The Culmination of a Week-long Game.

Every time I walk across the bottom floor of my parking garage to check my mail or on the way to the gym, I have to walk underneath it.  It’s hangs precariously across the alcove of one of the floodlights that line the ceiling.  Its cotton labyrinth lays across and around the socket as though it fell on the bulb upside down.  At its apex roosts the spindly eight-legged Minotaur.

It’s a beautiful horror and absolutely the last thing I want to see suspended above me.   The other lights have webs but they’re mostly cob’s or abandoned.

What tangled webs we weave when we practice to deceive. 

I’ve made some choices the past week that may have been the wrong ones so I’m in a little bit of a funk.  Some were school related. Others were motivated by personal reasons.   By the time I finish it, this blog should have dispelled my funk. That’s the goal, anyway.

The garage-spider weaves his web differently than any other spider.  It’s a jumbled heap of silly string but it serves his purposes.  Its motivations behind the web are clear, its intention obvious.  Instinctual. 

I’m currently enrolled in a Board Games class at school.  It’s fabulous.  It’s challenging.  My partner and I are tasked with concepting out and creating a board game from scratch.  She’s a designer so she will, uh, design and I will do the stuff with the words.  It’s far more difficult than I initially thought it’d be. 

We’ve got a rough idea of how the game works and some of the why’s but the what  is an issue.   To help, I pretend as though I am player and I have just drawn the particular card we’re concepting.  How would I react?  Do I curse my rotten luck or the rotten game?   There’s logic to the way board games work and I aim to discover it.

Currently, my web is as inefficient as it is asymmetrical.  It seems that while renovating it recently, I removed too many stabilizers and it collapsed under the weight and velocity of the ladybug that accidentally flew into it. 

I feel compelled to make a terribly complex board game.  It’s the wrong choice, of course.  The best board games are the simplest - except for Axis and Allies.  That fucking game comes with two instruction booklets and it’s the best game ever.

The natural state of the board game is simplicity.  Making it unnecessarily complex is just that ­– unnecessary.  

So it is that my decisions and choices were not wrong so much as unnecessary.  The fix is therefore easy.  To borrow from Dan Simmons’ genius award-winning Hyperion series, my answer is to “not choose.”  

Incidentally, I’m totally entering this blog into the “Best Extended Metaphor Ever” contest. 

I feel better.