![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Last night I priced out plane tickets for a one-way trip, leaving that night, between Logan and LAX. I couldn't afford them, of course, and even if I could there was no chance I was going to drop everything and go to Los Angeles. But the impulse was there. I was feeling trapped and unhappy, and I wanted to hang out with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thablueguy. Usually when I get the urge to blow this popsicle stand, to just drive towards the horizon and leave it all behind, its an impulse to go back to Chicago, to a city full of gamers and nerds I know and miss, still. But last night I wanted to hang out with Blue, plain and simple. To sit around and drink until playing in traffic sounded like a good idea, and to relish the fact that sometimes its OK to hate the world and everyone in it.
Blue and I met my freshman year of college through the Vampire LARP run at our school. A LARP we would go on to run together, for lack of a more suitable gaming outlet. It wasn't exactly what either of us wanted, but it was the only game in town, so there we were. The game ran every other Saturday night (a travesty we would both later disparage but find ourselves powerless to change) between 5 and 10 PM. Or at least, it aspired to. Northwestern ran on 10-week quarters (12 if you count exams). Fall, Winter, Summer, Spring. So all in all the LARP usually averaged about 3 games per quarter, 3 quarters of the year.
Somehow Blue and I manged to not meet for the first couple games. It wasn't like it was a big LARP and we got lost in it. In its peak during our tenure at that school it never boasted more than thirty players. But he didn't go to the first game and I didn't go to the second, or vice versa, and so it wasn't until the end of my first fall at school that he and I were actually in the same room together.
I liked him immediately.
I had created the Regressive Malkavian character every idiot creates for their first LARP. But I was determined to play him right. So rather than have him carry around a teddy bear and all that nonsense, I dressed him in the loudest Hawaiian shirts in my collection and did my damndest to play him like a petulant young teenager. I like to think I achieved a moderate degree of success. (An aside: the character would go on to develop a fairly severe Oedipal complex, having become the lackey of a male-female pair of the game's relative Elders, a Ventrue as played byoberndorf and an ostensible Brujah as played by rollick. Both of whom I would go on to be friends with as well.) It was fun, and it was irreverent. In a game I think of as typical as Vampire LARPs, where people wore dark suits and trenchcoats, I waltzed around in bright colors and shorts and was loud and unsubtle (both of which admittedly come naturally to me.)
And then I met Blue.
Blue was playing a character named Legardo, aka the Lizard, a Gangrel from a cult of crazy Mexican vampires heavily influenced by Aztec and Mayan culture. A character I would later learn was a pastiche, or perhaps an homage, to things that had come before in his roleplaying career. I was proud of myself for waltzing around in a Hawaiian. Lizard went around half-dressed, barefoot and covered in tribal beads, and usually half-wearing a full-head mask that Blue had made himself. He took irreverence to new levels, pretending (and occasionally not pretending) ignorance about literally all aspects of modern Western culture. All around him were folks trying to play Vampire, to politick and machinate, and he was like a handbreak forcing them to stop for half an hour at a time to explain, for example, credit cards. And why they were better, or at least the same, as paper money. And then of course having to explain why paper money was better than bits of shiny metal or glass beads. It was a laugh riot.
I had been having an unevenly rough Fall at Northwestern. I had banked everything on packing up and flinging myself as far across the country as I could manage, to a school where I didn't know anyone, a city I had never been to before. This was college and it was a chance to start over and reinvent myself. And it wasn't going so well, truth be told. I was enjoying my academics just fine but I hadn't met anyone that seemed like a lasting friend just yet. A quirk of the housing system had thrown me into the frozen north of Northwestern's campus, in a building filled with dour, serious engineering students. And in the absence of new friends and new opportunities I was falling back into some of my old patterns, some of the things I had left high school vowing never to do again.
Blue seemed to be taking to school like a duck to water. He had gotten a better housing assignment than me, right in the middle of south campus. And for all that he was brash and patently offensive, he had personal charisma no one could touch and already had a loud and colorful crowd of people around him. Friends and associates and even hangers-on. And I wanted in. Desperately. And, to my amazement, I got in. We had our share of false starts, of stalled conversations. One incident in particular involving Blue showing up at my dorm room and my prattling on to him for an hour or more will, in my memory at least, live forever in infamy. But something about the friendship gelled pretty early on. I started making the twenty minute walk from my dorm to his with relative frequency, in the increasingly cold temperatures of the Chicago Fall. And by Winter quarter I had gone from uncertain about my future at Northwestern to feeling comfortably at home. So much so that my parents would later make fun of me mercilessly for having undergone some sort of mind-meld with my friends out there, and Blueguy in particular.
When it came time to make housing arrangements for next year Blue and I got rooms in the same building, him in a single and me with a guy called Ben, a friend who I had met through Blue and his circle. And when Ben abruptly dropped us both like a bad habit at the end of sophomore year, Blue and I got an apartment together, in which we would live for the next two years. We did a lot together, had time to grow together and eventually grow apart. Find our rhythm. I dyed his hair Blue when he wanted and let him dye my hair pink for the first time, and several times after that. We introduced each other to music; I would start out hating his and grow to love it, and he would start out hating mine and end up hating it, like he hated everything else. He got me into the Chicago concert scene, got me going down to the Vic and more long before I ever would have done it on my own. We were briefly inseparable, and we made a good pairing, bouncing off one another well, balancing one another's attributes.
I've commented before that I don't think I would ever want to live with Blue again, and that's not precisely true. We're very different people and we can grate on one another in close quarters but I enjoy his company more than near anyone else on earth. And last night, when I was flailing and couldn't find my center, I knew that Blue would be able to help me. He's talking about moving back to the East coast permanently, but I'll believe it when I see it. Blue's a great idea man, and he's always planning big, but he also tends to have ten different plans running in his head at any given time. I'm confident he'll spend some time in the Boston area (his parents live near Lincoln) but after that, we'll see. But I miss him, and I'm looking forward to having him around again. Anger, he is always trying to teach me, is a gift.
thablueguy. Usually when I get the urge to blow this popsicle stand, to just drive towards the horizon and leave it all behind, its an impulse to go back to Chicago, to a city full of gamers and nerds I know and miss, still. But last night I wanted to hang out with Blue, plain and simple. To sit around and drink until playing in traffic sounded like a good idea, and to relish the fact that sometimes its OK to hate the world and everyone in it.Blue and I met my freshman year of college through the Vampire LARP run at our school. A LARP we would go on to run together, for lack of a more suitable gaming outlet. It wasn't exactly what either of us wanted, but it was the only game in town, so there we were. The game ran every other Saturday night (a travesty we would both later disparage but find ourselves powerless to change) between 5 and 10 PM. Or at least, it aspired to. Northwestern ran on 10-week quarters (12 if you count exams). Fall, Winter, Summer, Spring. So all in all the LARP usually averaged about 3 games per quarter, 3 quarters of the year.
Somehow Blue and I manged to not meet for the first couple games. It wasn't like it was a big LARP and we got lost in it. In its peak during our tenure at that school it never boasted more than thirty players. But he didn't go to the first game and I didn't go to the second, or vice versa, and so it wasn't until the end of my first fall at school that he and I were actually in the same room together.
I liked him immediately.
I had created the Regressive Malkavian character every idiot creates for their first LARP. But I was determined to play him right. So rather than have him carry around a teddy bear and all that nonsense, I dressed him in the loudest Hawaiian shirts in my collection and did my damndest to play him like a petulant young teenager. I like to think I achieved a moderate degree of success. (An aside: the character would go on to develop a fairly severe Oedipal complex, having become the lackey of a male-female pair of the game's relative Elders, a Ventrue as played by
oberndorf and an ostensible Brujah as played by rollick. Both of whom I would go on to be friends with as well.) It was fun, and it was irreverent. In a game I think of as typical as Vampire LARPs, where people wore dark suits and trenchcoats, I waltzed around in bright colors and shorts and was loud and unsubtle (both of which admittedly come naturally to me.)And then I met Blue.
Blue was playing a character named Legardo, aka the Lizard, a Gangrel from a cult of crazy Mexican vampires heavily influenced by Aztec and Mayan culture. A character I would later learn was a pastiche, or perhaps an homage, to things that had come before in his roleplaying career. I was proud of myself for waltzing around in a Hawaiian. Lizard went around half-dressed, barefoot and covered in tribal beads, and usually half-wearing a full-head mask that Blue had made himself. He took irreverence to new levels, pretending (and occasionally not pretending) ignorance about literally all aspects of modern Western culture. All around him were folks trying to play Vampire, to politick and machinate, and he was like a handbreak forcing them to stop for half an hour at a time to explain, for example, credit cards. And why they were better, or at least the same, as paper money. And then of course having to explain why paper money was better than bits of shiny metal or glass beads. It was a laugh riot.
I had been having an unevenly rough Fall at Northwestern. I had banked everything on packing up and flinging myself as far across the country as I could manage, to a school where I didn't know anyone, a city I had never been to before. This was college and it was a chance to start over and reinvent myself. And it wasn't going so well, truth be told. I was enjoying my academics just fine but I hadn't met anyone that seemed like a lasting friend just yet. A quirk of the housing system had thrown me into the frozen north of Northwestern's campus, in a building filled with dour, serious engineering students. And in the absence of new friends and new opportunities I was falling back into some of my old patterns, some of the things I had left high school vowing never to do again.
Blue seemed to be taking to school like a duck to water. He had gotten a better housing assignment than me, right in the middle of south campus. And for all that he was brash and patently offensive, he had personal charisma no one could touch and already had a loud and colorful crowd of people around him. Friends and associates and even hangers-on. And I wanted in. Desperately. And, to my amazement, I got in. We had our share of false starts, of stalled conversations. One incident in particular involving Blue showing up at my dorm room and my prattling on to him for an hour or more will, in my memory at least, live forever in infamy. But something about the friendship gelled pretty early on. I started making the twenty minute walk from my dorm to his with relative frequency, in the increasingly cold temperatures of the Chicago Fall. And by Winter quarter I had gone from uncertain about my future at Northwestern to feeling comfortably at home. So much so that my parents would later make fun of me mercilessly for having undergone some sort of mind-meld with my friends out there, and Blueguy in particular.
When it came time to make housing arrangements for next year Blue and I got rooms in the same building, him in a single and me with a guy called Ben, a friend who I had met through Blue and his circle. And when Ben abruptly dropped us both like a bad habit at the end of sophomore year, Blue and I got an apartment together, in which we would live for the next two years. We did a lot together, had time to grow together and eventually grow apart. Find our rhythm. I dyed his hair Blue when he wanted and let him dye my hair pink for the first time, and several times after that. We introduced each other to music; I would start out hating his and grow to love it, and he would start out hating mine and end up hating it, like he hated everything else. He got me into the Chicago concert scene, got me going down to the Vic and more long before I ever would have done it on my own. We were briefly inseparable, and we made a good pairing, bouncing off one another well, balancing one another's attributes.
I've commented before that I don't think I would ever want to live with Blue again, and that's not precisely true. We're very different people and we can grate on one another in close quarters but I enjoy his company more than near anyone else on earth. And last night, when I was flailing and couldn't find my center, I knew that Blue would be able to help me. He's talking about moving back to the East coast permanently, but I'll believe it when I see it. Blue's a great idea man, and he's always planning big, but he also tends to have ten different plans running in his head at any given time. I'm confident he'll spend some time in the Boston area (his parents live near Lincoln) but after that, we'll see. But I miss him, and I'm looking forward to having him around again. Anger, he is always trying to teach me, is a gift.
