I had a pretty great Christmas/New Years/Birthday, including the traditional week long gaming in Syracuse and the return of an old favorite tradition of mine, bare skinned snow angels. There’s plenty I could talk about, talking about such diverse topics as rampaging toddlers, taking down a red dragon with a vorpal axe and bladed shieldof difficulty 6 with a dice pool of 19, how scarily awesome Quelf is as a party game, or my new found love for the treb show and welcoming people to it.
But the story of note starts when I was returning to Pittsburgh from all of this. I drove back home Sunday night, it was an easy drive except for the hellicious amounts of fog that started outside of Erie and lasted all the way through to Grove City, about an hour and a half. I’ve driven in blizzards before, I actually kinda like it, but this fog was something else; probably the most frightening drive I’ve had in some time.
Flash forward to Monday morning at work, when everyone is slowly filtering in, back from a nigh-two weeks off, spent with family and friends. There was a lot of general chit-chat and kibitzing in the office this morning, happy new years, how were your holidays, how’s the family, etc.
I was talking with one person, let us refer to his individual only as B. After receiving a belated birthday present from this individual, we got to talking, and I talked about the crazy fog. B related how there was tons of fog around where they lived as well the previous night. A bit back and forth and I asked, “Have you ever read Stephen King’s ‘The Mist’?”
B’s response was, “Well, no, I highly doubt it was anything like that.”
My rebuttal, “Well, yeah, but you never know.”
This produced the expected “You’re talking silly business now” look on their face, like they did not know if I was merely kidding about the possibility of extra-dimensional bloodthristy creatures that can dwell only in mist existing in our world and just keeping a straight face, or actually serious about concerned on entering fog because of the elder eldritch entities contained deep within.
Now one part of me, the engineer portion, knows it cannot be true. Not only would such creatures be so biologically inefficient to exist, the constant stream of cars coming out of the fog in a normal and orderly manner common to any other time driving at night ensures that even if such fell beings of the mist were possible, at the very least they did not exist in the current bank of fog I was traveling in. Nor would the radio be playing normally, I would rather think in the event of an apocalyptical uprising of fog creatures the Gannon University radio station would not be playing music, but rather would either be silent or using the airwaves for the better communication of survivors and pockets of resistance groups.
So yeah, on that end, I’m totally joking.
But you know what, where’s the harm in thinking it might be true? And I don’t mean in a pretend along with the kids that so and so is real, but believe it to be true like you believe water is wet, soil is dirty, and the Bengal’s home games should be held at the state penitentiary for ease of the local players. First off, all it takes is one opening of a rift to a horrible other world filled with living nightmares who live in an eeriely silent white smoke to make a little thing like entering a fog bank seem like a real and frightening thing. It’s not scientifically possible, you say? Well, 600 years ago, try saying that little tiny living things that you can’t even see are what make you sick, and not an imbalance of the four humors.
Another tack: science is always working under theories, revising them as new technology all for new discoveries. This, of course assumes that the rules are always constant. Who is to say 2000 years ago, the atomic model did not exist, but everything was composed of the four primal elements? Then once humans figured this out, a god figure or series of god figures all decided to change the rules under us, keeping them this way until they figured this system out, and the cycle goes again?
Both cases, and countless more, sound like hooks from works of fiction. They are offspring of a creative mind taking the physical realm around it, working it with the hammer and forge of fantasy. But the world of fact is wholly separate from the world of fiction, we can enjoy the highs and lows of fiction preciously because it is not true. Seriously believing these rogue fictional things can live and breath in our world of cold, hard, logical fact is at best the sign of a fantastical mind and at worst the sign of an immature child who refuses to grow up, isn’t it?
Perhaps. Heck, probably. But I don’t really see that as a bad thing.
For me, letting elements of the fantastic into our world, honestly in my heart believing these things, however minor it is, is not a sign of immaturity. It is an indication of open mindedness, a leaping point for the chance of adventure and discovery that does exist in the logical world around us. Maybe getting off the interstate because the dimensional mist monsters are sticking to the highway sounds absurd. But when you’ve been driving for 5+ hours and it’s late at night, believing there really are things out there that want to go bump in the night makes you a much more alert driver, paying attention to everything a bit more than when the cruise control was going and the radio was playing. Which, I might add, is a safer way to drive through bad weather.
So maybe the mist monsters don’t really exist. But you know what, believing in them makes me a better driver and a more creative person. Believing in them allow me to see the everyday for what it really should be, a grand adventure in our limited time on this planet. Most people seem to behave as if their daily routine were just ordinary, not extra-ordinary. For me, it could be my day is trudging into town for a day sitting at a computer for nine or so hours and attending meetings.
Or, what if some government secret will flash across my screen at any time? Who knows if the key to unlock all the government’s secrets will be generated by pure random accident in the code I’m working on? Heck, what if my entire company is a front organization for some secret NSA project? Guess I’ll have to go in tomorrow, with a smile, to find out, just in case.
(Also, apologies to B if you read this and take offense, none were intended)