We all hold our dark secrets. Regrets that haunt only us. There is no need to share the humility of our past actions for fear of them being used against us. So we keep them to ourselves, stuffing them into the darkest parts of our subconscious. You could tell your self, "I was young, I didn't know any better," yet something inside you shutters every time you look back into your own past. It makes you curl up in your bed when you are trying to sleep so that you won't be late for work for the third day in a row, but the memory will not allow you to let go. It stays with you, plays itself over and over in your mind as if it is evidence being submitted to a jury against you. There is no denying the past, my friend. You have made many choices in your life, many of them good, some of them bad, but not one will spare you from the endless turmoil, the personal hell that is the memory of playing Magic the Gathering in the high school cafeteria. 

Note to Readers:  If you do not care to hear the trials of a Montpelier geek/punk magic addict, skip to the last paragraph where I tastefully insult some of the higher-ups of the logos staff. 

When I was a kid, I had some friends that weren't allowed to play with guns. Now, that's not a shocking statement in and of itself, but I don't mean real guns. They weren't allowed to play with plastic guns, or gun shaped toys, or any permutation of a gun. This included G.I. Joe, Transformers, little army men, squirt guns (no matter how hard the manufacturer disguised them as elephants or flowers, they still had a trigger), model fighter jets, you name it, if it seemed gun like at all to the parents, it was thrown out. They were also not allowed to look at anything that involved guns, like hunting shows or army movies or any cartoons with guns and explosions and guns that cause explosions and guns. This included G.I. Joe, Transformers and commercials for little army men, squirt guns, model fighter jets, you name it. If it showed anything that looked like a gun to the parents, it was turned off. There were two friends with parents like this. Andy and Jonah. Nathan was much different. His father was in the Navy, so was his much older brother. Nathan had lots of G.I. Joe's, and Shoot um up Nintendo games, and war movies. Then there was Tom, and he had his own guns, real guns. We used to play with them, I know that sounds stupid, and it was. I'd go over and just look at the hunting rifles on the wall in the basement shop. They were never locked, and never loaded but the bullets were right there next to the guns in a box marked "bullets." He had a .22 hunting rifle and a single barrel shotgun. His dad had a bunch of handguns and shot guns and high power scope riffles. I'd pick one up, take it to his back porch, look through the scope, make some gun sounds and go inside and get another one. But, Tom didn't have a Nintendo so we mostly went to Nathan's house. This was my D&D group. We played D&D and ate crackers and cheese and drank soda. I was an Elf, Nathan was a Fighter, Andy was a Magic-user and Tom was a Thief. Jonah was our DM but didn't know how to do it so... What the fuck do you care. This shit has gone on long enough. The point is that I played D&D with some friends when I was a kid. There. End of paragraph. 

Then I stopped playing D&D as any well adjusted kid should. 

In 1992, around the time that hypercolor shirts were the coolest thing anyone could have, I heard about a game called Magic. Magic the Gathering. What's this?  Older kids, kids in High School were playing Magic?  With Dragons, and Spells and HP?  I relapsed, big time. I didn't have much money so I found myself stealing lots and lots of magic cards, three or four "booster" packs a day, sometimes I'd nab a started deck. I would see the High School kids playing the pizza shop where they all worked. I would play against them, giants in my eyes, and get my ass kicked.  Looking back, I can now see them for what they are, a bunch of tall, skinny dweebs, dressed in black trench coats with stringy black hair and pentagram necklaces, always carrying large walking sticks and practicing made up Ninja moves on each other. They were Dorks, social misfits, Geeks, greasy faced pizza delivery boys with cracking voices and lots of zits. But to me, they were GODS. And these Gods handed me my remains every time I played magic against them. In order to defeat the evil High School Gods, I needed to train, and in order to train, I needed opponents of my own caliber. I called the D&D team, but not Jonah because he had gotten really weird by then. And not Andy because, well, I don't know, I just didn't like him anymore.  

Nathan and Tom and I played Magic against each other. Then Matt joined in, he was a year older and did all the fake ninja stuff but wasn't as threatening as the Gods from the pizza shop. We'd play on weekends, then sometimes after school. We eventually started playing at the pizza shop at our own table, once in a while building up our courage to go over and get our dignity put in a grinder and snacked on while we were beaten mercilessly by the Gods of facial puss. I continued to steal cards, got caught once but must have cost the store hundreds of dollars in shrink. Let the meek buy the cards, I was on a holy mission. I spent hours building a deck, the perfect green and white deck. Sometimes a blue and black deck. Or my favorite the dreaded Blue, Green and White deck of inner turmoil. I would poor over my shoe boxes of cards; monsters, spells, artifacts, counterspells, enchantments creating strategies, planning moves and counter moves, conquering the world. I was living a fantasy, like a mad scientist in a lab, but I was not creating just one monster, I was creating an army which I could unleash on my enemies. The High School Gods of poor hygiene would soon feel my wrath and tremble at my sight. 

Then they stopped playing Magic as any well adjusted kids should. 

Now I was in high school and I couldn't give up on my deck. I had sacrificed so much, by stealing from small family owned businesses. I talked to Nathan (because Tom had gone off to private school, far away from the killing fields), and convinced him to continue playing Magic.  I told him to bring in his deck and we would play during lunch. That, my friends was folly. I didn't know it but it was a social blow that I dealt myself from which I would never fully recover. "What the fuck are you guys doing!" "Playing magic." "Holy Shit!  You are a fucking loser." High school kids can be so cruel. "That game is fucking stupid." "No, it's not." "Actually, yes it is and you are fucking stupid also." It's hard to argue like this in a cafeteria when you are playing magic. So I did what any well adjusted kid would do. I put my magic cards away. 

Eventually I moved to Boston, with some college buddies. We were poor. Very poor. One day, Josh bought some D&D books at a garage sale and my twenty-something friends and I got together, drank some beer and made some D&D characters. This was about three years ago. We had two Elves, one was mine, one was Josh's. They were identical twins and their names were Tomax and Xamot. There was a Dwarf that Brad had made Reeb Reknird (that's beer drinker backwards), Ian had a Fighter named Thog or Thug and a Magic-User named Sparky or something. I was DM most of the time and would plan out adventures during work. Every Monday we would play, there would be a lot a beer and a lot of dice and I would take these heroes on quests like the WUBAMF competition (Worlds Ugliest Bad Ass Mother Fucker) where they were captured by Tricksy, the gay Minatour, and attacked by Queen Urunga with her paralyzing breast feeding attack. It was fun, I'm not ashamed. 

Well, actually, yes, yes I am ashamed.

Then we stopped playing D&D as any well adjusted twenty-something adults should. 

While we were playing, I once again relapsed and decided to bring the dust covered pandora's box of magic cards out from their forgotten hiding place. I taught Brad how to play magic. He played twice, and hated it, and made fun of me. He moved out about two years ago, unrelated to the magic incident (I hope), and told me to throw them out. What?  Throw out my collection of monsters, enchantments and artifacts that were once destined to rule the world. Never!  A year passed and I too moved out, put all my possessions in the back of my truck and rolled over to live a new life with new roommates in a new house with poor heating. There they were, in the same box, taunting me. Mocking my pride, causing me nightmares of humiliation and endless loss of face. This was it. They no longer had the grip on my soul, they had tortured me long enough and I threw them in the garbage, turned off the light, locked the door behind me and slid the key under the door stop for someone else to discover the misery that lay waiting, in the trash.   

Note to readers:  Although many names have been used thus far in this essay I will now refer to the two next characters as Mr. X and Mr. Y. Anonymity is important to me and to the readers of the-logos.com 

A month ago, Mr. X, a good friend of mine from an upstate New York private college which costs about thirty-two thousand dollars a year to attend, (We will call it S College) came back from M's Vineyard after visiting with his parents, who live on M's Vineyard where his father is the Sheriff. I walked into his apartment, which I have done many times in the past, and noticed three large white boxes on the table. I recognized the shape of these boxes to contain baseball cards. "What are these?"  "All my Magic cards. Mr. Y and I were talking before the holidays and he is bringing up all of his, too." said Mr. X through his soul patch which is flanked on both sides by long sideburns. He took a sip of his beer, which was a PBR (anonymity is important, remember) and lit an OG cigarette. I told Mr. X the story which I have just written here and which point Mr. X said, "Holy Shit!  You are a fucking loser."  College friends that work at Woodcraft Hardware stores can be so cruel. "Throwing those cards out was fucking stupid."  "No, it wasn't."  "Actually, yes it was and you are fucking stupid also."  Mr. X then told me that Mr. Y, a childhood friend from M's Vineyard with black messy hair, glasses and degree from a place we will call MIT, was also bringing his deck up from home. After a small fit of me questioning every decision I have ever made in my life and realizing that I've done it all wrong, Mr. X invited me to JSM, a near by bar that sold PBR beer. "Mr. Y will be there with his girlfriend of 7 years, Mrs. E, who has long black hair and is unemployed. Maybe someday we will play.  But we will have to wait until Mr. Y returns from his two week trip to the P canal in South America. Oh boy, how I love to play Magic!"