Pulling together

My mind is first starting to calm down.

I'll get the geeky shit out of the way first. In four hours, our guild got from scratch to General Vezax down in a 10 man raid. That's pretty damn cool. There's something to be said for accomplishing something that is done as a team. So it's a game. There's still a goodly amount of effort that goes into that.

Nevertheless, that probably has the least impact on how I'm feeling. Today I managed to crank out about a page and a half of a short story. I'm at something of an impasse with regard to how I want to develop the story further, but I'll actually give credit (credit, and not blame, mind) for that to Rachel. Not the other Rachel. (Heh?!)

Just something that came up in a bit of chat. Maybe it was meaningless to her (which from my own typical viewpoint would be the case for most people I talk to) it was a comment that resonated with me. I won't go into more detail, because I hate dropping lines directly from chat and I don't want to spoil the story either, but suffice it to say that I'll probably write three different versions of the story, and I'll go with the one that turns out the best. Because really, the characters in this story, it's up to them where the story goes. And what direction they choose to go in.

Some textiles just refuse to be woven in a particular way. For this particularly story I chose to develop characters that can be woven into many different fabrics of life. Hey, there's something to be said for flexibility. (I'm going to ramble. A fucking lot. The important shit has been said, so you can stop reading now and not miss a thing.) Especially if you like gymnasts. I don't. But this guy I knew in the 3rd grade. He did. Can't remember her name, just that she was in the 4th grade. The things he talked about doing to her .... lord. Illegal at my age to talk about a girl like that.

Disgusting or disturbing jokes aside though, it was an age at which that subject, sex, was at once pervasive and elusive. The genetic data is there, providing that instinctual drive toward the opposite sex, if you happen to fall into that 90%, but the blueprints stop there. There was, for me at least, a definite sort of mystique about girls for a while, even as adolescence and puberty cruelly twisted emotions awry with hormones. To ignore, or worse, to quarrel with a girl because attraction was beyond rational never gave good results. Not then, not now.

Eventually, one grows out of that phase. Nevertheless, there are certain qualities of that period of life as well that carry over into later stages of life and become an indelible characteristic of one's personality. And I think that perhaps I know a lot of people for which that is especially true, because there's a fear, maybe a reverence, but more than anything a very visceral fear of speaking to women. Also a very human response to rejection. And combined this makes for ultimately a complete lack of desire to reach out.

Frankly, I forgot what the fuck I originally wanted to say. But recently I've had, or given myself, the opportunity to taste that fear. It is on one hand not an especially positive experience with which to deal. I might need something like that more often though to give me some energy, to pump some adrenaline through my system. Active that fight or flight mechanism. It might very well be better to live with a nervous invigoration than a tired complacence.

...

This was pretty damn long.