In which our intrepid hero tells a few home truths.
One thing that I don't often do on my blog is write about myself. I'll opine until the proverbial cows come home, but there's not much about me as a person. So, it's time I drew aside the curtain, for but a brief moment...
I'm not doing this for pity, nor really to bitch; this is for those friends out there who've wondered exactly where my head's been, these couple of years past. Some outstanding misconceptions seem to have popped up over this period, and I should probably do something to clear them up.
There are Questions that Just Have to be Answered: I haven't been a member of the Liberal Party for nearly three years; I haven't worked in politics for nearly two; and (aside from one exception, where a couple of friends ran as independents for their local council) haven't worked on a campaign for years, either. There are good reasons for this, I feel.
First amongst them are the Mongolian clusterfucks known as the parliamentary parties, both state and federal. A number of MPs are intelligent, realistic, humane and generally nice people; sadly, they're exceptions to the rule, held under by a party structure that's top-heavy with clueless fuckwits, with little understanding of the voting public. As a consequence, the parliamentary parties fail not only as alternative governments, but also as opposition.
I'm sick of pouring my time, effort and money into campaigns to vote unelectable tools into office, and I'm sick of copping abuse at the polling booth, especially when I agree with a lot of the very reasonable things that some of the Party's detractors have to say.
The second reason I choose not to re-involve myself is because, by the time I left, there was no longer any mechanism for rank-and-file members to contribute to policy, at least in the NSW Division. None. Nadda. Zip. Zero. At best, a handful of members might get themselves elected to an ad hoc platform or policy committee which Liberal MPs aren't bound in any way to acknowledge, let alone implement policy from the party grassroots.
Thirdly, ever since ousted MP Peter King ran against Malcom Turnbull at the 2004 federal election, and members of my own branch voiced their concerns about branch stacking to the ABC in 2006, the NSW State Executive have enacted witch-hunts against and expelled party members who speak out to the media, or who merely fail to hand out how-to-votes for the Party on polling day.
Fourthly, the organisational party is dominated by an unholy mishmash of ultraconservative Traditionalist Catholics, adherents of Pentecostal prosperity theology, obnoxious neoconservatives, unabashed fascists, Communist-obsessed relics of Cold-War-era Central Europe (the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago, guys!) and assorted, fanatical personality cultists; collectively, they put pay to the worst stereotypes and even satire of conservative politics.
Incidentally—and I know some people may be shocked by this revelation—Malcolm Turnbull is not the fucking messiah. Deal with it.
Milling about in the gaps between these groups are a diminishing number of confused and worried actual conservatives, a smaller number of utterly unorganised and even more worried actual liberals, and a mostly stable collection of soulless hypocrites who worry only about their own preselections.
This sad reality is related to my fifth reason for not rejoining: the NSW Moderate (ie, centrist and politically Leftmost) faction, of which I was nominally a member, is essentially moribund.
The rot began years ago, long before the Lunar Right took control, in the halcyon days of a Moderate-dominated regime lasting nearly a quarter of a century. The reasons for this are too many to go into here, but let's just say that the Moderates ain't taking control back any time soon. And in the unlikely event that they actually do, there's little to suggest that things might improve.
Lastly, I'm sick of the incessant branch stacking, from Left and from Right. If I wanted to limit my contribution to public policy to a name, an address and a contact number, then I'd sell my details to a database marketing company.
So, no, I don't want to sign up again. Quit asking me.
The Drugs Don't Like Me Either: Shortly after my grandmother died, my doctor prescribed me a course of antidepressants.
Which was all well and good, except that I didn't want antidepressants—I wanted advice on treating anxiety. Eighteen years of violent abuse at the hands of an alcoholic schizophrenic, followed by a litany of dysfunctional family crap and a succession of horrific, exploitative work environments left me with an anxiety disorder and seriously shot nerves.
Now, fluvoxamine, venlafaxine and duloxetine might work great for some people, but they left me unable to concentrate or even stay awake for more than four hours a day. When I told my (then-)doctor about this, and the 60-kilogram weight gain, and the hallucinations, and the constant migraines and odd behaviour and other side effects, she kindly doubled my prescription.
After eighteen months of hell, I finally went cold turkey. Tellingly, it was easier to give up cigarettes cold—at least I didn't experience hallucinations or start literally going out of my mind when I butted out for good.
My short-term memory is still quite poor, the excess pounds are finally starting to shed and I'm more irritable than I used to be, but I'm mostly back to normal. I still don't remember a lot of that eighteen months, though; to give an example, I keep forgetting that Anna Nicole Smith is dead.
Luckily, the issue doesn't come up very often.
Keep Walking—I Mean It: Thanks to body mass and a quirk of genetics, my tolerance for alcohol nears legendary proportions, despite my modest and diminishing consumption. One of the few benefits of this—I use the term advisedly—is that I learnt pretty quickly that alcohol doesn't make you funnier, wiser, tougher, more personable or attractive. I discovered this mostly through suffering, in relative sobriety, the antics of friends with economy-model livers.
My cats are my children, and I take their welfare extremely seriously. One of them has a chronic anxiety issue, and another is depressed, because the last two flatmates that we've had have been belligerent fuckwits after a couple of drinks.
And they seem to need those drinks.
Whilst on an alcohol- (and possibly speed-) fuelled binge, the first poured Zippo fuel over his arm and set it alight, because he thought it would be funny; he also locked one of my cats in the fridge and spread about two weeks worth of Mim's and my food across the kitchen floor. I've mentioned this much previously. But then, there was the ordeal with the used condom...
He was last seen being bundled into a hostel room two suburbs away.
Time for a bit of cat psychology. If you put food down in front of a cat, and then walk away, the cat will assume that the food is for them. It's how you feed cats. A cat understands this, even though its brain is only about the size of a golf ball.
If you put dinner on the table, and wander off in an intoxicated haze, then as far as the cat's concerned, your dinner's fair game. If you then, some ten to fifteen minutes later, stumble back into the room and start screaming at and/or abusing the poor animal, then the cat won't react very well—as far as the cat's concerned, you're being a cunt, and you deserve whatever you get.
Our current flatmate hasn't worked this out yet, which suggests things about his brain's remaining functional volume...
At one stage, he locked one of our cats in the bathroom overnight, without food or water. Maybe this was an accident, or an alcohol-mediated lapse in judgement—we don't know—but it happened to the cat with whom he's had the greatest antagonism; Mim K/W and I wonder what else might've been going on when we weren't around.
We aren't yet in a financial position to remedy these problems permanently—although we're working on it—so our cats have taken up the slack: six vengeful, little demons are engaged in guerrilla warfare against the troglodytic lush who grudgingly shares their home. They're not happy with his continued presence, and so, my house has become a frigging combat zone.
With any luck, it'll end up like The Cats of Ulthar, only with no cats dying.
The upshot of all this is that now, my cats are stressed, and the smell of alcohol unduly distresses my poor babies even more. Should I so much as partake of a stubby or a glass of wine, then I can expect my cats to cower under furniture for the rest of the night. Whilst they know that I won't hurt them, they're not taking any chances.
My message to alcoholics everywhere: Fuck you, and the inebriated horse you rode in on. Between my mother, flatmates and various ex-friends, I've had enough of you ruining my life.
Roll on the GM Burnout Table: For a guy who lists roleplaying as one of his favourite activities, and (occasionally) writes blog articles about it, I actually don't get too much gaming done. It sucks, and I wish I did more.
Part of the problem, recently, was the pharmaceutically-induced malaise I laboured under for eighteen months. This made it especially difficult to do anything creative; I also had trouble reading more than a couple of pages a day, and even then, none of it stuck in my head.
But the other reason has plagued me almost since I started gaming, some 23½ years ago.
Excluding conventions, I've played under a total of seven GMs, mostly in campaigns that lasted for less than a year. But let's say (for the sake of convenience) that each of these campaigns were a year long; it's a nice, round number. Let's also say that I've had about 2½ years downtime.
This means that for two-thirds of my gaming life, I've been the GM. I ran the games; I did the heavy lifting crafting campaigns, and when I didn't, I had to read voluminous tomes in order to run pre-published ones; I was the one stuck at home, trying to build enjoyable player experiences, whilst my players were out living their lives; I hosted and often catered the games, rarely asking for much in return.
And things would go well for a while, but inevitably, scheduling issues would arise, or players would disappear off the face of the planet, or players with serious social deficits would decide to play politics and break gaming groups up for their own perverse amusement.
At some point, I realised that I was putting a lot more into games than I was getting out. Sure, my players enjoyed the games I ran, but all they really had to do was turn up and play. They still tell me how much they miss gaming, and ask when we're going to play next.
At this stage, my answer is this: whenever you get off your butts and do something—one of you can GM for a change.
Don't get me wrong—I love GMing—but I'm sick of doing all the work. I'm sick of having to structure my life around my players', and being greeted with confusion and outrage whenever I dare complain. I'm sick of having my dreams quashed so you guys can play out yours. Cut me some fucking slack.
*sigh*
So, that's about it. There are some major events I haven't covered here, either because they're still too painful to discuss, or because it'll cause me too much grief if I bring certain things to light right now. I'll get around to them eventually.
I'm sorry if I've offended anyone, but that's the price of honesty. As I said, I didn't mean to bitch, but some things just needed clearing up. If it helps, I'll try not to be quite so forthright in future—well, until next year some time, anyway.
Currently reading:- Robert J Schwalb et al.—Children of the Horned Rat
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On the other hand, the con itself is smaller, and whereas it boasted names like Tracy and Laura Hickman, Robin Laws and Peter Adkison last year (the latter pictured at right with Beave), Robert Picardo tops the bill in 2009 (who, incidentally, I still think of as "the cowboy guy" from Innerspace—now, I'm showing my age).
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