I be flying tomorrow to Miami in order to attend to my father’s health issues and be supportive family member.  If all goes well I’ll be able to fly from Miami to Indy and spend a week with Sarah and Amanda and Brett and anyone else who happens to be in town.  But at least until Saturday I’ll be incommunicado.  Who knows, the radio silence might do me some good – start working on the missing parts of the web page or something.

Mystara ended last night.  It ended well, as it had to end.  Close to six years of gaming now, coming to an end.  Seems a lifetime ago since we started.  I’ve really grown, I think, as a DM, a player, and a story teller since I started the Mystara campaign so long ago.  But all things end, don’t they?

Ah well, there’s always tomorrow.

I’m tired tonight, so forgive me if I fail to deliver beautiful prose.  For the moment I believe I’ll deliver my good nights, and see ya’ll from Miami.

I’ve got a ton of good ideas for different stories and such.  The funny part is that none of them really pertains to Penumbral, which is my long running project.  I have a few ideas for the story in the long run, just don’t know what the next chapter should be.  Ah well, one of these days I’ll sit down and start writing, force myself to produce something, even if isn’t very good.  Especially after I finish working on my Starbound Campaign Setting for D&D.

I wonder now why string cheese is called string cheese.  I stare at this piece of 4 inch dairy product and wonder in what strange market-centric universe could this phallic idiom be considered anywhere close to a string.  Strings are, certainly, stringlike – that is, possessing of the qualities of strings – and this cheese can be said to have nothing of the kind.  It is decidedly un-stringlike, except that it is longer than it is round.  Yet it is no more string than is CAT-5 cable.

Now, silly string is certainly stringlike.

String cheese is, unfortunately, not.

Delicious, certainly.  But not stringlike.

I ruminate now because I have – of late – spectacularly failed to ruminate, and as I have been reading through Tycho’s newsposts in Penny Arcade, I feel like making some hard concieved ruminations and laying them down upon my distant web server for your pixellated pleasure.

In truth I have a few things to ponder recently.  Of late I have been playing much Metal Gear Solid 3, of which I have discussed before.  I have finally, today, managed to beat the game.  It was the battle with The End that caused me such misery and pain that the howls were heard for miles to come.  It wasn’t altogether difficult, simply annoying.  But I triumphed upon my return and never looked back.  And the ending to Metal Gear Solid 3 was much better than I had anticipated.

You even get a tuxedo at the end.

So game having been defeated, I started rummaging through my computer’s old files, thinking about cleaning up the old hard drive.  When I came across a text file I called simply “Confession”.  It was ASCII text in notepad – a simple declaration of thought given fact.  Written, according to Windows Explorer, on September 26, at 10:11 pm, on the 24th second of that minute, year 2004 of our Lord.  Given the author’s voice – my own – I could determine that at the time I must have been in that fevered agony that I often fall into, producing such inane rantings on my journals that it takes a cryptographer to figure out what is going on.

I wonder now, if there is a journal entry in my old Blurty that relates to it… And yes, now I see that there is.

Oh what tangled webs we weave.  At first I read the letter - a letter addressed to nobody, merely a memo I left I suppose only to myself, a confession whispered only to the ears of my trusting and ever-dependant computer – and I shrugged.  It said nothing to me that I had not already known, because I am here now.  It was a bit disturbing in its tone – there is an utter desperation about it that I found somewhat tolling.  I didn’t remember writing it, much like I don’t remember writing much of what I write when I let my subconscious do the typing.  It is a channeling thing, a process more of spirit than mind, and as such it finds difficult purchase in memory.  So I was a bit taken aback, but there were no actual revelations found therein.

Except that something I wrote set off a disconcerting jolt of memory.  It was enough that it made me look at the date of the document.

And then I saw that I had written it in September.  Well, what’s so disturbing about that?

Simply to say that if I had listened to what I was telling myself in the letter, I would’ve been a much happier guy much sooner than i did.

As I wrote on the blog, “I think I’m beginning to understand the greater picture now. It all comes down to a confluence of the future.”  The confluence of the future did, in fact, occur.  It all, in fact, came down to it.  So why the hell didn’t I listen to myself in the first place?

Because that’s not the point, that’s why.  It’s taken me this writing to realize that - had I done what I, from the looks of the letter, wanted to do – I would not have succeeded.  I wasn’t strong enough then to face what had to be faced.  I hadn’t found my purpose, then, and so I couldn’t have survived the storm.

So I didn’t do what my fevered mind had told me to do – begged, even, rationalized.  I did what Alex had to do.  And I won out, in the end.  No regrets.

I just find it funny that I had, in a way, predicted what would happen without realizing it.  It was an open ended, sort of vague prophesy, more a logical discussion of what would turn out, but there it is.  Once again, I do not fail to amuse myself.

I had a strange and somewhat… revelatory dream the night before last and the thoughts that it created have been churning and burning through me like some crazy train that refuses to leave town.  At first I thought it was just borne of some post-hunt success high but now that I think about things the information contained within (I assure you, merely the result of adding 2 and 2 together) just sort of makes a crazy sort of sense, backed up by certain leaps of logic which I’ve made recently.  Ah well, water under the bridge, and there’s nothing for me or anyone else to be afraid of anymore, things worked out in the end.  Consider the coffin nailed.

Yesterday was a good day.  We went and looked at some furniture while we waited for the call from Dana, our real estate agent.  We got a full bed, a small dining table set, a couch, a trunk, and a drawer chest.  All very excellent.  Then we went to eat some lunch but mother wanted to go to Quizno’s and the way there was trafficked all to hell, so we decided to go off road and head back into the city.  We drove around some of the smaller neighborhoods and actually drove through the majority of Wakefield, home of Wicked Awesome Jess.  It’s a marvelously pretty town, in my opine, and I sort of wish I had any clue as to where the hell she actually lived so I could’ve told mom to drive by.  She’s working though, so no chance of my having visited.

After about two hours of driving about the small suburbs of Boston, Mass, we got back into the city and decided it was time for a late lunch, early dinner, so we went to this seafood place called No Name.  It’s won prizes for best seafood and all that jazz.  Personally, I didn’t think it was great.  It wasn’t bad by any means, and the seafood was quite fresh.  Just… not amazing.  Certainly not the best, though it may well be the best the city has to offer since it’s the only seafood I’ve had.

During dinner, the landlord of the apartment called me and interviewed me a bit, asked how we were planning on doing things.  And then after some consideration, he let me know the apartment was mine if I wanted it, and to talk to Dana to have the paperwork done up and signed.  Excellent!

So we looked around the area a bit.

Now, first things first, Boston is expensive.  Expensive.  A regular studio – no larger than my room in McNutt – will run you $950 a month.  This is twice what most of my friends pay in Bloomington for a full 1 bedroom apartment – with washer/dryer included!  And we’re talking about a shit room barely 12×12, a dirty dinky kitchen and a tiny bathroom.

So of course, my parents were eager to get the hunt under way.  Me, being a lazy bastard, was quite willing to wait till the morrow.  But they insited, so we started walking places.  First off, we hit the school.  It’s very nice – not pretty, per se, in the sense that IU was pretty (IUB is beautiful, so a comparison is automatically unfair; yet I have few other basis for comparison so it’ll have to do).  It looks very nice though, I like the buildings and it’s fairly sizeable seeing as to how it’s in the middle of the fucking city.

We went to the admissions office and they told us there was a realtor that works with the school not too far off in a little corner.  I can’t remember street names right now for shit, so sorry for that (not that most of you would care.)  But we headed off to find these fabled and mythic realtors who would hunt us down an apartment.  On the way there, not a block away from the school, we see some signs of apartments for rent.  We see an open rent office, go in, and talk to this guy.  He’s everything a good salesman should be – confident, knows his product, and can paint a good picture on it and actually sound reassuring.

The product, howeve, was crap.  it had two selling points: it was a first floor apartment and it was a half block from campus.  Actually technically in campus.  $1100 for a bedroom barely the size of the room in McNutt, with adjacent 3×6 kitchen and 3×5 bathroom.  He had a few others, but they were all stys – as in pig thereof.  The places all had that smell unique to unwashed college dormitories.  Personally, I didn’t mind.  I didn’t like it, but I could withstand it, certainly for a year.  My mother, however, had other ideas.

Anyhow, we carried onwards.  We found the realtor that was recommended to us, and gave him our info.  He was a real nice fellow, reminded me a lot of my friend Thom from IU.  Had a similar air, a sort of hang-loose attitude, shaggy hair, jeans and shirt.  A grad student nearby, studying architecture.  He showed us a pair of apartments, one of which I liked because it was big but… well, shall we say, they were – generally speaking – the exact same architecture and feel than the other buildings.

Now, we’d been looking for what?  Four hours or so, having seen 7 apartments.  None of which we liked, and they were all the bloody same.  My mother was in a mood.  I was in a mood because my mother’s mood entailed signing the first apartment we saw that was right by the school and it didn’t seem that we were making any headway.  My father just liked it cause it was a block away from the school.  So as I munched on a sandwich, I would hear my mother blather about how we were wasting our time and we should just sign with the first guy and move along to furnishing.  I was willing to accept it; I didn’t like it.

But we decided to hold off, and visit one  last office we had seen earlier before deciding to get lunch.  We walked the two blocks and went into the little office.  My mother did the majority of the talking this time, and got it across that she was disattisfied with what she’d seen so far and that she was looking for something that wowed her.  Now, I should point out, that it was a very nice woman this time – a young one of mid 20s I’d think – and she, I got the impression, understood perfectly.

Because she did, apparently, connect with my mother immediately.  She took us to a studio – a two room studio no less – a few blocks away.  It was amazing.  It wowed my mother, and definitely surprised me.  It wasn’t too expensive, but it was on a third floor.  My mother was sold, I still needed some convincing, my father didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

Then she took us to the next place.  Another studio, this time a regular one, and it was amazing.  Easily twice as big as what we’d seen from the other realtors.  And at $1150, just 50 more than the first shithole.  And two blocks away from the school, across the street from the Fenway.  I was sold.  It was a first floor, too, so my father was sold.  I wanted it, I told my mother I wanted it.  We went to see a few more places, but they were both one bedrooms at $1400.  They were massive – big enough for two people, easily.  But it was too much space I wasn’t going to fill, so I didn’t need it.   I was sold on the studio.

So, yeah.  First day on the hunt and we’ve already had great luck.  I put the papers in for the studio and everything.  Only down side is the lease doesn’t start till September and I have orientation on the 29th of August (classes don’t start till after the 6th of September though.)  So dad figures we’ll just get a hotel room for a few nights and move in as soon as possible.  So, if everything goes well, I’ll have a kick ass apartment on the Fenway.

Good times, rock and roll, man.