Level Ups, Break Ups, and +2 to music comprehension rolls.
Chapter 1: An introduction
Part 2: Leveling up and you!
CHARACTER BIO
Character: Cupcake
Race: Radical Faerie*
Gender: Fluid
Class: Level 5 Faggot
Sub-Class: Level 2 Reclaiming Witch
*Radical Faeries get a natural +3 on READING rolls, +2 to Processing. -5 on being on time to anything rolls,
STATS
Age: 27
Height: 6 foot 2 inches
Weight: 168 Pounds (Gurl has been EATING those feelings this month)
Hair: Brown
Beard: red
Eyes: Blue
Charisma: Questionable (slightly better now that some of the Stags leap has seeped from his system)
Strength: Negligible
Wisdom: Fleeting in a good way
Health: good (post break up modifier of actually doing like 20 sit ups a day is in effect, Cupcake gets +0 to all physical actions as 20 sit ups a day is not actually exercise even if they pretends it is.)
MAGICAL OBJECTS TO HAND
Back Catalogues of the DIVAS, +2 to camp cultural references
DM: We last left our hero singing drunkenly to Taylor Swift. The night devolved into Judy Garland Covers. Much was learned, almost everything was forgotten. But we return now to how, leveling up is a useful tool for marking the passage of time.
I find the concept of leveling up, to be one that when applied to my actual life can be rather gratifying. Personally I need new systems to mark the passage of time and experience, and since birthdays to me feel abstract and vacant and the majority of major holidays feel like vacuous markers of temporality, I turn towards the ideal of leveling up as a system to denote different stages in my life. Leveling up is a gradual process, but when one has traversed the boundaries between levels, I do feel as if one knows they have. The ‘real’ world, with its insistence on banality normativity can be so troublingly mundane that I rather enjoy the slide into the comforting arms of the fantastical in order to better understand and explore simple how to be in the world.
I Imagine its an experience many of us share.
Geekdom has a queerness to it, a flexibility around its borders that creates and holds space for all different forms of expression and desire. I am drawn to the diverse cultures of geekdom, as they give me the framework to revel in the magical, the absurd the mystical, the scientific, to fall in love with space operas, and in so doing shed the language of oppression, the language of stasis, of conformity, the language which in its ossification has forgotten to deem.
(Werk Party)
As a child DnD spoke to me. Mystical worlds, immeasurable powers, the ability to have adventures and quests far away from those tiresome conflicts of being called gay, and picked last for sports, (“IF ONLY THEY KNEW HOW MANY DIE I ROLL WITH EVERY CAST OF A MAGIC MISSLE." my soul would scream.) helped me find a place in the world and understand that I had intrinsic value, even if that was just as the teams resident wizard, capable of gesticulating goblins to death and never carrying luggage.
For me Geekdom/ DnD was not a way out of suffering, but a way to both legitimize it and take control over it. It gave me control. The verbal violence enacted upon me by bullies in my actually life became simply a form of confrontation from which I would grow as a person, having turned ridicule into an XP dream. It was a trick of self delusion that allowed me to turn suffering into trials, tribulations and adventures filled with drama and pathos, which when you’re 12 and prone to long day dreams is a useful framework.
So as I have aged, part of me has kept that framework present in the back ground of my daily life. I try not to leave the house and simply head to work, but to quest their, to pick up random inventory items along the way, to take on side quest, such as, get a cup of overly expensive yet surprisingly worth it coffee from some hip Brooklyn café, because in living within this framework life is always seen with a glitter of magic about it.
So, It has been a hawt minute (or about two months) since I lay on the floor in the arms of a bottle singing Whitney. And with the clarity of time I see that to break up, is to level up. All break ups are hard, and messy, and rip emotions from your heart as wind rips leaves from trees in fall. All is unmade in the moment when love frays and those future possibilities, like castles one discovers to late to have foundations built upon shifting sands, do slip back into granular oblivion.
But the re discovery of the self is delicious. Nearly intoxicating. Armed with song in my heart and the freedom to sing, I hear wisdom in the music, from the operatic grandeur of Pavarotti’s Nessun Dorma (I mean sing those emotions GURL.) to the songs of our dearly beloved Judy Garland, to the poetry of Sharon Olds and Mary Oliver, who blend words with the lyrics of emotions.
In breaking up, in ending, one begins again. One sets forth the self on a new path, a new quest, filled with new experiences to be had, new levels to be gained. It is not finality, or death, it is empowerment, new knowledge, the granting of new skills, and perhaps, for some of us, like myself, the ability to final hear the wisdom in the music. I am sure, and I do hope, that something has changed within me. That in the ending of this relationship I have learned enough to know how to be something that was till now, beyond myself abilities; to be more compassionate, more caring, more kind, to others, and to my self.
Through song, through music, I find myself circling back, fractally to a place I love, one of dance, one of movement, one of giving my flesh over to the ecstatic. It's the moment of witches,the movement of space, psychic space, mental space, the space of the self in relationship to self narration, a space I feel I once new and some how lost.
COMING SOON:
PART 3: Dance with me
Teaser:It's five am and I'm getting ready for a rave. My biggest question, through the fog of a pre coffee delirium, is how many costumes changes I can get away with...
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