Creative Outlet

A single sentence in the book I've been reading -- "So You're Mentally Retarded, But We're Just Gonna Call It ADD" -- got me thinking about what makes me tick.  Lauren's reading the book right now, so I can't remember exactly what the book said, but it's something along the lines of, "Dude, if you have ADD, you need a creative outlet."

So that got me thinking a lot about what my old outlets used to be.  Acting.  Improv.  The good ol' tabletop RPG.  

And now, every time I take a crap, I think about the next D&D campaign I want to run or whatever.  

My first idea was that many hundreds of years into the future, mankind has taken care of a couple of things:

• they've discovered magic and vampires
• they've built a supercomputer (most of the new Internet's backbone) powered by the molten core of the earth and built by self-replicating miniature robots
• and Oh yeah, they done went ahead and left earth.  Some left in ships, others just nuked the hell out of one another.  

But for the most part, earth is a forgotten spec in the back of most people's minds.  The vampires have set up a few low-tech human farms akin to villages of the middle ages, and there are a few wizards wandering around here and there.  Who don't get along with vampires?  Who cares.  Sure.

But the main idea was that this supercomputer at the center of the earth... its subroutines and self-replicating robots would, after a few centuries or millennia or who gives a shit, would have come up with something akin to intelligence.  It'd remember the humans, and do everything it could to learn more about what it's like to be alive.  

So... there's robot demons that come to the surface, out of their infinite labyrinth, every few years, to kill a human, put his brain into a machine, and simulate life.  They make people demons, and they send them to Hell.

For some reason, I can't stop thinking about this remotely-plausible Hell.  Like every other Hell I've ever imagined, its victims are almost completely random.  You don't go to Hell because you're a bad person or because you didn't say "Thank You" enough.  It just happens to people sometimes.  

That raised the question, "What other fantasy elements could be made into pure sci-fi?"  Maybe vampires are people who have willfully taken on genetic mutations that give them eternal youth and a kind of immortality.  Maybe the wizards are people with... nanites or some shit?  

But probably not.  This world belongs in pure fantasy.  Robots, mutants and people with nanites... that sounds like a bad mashup of every shitty sci-fi story ever written.

The nanites got me started on my second setting, though.  What if, in the distant future, after human beings have colonized the universe (but we're still going everywhere at the speed of light), you were on the planet that discovered FTL travel?  

Faster than light, in case you didn't know.

Suppose it was basically instantaneous.  After millions of years of slowly drifting out to the stars, what was once a lifetime journey would now be instantaneous.  I haven't really dived into the details of this one yet, but I think the question I'm most curious about is, "What would happen to the economy?" followed immediately by "What bad thing would governments do with this?"

I suspect, "We invented it, let's go kidnap some slaves from a lame planet.  Also: war with France."

I love that in my mind, lightspeed travel would be old hat.  

I'm realizing more and more how closed off I am.  What do you suppose the average number of people a typical person talks to in a day is?  20?  Even just, "Excuse me" counts.  How about a typical New Yorker?  How about a typical 28 year-old New Yorker?

How about me?  For me, today it was 3, including Lauren.  One was a wrong number.  

So I'm realizing just how profoundly cut off I am, and I'm starting to think that a good creative outlet would be just the thing.  I could get a gaming group started, make some nerd friends and socialize.

But then I feel a strange fear that I'm going to be leaving in 40-some odd days anyway, and what's the point?  Make friends so I can say goodbye to them?  I'll make my friends in South Africa.  And when I come back.  

I'm going to be a 30-something friendless loser.  At least I'll be in a great marriage.  Thank God for Lauren.  If it weren't for her, I'd probably already be a Zach Zinnel.  

God

Lauren just said that if God's real, the greatest thing he could have possibly give us was the ability to choose.

I'm not live-blogging. She said she'll sue if I quote her. This is to be totally off the record.

Lauren and I are getting along sooooo well. I love that we can smoke some weed and play some cards, or we can go to a show, or we can just talk about all the crazy fucking people around us. Seriously, almost said "in this city," then I said, "I fucking hate people who say that." Never ever gonna be that asshole God help me, Jesus.

Still, tons of nutjobs.

I really feel that now that I'm trying a little harder to be someone's husband, things are so much better in my whole life. I hate having had to have "grown up," and I've always dreaded it, and it's just as awful as I always imagined it would be, but there's also lots of great stuff about it too. I love that I'm good enough at my job to sort of choose where I want to work. Lauren and I will be able to live in all kinds of places. We'll share a lot the world together.

Realizing that I'm not really all that great of a husband was pretty awful for me. It made me realize that never in my whole life have I ever really wanted to try at anything. I've always sort of taken the attitude of, "If I try my hardest, people are just going to freak out and yell at me again."

I wonder what it was like for Bill, growing up as "the weird one." I seriously think my parents thought, "Andy will be the athletic one, Bill will be the smart one." Then we sort of turned out to have our own personalities, and Dad just had a hard time (at first) of letting go of Andy the hockey player. And he'd get so mad. Yelling at us in the car. When I think of it, it was absolutely insane. My dad's not abusive, but that was a really dark time in his life, and it scares the shit out of me.

And I think what happened to my dad was, he didn't really want to be responsible to anyone. I think part of him just wanted the fun part of having a kid. The kid watches hockey with you. The kid is athletic and not into, God forbid, musical theater. So when he started to ease into it, he came to realize that the kids not at all who you want him to be, and you're fucking lucky he's not a rapist or a bank robber.

How horrible it must have been for him to have to go through this crap that I'm going through with the added burden of children. Two kids who you love, and one last kid who represents your last chance to do something awesome. Please, let him love hockey, please, please God...

Shit. Dresses like Peter Pan.

Outlook not so good.

Dan did such a good job of balancing "I'm going to be my own person" with "I'm going to prevent Dad from having a meltdown."

Wow, didn't realize 'til right now that that's what I was talking about. Just been sitting here in stunned silence for the past thirty seconds.

Now it's starting to make a lot more sense. God, Dad loved us just fine, but he couldn't control himself. He's as nuts as his brothers or his sister. As nuts as his Dad. Jesus Christ. One of these Nathan K_r sons of bitches is going to be a fucking serial killer. I'm going to have to tell people, "That's my cousin." I mean, I won't. They'll ask. We have the same last name.

Realizing just how deeply mental illness must run in the family. And, oh, yeah, Dad used to get in my face and scream at the top of his lungs. When I was 8. In 3rd grade. You really weren't pulling your weight at practice today and, oh, yeah that's a totally normal screaming match to have with your father in the locker room in front of your teammates.

Wow, this is pretty fucked up to be thinking. I'm going between two extremes. Either, "I'm the crazy one, and I'm exaggerating everything" or "this shit all really happened."

Holy fuck. Do I have genetic illness that's going to make me schizophrenic? 'Cause that would be funsies. Am I going to scream at my kid?

My dad must have been in so much fucking pain all the time. Especially when he decided, "You know what? I'm going to be a grown up and contribute around the house, plan nice vacations and gifts for my wife, call my son and ask how he's doing.

OK, last one only happened once, but it was really nice.