Thus, began day two of my malaise. Having run through my previous life, it was time to make sense of everything, to put it into perspective. This was the typical therapeutic process. Where to start...
Ah, yes. We will start at the end. I was crushed by a grand piano. It would have been one thing if I had died the usual way, via truck, or a fentanyl overdose. But I had died in the most ridiculous way imaginable. I would love to be able to go back to my previous life for just a moment so I could look up the number of recorded piano fatalities that have been documented, excluding mob assassinations with piano wire, I have to imagine that number was pretty close to zero. However, looking back now, perhaps it was an appropriate death for a ridiculous life. A nice capstone if you will.
I often said, "I didn't know how to play the game," but perhaps that extended beyond the realm of women. The Gambler says, "If you're gonna play the game, boy, you gotta learn to play it right." Had I been playing it wrong the whole time? I always took life as a serious affair. But to borrow some TTRPG parlance, perhaps life wasn't a serious campaign? Was everyone else only palling around, only paying lip service to the storyline, and mainly using it as the basis for a good laugh? Was I the dower one, bringing everyone else down as I tried to play a serious campaign?
But could that be right? I'm sure my parents were NOT having a good time going through a divorce. I know my siblings and I certainly weren't. However, if viewed from an outside disconnected perspective, the GM of the universe perhaps, it did seem quite comical. I suppose seeing a child, and later a young adult moping around wouldn't be that entertaining, but the universe would be nothing if not patient. It could take its time to set the board, letting the dramatic tension build slowly.
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They say irony is the highest form of comedy. Much like quality liquor, top-shelf irony needs to be properly aged to reach its full flavor. The GM took his time to slowly age the sweet irony, ever patient, making only subtle adjustments to get the superb flavor to perfection. Then the day came to uncork his master craft brew. With a perfectly executed cucking, he broke the seal. If the irony was as sweet as the sheer sense of profound disappointment and shame I felt, it must have truly been a taste to savor. But why stop there, when you can pair it perfectly with a good bit of slapstick comedy to chase it down? A piano would do nicely.
Perhaps I should be grateful that the GM let me roll up a new character with some of my backstory still intact, which also seems ridiculous when you think about it. I'm sure he got a kick out of making me a fuzzy creature as well.
When I finished processing all this, my first thought was outrage. I'd been swindled!
After a moment of internal fuming, my second thought was, had I? I had played a serious game, in an unserious world. That was tragic, true. But I had been given a second life. And I realized what kind of game this was now. I had taken things seriously, suffering from anxiety, thinking that I was going to make a misstep. Perhaps that was true, but that only mattered in a serious universe, and if one thing was clear, this was not a serious universe. The dark clouds began to lift as this realization took form, and with it came this resolve: If this wasn't a serious universe, I would not live as though it was. I wouldn't let anxiety keep me from living life. No matter what happened, I would live in the knowledge that life was essentially one large cosmic joke. This I pledged to myself. And with this pledge, my malaise lifted.