A Bird’s Eye View of the Fire: Dreams

I have a confession.  Actually, confession is the incorrect word.  To confess is to cleanse oneself of a sin via airing the sin with another party.  I hold no secret sins I wish to divulge.  I’m kind of boring that way.

No, what I have to share is a secret dream.  A dream I’ve held since about 2008.  A dream I have shared with no one, not even my wife.  And that dream involves video games. 

I love video games, with a passion that is honestly a bit scary.  It eclipses my love of books, and sometimes I wonder if it doesn’t eclipse my family.  It’s… it’s a prodigious force in my life, a hulking monolith asserting its dominance over my time.  It is the alter upon which I offer my sacraments and oblations.  Many, if not all, of my days upon the third rock from the sun have been spent sitting in front of one variety of screen or another.

I’m not even mad!  I love them, I have always love them, and as far as I can tell I will always love them.  They complete me in a fashion wholly unique and utterly irreplaceable.  Not even my family could satisfy the part of my soul where video games lie.  Here in lies the rub, because the dream I felt so secretive of?  That dream I’ve never even told my wife about?  It involves video games.

Make no mistake, my dream doesn’t involve anything untoward.  Nor does it involve anything really revolutionary.  What I wanted, what I have craved, and what will forever be outside of my reach, is to make a living playing video games.

It sounds… silly.  It also sounds like wishful thinking to a large portion of the population.  HOWEVER.  Recent advents in technology, in interest, and in alternate revenue generation have made this a viable option.  Creating Youtube videos, streaming your play, and tying all of it together with a website or some other centralized location.  Donations from viewers, ad revenue from Youtube and Twitch, combined with a social media presence, can come together and create a web of money upon which someone can live.  It’s not even a terrible living: Many men and women who rely upon such revenue make quite a decent income.

In my mind, it dovetails nicely with my desire to create a brand as an author.  I already have a website which bears my name, and I’m developing a social media presence as a matter of course.  It’s 2017, and unless you can prove to a publisher that you have a ready made audience, you won’t ever print a book or land a contract.  Especially for an author such as myself, who is essentially a self made man.
However, however.  This plan, this dream, this nightmare, whatever it may be.  It has a central flaw.  Me.  I am abhorrent at video games.  Oh, I play them to an egregious degree.  But I am not good at them.  At best, I am decent trending to slightly above average.  That is not a brand however.  At this stage, to be truly exceptional as a streamer, I am going to have to scrap any and all thoughts of being good at the video game in question.  I can’t seem to break above Gold in League of Legends, and all of my ideas with Path of Exile are pretty much middling at best.   My only hope will be to become a successful author first, then come around the problem from that end, as an author first who happens to stream.  Rather than my true dream, which is a streamer who also happens to write. 

Part of, if not the largest part of, why I haven’t been writing so often is because that dream of mine refuses to die.  I don’t want to let it die.  A small part of me rebels whenever good sense tries to intervene and smother the dream.  It persists, regardless of the cost to me as a person, to my body physically, or to my ego and emotional well being.  It’s wrecking my day job, it’s eating into my professional development as a writer.  It erodes my marriage ever so slightly, and I know that to a certain extent I’m being a bad parent because of it.  It’s just something I want so very badly.

I hate that I can’t let it go.  I hate that I can’t make myself see reason, that I can’t see reality when it’s staring me straight in the face.  That small part of me understands the appeal of Trump: A man so willing to ignore facts and reality that challenge his ideas or opinions about himself is almost admirable.  I know that I’ll get my day in the sun.  I know that as I continue my career, I will have a chance to develop that branch of my… brand?  Reach?  Whatever the appropriate term would be.  Having to come at it from the other end is just galling.  It makes me feel like a failure.