posterity. Should anyone listen to me for any particular reason? Nah, I don't have anything special to bring to the table except what I've got - my perspective and my life experience, much as it is.

I'll tell you what really got me thinking about this, however, and it's not anything that I've mentioned thus far. Sure, I have a family that has always been supportive of my writing and my creative outlets, but someone not connected at all to me, my family, or really even my state (to my knowledge) did a series of writings throughout the last year of this pandemic called, "Curated Quarantine."

This gentleman is named Chris Pramas, and he doesn't know me. Hell, I don't know him very well past his writings and tangential meetings at Gen Con over the years, and supporting his company, Green Ronin Publishing. His series was a brief glimpse into the games on his bookshelf - games that he has collected over decades of being a tabletop gamer.

Yes, a tabletop gamer.

I guess that's not such a taboo thing any more, but while I was growing up, and no doubt when Mr. Pramas was growing up, it wasn't something that one advertised widely. You see, back in the 1980's and 1990's, when I was a prime young-un, a little thing called Dungeons & Dragons was one of the things that came to the forefront of an epidemic known as "Satanic Panic." More specifically, a lady named Patricia Pulling spread the absurd notion that D&D led to satanic worship, delinquency, and a myriad of other things. Needless to say, it was all complete and utter bullshit, but the effect was that if you were one of those guys who were into role-playing games, you were one of those weirdos that liked to run around in steam tunnels and have mental breaks with reality on a regular basis.

Nowadays, gamers have a lot better press. Probably because all of us who grew up in the 80's and 90's now work in all sorts of fields and don't run around in steam tunnels and live in our parents' basements - we became movie stars, CEOs, and generally successful people. Now, we have proponents of the tabletop gaming scene like Critical Role and others, and Dungeons & Dragons is a much more widely accepted thing now that Hasbro has owned it for almost two decades.

All that aside, Mr. Pramas (I don't know if I should call him, "Chris") did a post a day, more or less, about something in his collection. Now a chunk of what he wrote about were wargames, which never really interested me, but the other things he wrote about were predominantly role-playing game books. I greatly enjoyed journeying down the occasional rabbit-hole and being reminded of games from my past that I had forgotten, or at least filed away in the dark recesses of my nerd-soaked brain.

He talked about great games that I remember having great times playing or running with friends, or some I just read and never got around to. Games such as Underground, Paranoia, and a plethora of others.

So I decided to start with doing the same.

In my next post I'll talk a bit more about why I'm doing this, and where I intend to go, but for now, I need to get some sleep.