On Thursday morning I recieved a call at 6:40 AM from Chris Steinwinder, longtime nemesis and arch-rival in the field of GMing. Both Steinwinder and myself are friends of Sterling Dubbert, my roommate. Our longstanding differences were set aside when he told me that my roommate, friend, and partner-in-crime had passed away.

The doctors were able to drain the infections from his brain and identify them as what they were. He was slowly winning the battle against the infections, thanks to loads of antibiotics. However, Sterling has always hated hospitals, and continually fought against the doctors, nurses, and etc. This meant that the majority of his time conscious once he was revived from his coma was spent under heavy sedation.

My friends were able to visit him in Las Vegas, an opportunity I missed when I made a choice. Either get myself a job (I had an interview) or go say goodbye to my friend. I wonder if I made the wrong choice, but given what I had committed to, I think it would be unforgivable for me to both miss out on seeing him in person one final time, and to give up on a job.

Sterling's life is over, but mine is not. It's a struggle, but I can set aside the pain of loss of one of my best friends long enough to try and live. I tell myself it's what he'd have wanted, without knowing if it's true.

I spoke with my mother a lot over the last few days, and we spend time talking about a lot of things, much of it Sterling. He went to the city (San Francisco) a few times with my mother, usually to the Vapor Room, which is where we normally bought our medicine. I wasn't with him, and when he was alone with my parents, he told them things he'd never shared with me. My mom told me that Sterling said he thought I had a lot of potential, and if I could just focus, and stop being so hard on myself, I'd be a much better person.

So I'm trying to be that person, someone a little less self-absorbed, a little more externally aware, and I'm going to try and follow his example.

Born without a pulmonary (sp?) artery, he was supposed to die at the age of five. He made it two and a half weeks past his 24th birthday, showing us all that the best way to stick it to the man is to live well, and much longer than the man thinks you can manage. It was ultimately his heart that failed, but nineteen years on the system is something to be respected.

His girlfriend flew in from Australia to be with him while he was thought to be recovering ... he died shortly after she boarded the plane, so she wasn't aware of the situation until he landed. I'm awkward with his family's requests to manage his things ... but they're his family, so if they want his credit cards and jewelry, who I am to say otherwise?

I spent the majority of the last few days in a daze, trying to get the job I'm working at getting (I start on Monday), and preparing myself for the uncomfortable job of cleaning up Sterling's room. All of his clothes are now packed, and his possesions are sorted out. Keepsakes and momentoes have been picked out for close friends, and everything else is ready to be put away.

Tomorrow, we go to Davenport, and we have a bonfire at sunset to remember him. I need to write a eulogy. Ah ... I always wondered how I would cope with the loss of a dear friend, or a family member. And I suppose I'm surviving. I've only broken down once, though I think I'm close to a second time.

But I have to remember. It's not goodbye. There is no farewell.

Sterling, this one's for you. I won't wish that you'd rest in peace, because I know you'd never rest if you had a choice otherwise.

Even if next time is further away than I can presently concieve.... Good luck, Sterling.

What a month. Unemployed, scrambling to look for work. -_-

Tired. Some positives, but all abstract momentary amusement, nothing concrete enough to build a life off of.

My roommate went to Las Vegas to visit with his family. He'd been complaining about headaches (a migraine, really) all week, and when he got to Vegas, he went to the hospital there. He's currently in an induced coma as of last night (Sunday). As it turns out, they discovered a tumor in his brain.

I don't know much more than that right now, and they need a week to find out if it's malignant or benign. When his parents called to talk to me, they asked if the rent was paid. I told them Sterling (the roommate in question) had told me it was.

An hour later, after I'd explained to the gaming group we're part of what had happened (I also need to get in touch with Sterling's girlfriend in Australia and let her know -_-), I got served a pay-or-move-out notice.

So I've got until tomorrow to come up with $1.3k.

Last night, being the responsible person that I was, I got Peter and David together and we played a drinking game. Whenever we saw a glass, we'd drink from it.

I'm not quite sure how the evening ended. It seemed to go well enough. The morning's hangover was unwelcome, but deserved. Then I spent some time talking to my mother at her house.

After I got home, I checked with the landlord to see if there'd been some kind of miscommunication about the rent.

There hasn't.

Still trying to get a job, but....

...now what?

Busy week. Wednesday (last week; the 22nd), I lost my job. I didn't actually lose it, though.

I quit. Essentially, weeks and months of pressure and stagnation took their toll. I snapped. I walked.

Thursday, I tried to calm down and recenter myself. Friday, I began cleaning, certain I'd be ready to look for work on Monday. But my sleep schedule had been off, due to stress, heat, etc. So I was up until 7:00 AM on Friday dusting things and wondering if I could rig the vaccuum cleaner to run silently (I was manic).

I'm woken up sometime around 9:00 AM by my mom calling my cell-phone, explaining to me that something bad is happening to my brother Jason, and she needs me to get a truck to move his things out of his place before anything gets worse. I'm still half-asleep, so I tell her I'll have what she needs in two hours, and warm-boot my brain into crisis mode (which, oddly, I seem to handle well, generally).

After a few phone calls, I arrange transportation, a driver, and one extra warm body to help move things. I call my mom to let her know what's going on, and she cries that my brother was arrested.

Damnit.

My parents are a handful of hours away from their vacation, and now this crisis blows up in their faces. Being unemployed, and having no other obligations, I make it to my mom's place and offer to house-sit for them, and take over handling my brother. After they leave money for his bail (ouch!), they leave, and I promise to give them updates as they come to me.

I spend most of the night waiting for a call from my brother to say he's completed booking, and needs out. He calls at around 4:00 AM, tells me he's been booked, and his bail has been set at 25,000$.

As it turns out, the way this works is that you pay a bail, and if you show up to your court-date, your bail is returned to you. I didn't happen to have 25k lying around, though. The way a bail-bondsman does things for you, is he takes 10% of the bail, and keeps it for himself. You don't get it back when you show up to court, though. This is probably old news to most people, but it was the first time anyone in our family ended up in jail (I've been put in the psych ward, though).

I explained to him that my parents already paid a bail-bond place the maximum possible bail he'd have set, and we just needed it to finish processing. This ended up taking until 5:00 PM on Saturday. He was in jail for over 24 hours.

Still, I managed to get one of my friends to pick him up, and while waiting for him to arrive, I get a call from my brother's ex's father, trying to get a hold of my mother. I don't identify myself when I answer the phone (as a rule), or I lie about who I am (in a humorously obvious fashion: "Thank you for calling Shinji's Wholesale Ninja!" or "You have reached Abduhl's Discount House of Worship". In this instance, since it wasn't MY home, I just said, "Hello?"). So Dude doesn't know he's talking to family.

The reason for this is that my mom wanted to talk to my brother's ex's mother, but asked the police first if this would be okay. They said, "No, this could be seen as an attempt to intimidate the witness". And yet, he called us. I told him that the people who he was looking for weren't around, and to try back on Wednesday (they'd be back on Sunday, but much to my surprise, I can not only lie easily, but apparently quite well). Still, I took down his message, which was pretty much, "We want to make sure that Avalon's not around any time Jason comes over to pick up his stuff."

Whatever.

Next call is from Kaiser, trying to get ahold of the Harper side of the family, the ones who are responsible for my grandmother's health; she took a bad fall down the stairs. No status update on her health because we're not Harpers, don't have the insurance information, and Anita Harper, the one who does ... ran away from the stress in her life.

I stand in the middle of this, watching my family literally crumble around me for a few minutes. Time for a margarita.

Good times.

My brother gets back to the house, we have a discussion about how Mom says he's to handle his affairs, and explanation of just how much debt he's in to Mom, and an offer to get some pizza. Mmm. Pizza.

Things start to calm down around then, and I realize that I'm running on about 6 hours of sleep across the last 72. Most of the last 24 hours has been fueled by adrenaline.

I go home. I crash. I wake up on Monday, and another crisis; my brother's things need to be out of his apartment that day. Using my madly leet arrangement skills, I aquire what U-Haul will not give me. A vehicle.

We move all my brother's stuff within the alloted hour (even though this involves me and my brother walking a quarter mile with a book-case).

I'm kinda tired, still. It's good to be able to try and help, but I'm so numb and ... drained.

Legacy of Destruction

I have wrought my work upon the world. I slaved for months trying to assemble something that my mind could use as a plan; I don't think in a linear manner. This often shows, but often works; usually when I plan a game for my players I plan it very loosely, and not very far ahead. I want my players to be able to make choices and do what they want, so I come up with things I expect they would do, and then try and plan for things they might do, and then, things that go wrong.

A lot of my GMing style is really making it up as it goes along.

But I finally sat down one day, in 2003, and started putting together a game -- my vengeance against Mr. Steinwinder for the E-Tourney, I suppose. It failed, in the original attempt, because one of my players got sent to jail for six months.

Some months later, after I'd fleshed out possibilities, and well, things I hoped were NEAT in my game to share with my friends, I tried again, and it worked. Now, this was a rare accomplishment for me; according to everything I was hearing, I was finally running a game well, and people were having fun with it. More importantly, the system was two-fold -- it had a technical underpinning beneath it that made it cool.

Essentially, I game up with a mechanic to make HERO even more complex, and that basically allowed me to offer my players what was effectively beyond cosmic levels of power, forced through merely heroic VPPs. And it seemed that it was working, too!

Then somehow (it's way complex, and makes my mind hurt just thinking about how), my math on my character sheets just got ... bad. Things stopped adding up, and then the game I invested so heavily in was basically at a point where I could let it die for a week or so, laboriously go through my ancient mIRC logs, and try and rebuild the characters, 1 CP at a time. One cell at a time. One line of mIRC at a time.

And I'd been trying that for nearly a week already. Some conversations weren't mIRC, they were through e-mail I no longer have access to, or AIM conversations which weren't logged at all.

And then, that's just chargen, not counting various tweaks I allowed to fine- tune characters as my players got familiar with the system.

So I could either (since the game was already struggling, and had just gone through several months of hiatus due to scheduling difficulties) kill it off and try to rebuild again. Or just abandon the mechanical side of the game and turn it into a freeform, which makes my attempt at running a HERO game online a failure.

So Steinwinder wins.

Note to self: Primary (immediate) goal is the aquisition of time for meditation without actually distorting time (or the perception thereof (immediately)) to achieve it.

I have a plan.