The Return to Sanity

So, yes, I’m back, I think. At the very least, I can compose sentences without cursing, which is a good thing, and my weekend was actually pleasant in a mildly stressful kind of way.

On Friday night I taught at UQ and went to my sister’s place to do washing, whereupon I was promptly fed delicious butter chicken (with bonus ham) and indulged while I ranted about my week. Afterwards we bundled into the car with a camera and a tripod and went galavanting into the night in search of the photograph of a somewhat spooky pedestrian underpass that will go with my next Flotsam story.

We found one by walking through a darkened bike-path through a stretch of scrub between Griffith University and the Highway. This process was made somewhat more exciting than it could have been by the fact that we’d forgotten to bring a torch, so we lit our way with the soft glow of my sister’s iPhone screen.

I think it was the first thing I’d done all week that actually counted as fun.

My good mood was ruined a few hours later when my neighbor came home and blasted their stereo at four in the morning. The bass was so loud my bed actually moved while I was in it, twitching its way across the room in that strange little dance furniture does in the presence of loud music.

I did not kill my neighbor, which I thought was very restrained of me.

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On Saturday there was a desperate attempt to finish this week’s Flotsam story, which was a) overdue, and b) overdue, and c) really, really overdue. If you’re getting a sense of the theme there, you’re probably understanding exactly why last week was so miserable for me.

I dislike blowing deadlines, even by a few days, and I couple this with a pigheaded stupidity that makes me incapable of admitting I’m going to blow a deadline even when it’s patently obvious that it’s going to happen. Couple this with the added dayjob stress and I spent much of last week in the red-zone, building up the kind of self-directed anger that’s best released by destroying a major metropolitan area in a pique-fueled kaiju-esque temper tantrum.

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On Sunday I was afforded the opportunity hang with one of my Melbourne peeps, Kapowe, who was drifting through Brisvegas for the day. There was beer and bacon and catching up and I was forced to torture him with stories about the awesomeness of my current Deadlands game which is rapidly approaching my favourite RPG campaign that I’ve ever run. We also spoke of books and games and his rapidly rising career in voice-artistry, which is one of those unexpected and unfeasibly cool things my friends occasionally wander off and do when I’m not really looking. (Edit: were I a good friend, I would have mentioned Kev has a shiny new email newsletter for folks who may be interested in voice-over stuff)

After this, there was Deadlands, and it’s not like I’ve been shy about how much that improves my week. Our games are usually fun, especially given something with obvious genre tropes like the western we can play off, but last night’s session my players went above and beyond to make with the awesome. Wild flying machines were invented, plots were advanced, characters were fleshed out and given unexpected new arcs. At some point I need to stat out a guy named Dressed Up Eddie, himself a neat piece of meta-narrative lifted directly from the works of Raymond Chandler, and I didn’t even put him into the game.

It was a good way to end the weekend. Possibly the best way I can think of.

And since I’ll be freed from the dayjob at my usual time, I think I’ll celebrate by doing some writing this afternoon.