The Pot Calling the Kettle

An article by Don Quixote    5 Comments

So I get this IM from Flammer “Hey buddy, your blogging has been light this week…”. To which I responded “Bite me.” Good ol’ Tom, always good for a good, ‘bite me’ response. In any case, here’s today’s news:

I just finished reading, “The Thousand Orcs” by R.A. Salvatore. I’ve been reading quite a lot from him lately. A few months ago, I found a copy of the Icewind Dale Trilogy at a used book store and I picked it up. I’ve known of R.A. Salvatore for years as my buddy Scotty Johnson is a huge fan. But as is common place for me, I’m not one to jump on the band wagon right away (See my other writings about Settlers of Catan) and normally end up kicking myself later for it.

I had just finished reading the last in a series by David Farland as well as the most recent book by Terry Brooks and I was looking for something new. Nathan Prong had tried to get me to read something by Tad Williams, but I got a chapter or two into and I hated it, so this seemed like a good option. Needless to say I was hooked. The books are basically a collection of stories about a group of friends as told by a Dark Elf (long story, some day if you want the whole of fantasy fiction explained I’ll be happy to, but for now, just go with it) Drizzt Do’Urden. The bulk of it is your typical fantasy novel filled with swords and adventures, failures and success, but the part that really sold me were the journal entries recorded by Drizzt. See Drizzt is an outsider. He is hated by almost everyone around him because of his heritage (i.e being a Dark Elf). As a race, Dark Elves are just plain evil. They love chaos just for the sake of chaos and your usual evil nasty stuff. For some odd reason Drizzt is different and has made his way to the surface to escape his people.

His journal entries are generally diatribes on mankind, how we think, feel and function. What makes man and men so different from the other races. In the end its our humanity that does. All that has little importance to where I am going I suppose as in the end all of that makes me think of Scotty.

I don’t know that you could say that I have a lot of friends. I have a lot of people I know, and people who know me or at least know of me. But I would put Scotty into the catagory of “friend”. I cannot recall that Scotty and I have ever had deep meaningful discussions about life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. I went to college with him, we’ve played fantasy football together for 6 years, we share similar interests and when we get the chance we can hang out. Scotty was the guy on campus who had the coolest computer back in the day. He had speakers and he had just signed up for this cool thing called, “Prodigy”.

Yeah Prodigy had this cool thing called “eMail”. I remember the day Scotty tried to explain it to me. My first concept was that e-mail worked like this: You’d type a letter on your computer and then send it. Someone would then print off your letter and mail it for you, that way you could send it to anyone. I think Jamie Wetzel was the first one to show me the internet through an MSU account that worked on UNIX. From there I went to Shadowlands (a BBS that we ran in college thanks to the help of Bob Saxton’s wiring in the dorms). There was also the classic L.O.R.D. that we all used to play. Here I am today a computer demi-god because of the spark from some of my friends. As my mind wander’s down the road of these memories I recall our annual Warlords day were I burned down Scotty’s capitol city.

I miss a lot of things about those days. A year or so ago I caught off my last outside contact with the old days when I dropped out of the Mid-West Fantasy Football league (3 time champ or something like that) because I was afraid of how people would react to everything that has gone down the past few weeks.

When I called to tell Scotty about things with Kara, his basic response was, “Ah bummer, I’m sorry to hear that.” And without missing a beat, we were onto Spiderman 2 and comic books, Scotty was still Scotty.

I miss my friends. I miss the fellowship and learning new things. I miss the laughter and the tears. I miss knowing that there are folks who genuinely care for you, good or bad. As I reconnect to things of the past, I am encouraged to find that many of those folks are still there, wondering where I’ve been all this time and wondering why I’ve taken so long to find my way back.

The road ahead is long, but I am confident that I do not walk it alone.