MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)

dispatches from nowhere

published: 10-12-2017

The last few weeks have been an absolute mess, and I suppose I owe an explanation.

My basement flooded a week and a half ago. The sky cried itself to sleep and made the sump pump in the lowest level of my house fail, causing unknown structural damage and destroying a great deal of personal possessions. Lots of mementos of my childhood are just gone. All the video game systems in my house either have their power cords destroyed, their controllers either outright broken or out of whack, or don’t have the correct output cords to be compatible with the TV in the first basement, which is where my room is. I’ve essentially become a refugee to whatever emulators I can get running on my computer, which, seeing as Windows has apparently decided to actively work against me whenever I boot into it to play games, really isn’t that fun of an experience.

Except for last Saturday, a birthday party for several members of my family. Getting my rear end handed to me while playing several bootlegs of Wii games that took half of the day to download was pretty… interesting.

The Duality of Mankind, my next book, is now a third of the way done through the first draft. I’ve had to restart writing on it four times- first, two teenagers trawling their way through high school and the death of one of the main character’s family members; second, some sort of pseudo-anarchist utopia with a kid who fell form the sky; a third rewrite I won’t mention that only got half a paragraph before I gave up; and now the fourth attempt, which I’ve almost completely plotted.

And what has become of me?

I’m not quite sure. Halloween has become a balance of trying not to embarrass myself by dressing up as someone I’m not physically fit enough to be and not sucking up to anyone else by being so generic as to be unmockable and unremarkable. I remember almost half a decade ago wandering in my neighborhood with only a glowstick to illuminate my way, trampling among high hills and valleys with my cousins and brothers, a plastic pumpkin bucket swinging from my arm. The neighborhood was friendlier back then. Adults were a lot less terrifying, and checking over every piece of candy was just a stupid rule that could just be circumvented by stuffing your face full of chocolate while in the back of your van on the way home.

But then the family scattered across the state, and we stopped waiting for the sun to leave, and we started waiting for parents to chaperone us instead. And eventually I stopped going out at all, waiting for a friend’s invite that never came.

I’m not so sure that I want to be here anymore, but wanderlust isn’t so useful when you’re not even sure where “here” is.

There are so many responsibilities that I’ve been neglecting, and I know that this is one of them. I’m coming back. I promise.