You Are The Quest Master!
I live every day just trying to get to the otherside of it. I grind my way through the business side of parenting and a job to get to that little speck of time that is mine. That’s only become more difficult in the last four years with all the difficulties we have all endured. Let’s just say that the underlying current of our times starts at apocalyptic and then we have to layer all the work we gotta do to survive. This is America for most people who live here. We are just hustling to survive while a small group of people pull tricks on us to hoard more wealth and power.
Since I crashed my bike, I feel like navigating all this has been even more difficult than normal. I feel like my nervous system hasn’t really grasped yet that I am not gonna get some test result that tells me I am about to die. That’s what it felt like for two months after my crash, waiting for my MRI, CT, and Exercise stress test results to tell me whether I was in danger of eminent death. Evidently, it takes a while for someone to recover from facing their own mortality in a serious way and not just conceptualizing it. I am still learning that.
To make matters worse, my therapist was really concerned with whether or not I was really feeling all this. She was more concerned about whether I was rationalizing my way out of really feeling through the risk to my life than how I was doing given that I was facing tests that would ascertain whether I would live. We can just add her to the list of people in my life who take a shot at me when I am down rather than support me. She really wanted me to go there, which is sorta hilarious. How can you not go there when you have a toddler you want to see grow up? Get the fuck outta here, hoss. I really need to find a new therapist. I basically ignored everything she said on the topic and told her as much when she asked about it.
This whole bit of people taking shots while I am down reminds me a bit when I was a youth tennis player. There was this time that my dad took me to a tennis tournament out of town, because I was trying to get a sectional ranking. Its still unclear whose idea that was about rankings being important. I don’t remember it ever being my idea. I was losing to some kid my dad thought I should be beating, so my dad, the garbage can, called my mom and complained about how I was out of shape and overweight. If it wasn’t enough to have to try and earn the respect and love of my father, I had to get kicked in the gut with my father thinking that if I was just skinny or trained harder I would be a winner. This is why I don’t play tennis anymore. I don’t want to take shots at anyone while they are down like I was forced to do for decades. #Thisisamerica.
Since having these experiences, my goal has been to build and gas people up. This journey isn’t a zero sum game where you have to earn anything. No, if you are trying to live as your authentic self in a society that tries to force you into taking shots at people while they are down then you deserve to be filled up with the premium gas. I don’t get down with all that BS discussion of participation medals being the downfall of America. Give me a break. That’s not real. That wasn’t my upbringing. I had to earn every speck of anything that I have, and that is wrong. Human beings deserve love and respect and shouldn’t have to earn that. Contrarily, it brings me joy to gas people up, because I want people to know that they are supported. This inclination stems from feeling like I don’t really get that support from anyone, save Lily. This is the downfall of having your mom die when you are 28 from a preventable form of cancer that would have been prevented if we had universal health care instead of a huge arsenal of bombs to send around the world. I just want to normalize more people getting that sort of support in the hopes that I will get it back as well. I am just a walking american male stereotype with my “do it on my own ways,” but I can help others from that same outcome.
Yes, It’s another instance of me being the cringe I want to see in the world, but it’s so true. In a world where all my calls to my congress person are ignored, I have my tiny actions. In a world where all my suggestions at my job are cast aside, I have my tiny recommendations for you dear reader on how we can live better. In a world where I have little control over the reports that I publish professionally (I have published some 30-40 technical reports as a “professional,”) I have this little space where I get to have my say. Isn’t that all we have really? We just have control over those little specks of time away from our jobs to be able to bring the full extent of our cringe to the rest of the world. Yet, maybe these little specks of time contain the portal where we can become QUESTMASTERS!
As I was riding around this week, the notion that I am a quest master took hold of me. I was just riding along, taking pictures of interesting little things that had changed since I rode the same road a week earlier and looking for turtles and pikas, and it occurred to me that I am the master of my quests. In a world where so much of my control and agency has been stripped away from me, I still control how enchanted I think my life is. I get to decide how damn delighted I get to be while moving around my built environment in my everyday life. I can choose to get lost in the endless cascade of meaningless words in politics (See King Crimson song below) or just render visible my values with my actions. I can choose to allow myself to get stretched too thin in the churning machinations of a byzantine bureaucracy or just become an invisible cog that lives a secret magic life.
Did you know that you are a questmaster too? yes, indeed you are. I dub you your own questmaster by the power appointed to me by the general wizardry guild (yes, I just made this up). You are probably surprised to learn this. Congratulations are in order. Shall we have a celebration? We probably should. This means that you get to live your life making up enchanted reasons to go places, see things, and listen to the world around you. Need to make a decision on dinner? Might I suggest consulting the wind? No one has been asking their counsel lately and they really should be. Your everyday life can be just as enchanted as any of our finest fables and stories, if you let it. Say it with me now:
I AM THE QUESTMASTER. YOU ARE THE QUESTMASTER. WE ARE ALL THE QUESTMASTER.
This quest mentality is one that as been consistent in the project with our discussion of omen bike questing and quest discussion with Meredith Graves, friend of this quest master, who had this to say about questing when asked what is questing to you:
“At first, ‘questing’ was a private game where I superimposed a fantastic lens over the real world, narrating my daily life to make everyday tasks more bearable and inspire me to remember the magic that always exists in the mundane. It was a funny personal creativity exercise that I figured would be restricted to an existence inside my own head – I’d been indoctrinated with language and tools from TTRPGs (“Table Top Role Playing Games”) after spending a few years working alongside some really brilliant minds in the games industry, and had started to become interested in how games are developed. It has since expanded to include quests-for-quests sake; not just rewriting my to-do list as if I’m a fairytale adventure princess, but actively going out in the world to find strange and miraculous things, and maybe doing some errands on the way if I remember.”
As Graves notes, we really should be using a quest lens to ensure that we remember that “magic always exists in the mundane,” that there are “strange and miraculous” things to find on our quests, and that “when you go out looking for magic, you will find it in some form.” For someone like me who is not thiving but surviving, questing is a lifeline to the joy, awe, and gentle bemusement that I need to get through the day. Lily always says she can visibly and audibly tell when I have gone on a little quest bike ride. That how palpable the difference is for me. I quest to stay alive to the possibility that I can live into a new chapter of my life. Questing is what keeps me going in a world where my society is trying to deaden my magical impulses with convenience and remote-piloted drone strikes.
If interested, you should go read Meredith’s whole interview on questing, because she is the one that got me hip to the questing game.
Also, Meredith has this sick tight talk coming up this month on Saturday August 17th from 1-3pm for Salem Witch Fest, entitled “The Devil Made Me Do It: An Incomplete History of (True) Occult True Crime.” The talk will be about:
“The Salem witch trials may be the first thing that comes to many peoples’ minds if asked to share their thoughts about the idea of witchcraft and the legal system. Of course, like other popular occult-adjacent legal moments in American history, such the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and the case of the West Memphis three, the ‘witches’ of Salem, Massachusetts had nearly nothing to do with the actual occult, and everything to do with the prejudices of those in positions of legal power. Much has been done over the past few decades to rectify this history and uplift witchcraft in the popular imagination, up to and including freeing the previously-incarcerated, an incredible feat and one that should be celebrated. By virtue of these actions, however, there’s been an oppositional push to completely separate the occult from legal narratives – a move that is both ahistorical and, frankly, dangerous. This presentation will compile a short, imperfect history of actual occult crimes, covering a range of circumstances, belief systems, motivations and the like, from the sacrificial rites of Adolfo Constanzo to the recent spate of Mormon family annihilations in the American west – along with speculations on their larger implications for our community, as well as culture at large.”
You can buy a ticket for the talk and watch the recording whenever (That’s what I did!). Tickets are available here.
Ok, I am done gassing my friend up! Here are some of my favorite magical moment’s from my quests this past week:
Thanks for being here, hosses. I so appreciate your support. When you read my writing and comment, you are enriching the life of this weirdo right up here! Your support is what keeps me going. I hope you never underestimate how much your time and attention matters, because it matters to me!
Best,
James
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