Personal Historic B.S.

—> Why Am I Doing This ? <—

— An ex Girl-Friend Tried to show me the on-line Role – Playing Text Game – “GemStone” { Not sure exacty whether that was a one word title – or how it might have been spelled – Ya gotta figure this was circa 1988-ish and the game was hosted on GEnie – General Electric’s foray into the on line world before “AOL” was “Apple On Line” – }

— She had me watch over her shoulder as she connected ( @ $6.00 an hour in non-prime time – $18.00 an hour [ U$ ] between 8 am and 6 pm )

— She had a newbie half elf character and she wanted to show me this text game she was delighted with. As soon as she logged in, clicked on her character and told her character to get into the on-line game world – she didn’t finish explaining what Fantasy races were available when an idiot player’s Troll saw that her character was a newbie and killed her with two punches. – She gasped and said, “They’re not supposed to do that!”

— And I kind of rolled my eyes and thought, “Gimme a break – Ya wanna pay six bux an hour to have the character you spent so much time and energy and creative thought – and, in here case Love – into ‘Rolling’ and outfitting and giving a clever one text line personal description to – So that some ice hole can break the rules of the game and kill you ten seconds after you log into the world?”

— Maybe a year later – She’d moved closer to Syracuse where she was a grad student in their Creative Writing Department  {She was, and is, an amazing writer – I never saw anybody else sit down and write an outline for a story line, then think for a minute or two and begin serious writing – and bring her characters and plot to life – and do it so well – I still consider her a friend – even if she’s married and living on the other side of this continent – and we haven’t had any kind of communication – even email – in at least 5 years – }  — Okay so about a year later, I think – I was driving up to Syracuse to see her on weekends and talking on the phone sometimes during the week – she told me about a new on-line text game that she was even more excited about – explained that they had a ‘training grounds’ where new characters could hang out, learn the ropes and kill wimpy NPCs until they made it to level five skills, at which time they could migrate into the larger world of that game – and she told me she’d been able to ‘roll’ a character that couldn’t be attacked by other player’s characters – a Bard – who couldn’t sing anything yet as that hadn’t been implemented, but he could sit in a bar with her friends and recite raunchy limericks about other characters they knew and loved or hated, and she thought at that time a street urchin might have looked more like something you don’t want to step on in shallow water on a tropical island – or at least that’s what is sounded like as she read me a street urchin’s description – This new game was “Dragons Gate” and I still wasn’t all that impressed.

— I came down with a weird case of pneumonia that was complicated by a weird allergy I discovered I had to something in Formula 44 cough medicine – I couldn’t sleep at all for over two weeks. I spent a lot of time lying in bed staring into the darkness above me – not being able to feel the loving nature of the universe I was used to feeling – And when I began to hallucinate something in the air above me, slowly rotating clock-wise – looking like a UFO with a blue and white patterned exterior – something like a dinner plate with a subdued scene like something stolen from Currier & Ives … I figured it was time to get up and drive to the emergency room and find out what the bleep was happening to me. A young intern or resident – at like 3 am – told me my electrolytes were squirrely and when he learned that a doctor had told me to keep taking cough medicine beyond the time limit suggested on the labels – and when I couldn’t get the Robitussin I’d never had any problem with – So I got the Formula 44 and after two weeks taking that, I couldn’t sleep and two weeks after I stopped being able to sleep I was hallucinating – he said something like, “Oh, Jesus – you shouldn’t be driving at all -” I found somebody to cover me at work and under doctor’s orders stopped taking the cough medicine and chilled – staring at the ceiling a drinking two quarts of gatorade a day to get my electrolytes back up to snuff.

— And then I got a call from my mother, my father was in the hospital – paralyzed due to a compression fracture that was a result of taking steroids in order to breathe and not being able to stop every now and then to let his body get over the toxic side effects of the steroids – the steroid ate his calcium and weakened his bones and the used to be six foot two, three hundred pound mean drunk was a basket case. He needed a spinal fusion operation. A couple days later I got another call from mom, my father was in tears and pleaded with her to ask me to come back home to help her take care of him –

— I also got a call from one of the bosses at work, the guy who I’d gotten to cover me while I was sick couldn’t handle my job and walked off. They had two other guys and a supervisor covering my job and if I wasn’t back in two days I was fired. — I went back to work – and began to plot my escape – I learned that the company I worked for was double charging their sub-contractors and cheating everybody and they still weren’t paying me enough to live on – even after they realized it took two regular employees and a supervisor to cover me when I had pneumonia – So it took me almost a month to not spend enough money to rent a truck and load it with all my junk and drive back home – had another guy promise to cover me at work and told the bosses I had a family emergency and had to drive to th next state and take care of my paralyzed father for a couple weeks – didn’t know where I’d be staying and I would be in touch with them.

— This second guy I got to cover me at work didn’t last a full week – but they didn’t know how to get in touch with me and after two weeks I called one of my friends back in the finger lakes country and he laughed and said, “Hey – they fired you and now they have two supervisors trying to cover your job and they’ve advertised for two replacements.”

— In the mean time – My father had had his operation at the VA Hospital and had to wear a Frankenstein metal halo for a while and when that came off he was really upset that he couldn’t just get up and walk like he used to – and he uncharacteristically thanked me profusely for coming back home to help him out. This was after his nurses and dietitians had kept him on a salt free diet after he should have been allowed to go back to eating ‘more normal’ food – That was his last straw for a while and he went against doctors’ orders and signed himself out – then discovered that he had so much trouble just getting out of bed and getting a few feet away to a commode he got from somewhere – that he admitted he had to get back to the hospital and had to talk to a psychiatrist before they re-admitted him. He surprised me one night, when out of the blue, he said, “Wow – that depression shit really is something…” { This is a guy who was so healthy as a kid he accused us of faking it when we had the measles. } —> He was, however still prone to pulmonary distress – especially at night and often needed to be rushed to to the VA Hospital at any hour, day or night where it usually took more than a a week to calm him down and get his medications right. I tried for several months to find some kind of work I could do that would allow me to have enough free time to get my father to the emergency room, three towns away – and get my mother there to visit him during visiting hours – and basically, I had to become one of the USA’s vast network of unpaid home health aides.

— When things settled down, my then off and on GF came to Connecticut for a weekend visit to get away from impending cabin fever up near Syracuse. And while she there, she had her pacifist Bard take part in an Elder-Run Scenario in which one of her game friend’s character gave birth in a farmer’s field – and – because they hadn’t been able to get their ‘companion’ program to work yet – some evil dark thing with wings cast a darkness spell on everybody who couldn’t see a bluddy thing and when he spell lifted the new mother was gone and so was her baby. They began to search all around in every space the game had, which was a lot of territory. And somebody with ESP found the new mother, half dead, in an alley somewhere and everybody rushed there. The story line went: The dark winged evil thing kidnapped the baby and when the mother fought to try to keep her son – it beat her close to death, she tried to follow the thing as it flew away anyway – I watched my friend go through this with her on line friends – she was using my wimpy Apple IIe with its green letters on its black screen because it was out of the question for her to bring he Mac two hundred and fifty some miles and set it up and use that on my dial up modem.

— This was fascinating. I was hooked.

— About a month later – she asked me to house sit and cat sit while her parents treated her to a couple weeks in Hawaii. Before she left she rolled up a character for me to play with – a catlike humanoid that we named “Purrrrcival” whose ‘stats’ made it a superb thief – even if the cat-like race frowned on its people becoming thieves –  She had automatic sign-in routines on her Mac – and the black printing on the white screen wasn’t my favorite way to look at a computer, but she said I could play that character while she was on vacation. She asked me to only play that character for an hour or less and only in non-prime time – And we found out that thieves could not begin their on-line in-game lives in the training grounds – so I was on my own – and barely survived – And when she came back she paid me enough to get my own GEnie Account back up and running and I rolled my own “Purrrcival” spelled slightly differently – because no two characters could have the same name. And this time, he’d switched occupations and become a more respectable fighting cleric dedicated to the goddess of peace, love and protecting the weak and innocent.

— I also rolled up a Dragon character and with three character slots – and while characters are training to upgrade their skills etc, they are unavailable for 24 hours at a time and I used the third slot to roll up and try out several other characters from various in game races.

— Then, not being able to get a job that allowed me to be there whenever my father needed me – I ran out of money and stopped playing that game for a while.

— And I began to program a wimpy game that my nephews could enjoy – programmed in AppleSoft Basic with a 32 KB program limit. the kids loved it.