A Pilgrim’s Digression

It’s one of those mornings where the alarm clock must have been going off for ten minutes before the sound penetrated my sleeping brain. I was in a deep freeze of undreaming sleep. When I finally did come out of my coma, I rolled out of bed into the morning dark and staggered around my room trying to get my bearings.

What time? What place? What am I supposed to do?

I try to gather up the things I will need in the bathroom. Towel, contact solution and contacts, toothbrush. I end up standing, swaying in the dark, trying to get straight in my mind whether I have everything.

Ugh, my head.

Fifteen years ago, this might have been the morning after a night on the town. Instead, it is the result of playing World of Warcraft until ten past midnight, then not being able to fall asleep until one A.M. Then the alarm went off at what time?

I look at the clock for the third time. 4:50 A.M. But I know that’s not right. I always set the clock fifteen to twenty minutes fast, so that I feel like I am saving time. It sounds silly, especially when I have barely slept and I’m standing there looking at the clock thinking “It’s really 4:35 A.M. Can I go back to sleep?”

No, I can’t.

I hadn’t done this in awhile. I thought the addiction was over, after more than a month of being able to quit playing and go to bed at 10:30. But last night, I went on an impromptu Karazhan raid with some people I hadn’t played with for a long time, and we had so much fun. There was Frenchy and his wife, the two Quebecoise who everyone loves to hear speak over Vent. There was the middle-aged, retired guy from Vancouver…who plays a petite, pretty female Draenei mage. There was the newbie, our novice Paladin healer we took along just to gear him up out of greens and blues. There was our guild leader, female cancer survivor and tree Druid, never letting our health fall much below 5%.

It was a wonderful time. We almost could have made a Karathon of it, running the whole instance, but we started too late. So we went through Shade of Aran, then did the Chess event just for kicks (and to try to get our Paladin the shield that drops). Then we all quit, dead tired.

And this is the morning after. I feel like crap, but am happy as can be.

June was a difficult month during which I got to play very little. It began with me losing my free Internet connection here in Washington, and ended with a death in the family. The latter is really the biggest issue, since the Internet connection was something easily remedied by buying internet service for my Washington bachelor pad (that last is a joke, please do laugh).

My great-grandmother died on the morning of Thursday the 26th of June. I had to travel to West Virginia on Friday for the viewing, or “visitation” as it is properly called these days, and stay for the funeral on Saturday.

It was a rather odd affair. No one seemed particularly saddened by her death. At the viewing, people visited with each other, laughing and telling stories. Her son–my grandpa–and his two brothers had planned a fishing trip to Canada for the week of July 4th. They were actually supposed to leave on the day she died, and they merely postponed their trip by a couple days, leaving immediately after the funeral. My grandpa even joked that they should have brought their boats with them to the funeral so they could get an even better head start on the 13 hour drive. No one seemed to feel this behavior would have been offensive to grandma.

She was 96 and had recently been diagnosed with Leukemia, which her doctors did not recommend be treated because of her age and frailty. She died peacefully in the hospital, aware of the people around her and able to communicate, so this, too, probably contributed to the feeling of peace people felt at her passing.

Still, it was pretty remarkable what a long life she had, and sad that we never got to celebrate her hundredth birthday. She was born in 1911, so she still had a few years to go before being an official centenarian.

I ended up spending most of the rest of the next week visiting. My grandma needed someone to stay with her while the men were fishing, so I was happy to have the time with her. It was good to have Brendan spend so much time with her as well, because she is sick, too.

I took her to her chemotherapy on Thursday. I found out that while we were all visiting at my great-grandma’s funeral, my own grandma was making funeral arrangements of her own.

Yet for all that, she seemed so cheerful and healthy during the week we spent together. It was a good week for us all.

Now I am back and feeling rather at sea. I haven’t felt much like blogging. The summer has become oppressively hot, especially in Washington where the humidity is like wrapping a damp cloth around your head and trying to breathe through it. At this point, I am just kind of going with the flow of things.

I felt like blogging a bit today, so I blogged. I may not write again for another two weeks. The election does not interest me at all right now–I have barely even paid attention to the news since the Primaries ended in May.  I am just living.

This is what they call the summer doldrums. And I am ready for the Fall.