Why Do You Bet That's Nice? (1/25)

 This is a free-write/journal about my emotional arc with Dimension 20. There have been many times in my life, many of them directly connected to watching this show, that I was convinced I was at rock bottom and that's where I was going to stay. Clearly I was wrong. Go me!

Yesterday Siena and I went into the city to see the Dimension 20 Live Show “Gauntlet at the Garden”. It was a surreal experience. I’ve known about CollegeHumor for about as long as I’ve had access to the internet. They were the fist sketch comedians I interacted with before I knew what sketch comedy was. Funny little videos, silly cartoons, jokes that went a mile over my head.

In the Spring of 2020, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, a little event happened called the end of the world. I was back at home, miserable. I couldn’t see Siena, I couldn’t see my friends, my senior year had ended, and COVID was hanging like the sword of Damocles over everyone. Joe Biden was, for some reason, made the Democratic nominee for president. There was climate disaster, social and racial injustice, and an ongoing pandemic that he seemed woefully ill equipped to rise to the challenge for. The world was a very very miserable place.

And I’m not going to say “And then… CollegeHumor saved me!” because CollegeHumor couldn’t. I remember being online the day CollegeHumor was shuttered. I remember the weeks of discussions beforehand, how Meta had inflated their advertising numbers to get people to pivot to only video, only on Facebook. And to everyone’s surprise, corporate greed from The Website That Commits Treason & Also Tells You What Your Parents Are Up To ended up harming artists and working people! Who’da thunk!

So when the pandemic was rolling on, I would lie in bed for hours trying to find something to occupy my time, trying to keep the misery at bay. And I was fortunate enough to stumble on some CollegeHumor sketches. I watched a lot of them. I watched too many of them. I’d watch them, curled up in bed, eyes puffy from mourning my life, my education, my friends, my career, the industry I’d spent 4 years to get into that was now screeching to a halt, and for a secret 6th reason (This is called foreshadowing!)

I watched this sketch around 60 times. Brennan’s voice as he says the sentence “Why do you bet that’s nice” is my “Cellar Door”. I think it might be the best a sentence has ever sounded. I liked watching them because I could point at things and say “Hey I know that!”. I could see the game, I could chart the escalation of it. It was nice going back to a channel I’d had only passing familiarity with the past few years.

And then I got into Dimension 20. Long hot days of the summer of 2020 were spent watching episode after episode of Fantasy High in my basement. I was deeeeeply depressed at the time, but it was nice to have DnD back, with a light, breezy feel with easy to digest episode lengths. Now they’re up there with the industry standard of 2+ hours per episode (If not longer), but for a while it was nice to plow through their backlog in a matter of weeks. The DnD was a nice distraction to the fact that the world was ending and my life was over.

Now we get to the foreshadowing from earlier. At some point in 2020, I spontaneously developed a very strange, annoying, and embarrassing eczema like condition. I say eczema like because no doctor I’ve seen has been able to diagnose what it is or why it happened. But I still deal with it. Every time it seemed to be managed by medication, it would come back with a vengeance. I remember watching the second episode of Unsleeping City, my face puffy and red and covered in oozing scabs, and I remember thinking that this was it. This was my life forever more. I was beginning to pick up speed on my rapid tumble in the downhill portion of my life. Nothing could improve, only ever get worse. The world was terrible and my skin would always be disgusting and there was nothing to be done about it. I would never play DnD again, only live vicariously through others. I was going to lose all my friends to time and distance and I’d be left alone.

While I eventually got the skin thing under control (To the extent that a mysterious medical issue that still bothers me 5 years later can be), that winter I’d just lost my job at Trader Joe’s. My contract was only for seasonal work and after the Super Bowl, they no longer had need for me. So Siena came over for Valentines Day. I was depressed and scared and unemployed. But she came to me excitedly and told me that one of my presents was a Dropout subscription. And we spent the night eating sushi and drinking champagne, gorging ourselves on the Trader Joes snacks we’d come to love. Maybe everything would be okay?

The next morning my mom tested positive for COVID. 2 Days later, I did too. I sat in my bedroom, wracked with body aches and a headache that never diminished, sniffling and polishing off the multitude of snacks that Siena and I hadn’t finished. The issue was I couldn’t taste a damn thing. I was eating gummy worms and brookies by the handful, and the sensation was strange as anything I’ve ever felt. Not a thing registered. No scents, no flavor. Nothing at all. But as an Olympic Tier emotional eater, I decided that a little thing like “taste” or “gratification” would be no obstacle to me. So I ate snacks, and played video games on my laptop, and spent every waking hour in bed watching A Crown of Candy. And that was going to be my life. I was never going to taste ever again. I was going to be miserable like this for the rest of my days.

And then it all worked out.

I had a very emotional response going to the city to see the DImension 20 Live show. A show that had been there during some of the lowest moments of that first year of the pandemic, when I was convinced my new normal would be a painfully slow slide downwards. Performers I had laughed along with while I was grappling with the understanding that my life was essentially over. And I watched Kingston Brown (From Uptown, no less), and I watched Brennan Lee Mulligan who I have stolen so much from as a DM, and I sat with my fiancee whom my love for is a well that has no bottom and by coincidence I sat in the same section as two beloved friends who I’ve had the privilege to play RPGs with for over four years.

My life hadn’t ended when I thought it would. My “new normal” always changed for the better, I always moved forward and grew and toughened up and improved. The life I have now is so precious I grip it hard with two hands, thankful for every single thing that I had been so convinced would never possibly come my way.

And I left the Garden and I felt this pinprick of ice in my soul. A jealous, bitter shard of ice that was despondent that there were improvisers and sketch comedians being paid to play Dungeons and Dragons at Madison Square Garden and it wasn’t me.

But I’d danced that dance before. I knew that my misery and anxieties were wrong. Life will get better, my circumstances will change. They always had before. They will again. So no, I won’t be playing DnD in Madison Square Garden to a sold out crowd of tens of thousands any time soon.

Doesn’t mean I won’t though.