What happens after the good ol' days? Time keeps marching on, and I've found that it's hard to stay in one place for long. At least on purpose.

After I left California in 2005, I went to Arizona. At first I was in the Phoenix area, specifically the suburb of Chandler (where I would coincidentally be neighbors with someone I'd end up dating 13 years later). I didn't have much in the way of community there, with the shops being pretty far from my house and I couldn't drive at the time. I worked at a few different shops in the mall and mostly just tried to stay out of my house to avoid my Mom who had decided to abandon her mental health treatment.

It wasn't until we were in Tucson in 2006 that I found places for geekly gatherings in a shop not too far from my house that I could walk to if I so chose. It was a gigantic shop called Hard Castle Games. It had a big front shop space with lots of gaming tables, as well as a huge back area with couches around tables that were ideal for roleplaying games, and there was even a LAN setup that was mostly occupied by WoW players by this time. It was open until midnight on the weekends.

This was comparatively amazing to me. Real estate in California was already unreasonable before I left, and has only grown to further ridiculous extremes since I've been gone, so to find myself in a gigantic shop like this was shocking.

The Scooby Gang had disintegrated by this point. My high school girlfriend and I couldn't handle the long distance, and she ended up in the arms of a friend or two. Or three. We all took it various degrees of poorly. Ultimately though, I'm the one who tore us apart. This isn't a story about heartbreak though, so we'll save that for another day.

I found a new group at Hard Castle. I put together a lovely little group of gamers for a weekly DnD game that consisted of my first openly queer friends. I was still pretty firmly in the closet at the time, and dealing with emotional tumultuousness in the meantime anyway.

I put a lot of myself into these games. It was the first time I took the effort to make maps for the worlds I would create, something thought out and promising grand adventures. And it delivered in spades.

The party traveled through the lands that my high school friends had gone through, hearing tales of their exploits and accomplishing their own. In one of the early games, they chose to find a goblin village and massacre the inhabitants.

Having started reading the webcomic, Goblins, it left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. So I drew a little picture on a piece of paper, crumpled it up, and handed it to the players saying they found it on one of the bodies of the goblins they killed.

It was a crude picture of a goblin holding a spear with the letters "DADDY" next to it. To say that the players were horrified would be an understatement. From that point onward, they fought for equality among all the creatures of the realm, and found themselves at odds with the traditional humans and demihumans more than not.

I had a little following of people who loved my games, even if they weren't in them. I think they just liked my passion in hindsight, but in my youthful insecurity I relied on it for what little self confidence I had.

If I was the only insecure person in the community, I think things would have been alright. But as they say in the old west, this town's not big enough for the two of us.

I had a player who also ran his own games that was openly highly envious of the attention I received. And his general dickishness to me was responded to with twice as much from me, which was my policy at the time.

Ultimately it tore our little group apart. He was an insecure little weirdo who I found in the shop bathroom shaving his body hair more than once, but I was definitely a prick and could have been a lot more diplomatic than I ultimately was. I think part of me wanted the fight 'cause I hadn't had any say in any of the big changes in my life as of late.

I found myself kinda skipping from group to group. Occasionally running a campaign here and there. I became well known in the city for great games. It was one of my only real points of pride at that point in my life.

But I was tinted with depression. I think that's what made me so angry in those days. I would run these fantastic games and find myself becoming better and better at GMing games, but every game I ran I just wished so much that it was with my precious Scooby Gang.

My friend Thomas was in the Army by that point. We spent a lot of time talking shop about DnD and Warhammer 40K. Steph wasn't talking to me much by that point, and for good reason. Most of my friends back home had gotten into various other things, the bar scene, bands, huffing shit on couches. But there I was, just trying to hold on to the past. And getting very frustrated that nobody could embody it the way it was.

It didn't help that most everyone I met was some conservative jackass. It took a long time to meet my people at a time I could be with them.

And that's a story I probably won't tell here. You can ask me if you're curious though, just say "tell me about Amy." It's a good story, but not the sort of thing you throw onto a public blog.

Still, I did meet my people, around the time I was able to focus on school and become the best damn scholar I could be. These guys saw me walking around and had heard of me and my legendary games, especially Star Wars. They invited me around.

I said no.

I'd been through too much heartache and I'd been too much of a prick to people, I didn't want to repeat the story again.

They treated me like a stray cat though. They invited me around, treated me with kindness, and ultimately, I was comfortable enough to run Exalted for them.

Exalted is a crazy fucking game. It's kinda like being in a shonen anime in a setting like Avatar (last airbender) if it was really dark. The game is designed to let the players be demigods and involves rolling dozens of dice at a time if you're doing it right (or wrong). My games involved breaches in the timeline, giant robot centaur battles, a huge undead dragon that bled armies of zombies onto the battlefield. My friends got me on Cocaine!

...so to explain that last sentence: one night I was pretty tired, so my friends got me... an energy drink. Called Cocaine. They told me it used to be illegal in the state but something changed.

And let me tell you, after drinking that shit, I was bouncing off the walls. The game involved armies of dudes destroying each other while riding dinosaurs, my players cutting swaths through thousands of bodies and rivers of blood. I interrupted the game several times to call friends I hadn't spoken to in years. We started at midnight and ended sometime after dawn.

My girlfriend posted on facebook that my friend Brandon was no longer allowed to give me "cocaine."

We really jived with Star Wars though. I had a cast of NPCs that were very memorable, and the stories of those NPCs made their way around town, especially my favorites, Cap'n Zog, the Trandoshan mercenary, and Dr. Zharago, the Chiss mad scientist.

To be completely self reflective most of these characters were kinda hilariously inappropriate. Def a product of their time that shouldn't exist outside of it.

Honestly, it was lovely to finally find some people I could vibe with. It's easier now than it used to be, but back then it was hard to be comfortable in my own skin.

So I've summed up about seven years in a fairly short space here. Obviously there was a lot here wrapped up in the various aspects of my life. I skipped over late night drives with my gaming groups into the mountains, where we'd gaze down into the empty valleys below and try not to get eaten by bears. I've completely glossed over drunken bonfires shooting at bottles in the desert with my 40K buddies. Didn't even mention the time I caught on fire while playing a storytelling game around a campfire.

Not to even mention the night we camped on top of the mountain telling stories and drinking and shooting, and came down in the morning to discover it was the one day of the year the saguaros bloomed.

Saguaros are magnificent things. Did you know they don't even sprout arms until they're nearly a century old? Driving down through the dawn as the forest bloomed for only a few hours was one of the most...

I hated being there so much. But I couldn't manage to be anywhere else. I couldn't stand on my own. I couldn't go home 'cause even the Scooby Gang wasn't there anymore.

The future has a way of finding me though. And so my time in Tucson came to an end in 2012. I bid farewell to my friends down the street.

I found myself repeating the past again, mourning for a safe harbor that I couldn't stay in forever. The place I had carried so much resentment for was now the bastion of my happiest days.

I gamed through voice chat with those guys for a while afterwards. But y'know how distance goes. Ultimately I found a new gaming group, and then another. I'm still running games, and I'm still getting better at telling stories with my friends.

But that'll be something I talk about more in the last leg of this story.