Reality tales

I do often think that most of my inspiration to write came from having spent so much of my childhood passing my time in the various online RPG games. I've said it before but it's always worth sayin again, because I think that what essentially happened to me is that, as a child, and a teen as well, I got addicted to this sort of virtual world that then, once I reached adulthood, very much became unsustainable -- but not necessarily in the way you'd think.

This means to say that I could have still gone on playing the virtual games when I was older (many seem to think they must quit ) but that , for some reason, the allure of the games, and even the "realism" that I felt when I played them as a kid, very much faded once I hit adulthood. In other words, I did not feel nearly as immersed in any game I played past the age of 20 or so...as I had when I was a kid. At the same time as that thoigh, I still had the need - as though it was a drug I got addicted to-- to slip off into these other realms. I still wanted to feel as I felt then, when I played a game pretending I was a magician or a Druid or a samsara warrior or some such thing. I still wanted my brain to drink deeply of just the thoughts of the places the games brought me to.

The real world to this day I feel...simply does not compare to the world I remember from the specific online RPG's I played as a kid. It's actually almost creepy just how vivid my memories really are from them all. If they weren't so vivid, I obviously would not be consistently returning to them all these years later. Alas, if you looked thru my archives, you'll see I hit this subject and return again and again. I do not revisit any other childhood memories nearly as often as I do the ones where I was playing the very specific online roleplaying games. In fact, I've often said to people that my entire obsession and wish to live in Europe stems completely from just how much I played the games. Most of them, after all, though they weren't say in Europe, were set and featured medieval type cities that were just like European ones more or less. I honestly therefore think I got addicted to the sights and the sounds of this medieval style world.

Unfortunately though, like I say, the games very much dried out once I got past 20, but that need and that want to keep going back to that other world I recognized never did , and I think it is really this core "addiction" of mine at the end of the day that has ultimately kept me tethered to the keyboard as I am. I write stories for fun, but I also think I write them literally because I find the reality of actual life in this modern world and especially this country with no history  that intolerable....

In fact, I often find that, as much as I wish I could, I seem to have a very very difficult time trying to write stories in any sort of true reality connected to my own actual life here in the States...and it's probably for the exact reason of my early childhood immersion with these fantastical  video games. For example, even the stories I write that I purposely keep void of magic or sorcery et cetera, I still tend to wind up making fantastical , and unreal, in some other sense. In the summer of 2014 for example I wrote  about a girl named Angela becoming a world famous director out of Miami at the age of 21....and then from there I just basically used her fictional bank account as an excuse to have her hopping all around the world living in luxury. Yea,  Angela didn't leave reality or step through portals or cast spells, but I still couldn't really write her as "truly real." And of course to me being truly real is, I suppose, being mundane ...or maybe very tragic. It's also being trapped, more likely than not, in the United States. Obviously I can't really write that well of a real person livikg in a city like Florence because I've never lived there. I might be able to get close but...it still doesn't feel right. I can write about an American though. Naturally! It's just that I don't really want to. Because I get mad.

I , as you can perhaps see, am a little conflicted when it comes to wanting to write realism to not wanting to write it. On the one hand, I'm addicted to this fantasy drug I've been chasing since childhood and I desperately want to experience rather outlandish and impossible things through writing and keep going back to that fantastical realm ....but on the other I also feel like I'm perhaps doing a disservice (to who) by *not* writing realism, and I think it's the reason why I wind up sort of switching between essays like these and then just pure fantasy tales. Trying to write about reality just seems boring. It also seems like, well, if I'm going to write about a pure reality, ought I not just write an essay?

Let me give you an example of something positive  that would usually get my fingers itchy to start writing ...and which would probably also veer off into quickly into fantasy: I am scrolling around on Twitter, or watching the National Geographic channel, and I see a short show about the Amazon rainforest, or Africa. I begin to get a little saddened by the fact that in reality I do not have the means to get on a Boeing jet and leave instantly for the place. So what do I do? I start writing a story set there and for the next few hours I find peace and relaxation feeling as though I'm there, and deeply immersing mysef in the idea of the place. Eventually the story that began as being sinply in the African jungle with elephants and rhinoceroses turns somehow into something about  magical sea creatures and crazy weather and talking animals et cetera. I'm in a good mood. I'm on vacation...

But now take something that doesn't leave me sad , but rather very angry, like when I start thinking about the political situation in the States, or the student loan debacle here (which has ruined family members) or even the immigrant story of my family from Italy that, if you've read me, you'll know I am deeply deeply conflicted about. When I start thinking about these things, these very real and day to day things, it seems that my fingers never , or at least very rarely, end up inspired to write a fictional story about this, but rather to just often write paragraphs of angry flipped out diatribes trying to explain jusr why I find the situation so intolerable . Often when I get to the end of these diatribes ll admit I do feel better ...and relieved...as though I've taken a bath....but...I don't like at all what I've written. Like, I feel as though I wasted my time. "Why couldn't I have written that as fiction?"

Alas I have no idea why, except to say that I think there is some sort of deep ceded connection somewhere in my brain when it comes to the idea that writing is now *supposed* to be for the fantasy and perhaps solely the fantasy...and ive also said this before ...but if you look at so much of what literature has become for many very excited readers, you'll see this is really very much the case. The truth is that the written world now very much mimics the video game and the movie world: Stories about pure reality seem to be pretty much out the window. People want stories about fantasy. The most popular stories , so far as I can tell, often seem to be fantasy.....

I dunno. Back to da page I guess. I got some tits I wanna grow and some dresses I wanna wear and some big Boeing 747 jets I wanna on. And as you can imagine ....I can't do none of that in la realta.