The Hedonism of Everyday Things

or: I love writing and games

I want to tell you it’s because it’s getting colder, that the leaves are on the ground, that I’ve driven through snow in the mountains already this year. I want to tell you that it’s because it’s cozy season that I’ve spent an awful lot of my time writing and an awful lot of my time thinking about tabletop roleplaying games, that I’ve spent less of my time organizing and less of my time worried about preparedness.

These reasons might even be true. It might be that for everything we have our seasons. A few hundred years ago, I might have spent this time of the finishing my preserves for the winter, then these comings months holed up knitting and weaving and crafting. Maybe I’m falling into winter mode because winter is approaching.

All I want to do is play games and write books, and it feels self-indulgent, and it shouldn’t feel self-indulgent.

Emma Goldman has that famous quote she never quite said, “if I can’t dance it’s not my revolution,” and maybe for me it’s “if I can’t tell and play stories” instead.

I’ve spent this whole year on high alert. I’ve put most of my hours into getting ready and helping others get ready. Right now I just want words to appear on pages instead. Words with swords and spells.

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I’d always figured I was a bad hedonist. I wanted, when I was younger, to lose myself to the world and get swept up by sex and drugs and novelty and wild experience. I had some of those things, but if I’m being honest when I think back on my well-spent youth wandering, I remember some of the more subtle experiences better.

I remember reading The Lord of the Rings while crouched behind a log outside a forest defense camp in the dark, reading by a red headlamp, sitting watch in case the police raided in the middle of the night. I remember that my fellow watch-mate fell asleep immediately every night and started snoring, and I had to—or got to—sit watch alone. She’s now a successful Instagram influencer, but I’m not going to call her out by name. I remember that I heard the song of the rails most nights, the eerie resonance of train tracks in the middle of nowhere, that sing long slow chords even when trains are miles away.

I remember that one night a black SUV drove past our position at roughly three in the morning, and I had to shadow it through the woods, and that it dropped someone off and drove away. I couldn’t find whoever it had dropped off, and I had to walk a mile under the moonlight to the treesits to warn everyone what had happened. We believed at the time—and frankly I still do—that the government sometimes trained spec ops teams by having them stalk forest defenders in the woods. So the whole mile I walked to the treesits, and the mile I walked back to my position, I was convinced I was being followed.

It turned out that a forest defender had gotten her dad to drop her off in the woods, but that they’d gotten lost en route and hadn’t made it until three in the morning, but of course I didn’t learn that until later.

I remember nights like those far more vividly than I remember parties or chance encounters. They’re far more meaningful to who I am, and how I see myself.

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One night, some years back, I was invited to DJ a goth night in Asheville because the regular DJ dropped out and I had somehow earned a reputation for good taste in music (don’t believe it). A friend of mine, a psytrance DJ with goth leanings, found out and asked if she could split the night with me, because she’d always wanted to DJ a goth night. I said sure.

“How are you planning to DJ?” she asked.

“I don’t know, I was thinking about making a Spotify playlist.”

That simply wouldn’t do. She would not share the night with someone who was DJing with Spotify. So the night before, she invited me over and taught me how to use real DJ software and her decks. I remember that night well, too. It sits in my mind as a pleasurable thing, as pleasurable as the night we DJ’d together.

But I bring it up because we got to talking, and I told her I’d always been a bad hedonist. That I’d tried for sex and drugs but settled back into music, books, games, pleasant company, and maybe the occasional riot or direct action.

“You’ve got hedonism all wrong,” she told me. “The pursuit of pleasure is rarely about what people assume it is. Hedonism is about finding out what you desire, then embracing that desire.”

That next night, while she was DJing, I scared a man into leaving the goth night. He’d come in with some friends to make fun of us weird goths, laughing while mimicking how we danced, looking to his friends for approval. So I warned a few people that I was maybe going to pick a fight, then approached the man.

“Hey, man,” I said. “The thing is, people don’t actually really appreciate it when you come into their spaces and make fun of them.”

He looked at me, at he looked at a couple people who’d decided to come stand behind me, and he left.

And maybe it shouldn’t have, but that gave me pleasure.

I think I get pleasure out of doing the things that I’m good at, that I’ve spent my life learning to do. I don’t think “be scary” is always something I’m proud is in my skillset, but I spent an awful lot of time living on the outskirts of society while looking like a man in a dress, and “look scary” was always my first line of defense. I almost never actually get into fights. Those sound less pleasurable to me.

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I’ve spent this whole year on high alert, and I certainly don’t regret that, because this has been, obviously, the most living-under-fascism year of my life. Some of my worst fears weren’t realized, but I don’t think I was mistaken to have those fears.

This is a common thing with preparedness. If there’s a tornado warning, and you get into your basement, you’re not a fool for having gotten into your basement if the tornado doesn’t hit your house.

And the tornado did hit the houses of people I am in community with, and the tornado is still there. And Trump’s recent drop in popularity doesn’t make him less dangerous. A wounded tiger is still violent. Well, presumably. I’ve never actually witnessed tiger behavior. Poor creatures, so many of them stuck living their lives in metaphors and zoos.

I’m not leaving organizing, I’m not leaving preparedness. Both of those things give me pleasure. Any I’m not actually a hedonist, not at the end of things. Oscar Wilde, that wily anarchist, spent his life pursuing pleasure but then learned in prison that pain and suffering are just as holy, are just as important to a whole and beautiful and meaningful life.

But if the worst is coming—and it may be, and it may not be—one part of preparing for that is to live our lives to the fullest. To tell our friends we love them, and show our friends that we love them. And to play Rimworld as a vampire who builds a gothic manor in a medieval forest. And to play Pathfinder with my friends and convince IHeartRadio to pay us for it. And to finally get the sequel to The Sapling Cage off to Feminist Press, who’ve been waiting patiently for me to turn in the manuscript. They very patiently accepted “fascism is here and I’m a trans woman in the second-reddest state in the country” as an excuse for missing a deadline once already.

I’ll still be keeping up my work, because I love my work and because I love eating food and feeding my dog. But if you need me, I’ll be at home, watching the snow fall and praying it won’t be the last snowfall. One year it will be the last snowfall, either in my own life, or for the region thanks to climate change, and I want to have enjoyed it the way I prefer to: mostly from inside a warm house, watching out the window, while reading books.