The Castle under the Bed

I've talked about it for months. I've scoured Amazon for the cheapest copies of official rulebooks. I've devoured hours of relevant podcasts and YouTube videos (thanks, Second Rate Dungeon Masters!).

And last Saturday, I finally followed through. I trapped six of my friends in my living room and made them play Dungeons & Dragons with me.

If D&D were a disease, I've exhibited symptoms all my life. For starters, there's my ongoing obsession with swords, which began with an inexplicable affection for the Mouse King from The Nutcracker.

Yes, that Mouse King. Source

Yeah, so, try unpacking that one. Or don't. I've been digging for the Freudian root of both the sword thing and the terrifying multi-headed villain thing for a long time, and trust me, the deeper you look, the weirder it gets.

Swords aside, I grew up in an age of fantasy resurgence. With The Lord of the Rings in theaters and Harry Potter on bookshelves, magic pulsed through my favorite pieces of fiction. My mother and I read The Hobbit together, and determined that we were meant to be hobbits all along. Even The Chronicles of Narnia deserves some credit for shaping my proclivity for the fantastical.

Those stories trickled down into the games I played with my younger brother, particularly a half storytelling, half make-believe adventure starring my bro as a traveling king in a magical land, accompanied by a talking, rainbow-furred wolf and an army of gymnastic elves, burly rogues, shape-shifting feathered dragons, and... fantasy pro-wrestlers? There was a lot going on. So much going on that I later painted a mural of it on our shed:

As I asked my mom to send me photos of the mural (thanks, Mama!), I was reminded of a discussion I had with my dad before I went to college. While my mom was tucking boxes of condoms (yes, plural, because apparently there was a sale at the CVS) into my duffel bag, my dad warned me of the dangers of D&D. This will always stand as a rare moment in my life in which my father demonstrated greater insight regarding my identity and priorities than my mother. I guess Dad had seen too many of his collegiate brethren fall prey to the temptation of the role-playing table, neglecting their studies in the process. 

Luckily for everyone, I turned out to be very gay, and despite housing a desperate lust for twenty-sided dice, was bad enough at socializing that I couldn't even find a D&D group in a liberal arts college in Ohio. 

My D&Disease became the unscratchable itch, and I know where I first picked up the illness. 

"There's a castle under the bed," my grandmother told me, when I was small enough not to question it. I was also small enough to fit under the bed to look, and discovered that yes, there was indeed a castle under there. 

I hauled the plastic and cardboard construction out and brushed away the dehydrated spiders that had perished in its dungeons. It had belonged to my father and my uncle, and because Douglases are genetically predisposed to draconic hoarding, it had lived for several decades beneath beds or in basements, awaiting their return.

I am 99% certain this was the set, and also pretty sure I couldn't figure out how to put together the raised rocky bits, and so the miniature well with the little retractable bucket couldn't even descend anywhere. Source

An obsession was born. I paraded knights across the drawbridge and plotted an uprising among the armored horses. I bee-lined for my army every time I visited my grandparents, forgoing my dad's dusty G.I. Joes in favor of the castle's flimsy walls and red roofs. 

Sometime around the discovery of the castle, we went to that famed and golden land, Medieval Times, deepening my sickness. The jousting was fantastic, of course, but the dungeon displays called to me the most (another Freudian rabbit hole to avoid). It's almost as though I were being primed for my true calling in life: nervously stumbling through dungeon-based medieval fantasy roleplaying games.

Which brings us to last Saturday, my first time being a Dungeon Master.

For those of you unfamiliar, the Dungeon Master (DM) is the person who provides the narrative framework for a group of D&D players. They are a storyteller and a physics engine, both announcer and referee of an imagined sport of their own design. They contribute a setting to a story starring the players, and can be both a cheerleader and an opposing force for the fictional heroes. 

As I juggled binders, maps, rulebooks, browser tabs, and spreadsheets on Saturday night, I realized just how weighty that duty is, especially for someone fairly new to the the actual rules of D&D. But I also had a terrific time building a mystery for my players to investigate, and responding to their interactions with my fledgling world. 

Some parts of the game went better than others. Six players, ranging from highly experienced to "I'm only here to support you in the hopes that you'll finally shut up about D&D, Abi," are a lot to keep track of and appropriately challenge. They slaughtered my first wave of monsters with little more than a scuffed boot between them, which prompted me to engage them in a higher-stakes battle deeper in their adventure, one that could have seriously impaired the party had they rolled slightly worse (and had my stupid laser-rat actually succeeded at his lasering before getting splatted). 

I fear I slowed the game down with my choppy battles filled with multiple monsters with unfamiliar stats. I also fretted over providing enough of the right information, whether while acting as an NPC (non-player character, as in, everyone in the world other than the player characters) or just as a narrator. Towards the end of the session, my adrenaline high had taken a toll on my cognition, and a guide character I'd placed in the dungeon my players were exploring became similarly loopy.

But other things went fairly well. My players successfully discovered secret doors and uncovered clues about an ancient cult. They also got into character, intimidating my poor gnomish tavern-keeper into upping their pay and making the inevitable jokes about ball-licking that come when one of the characters is an anthropomorphic cat burglar. 

However it played out, we still told a communal story, and I definitely want to try it again, even if it set my anxiety into overdrive and convinced my FitBit that I was going into cardiac arrest halfway through the night.

D&D is a weird mix of group storytelling, strategy, and luck, and speaking as a writer, I consider it literature-adjacent. So, more likely than not, you'll hear more about my tabletop adventures in the future.

Until then, may your dice be blessed and your ale be strong, and try not to extort the bartender. 

Fairy Tale

Controversy erupted earlier this week over the release of a picture book featuring a lonely princess who, in a daring twist of convention, is rescued from her draconic captor by a handsome prince.

The book, titled innocuously as A Day in the Dragon's Tower, hit shelves with little initial fanfare. However, once readers brought the book home to their families, they discovered its contentious content, and were quick to express their distress on social media.

"Like all good catmoms, my wife and I read bedtime stories to our furbabies every night," self defense instructor Sharon Meyer-Richards (they/them/their) posted on a Facebook page called "Animoms." "Now we're forced to address a highly sexual topic with our cats well before they're ready to hear about that kind of stuff. Our youngest hasn't even been fixed yet! What are we supposed to tell her?"

Luxury soap shop owner Martin Ramirez (he/him/his) commented via Twitter: "It's a sorry day when children's books turn political. Further evidence of the #StraightAgenda."

His sentiment and ones similar to it have been repeated across the internet at a viral pace. Even the President chimed in with her opinion through a Tweet featuring the book's cover and the simple caption: "Sad. :("

Not all responses carried as much vitriol. "They could be bisexual," Tumblr user straightrightsally (unspecified pronouns) argued, spurring another online debate of whether bisexuality is even a thing.

Several mainstream booksellers are now championing the book, featuring it prominently in window displays, festooned with black and white streamers reminiscent of the Straight Pride flag. While many in the Straight Cisgender and Questioning (SCQ) community applaud the act, some remain skeptical.

"I appreciate the gesture and the representation, but, I don't know," a self-identified cisgender, heterosexual woman said in the cafe of one such bookstore, turning her copy of the book in her hands. "Like, I love that there's a story out there about a woman and a man falling in love, and the woman's even a damsel in distress, which is something you hardly ever see in kid's stories. But it feels like tokenism, you know?"

Others have voiced a similar concern, comparing the book's promotion with the tendency of large companies to adopt a black and white color scheme during Straight Pride Month as a marketing ploy. 

"They're just trying to make a buck off of SCQ folks," the shopper continued. "The author isn't straight or cis, either. Maybe xe is an ally, which is great, but I'm always a little suspicious when it comes to products that seem targeted at a cishet audience."

The author, Des Walker (xe/xem/xir), has made few public comments regarding xir latest children's story, beyond a statement on xir public Facebook page that the book's characters are open to interpretation. 

Fans of Walker's page support that perspective for the most part, with one anonymous user writing, "I don't see why such a big deal is being made. I assumed one or both characters weren't cis. Not that it should be a problem if they're both cis. It should be left up to the individual reader."

Ty Matsui (he/him/his), director of Straight Jokes for Queer Folks, disagrees. 

"It's a matter of representation," Matsui said in a vlog on the Straight Jokes website yesterday afternoon. "In the industry, we call media like A Day in the Dragon's Tower straight-bait. It's teasing its readers, suggesting the two characters could be straight, but never outright saying it."

Later in the video, Matsui talks about the representation he used to dream of as a child.

"It would have made life so much easier to have seen healthy, heteronormative couples on TV when I was young. Every time I saw a different-sex pair on the screen, it got dismissed. 'Oh, they're just siblings' or 'Oh, they're just friends, don't make it sexual,' or 'Oh, that's actually his grandma's ghost, so if you interpreted any of the dancing and hand-holding as flirting, then that's on you.'"

Despite Matsui's progressive stance, his show has received flack from SCQ viewers for reinforcing negative stereotypes and making light of straight experiences. Straight Jokes is a reality show featuring five straight, cisgender hosts who descend upon uptight queer people (usually nominated by their family members) to teach them how to dress down, relax, and appreciate the little things. The premise seems friendly and palatable, but many consider it condescending at best, and appropriative at worst.

We spoke with our own Sports writer (and casual fan of the program), Rick Brown (he/him/his), to learn more.

"The problem with [Straight Jokes] is that it takes straight culture and tries to sell it to the masses. I feel like my identity is being used as entertainment for people outside of the SCQ community. They glorify these stereotypes about us, but it doesn't make the real world any kinder to straight folks."

Brown, a cisgender man who had to wait for cishet marriage to be legalized three years ago to marry his high school sweetheart, discussed the prejudice he encountered when trying to order a cake for their wedding.

"The bakery we settled on was supportive and willing to bake for us, but when it came to the cake topper, we were harrassed over our choice. It was humiliating."

The cake topper Brown and his fiancee wanted featured a groom being dragged by the back of his tuxedo by his bride, apparently reluctant to marry the woman he proposed to. The bakery questioned Brown, suggesting a more traditional topper, perhaps one involving two people embracing, as if they both wished to be married.

Pictured: a cake topper similar to the one requested by the Browns, featuring additional elements of straight culture, including cheap beer, multi-player shooters, and poorly-fitted formal wear. Source

"That's just not our culture," Brown explained. "They talked us into a topper with a bride tugging the ear of the groom, a compromise. I didn't want to argue with them over it. I was still able to paint 'HELP ME' on the bottom of my shoes, and my best man cracked up the reception with his speech about my new ball and chain."

Brown also suspects shows like Straight Jokes encourage SCQ stereotyping in other corners of pop culture. 

"Every Halloween, you see more queer couples dressing in traditionally SCQ costumes, like plugs and sockets, hunters and deer, and giant pairs of boobs. I know it doesn't seem like a big deal, but the small things stack up."

Brown's statement is reinforced by the recent viral news story about a straight bar's emails with a queer bachelor(ette) party. The bachelor(ette) party asked the bar if it was "clean" and if there was a chance "those with uteri could become pregnant by using the [bar's] bathroom, since heteros are so susceptible to unplanned pregnancies."

"We advise you read a little more about pregnancy before you impregnate our club with your ignorance," the bar shot back.

The spread and exploitation of other cishet customs has sparked similar offense. Curious queers have insulted the SCQ community by trying out traditionally heteronormative pastimes, such as catcalling, drinking Mountain Dew while walking around Wal-Mart, entering their children in beauty pageants, and paying employees less based on their gender identity.

"If you want to engage with straight culture, that's great," Brown said when asked about SCQ appropriation. "But you also have to be on board with our cause. You have to back us up, give us your support. While our rights have come a long way in the past couple decades, we still have a long road ahead."

For many SCQ citizens, A Day in the Dragon's Tower is much more than a simple children's book. It carries a message of tolerance and diversity, even if the delivery of the message is flawed.

The woman in the bookstore cafe told us her copy of the book is for her younger cousin (they/them/their). 

"I just want them to grow up in a world where people like me and my boyfriend aren't viewed as abnormal or implicitly sexual. I want them to feel safe and loved if they happen to discover they're cishet someday," she said. "Because, at the end of the day, if you're upset over a book that's all about love and being true to yourself, then maybe you need to reevaluate your priorities."

All Out

If you lived with me in college, whether as a roommate or a more general housemate, you may remember a recurring Saturday afternoon scene. Maybe you entered the house, coming back from the library, and encountered a pair of black marching shoes strewn across the hall. Further in, spats and wool socks, then a horse-hair sporran, then the signature yellow and black kilt, unspooled, stretching toward a figure lying face-down on the floor, hopefully in the correct room, occasionally not.

That was me after almost every football game in my college career. Some of it was a goof, sure. Despite my generally low self-esteem and tendency to go catatonic when over-stimulated, I've always been flamboyant. I like putting on a show, making reality a little more colorful and story-worthy. And ya boi loves some attention. I mean, I self-published a book and maintain a blog that is 90% me talking about myself (the remaining 10% is me complaining about cartoons not being gay enough).

A lot of my post-game collapse sequence, however, was real. 

I played tenor drums in the College of Wooster marching band. Imagine a set of five toms arced in front of your hips, held there by a stiff metal harness that distributes the considerable weight (often heavier than the snares or bass drums on the line) to your lower back and shoulders. With five (or more) drums to work with, the music for tenors can get complicated and showy, and as part of the drumline, it is mission critical that you don't donk up your performance. When all else fails, the percussion has to be there, consistent, timely, and precise.

The prototypical tenor player is tall and muscular. AKA, the tenor players on either side of me in this photo:

Exhibit A

Notice my expression? I'm wearing some variation of it in every photo I have of me marching the tenors.

Exhibit B

Though it may seem indiscernible from a "taking a moderately strenuous dump" face, that's my "oh wow, this hurts so bad I'm kinda worried I'm going to die on this astroturf" face.

For me, that pain could be debilitating, which was why I'd drag myself back to my dorm and strip down as quickly as possible before my muscles could stiffen up and trap me half in, half out of uniform. 

Then I'd lie down and wait for the hurt to stop and the exhaustion to pass. Sometimes in the middle of the floor in naught but my undies.

This isn't a "pity me" story. I wanted to play those drums. I chose to put my body through that, because I loved performing, and being part of that group of musicians. 

And all that suffering? That's the standard by which I measured my worth.

Because it wasn't just marching band. Everything I did, whether it was creative or academic, had to completely drain me, or I wasn't doing enough. My philosophy was that if I had energy to spare after completing a challenge, that meant I hadn't given my all, and if I hadn't given my all, then I hadn't done my best work, which made it subpar. Unacceptable.

I've been thinking about this lately because while I've mostly eradicated that philosophy from my head, remnants remain. I passed a small licensing exam recently, one that I'd spent a lot of time studying for and fretting over. The week leading up to the test, I essentially reread all of my course material, which was time-consuming and brain-numbing and what was the point of reading it all before if I was just going to read it all again?

Every night, lying in bed, I'd tell Kelsey about my fear that I wasn't working hard enough, that I was going to fail the exam and make a fool of myself and never succeed at anything again. I'm sure she loved having the same dang conversation every night.

After finishing the exam, I had to sit in my car for a few minutes, waiting for the shaking and nausea to pass. I drove home in half a trance, and my brain turned to mush for the rest of the week. I was proud, but not just of passing. I was proud that I'd fought so hard that my brain couldn't manage basic math the next day, despite being able to calculate the blend of interest and principal in the sixth payment of a 30-year mortgage for the test.

What a dumb thing to be proud of.

I passed the test with plenty of points to spare. I didn't have to worry and cram in such an all-consuming manner and leave myself intellectually out of commission for a week. I wasted energy. I exacerbated my anxiety, which in turn affected other aspects of my physical health. I wrecked myself for a test on a subject that I actually know pretty well. 

The problem with always giving your all is that you have nothing left by the end, and that may be well and good for the occasional game or performance or project, but it's not sustainable when it's applied to every aspect of your life.

It's so easy to feel like you're not doing enough these days. The world seems like it's in shambles, social media instantly informs you of the accomplishments of your peers, and it can all feel like too much to shoulder. 

The thing is, you're allowed to take care of yourself, and sometimes that means giving "some" instead of "all." It's not your job to be perfect, and you're not doing anyone any good by running on fumes alone. It's not a point of pride. It's a flawed way to view your worth.

You can't give your all when you're all out.

So next time you're face-down on the floor in a state of partial undress, think about what you gave to get there, and whether it's worth it. And take a heckin' nap while you're at it. You look exhausted.

Hands in the Soil

When I lifted my hands away from patting soil into place around the spruce sapling I'd planted in our front yard, I noticed something familiar about my fingers. With the dirt deepening the lines of my knuckles, I recognized the strong, sinewy hands of my maternal grandmother. 

I've never had much of a green thumb. Plenty of houseplants have met a premature demise at my hands, and I'm a known killer of cacti. So, it was surprising earlier this year when I managed to keep a begonia flowering in my kitchen for a couple months, which is a big deal for me. There are a few plants at my office which I care for as well, including a century-old fern that once decorated my great grandmother's porch. This year, they've been in exceptionally good form. While I know this is primarily due to the outdoor conditions, I feel a measure of pride as I water and trim them, as though I could claim their success as my own.

I associate gardening with my mother, who keeps her gardens gorgeous and green throughout the spring and summer. I cannot imagine the Victorian home in which I grew up without hydrangeas bursting with firework blooms around it and swallow-tail butterflies flitting among flowering bushes in front of the porch. 

Some of her gardening prowess comes from her mother, my grandmother, Edie. When I think of her, I imagine her kneeling by a garden bed, gloved hands pulling weeds out by the roots, piling them next to her legs, tireless under the Michigan sun. 

Edie died as a result of her ALS on Christmas in 2011, surrounded by family. The year is significant, because at that time, I'd come out as gay to my parents and friends, but I can't remember if I'd officially come out to anyone else by then, or if it was a shapeless knowledge that seeped outward without me directly addressing it.

I don't know if I ever talked to Edie about my queerness, and that uncertainty tortures me.

Edie and I were close. I spent summers with her and my grandfather, Bill, camping in their RV or roaming the strip of woods behind their home, hunting morel mushrooms to fry in butter. My relationship with my grandmother was one of quiet, mutual understanding, a kinship of spirits. As much as I loved my parents, there was a need in me that could only be met by spending time with someone as much like me as Edie.

As a kid, I thought of my grandmother and myself as a pair of cats in a family of dogs. We were independent and aloof, content to devour books as we reclined in patches of sunlight, and to sneak away to peruse yard sales, seeking treasures and projects and discarded histories. So often, the world felt too loud for me, too overwhelming, and Edie could sense and relate to that, and would sit with me by the fire, and we could be comfortably quiet together, and be nourished by that.

A lot of our communication was nonverbal, a contrast with our more verbal family members. Our conversations were book recommendations and sewing projects and polishing found furniture and sharing ice cream at midnight. 

I'm so afraid that none of our actual conversations were about something that is so large a part of my identity as my queerness. 

Which is not to say being gay is or should be a huge part of one's identity, but in the current culture, it kind of is. I'm sure Edie would have accepted me... her son is gay, too. But I actually don't know much about her opinion of LGBT matters. 

What torments me most, though, is that regardless of whether she knew my orientation (which, given our silent conversations, she probably sensed to some degree anyway), she never met my wife.

Kelsey is such a significant piece of my life, and it astonishes me that she never met one of the other huge influences on my life. I think about how my grandmother wasn't at my wedding and I cry.

But then something will happen that reminds me that Kelsey is still meeting a part of Edie. I look in the mirror at my hair, graying early, like Edie's. I tap on Kelsey's arm when I see a sign for a garage sale. I use the garden hose to rinse dirt from my grandmother's hands.

Kelsey did meet my grandfather, when he was sick, close to the end. I think he knew we were together, but I didn't know how to talk about it. Kelsey recently told me about her one conversation with him, showing him a photo of her old truck, his face briefly lighting up. I wish he'd had the strength to show her his barn full of tools and projects. I wish they could have known how much alike they were.

Because day by day, we step more into my grandparents' shoes. We dream about camping by Lake Michigan as we stoke the fire in our backyard. We hunt morels, though we lack the perfect hunting grounds that Bill and Edie had. We take our dogs down to the shore to fish with us. We create things. We cultivate saplings.

Pulling weeds from the garden, our hands in the soil, we keep them with us.

Bad at Aging

As I was being rolled into the OR for a minor medical procedure, the doctor greeted me with a cheerful, "Hey now, you're too young to be in here!" Which is definitely on my list of the top ten things I don't want to hear while being rolled into an OR, just after "Oh my, that scalpel's a little rusty, huh?"

He probably said that because I was coming in for an endoscopy after having a years-long case of heartburn, something he likely treats more in chubby middle-aged or older men than 20-something, healthy-weight women. Turns out I have a hiatal hernia, so that's one more mild disease I'm collecting slightly ahead of schedule.

I'm 27. I recognize that I have no right to talk about aging, and yet here I am ready to do so, and here are a few reasons why:

1. Every year on my birthday, I look up the age I'm turning, just for giggles. For every age, there are listicles about why each age is awesome, and blog entries about what makes year ____ so great. At 26, those articles leveled off, and I came across quite a few titled along the lines of "Life Lessons I Learned by Age 26" (I guess 25 was rough for more people than just me). Last year, I looked up "age 27" and the first thing I found was a gaggle of neuroscientists claiming that to be the age at which "brain decline" begins. Immediately after, at least a dozen sites about the 27 Club. 
2. Last summer, my father-in-law noted the swirl of gray hairs on the back of my head. I played up being offended as a joke, but I think about it every time I get a haircut and find ever larger numbers of gray hairs in the fallen trimmings. (An update since I started this blog entry: The other day, as Kelsey and I were driving to dinner, she looked over at me and helpfully commented on how the grays were particularly prominent in the slanted evening sunlight.)
3. One glass of wine is now sufficient to leave me dry-mouthed and achy the next morning.
4. If I don't wear concealer under my eyes, my coworkers ask if I'm tired, or whether I'm feeling alright. 
5. I get excited about making pot roast.
6. I play sudoku while I poop.
7. I officially feel out of place in the Juniors section of Kohl's. 
8. I relate more to the parent characters than the teenage characters in shows and movies, despite my "babies" having four legs and a (marginally higher) propensity to crap on the carpet while company is over.
9. I had to call AT&T support last month because I couldn't figure out a problem I was having with texting. What's worse is that I couldn't even describe the problem I was having, and I could hear the woman on the other end gradually dumbing down her explanations to a bar just slightly above "elderly woman with early signs of dementia and no email accounts."
10. The sign on the self-service cashier machines at Kroger say to have your ID ready if you're buying booze and "look younger than 27."
11. I've reached a 50/50 probability of being carded for alcohol. Which isn't such a big deal, except Kelsey is almost always carded. Granted, she could claim to be a high schooler and get away with it.
12. Meaning, I could not claim to be a high schooler and get away with it. Between the black goat beard on my chin that I shave at least once a day and my spoiled milk complexion (with Grinch green undertones and Simpsons yellow highlights), I'd blend into a high school hallway about as seamlessly as Steve Buscemi. 

Source

Now, I don't know if you picked up on this subtle characteristic of mine, but I get real existential real quick. I don't mind being psyched about going to bed early, and I'm actually getting into the idea of being a premature silver fox, like my grandmother was. What makes me nervous is the possibility that I've very suddenly entered the "all downhill from here" section of my life.

Like, did I mention that neuroscientists think mental decline starts at 27? Oh no, I did, didn't I? IT'S HAPPENING.

What if my healthiest days are behind me? What if I start collecting illnesses with the same reckless abandon with which I collected Pokemon cards not so long ago? What if I have to start asking younger people how to use the Facebook? What if I don't get sexy silver hair, and wind up with the yellowed smoker's 'fro of an old biddy who plays the same slot machine for 10 hours a day?

On the other hand, what if finally looking my age (or even a little older) makes me a more confident businesswoman? What if I'm chugging closer to the life stage in which I've learned many of my biggest, most painful lessons, and am able to be a better, more considerate person because of it? What if I'm developing into the sort of person who could be a mother to more than just a couple of weird Chihuahua-monsters?

For a long time, I've been afraid of getting older, but now, Peter Pan is turning gray, and I'm not even that worried about it. The world gets bigger and bigger, and I learn more and more. I'm excited to live each stage of my life, rising to new challenges and reaping new rewards.

And for those of you rightfully rolling your eyes at the under-30 rugrat fretting about aging, what advice can you share with me as I squint at this screen and wonder if I'm ready for reading glasses?