I apologized for the beercans, my beard, and everything on the floor
and pretty soon everybody was yawning
and the editor suddenly stood up and I said,
are you leaving?
and then the editor and the poet were walking out the door,
and then I thought well hell they might not have liked
what they saw
but I’m not selling beercans and Italian opera and
torn stockings under the bed and dirty fingernails,
i’m selling rhyme and life and line,
and I walked over and cracked a new can of beer

From “I Am Visited by an Editor and a Poet” by Charles Bukowski

I got invited to a couple things here and there this week, but it’s just too hot to have friends right now.

Even pleasant acquaintances drain off the strength I need to prop myself up against the oversight of that middle manager, the sun: Peeking in the front of my house trying to see if I’m getting ready for work. Hovering around all day wearing me out before one final, enervating blast in the evening that says: “Don’t worry about it. You’re tired. Just watch TV and be ready for me in the morning.”

Fucking bastard. I’m pretty sure the sun voted for Trump.

It’s also too hot for flavors. I get an 18-pack of Michelob Ultra at Wal-Mart and put it on ice in a cooler next to the couch because it’s too hot to go the fridge, too. Gonna have me a little dirtbag beach party and edit far into the night.

That afternoon I finally got the scathing dining room haunting scene drafted in my third session of Dwelling, a solo RPG for ghosts, after a week of avoiding it…and realized there were still hours of fine-tuning, formatting, cutting the audio, and editing that, too. So I got a rank of aluminum soldiers for the final push.

This Dwelling session was probably a full 24 hours of pure work spread out over the weeks, which has me thinking about an encounter from a few years back: A local who I had over for dinner a few summers ago.

I was mixing up Bull Shots for him while the charcoal heated up. In the course of trying to sell me on some local open mic events — which drive me into a rage — he pursed his eyebrows at me like he was a college dean trying to help a struggling student and asked: “So I’m trying to get a sense of what it is you’re interested in.”

In the previous weeks, I’d sent him links to my best episodes and blog posts, including essays and fiction. I’d given him collateral that l made with the help of two of the best graphic artists I knew. I’d also invited him and his friends to learn a couple of the more accessible games I love.

“No takers,” he told me a week later on the eve of the game night. Just the two of us, I thought. That’s OK. I had a solution for that. I showed up with Patchwork Americana, a gently themed two-player game that can be successfully taught even to people in a coma.

Except there was another attendee: A friend of his from down the block who appeared in the kitchen and loudly announced, “I’ve never played a board or card game in my life and I never will,” like he’d been practicing on the sidewalk the whole time over. I didn’t have a solution for that. Nothing I’d told my new friend about what I love or why I work at it had registered. I checked off his street address as a dead end.

This string of encounters gnawed at me. In the aggregate they pointed to a personal challenge I’ve never squared up with: Could I articulate for myself why I’m ready, in what should be the threshold of my Golden Years, to rip up every other single thing in my life and use it as kindling for just one more night at the table or on the mic? Can I try my twin justifications on you real quick?

Pillar #1

Being around a board game table is the most beguiling alignment of the social, the cerebral, the rational, the tactical, the tactile, the aesthetic, the participatory, the received and the intuitive — all bound up in pure entertainment and comedy and snap psychological studies that both locate our unique vantage points on contemporary culture alongside and inside the kinetic world of the game. And if these vertices aren’t juicy enough, marvel at the nourishing bedrock: Our shared instinct for the most beautiful of the human afflictions — the need for organized and intentional screwing around.

We’ve been in this grip for millennia: Can you get that rock through that hoop? Nice! Now what happens if three dozen of my friends try to kill you when you do it? If you die, that’s like, minus five points. Or let’s scratch out some kind of arena with a stick in the ground and see if I can end up with more of your stones than you can have of mine. See, I won and you didn’t even have to die. Damn, it’s raining. Maybe we should put this on some kind of board. Etc.

Board games to me are as worthy of study, love and even obsession as any of the great art or technology. They’re my lab, my temple, my library and my playground.

Pillar #2

Sometimes before a nap I imagine I’m in the cockpit of a B-25 Mitchell fitted for interstellar flight, pushing straight for an asterism in a faraway cluster that you can only see if you unfocus your eyes and look at something else. What else was I looking at before this?

My whole life I wrote for survival, for flashy extras, the cheap pleasure of being the guy with a Brioni tie who picked up the bar tab, for social validation and feedback weighted with what I now see was a misguided quest for heroes and corporate dads, the delusion of having a seat on somebody’s rocketship or getting to author a chapter in a great story that everybody knew. Between 2007 and 2010 I lost my primary income something like six times. I wrote for fear. I wrote because I didn’t know what else to do.

But something changed when I got down to Starkville. None of my fantasies about this place materialized. The war chest drained out. The house deteriorated. The car committed a series of expensive mutinies. My network, to what extent it still existed, got tired of my schtick.

But somehow I kept putting out episodes. Last summer I rededicated myself to better frequency, scripts, and audio, and realized I had accidentally framed a home for all the little professional tricks I picked up at the newspaper, the startups, the small agencies. I committed to being my own best client for the first time in my life.

Personal finance is a game I lost decades ago. Like the thing in my garage of which I only ask short errands, my body is an expensive machine I know I can’t afford to keep. I got rid of my first tooth ever in May. $750 for a crown? Fuck that. I had it yanked. I think of this first sacrifice whenever I catch myself tarrying on an episode. I think of the tooth and the awful morning when I look in the mirror and realize I didn’t heed the slow boil of failing systems and I’m now one of the grayed-out NPC aging bachelors of the desert, shopping cart full of processed food, hunched, wheezing, deracinated, desexed, fly and jaw open.

Look for contract work? I wasted a year and a few hundred dollars on Upwork in between reading my LinkedIn feed and feeling the other creatives standing next to me with decades’ worth of better portfolios, better attitudes, improvised weapons in hand, circling that bright can in the rubble marked The Last Job in America. Or I could barrel into what I’ve started and see if it leads somewhere more interesting.

At the very worst I can say I gave my best to a body of work that finally used all my skills, taught me some discipline and gave me some pride. At the very best? Maybe if I keep putting my head down and doing the right thing, I’ll meet a different breed of opportunity through this big door before me, deceptively labeled: Play. I’m wagering everything I have left on finding out.

There’s nothing quite like finishing a paragraph at the same time as a beer and hurling the empty across the living room. I got in over my head when I bought this house, but my retreat from its general decay to the rectangle of this room, 29 feet by 13 and change, is a success tonight. Everything I need to do what matters is here.

Give me time and the right rectangle where I can think and see...it could be the rectangle of the frame holding the first Van Gogh you ever stood close to, your breath catching when you got to see how he mixed the colors and where he laid it on with a fury.

The rectangle of my work table that holds the rectangle of the game board, through which I see the slowing and erasure of time, the completeness of self-forgetting, the mind in dance with a story and a system and the last of the people I want to call friends.

That’s what I wanna write about, and I hope you spot the little cluster of stars you want to tack to with less waste and sorrow than it took me to spot mine.

It’s late.

Tomorrow the sun will rise with a Palantir logo on it.

I’d Rather Die at My Game Table Than Live in Your Office