The Hedonism of Everyday Things

I want to tell you it’s because it’s getting colder, that the leaves are on the ground, that I’ve driven through snow in the mountains already this year. I want to tell you that it’s because it’s cozy season that I’ve spent an awful lot of my time writing and an awful lot of my time thinking about tabletop roleplaying games, that I’ve spent less of my time organizing and less of my time worried about preparedness.

These reasons might even be true. It might be that for everything we have our seasons. A few hundred years ago, I might have spent this time of the finishing my preserves for the winter, then these comings months holed up knitting and weaving and crafting. Maybe I’m falling into winter mode because winter is approaching.

All I want to do is play games and write books, and it feels self-indulgent, and it shouldn’t feel self-indulgent.

Emma Goldman has that famous quote she never quite said, “if I can’t dance it’s not my revolution,” and maybe for me it’s “if I can’t tell and play stories” instead.

I’ve spent this whole year on high alert. I’ve put most of my hours into getting ready and helping others get ready. Right now I just want words to appear on pages instead. Words with swords and spells.

I’d always figured I was a bad hedonist. I wanted, when I was younger, to lose myself to the world and get swept up by sex and drugs and novelty and wild experience. I had some of those things, but if I’m being honest when I think back on my well-spent youth wandering, I remember some of the more subtle experiences better.

I remember reading The Lord of the Rings while crouched behind a log outside a forest defense camp in the dark, reading by a red headlamp, sitting watch in case the police raided in the middle of the night. I remember that my fellow watch-mate fell asleep immediately every night and started snoring, and I had to—or got to—sit watch alone. She’s now a successful Instagram influencer, but I’m not going to call her out by name. I remember that I heard the song of the rails most nights, the eerie resonance of train tracks in the middle of nowhere, that sing long slow chords even when trains are miles away.

I remember that one night ...