Nearly every weekday I talk on the phone with my friend Dustin. Our conversations usually centre around gaming of some variety, mostly old school role playing games, but also about current game industry news, events, Gencon and other things.
We met twenty years ago at The Armory, a game distributor I was working at in Baltimore before I made a leap to Games Workshop. Dustin was working at the STSCI and came to the Armory looking for Magic cards. We hit it off and became good friends.
Over the next few years Dustin got married and then work moved me away from Baltimore to Toronto. We got lost in the shuffle of our lives for a bit but eventually we reconnected.
About the time I reached out to Dustin he was starting to go though a long separation and divorce. At the lowest point of the whole thing I told him to call me whenever he needed and we would chat for as long as he wanted. He agreed and so in the winter of that year, February I think, he took me up on my offer and called whenever it seemed things were spiraling out of control. At that time I discovered two things:
A.) The final tab on exactly how much money she was screwing him out of, a figure well into six figures, was ridiculous but a bargain at any price to be free of her conniving and troublesome ways.
B.) I didn't have an unlimited cell plan.
One $1500 phone bill later I changed B.) pretty quickly. (Verizon cut me a deal on the bill but I still had to pay north of $1000.)
That month set the stage though and we began talking every day, Monday through Friday. I listened to him talk about the blows to his ego at moving back in with his parents, getting to know his Dad pretty well in the process, and just tried to offer support to someone who had followed his heart only to have it crushed and ripped out. I rejoiced as he put his feet back in to job market and found work. I was a sounding board for his first online dating profiles and his possibly less than helpful friend as he began to date the woman who he would go on to marry. (She's warm, wonderful and genuine in depths his ex-wife, the She-Beast of Smyrna, will never know.) Over that time he helped me figure out all sorts of things as I became a parent and then ended up staying home with our son and quitting my job.
We talk about all sorts of things. Hopefully some of these conversations will be entertaining and informative. I'll try to spare you the really dull ones.
Cheers,
Jim
No comments:
Post a Comment