for whom the baja blasts

Take a good look at this obnoxious picture. These are the #schoolbusfires in a nutshell (although missing many members due to distance). Some may remember the namesake from the pandemic-era twitch stream days , but this is a group of friends that came together because of the Monolith all those years ago, primarily playing GTA Online and various Halos, but have since become a critical part of each other's lives. Sometimes I will share the ongoing bits or memes of the week with my girlfriend or the gang and they'll be astounded at the absurdity. I love them for it.  I suppose this is just another one of those bits. 

On April 20th, I hit a decade without drinking. I've said in the past, I feel great about managing this, but there will always be a part of me that simply considers this as getting back to square one. Even more so, considering the years of mental health issues that I had ignored as real and trying to get right on that path. I like to think that I'm managing that as well, but the landmarks involved are of course less tangible and progress isn't nearly as linear.

As part of my daily reading, I have a grounding morning of quotes and introspections I go through. This recently leapt out at me: "Whenever someone has done wrong by you, immediately consider what notion of good or evil they had in doing it. For when you see that, you'll feel compassion, instead of astonishment or rage. For you may yourself have the same notions of good and evil, or similar ones, in which case you'll make an allowance for what they've done. But if you no longer hold the same notions, you'll be more readily gracious for their error." - Marcus Aurelius, MEDITATIONS

Time will never cease bringing on even more somber occasions for memorializing loved ones. When I last wrote about the loss of someone, I had never considered I would have to retread that ground so soon. That was naive. It's been a really weird place to sit with emotions, having recently wanted to firmly bar myself from living too closely with nostalgia, but then being met with devastating news about someone who made those good old days so good. My buddy Marvin has left the world too soon.

Years ago, in the early days of our work on the Monolith, I had begun extensively researching ARGs, having only vaguely heard the term when I was younger. I've talked about it before, but there was a sort of chicken and the egg situation when we really started to get the project rolling. I knew "what" an ARG was, but never had the words. Growing up, I participated in I Love Bees and thought the concept was incredible, but didn't have the terminology for it. Obviously, the allure of making media that felt "real" was always there from the beginning of the project, but a few deep-dives around 2010 brought everything into a new perspective.  Especially when I realized that the godfather of all alternate reality games was set in our own New Jersey.

Something really amusing and heartwarming happened to me recently. 

In some of my writing, especially recently, I've remarked that it feels as if I have gone to too many funerals for peers and have read far too many obituaries about old classmates. Terribly, this has not stopped, and I have sadly had to pay my respects to a former employee of mine who was only a few years my junior.