Some social crucibles are more intense than others. I was a drama rat in high school, and the pressures of preparation and performance do remarkable things to break down the barriers between people working on a show. Of the people in my wedding, for example, half the groomsmen and bridesmaids (we had six of each) were people I'd first met working on plays. By contrast, I've lost touch with most of the people with whom I worked on the yearbook, or who played on the 9th-grade basketball team with me.

Still, nothing has ever been as intense as the crowd with whom I played Dungeons and Dragons in college. We had the luxury of a large and comfortable place to play--the chambers of the Philanthropic Society, to which one of the players belonged--so we were able to engage in marathon sessions of gaming. They usually began just after lunch on Friday and continued until the early morning or even the late morning, so we got hours and hours of exposure to one another's little personality quirks, pet peeves, and underlying philosophies. D&D is a role-playing game, so each of us created a character with certain strengths, weaknesses, skills, preferences, and quirks; we would then engage in what was essentially a spirited session of make-believe at the direction of the dungeon master, or DM, who had created a variety of places, monsters, treasures and traps for our characters to negotiate.

What I find fascinating about role-playing games is the question of how much the characters and the players overlap. If you spend a lot of time playing a brilliant but fundamentally self-interested thief, is that a sign of something in your makeup, or just a role you're putting on? And if it's the latter, how long before the role begins to creep into real life, before the abyss begins to gaze into you?

My main character, for example, was a paladin, a holy warrior whose power came from his dedication to his deity (who was in his case Tyr, the Norse god of war). In D&D terms, paladins are "lawful good," meaning they must follow a rigid code of behavior that puts morality as Job One. One of the other players also had a paladin, but the two of us played our warriors very differently. Mine was named Gordian, a name suggesting that either morality is much more twisted than we might think, or that cutting through the bullshit to get to right and wrong was actually a pretty simple task. Gordian tried hard to do the right thing at all times, but if there was a dilemma whose horns were justice and mercy, he generally went with mercy; he was also a loner, living either on board his warship or in the basement apartment a friend kept for him in her castle, and focusing primarily on righting the wrongs he stumbled across. He eventually retired to a lighthouse, keeping unwary ships off the rocks. If there's such a thing as a libertarian paladin, Gordian was one.

My friend's paladin, by contrast, was named Beowulf; like her namesake, she was possessed of a certain degree of self-confidence, and after she'd gone up in the ranks of paladins, she became a monk. (Not a nun; in D&D, monks are a different class of character altogether--kind of like the Shao-Lin monks that Caine hung out with in Kung Fu.) After rising through the monkish ranks, Beowulf wound up founding an entire city based on principles of rational behavior, ruling and ordering it in minute detail in the name of law and order. The only real differences between Beowulf's rule and that of Mussolini were that Beowulf a) had a moral compass and b) could have kicked Benito's ass with her bare hands.

Still, there's a lot about the players to be learned by studying those characters. I wonder if the people who played Tarot, Mavel, and Duke have the same insights into me through Gordian that I have into them through their characters. I suspect so. And that may be why those friends still hold a unique place in my heart. After all, friends help you move; real friends help you move treasure liberated from angry dragons.
9:30 AM

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I wonder sometimes whether aging really changes us all that much. Every once in a while I find myself in a mood that seems completely familiar to me. On Saturday I was in one that I've known for decades--that of the loner. People are often surprised to hear that I view myself as, down at the core, a very shy person. I can't deny that I'm very talkative, and I've become adept at injecting myself into conversations at a superficial level, but that's a skill I've gained through long practice. In fact, I could argue that most of my education has been a process of learning to share my opinions with strangers without fear--all the creative writing courses, for example, or the years of radio announcing, the plays, the improv work, the entire grad-school program in education. What was I learning in them if not to get over the stage fright and express myself?

The Web, like the announcer's booth at WXYC, is the perfect place to share your personality with the world under the most controlled of circumstances. If I felt like playing Prince's "When Doves Cry" or Queen's "Death on Two Legs" on the air, there was nothing my listeners could do except turn the dial--they couldn't get anywhere near me. And here in my journal, I'm free to play pretty much any tune I want, no matter how obnoxious or cloying, without fear of criticism. It's a great gig.

Still, sometimes I feel a bit cut off from friendships. I'm fortunate in being married to my best friend, and in having a few old buddies whom I think I could still call at 4 a.m. for bail money, and in having an enormous group of online chums--my "invisible friends," as one of them recently put it--with whom I can banter to my heart's content on a daily basis. Yet I feel as though I've gone a long, long time without making a really close friend.

Maybe it's the banter that's done it; I've become skilled enough in shallow chatting that I'm having trouble getting any deeper. Many of my deepest friendships developed during times of extraordinary stress and difficulty--high school, for example--when our facades were either incomplete or cracked and battered to the point where we could see the real people inside. Now that I'm older and hidden behind a secure and freshly-painted persona, it's much harder for anyone else to see behind it--and a hell of a lot harder for me to see others from inside it.

So, here I am--sitting inside the tall tower of a castle I myself built, wondering why no one comes to visit, and occasionally firing messages tied to arrows out of the window. You don't have to be a fan of Monty Python and the Holy Grail to laugh at that.

12:21 PM

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