1. I only have an hour to write this, so I’ll make it quick.
In my final year of grad school, I began taking lithium because I wanted to die more than I wanted to write a book. Well, I wanted to die before that, but I couldn’t tell you exactly when I started to want to die except maybe it had to do with the moment air inflated my child-lungs like two swollen metaphors dragging the wreckage of language past my lips. I am going to say a lot of heavy-handed things like “the wreckage of language.” I am going to ask silly questions like “How much is my concept of home tied up in various “special sauces” that slather unrecognizable meat pucks in a handful of regional restaurants?” Above all, I am going to live.
2. You awaken in a spaceship with a tadpole in your brain.
This is not the latest RFK Jr. headline, but the premise for Baldur’s Gate 3, a 2023 role-playing game released by Larian Studios based on Dungeons & Dragons. After escaping the spaceship (originally, I wrote friendship) and making some sexy new friends/enemies, your first major quest is to alleviate yourself of the brain worm altering your physiology. The worm conducts a process known as ceremorphosis, transforming its host into a mindflayer (to the uninitiated, think purple Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean only with psychic powers and way hotter).
In my first playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, I believed the urgency the game sold to me. I went without rest (in and out of game) to delay my transformation. Resting, a gameplay mechanic carried over from DnD, crucially restores in-game resources increasing your odds of success against bugbears, cutlist goblins, gnolls, trolls, and the like. By not resting, I made the game way more difficult. I died a lot. I disappointed Lae’zel (my hot, pushy Githyanki girlfriend) with my inability to lead us to her crèche where her people could possibly help. I disappointed Shadowheart (my hot, goth religious fanatic girlfriend) with all my prying. I disappointed Astarian (my hot, twink Vampire boyfriend) every time I went a little too far out of my own way to aid another’s troubles.
And I went out of my way a lot. Yes, I understand I need to get this worm out of my brain, but first I must make fun of this bugbear’s penis size while I barge into the barn where he’s having sex with a troll. I need to launch this deep gnome off the windmill just for fun before save scumming (saving just before an action or decision only to reload as needed to “fix” the outcome). Oh, and Shadowheart wants to share a bottle of wine with me tonight. Astarion wants to get lost and naked in the forest. Lae’zel describes how my battle-hardened scent stirs her desire. After much meandering, it became apparent to my party of adventurers that the ceremorphosis, for some reason, was not taking hold. I am not doing an adequate job of detailing just how many outcomes Baldur's Gate 3 contains, what with its over 17,000 endings. Every time I have played the game, it has been a different experience. But no matter the differences, there is no danger in transforming into a mindflayer in Act One. So rest away, adventurers. Meander. Do not make your life harder than it needs to be.
3. You awaken in the desert with a book in your brain.
In Dungeons & Dragons, you roll dice and pretend to be someone else. If you have not role-played—well, you have. You just have! Look at you, reading this on your phone or laptop, in a house or on a bridge, while driving, with a lover laying next to you, totally alone (except, I’m here, hi). I’m saying you did not come this far without playing a role. And maybe in that role-playing, if you’re like me, you seriously wanted to not wake up inside your own body anymore or not wake up at all for that matter. We in the business call that a critical fail, my kindred sibling. In the video game Final Fantasy Tactics, a character named Delita tells a princess to “blame yourself or God” when it comes to her being wrapped up in a wild political plot, and I choose to blame both.
I have been Golgotha Vanukekali, the Goliath Barbarian, for nearly eight years now. After a series of bad dice rolls by Golgotha and comrades mid-grueling combat, Golgotha recently lost an arm. He seeks redemptive vengeance against his older brother who cut it off to use in some kind blood ritual. Golgotha has motivations. Convictions. A sense of justice. Golgotha has vision.
Does Geramee?
4. "But loneliness that deep gets into the marrow, Now that I'm here—among friends—I can feel it burning out of me. Little by little, step by step" —Karlach (Baldur’s Gate 3)
Something about being somebody else imparts into me a will to live. Paradoxically, when I roll a die, I want to live. My years as Golgotha, and perhaps my years as Geramee, too have inspired me to start my own DnD campaign, and I’ve had the pleasure of watching another group of misfits slowly form bonds. Friendships. I don’t think I’ll ever write about how role-playing personally feels to me a fundamentally trans activity. I meander. Or how in the invention of characters, I feel as though I am reinventing myself—that this impulse is not how everyone experiences fictional or “fantasy” products. I meander. Or how our need for constant remakes of older media highlights our indulgence in nostalgia not simply as a “return” to something but a re-understanding of what that something is. A remake of ourselves. It’s all too on the nose. Besides, I meander. So maybe I’ll never finish the book-length projects I’m actually working on. Maybe I’ll die too early like my mother or keep on moseying no matter the urgency I feel rising over me like a moon-sized water balloon reaching capacity. Maybe someday I’ll write about friends (not the show) as those who remember you when you don’t recognize yourself. That it’s OK to not recognize yourself. That there’s more to yourself than just yourself. Baldur’s Gate 3 captures this perfectly in all of its sprawling outcomes—the disjointed intersection of personal histories, the element of chance in many social interactions: the (mis)fortune our hearts delight in with one another.
If it has taught me anything, it’s that not even the ambition of would-be gods and the might of actual gods can stop gay people who have trauma bonded.
5. “I lost my real briefcase. My whole life was in it.” —Tony Soprano (The Sopranos)
So the quest that was so urgent (getting the worm out of my brain) turned out to be not so urgent. I meandered. Regretfully, I meandered here, too. I’ve been having gruesome nightmares lately (that are being treated). I don’t Rest so well. In Baldur’s Gate 3, you learn you have a dream guardian who protects you from ceremorphosis. Hence, all the meandering. The initial conflict in Baldur’s Gate 3 is not whether you will become a mindflayer but whether or not you want to continue to live under the threat of becoming one. It is a literary device that deletes all of one’s conviction, heart, and spirit and replaces it with monstrosity.
In The Sopranos, dreams are used to convey core conflict in non-narrative, mostly aesthetic manners. Tony Soprano says, “there’s no geographical solutions to emotional problems,” but (spoilers) Tony gets a lot wrong. Like how emotional problems do have geography, and if that landscape resembles say New Jersey, (see metonym: America) your emotional problem is likely pretty violent. Most notably, in a coma dream, Tony refuses to give up his “business” symbolized in a briefcase. This refusal, because of Tony’s line of work, resolves to violence but also affirms his will to live.
I’ll be the first to admit that I am not the boss of the New Jersey Mafia family, but I do feel a deep connection to my work. And if my own refusal to give it up bound me to violence, would I have the conviction of Tony Soprano? Don’t I already pledge myself to some level of violence? I meander. It’s not a great comparison, considering the refusal is resistance to imperialism which has more in common with Tony’s line of work than mine. Still, resistance is often violence, and I hope to have the strength to choose it (at least more often than I choose to blame myself or god). So if my nightmares were a guardian, or a warning, or an emotional geography, what would they say about my own conflicts?
Let me try to convince myself of something obvious by simply stating it, but also for you, the other consciousness in the room: there are things more important than writing, being “relevant,” that opportunity, your big break, the right time, the right place, the hunger & its feeding, your ego & its needing, your incorrect and correct perception of yourself (get over thyself said Socartes before the hemlock made him a memory), are we having fun yet asked Nickelback over & over again two months before 9/11, besides I am just getting started—
There is this second and the next second: the steady, tangible, permanent hands on the imaginary clock rounding up a big swing—I mean hour. I mean uppercut. I mean watchout. Put your head on this pillow. Take a rest. It’s going to be a long dream.
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Golgotha Vanukekali the Storm Herald Barbarian is Geramee, a writer, Social Media Manager for The Kenyon Review, and Poetry Editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Visit geramee.com for more moseying and meandering.
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