Shoot Club: Sanity Check
TomChick - Columns - Comments - 08/17/06
This stuff was fine when I was in junior high. And, yeah, I admit, high school. Okay, okay, college, too. But in the immortal words of Danny Glover and a thousand cops on the verge of retirement, I'm getting too old for this shit. I mean, seriously, me and Trevor improving an imagined seduction to each other is gayer than anything Ang Lee has ever directed. Maybe even Gregg Araki, if you're gay enough or arty enough to know who he is.
I had a bad feeling going into this. "You should join us this weekend," Trevor had said. "We're playing on Friday night. You should join us."
"For D&D? No thanks."
"It's not D&D this week. It's the Cthulhu game."
"Cthulhu game?"
We've been doing board games lately. Which means Trevor explains them to us and sometimes has to play them for us because he's done a bad job of explaining them. 'No, no, you don't want to do that because of this,' he'll tell us, pointing at some marker covering a number or maybe a card played face up in a box, 'you want to do this.' Then he does it for us while we watch. The summer has been slow, hence the boardgames. It makes me wish more computer and videogames would hurry up and come out.
But there was that one Cthulhu boardgame we tried, which was cooperative. No one plays Cthulhu. We’re all investigators. That didn’t change the dynamics much. 'No, no, you don't want to play your elder sign because of the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath at Miskatonic University,' Trevor had told me, 'you want to play the Charles Dexter Ward card.' Then he took the card from my hand and played it.
The whole thing was pretty cool anyway, mainly because I remembered bits and pieces of the Cthulhu stuff. I couldn't tell you thing one about who Charles Dexter Ward was, but I remembered his name.
"Yeah, you remember the Cthulhu RPG, don't you? I'm going to be doing a module I wrote back in the 80s that I never got to run."
The 80s. Back when I made out with Sarah Goldman, whose perfume I sometimes recognize on someone else. Back when Wes Ellis explained that you knew you were drunk when you moved your jaw back and forth, but you couldn't feel it. Back when there was nothing to do and all day to not do it. Back when I probably remembered who Charles Dexter Ward was because I'd just had my mind blown by an H.P. Lovecraft story in that way that can only happen the first time you read it, and only if you were a kid. What else was I going to do on Friday anyway?
"Friday? Yeah, I guess that sounds good. I'll be there."
"Well, we need to play at your house anyway, so cool."
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