Saturday, July 09, 2011

Rotwang! Is An Angry, Embittered Man (WARNING: INCLUDES PATHOS)

Yesterday while washing dishes, I listened to an episode of The D6 Generation Podcast (which is not about the D6 System, as it turns out).  It was interesting enough, and kind of informative too.

Mostly, I found it depressing.

It's not because of anything that's wrong about the podcast itself, but rather because of what I heard in it -- and the questions it made me ask myself.

I heard these guys talking about all the games they've been playing --tabletop RPGs, minis games, board games...talkin' about the minis they're painting, the games going on at their FLGS, the cons they've been to or are going to, the terrain they're building...

...and first, I thought:   Where do they find the time?  Don't they have jobs, families?  Of COURSE they have jobs and families.  So where do they find the time?!

That was not what bugged me.  What bugged me was the very next thought that followed it:


Why don't I have that?!  Why can't I have that luxury? 

Yes, a luxury. To me, such a thing is a luxury.  I don't have a fancy car; I don't care.  I don't have a huge paycheck every week; I'd like it if it were bigger, so I could pay off some bills and have some walking-around money, but I'm doing OK.  I don't have a yacht, a mistress, a race horse,  a big HDTV, a...freaking...I dunno, a solid gold burro.  I don't want those things.  Those aren't things that would make me happy (not even the mistress OR the burro).  I actually want very little in life -- I'm remarkably easy to keep happy, and at that, with very few and comparatively small things.

I can't find the time or opportunity for gaming.  Oh, I have some friends coming over on Tuesday to play Microscope, but that's a rarity.  It's hard to get my friends together for gaming, what with people's schedules and such.  I'm about 15 minutes away from the games store, but I don't feel comfortable there -- and gas is expensive.  I live in a fairly populous area; I'm not in the middle of nowhere, in fact I live in a golf resort/condominium kind of place, with about 33,600 people living in it -- but I'll be damned if I have any way of finding any gamers in the place.  Life is commute, work, commute, come home.  

If I get to game for more than a few hours every two months or so, it's a bonanza.

I try to vent this stuff by making it kinda funny, like this.  But the truth is that it's seriously dragging down my quality of life.

Is this adulthood?  Really?