The mind is a strange thing.  It leads us to thoughts – recurrent, recursive, obsessive.  These thoughts do not leave us, but plague us, dwindling slowly over time until we are naught but one with our minds, living entirely in a realm of the fictional.  Then the fictional world begins to intrude on the real world – faces from the menial reality of the mind become intertwined with those of our day to day, replacing what we see.  It’s a film seen through a filter of despair and want and hope, and all of those things that make us inherently human.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken a path that would lead me to playing the white knight on a regular basis.  Perhaps I should have been aware of some inherent weakness within, known that it could – indeed, would – happen at one point or another.  Does the solution to the problem lie within my awareness?

But then, if I were to believe myself immune to the fantasy I would be denying a core essence of what makes me a person.  Is it not a part of life to find things beautiful?  And in finding beauty, do we not then care for things?  Things, I say, as if I speak of some absolute – but then in a way I do, for to do otherwise would be wrong (in so many ways).

My momentary obsession has led me to searching the dark corners of the internet, where I’ve found more answers – and like any good answer in any good story they’ve led only to more questions and the subsequent desire to continue questing.  But herein lies the dilemma of the unattached: my horse can go no further, lest I cross some unseen, unknown boundary from whence I fear an inability to recover.

So I’ll stop and sigh and leave things to my dream world, those questions vacant and unfulfilled.  In my mind’s eye I can see the answers, tantalizingly near, dancing as if shadows in some misty veil.  But that is a line I cannot cross, else obsession becomes more.  From this I will recover, once my mind is filled with thoughts of more than she.

I love how time makes things lose meaning.  Perhaps love is too strong a word for it, but it’s an interesting phenomena to me.  Something we write about, something we talk about, so passionately at one point will, given time, fade into meaninglessness.  And yet it’s not meaningless.  There’s the meaning of what was, and what it has become.  That which once was a meditation on one subject can become beautiful and poetic not because of its definition but rather because of its aesthetic value, it’s sense of construction.

Does something that has an intrinsic mysterious value – meaning a value that none but the author understand – have meaning outside of its construction?  Does that value remain after I have written the words, read the words, forgotten the words?

All of this fascinates me to no end.

Perhaps my problem stems from one of evolution.

The warrior awoke, learned to fight. The fighter fought, learned to lose, but accepted happiness in fighting. The fighter fought, won, and accepted happiness in winning. Having won, the fighter now is no longer content to fight and lose. Is it a competitiveness in my spirit which has caused me such restlessness?

I should be happy at my state, and yet I find myself still struck with obstinate sadness. I am happy that I fought, at long last, as had to be done, but yet I am unhappy that I have lost the fight, though I knew it would happen and in fact predicted it could not have gone any other way.

Or did I forget to smile when death came for me? Did I falter? Did I give out?

These thoughts gnaw at me, still. Let them be quiet, else I shall be forced to reveal the truth of self.

I walked home from work today. Part of it was that it was a nice day out. Part of it. I swam around in humanity, drank it all in as I walked past Boston Commons, through the garden, Newbury street. I was surrounded by people being people.

I got home and I wanted to cry. I’m broken and I don’t know what I can do. I gathered the pieces of the mask and I tried to put it on to no avail.

The mask is heavier than I remembered. And I have grown to like the light.

So.  Gary Gygax died earlier this week.  I haven’t really written anything about it, even though it’s actually fairly big news, because – well, honestly, there are many reasons.  I don’t, generally speaking, become affected, on a personal level, when celebrities or pop figures die.  I’m sure perhaps that might be different in the future.  Don’t get me wrong – when I heard Heath Ledger had passed I was taken aback; I had a similar reaction to other celebrities who have died recently.  But I’m never moved, down deep in my soul.  To me, I guess, death is just another part of the journey.

So when I think of Gary Gygax the man, I feel only a small bit of empathy for the fact that he died.  And I’ve read a lot of what people have written, and particularly the comments that people wrote about him – and in general everyone lionized the man Gygax.  After all, he was, in the end, the ubergeek.  He was one of the first to come, and he was certainly the highest proponent of roleplaying games.  He helped build an industry that now makes more money than certain small countries.  The sum total of works that he has affected, directly or indirectly, is a business that probably makes money than most countries.  And still, this is not Gygax the man.

I’m not here to speak of Gygax the man, for what I knew of him I knew only from legend (and from reading some of the court documents from the original legislation surrounding TSR and Dungeons & Dragons, but that’s beside the point.)

However in reading through all of the various eulogies and comments and in general memories and desires that people had, I was moved.  As a geek, I was moved.  As a roleplaying gamer I was moved.  As a person, I was moved.  Because I saw all of the tangled threads that spun from one Ernest Gary Gygax and, through a very short line, connected straight to me.  And to you.  And to a great many other people in the world.   And I’m not talking just people who play Dungeons & Dragons, though we are likely the only ones who recognize this link, at least intuitively.

If you have ever enjoyed a fantasy movie in the past twenty years, it’s likely you have E. Gary Gygax to thank for it in no small part.  If you have ever played a computer roleplaying game, or a mass multiplayer online game, or a platformer like Super Mario Bros., you have E. Gary Gygax to thank for it in some small measure.  If you have read a fantasy novel written in the last twenty years, you have E. Gary Gygax to thank for it in no small way.

I don’t believe I am misstating the facts when I say that Gary Gygax changed the world.

I owe the majority of my current friendships to Gary Gygax, because most of the people I hang out with now I’ve done so thanks in a major party through roleplaying games, with D&D being the flagstone of those unions.  Thanks to Gary Gygax, I had an outlet for my creativity starting since before I knew what a roleplaying game was.  That’s right – before I played Dungeons & Dragons, I was creating my own games and RPGs, inspired by video games which were in turn inspired by D&D.  Some of the clearest memories of my childhood are playing these video games with my brother.  Since the third grade I was putting my friends Rick and Jay through my homebrew games, which at first were just arbitrary adventure mazes and then later involved actual characters and stories and (post-D&D) dice and task-resolution, and…

And.

And that’s the story of E. Gary Gygax.  That’s the story of Gygax and every single gamer in the world.  There’s a more than good chance that almost everyone under the age of 30 in the United States has been touched, in one way or another, by E. Gary Gygax.

But this isn’t about the man Gygax.  If you want to read more about him, two authors I seriously respect have written far better remembrances than I ever could: Eric Burns (link is, as of this writing, down) of Websnark and Monte Cook, of Malhavoc Press.  And, I am certain, there are far more out there.  As for me, I’ll honor what he gave us the only way I think I can.

By playing Dungeons & Dragons with all of my gamer friends.