Shorthand for Nothing

Dear classmates from my graduating class,

I’m sorry I didn’t bother doing anything for my graduation. I didn’t even record one of the little speech things that you all had.

That second part isn’t exactly true, actually. I recorded something, and even then, at 18 years old, I bristled at the idea of saying the expected things. We were supposed to thank everyone we knew, I think, and say something cheerful about the future. Instead I wrote something like “I never really liked the idea of giving thank-you speeches because they feel disingenuous.” I still think that, really, but I’ve learned artful since then. In any case, the administrators didn’t like the message, and said I had to do another one, and I just said that I wouldn’t. For some reason they let it drop.

I wasn’t even at the graduation ceremony. I was in Florida, for a cousin’s wedding. I had no interest in going to graduation anyway, though. One of you thought it was hilarious to call me at four am and ask when I was showing up. I wasn’t sleeping very well because I never do on trips, so I was a little annoyed, and I’m sorry about that, too. I hope nobody missed me. I always assume that nobody does. But it had to have been noticeable. Did they call my name? Did they point out that I wasn’t there? Did they dress someone up like me? I know that when it came time for my section of the video, with the recorded speeches, they just played the music louder.

That part made me happy, at least. I hope nobody was offended. I hope you all had a lot of fun celebrating the end of your high school careers.

Yours,

Rob Mason

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We played a one-off Call of Cthulhu session the other day. The system is really nice for the cosmic horror genre. It’s pretty easy to understand, doesn’t have a lot of fancy things going on for it, and ultimately your skills are probably going to be insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Sure, you can equip yourself to deal with the eldritch monstrosity, but the odds are pretty good it will still shatter your mind. This is how horror works. There may be a solution that works, but it’s hard, it’s not obvious, and even then it’s only dubious–maybe it only works half the time, or maybe it’s only put things off for a while.

You are alone in an uncaring universe. Your character is unremarkable, and even if you win it was probably mostly because of luck, and the odds are you’re probably permanently scarred by the experience.

The most interesting thing, to me, is that in CoC and some other horror-genre games, you’re not playing anyone special. Almost every other system, from D&D to White Wolf, is about playing someone who is more awesome than regular people. In horror, you play someone who at best knows how to use a gun or pick a lock, neither of which are impossible for anyone with the time and the tools to learn. It’s fundamentally a story about real people in situations that are beyond them, and the depths of the human psyche.

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