Blog

This is a photograph from the Holographic Studios bathroom in New York. I was there in August at one of the last days before they moved locations. The pictured shelves are an accumulation of decades of cleaning supplies, toiletries, over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, kitchenware, and unknown treasures buried in the back.

My girlfriend may be horrified to learn that I love this type of hoard. It summons in me a wonder and nostalgia. When I moved to New York in 2001 and started meeting people locally, shelves like this seemed commonplace. New York dwellings are notoriously small. So where does your stuff go? The answer was often: on the walls.

In places with more space, this stuff of life would be hidden in basements, behind closet doors, deep in crawlspaces, and above attic panels. In New York apartments there is no such place, and so the walls become years and decades-long in-progress sculptures.

Some are well curated. A personal library of books and music, just slightly overstuffed, contents rarely touched, with a few well placed knickknacks. Others, like the holography installations, are constructed like a Jersey shore arcade coin pusher game: teeming with ephemera and somehow not collapsing into chaos.

The first time I ran a tabletop role-playing game was in my teens. My friends and I played Magic: The Gathering and the video games of the era: The Legend of Zelda series, Ultima Online, Diablo II, etc. In high school, our friend's Uncle Bobby introduced us to RPGs through a fantasy LARP that he ran. Playing Dungeons & Dragons on our own was the next obvious step.

As the only one willing to read the Dungeon Master's Guide, I was the obvious choice for Dungeon Master. I had practically no clue what I would be doing. But in preparing to run the game, I had come across two guiding principles.

The first principle came from Uncle Bobby. As our nerd-elder, he had gaming wisdom we didn't: video games are restrictive. Live-action and tabletop RPGs were superior because they weren't limited by computer programming. In an RPG, the players can do anything!

Amazing! Got it.

The second principle came from the Dungeon Master's Guide. With the help of my obsessive personality and strong desire to run the game "right", I read the whole thing cover-to-cover. I can't remember what it said 30 years ago, but I do remember the godlike responsibility it bestowed upon me. I had to portray a real, living world.

In my mind I thought: "This will be so awesome! We're going to play a game where the players can do anything! I'm an honest guy, I'll facilitate this realistic fantasy world!"

I spent hours designing a castle on graph paper that my players could explore. I wrote up little evocative descriptions of the environments. I was so excited! We were going to have a sleepover so we could play all night. My two friends came over, we got our dice, their character sheets, and we got going. It's midnight by the time we start the adventure.

Late, yes, but I was going to get to see what D&D was all about.

And the adventure began:

Two heroes approach a massive castle, surely full of dreadful beasts which they'll have to slay. They swing open the doors and enter. I paint the scene for them: a long corridor of dressed stone, the damp dank air, a rat scurrying across their path...

"A rat?" My friend asks. "Where did it go?"

I'm stunned. I have no idea where the rat went. This is not in my notes. But I can do this. I read the books. I know that anything can happen here. I can do this, I just have to portray a realistic world.

"Uhhh... there's a little hole in the wall, it scurried in there." Phew! Good thinking. This is going to go just fine.

"I get on my knees to check out the hole." Hm. This hole is meaningless. But they players can do whatever they want, so let's see where this goes.

"It's a small crack between the stones, big enough for a rat to squeeze into."

"I stick my sword in the hole to see if I can get the rat out."

For the next two hours, I facilitate the telling of an epic tale of two fantasy heroes attempting to locate a rat in a castle wall.

I tried to edit the scene, move them along, but it didn't take. I got frustrated, straight up told them that they needed to move on. But they wouldn't let it go. It went from mystifying to irritating to enraging to comical. The other player and I were folded over in half laughing about this hero who wouldn't let go of pursuit of this rat.

The next morning, the bleary-eyed ratcatcher earnestly asked me: "What was the secret about the rat?" I told him it was just flavor text, mood-setting text. I don't think he believed me.

The campaign ended that night, I'm pretty sure. If we played again, it wasn't as memorable. We talked and laughed about that rat for months. It was so stupid. And it was amazing. Uncle Bobby was right: we really did things we could not do in a video game.

The Ridgeways are at an AirBNB this weekend to attend Kira and Greg's wedding. This is the kitchen of the weird place we stayed before anyone else woke up.

I love mornings with this crew. The too-strong coffee, the idle chatter, the quiet voices before others awake. I will always miss our old home together.

Preparing a tune for a wedding this weekend, written by the bride and groom.

The Ridgeway House pumpkin carving gathering lives on

On a walk in Oakland

I won this backgammon crown at a local backgammon tournament organized by Jenny. Check out how excited I am.

I've been walking to work more often, and just walking around my neighborhood more because of that. When I'm lucky I get to see some of the neighborhood cats.

My old friend Yoko OK and I have been recording together, at a distance, during the pandemic. Today we're releasing an EP of four of our recordings - House of Hidden Life. I'm also posting a record we released last year too!

And last year's People Pleasing