Our Fight

Must have been six years ago. I was on the third floor of a local bookstore, gazing at a bunch of genre titles I had no intention of buying, when I saw a guy I hadn't seen for years looking through books one aisle over. I resented him a bit because I had been kicked out of his gaming group a few years back; he had said his core group wanted to keep the numbers down, nothing personal, but it still felt a bit personal since I enjoyed gaming with them. I also suspected it had something to do with my having quit a job at the same place where his wife, also a player, worked, so it seemed to me as if they were avoiding discomfort there. 

I had all this in mind when I saw him there in the bookstore, and I thought that I could easily just ignore him and get on with my life out of some sort of revenge for being snubbed. But I do try to doubt that part of myself enough to at least challenge that sort of reality I want to set up for myself, the kind of outlook you could characterize as being a cave with the exit walled up with brick and mortar, with barely a pinhole for fresh air.

So, not wanting to wall myself off as a matter of habit, I walk up to the guy, ask him how he's been, prepared for some measure of "fuck you." But he's cordial, we talk for a while, he writes down my email address in some electronic gadget, and I figured that might be the last I see of him--  even if he meant to talk to me, he could have entered one character in my email address incorrectly and that would be that.  But in a short while he did email me, and us both being geeks we managed to keep a conversation going for pretty much up until today.

He wasn't doing too well even when I first met him, way before meeting him the bookstore, more than a decade ago now. He was living through a collision of health problems that probably would have killed off a good number of people. He had managed to survive, despite all the changes that these conditions thrust on him, although there would forever be gaps in his memory around the time his symptoms intensified. Every few months it seemed that something new and more uncomfortable visited itself on him, but he kept active, kept up with his hobbies, organized events, went on trips, all the stuff that other people would have just given up, shouldered with their new role as a person with a chronic illness.

He would admit to me, though, that it was getting tougher over time. He had to balance all sorts of medications and diet restrictions, which seemed more a holding pattern than any sort of treatment. He'd take chemicals meant to get his body in working order, and be stricken by them, unable to do anything for days.  He fought these things indirectly, by using his irreverent sense of humor to pick apart hypocrisy, some of which he published on a blog which mostly just family got to read, but which he let me read as well.  I didn't always agree with him on his politics, but I didn't much mind; I knew where he was coming from, and as he told me, he gave no quarter because to do anything less would mean going under, going insane.

Over the years it's taken him longer and longer for him to answer emails. He asked me to pare down the topics, and he would trim a lot more in his replies. Even though I did this, there would be long pauses between emails, sometimes weeks, when it used to be only a few days.  He said it was harder to concentrate, harder to remember. The few times I'd met him in person since our friendship had been renewed, he looked like he was doing all right, getting around OK with a little help, still managing those events, still running games, still laughing at my dumb jokes. I knew he was having trouble, and I knew how hard he was fighting; it was hard for me to say goodbye when it was time for us to end our visit.

Today I got a short email from him, badly misspelled, saying he's on heavy painkillers and can't manage to fully reply right now, much less do anything at home, and that he may be off the painkillers in a couple weeks. I don't know what's necessitated his needing to take them, but I hope that's true.

The reason I bring this up is that we seem more and more to have a fascination with the end of the world.  We've always been a bit into eschatology as a culture, even if we don't take these numerological end-of-the-world pronouncements seriously. I've talked with you before about my own fascination with the wasteland and the end of the world.  And I can't help but think, whether this latest proclamation about the world ending (tomorrow, as of the time of this writing) is a cynical ploy to gain followers, or if it's a genuine number crunching scheme that happens to yield different results each time, that waiting for everything to fall down is a horrible way to live a life that, odds are, is much better than the one my friend (and the many people worse off than him), wakes up to every morning.

My friend's own world is slowly getting snuffed out by things beyond his control, but he still fights, he still gets up, he still makes something of himself. I don't think we need these kinds of challenges to justify our existence, but if all we can hope for all of humanity is a cosmic reset button, maybe we should ask ourselves if we're doing enough as individuals to warrant seeing the world in this way.

It took me a while today to realize that my friend's email was getting to me, that I had been able to pretty much shelve my fears about what he was going through until I read his note, and this darkness has been spilling around the corners, invading my day. By contrast, I find all the apocalyptic talk disgusting.

I try to remind myself we've all got that sword hanging over us, we've all got our own piece of the abyss, whether we choose to stare into it or not, and we have to deal with it in our own way. To eagerly invite obliteration for humanity, though, feels like a form of suicide, even if fate is the one holding the knife.