Justin Achilli

Deciding to do big things is scary. It gives me a butterflies-feeling in my stomach. Decisions, though, are the hallmarks of adulthood. Once consequences for one’s actions become real considerations, those potential consequences invariably take on their own gravity.

With that in mind, I’ve tendered my resignation at White Wolf Publishing. It’s an amicable split. It’s a friendly parting of ways. I don’t want to make games anymore and White Wolf, obviously, does.

From my perspective, the time is right for me to shift gears. I’ve been doing this for 10 years. I don’t have a mortgage to pay. I own my car. I don’t have a wife or kids to support. If ever the time was right for me to strike off on my own and do my own thing, that time is now.

Okay, not now now, but very soon. I’m at White Wolf through the end of March and then I’m off to the wild nether realms of… the other stuff I want to do.

I’ll miss many of you, but you’re more than welcome to keep coming back here and finding out more of what I plan to do. If you’re breathing a sigh of relief at my resignation, that’s cool, too. Have fun with games, either way.

I’m sure we’ll make some official racket about this later. Right now, though, it’s at the forefront of my thoughts and I figured I should spend a few words on it here. Again, it’s a proposition that carries its own fears with it — but those fears let me know that I’m making the right decision. If I had a sure thing in the bag, I don’t think it would mean as much to me.

And I’m cool with that.

I’ve heard people complain that reality TV is the harbinger of television’s death. While this claim has some validity, that’s typically the case for only a few shows. The true shows that exhibit a creative paucity are the shows that depict one-time celebrities is various states of “reality.” There’s nothing real about, say, Celebrity Fit Club, in which a cadre of privileged individuals receive constant access to a staff of professional nutritionists and personal trainers and then are patted on the back for losing a pound a week.

That’s all beside the point, however. Far worse than reality television — even bogus, washed-up-celebrity reality television — is the recent spate of clip television that offers celebrity gossip which is then wittily commented upon by D-list paracelebrities.

It’s the television equivalent of reading a snotty blog. (Ahem.) How are these barnacles, who themselves have achieved only the most rudimentary degree of success, qualified to render judgments on people who have actually succeeded in their careers? How is Michael Ian Black’s opinion of Wham! at all relevant? What insight does some smarmy douche whose only resume entry is The Marijuana-Logues offer anyone at all when he cleverly riffs on Martha Stewart? For an actress whose sole accomplishment is playing “Girlfriend in Glasses” on a show like Yes, Dear, deriding Russell Crowe or Tom Cruise is not comical or cutting or cathartic, it’s only grotesquely petty. Attention, Fat, Sassy, Black Woman who owes her ability to pay monthly rent to VH1: The only differences between you and Courtney Love are 600 pounds and the fact that people know who Courtney Love is.

Who watches these shows? What deplorable, empty-lifed people keep these shows in production? Is our cultural sense of resentful entitlement and schadenfreude so great that shows like this characterize us?

It’s easy to be negative. I do it here alot. After a while, though, it just becomes disgusting. It’s not true creation; it’s immature. The line between “insightful satire” and “bitter no one” is more than just having access to Viacom cameras.

Certainly, some of pop culture is the utter shits, but to have members of what makes it the utter shits commenting on the utter-shits aspects of it is the depth of self-satisfaction. Is it intended to be ironic? Isn’t sneering, disaffected irony 10 years out of date at this point? Where did this phenomenon come from? Why does it persist? Do people really aspire to be bottom-feeders, or do they take this work because it’s all that’s available?

Holey smokes, despite the condition (0% police fear) right now, I have so much exercised wisdom that I should probably be a saint.

I take it all back. It’s football season. Life is good.

I’ve been a bit under the weather recently, coughing and wheezing with the usual late-summer cold I inherit at the end of every planes-and-hotels-and-convention-centers season. Such being the case, I decided to forgo the gym and instead take a walk through the neighborhood. The air outside would do me good, I figured, and it had been a while since I went anywhere for the sake of the trip as opposed to the destination (even if the trip was only half an hour in length).

I like Atlanta. It’s a beautiful city and I’m utterly enamored of my neighborhood. It has an undeniable veneer of yuppie douche, but that’s thankfully localized and there’s enough to be a part of that eclipses that aspect.

I walked past the fountains at the hotel, where the mist and water made the air cooler — barely perceptible, but a degree or two nonetheless, which is all the more noticeable after our mild summer and into this breezy early fall.

I walked past the courtyarded buildings in the Tuscan style and that of El Escorial, where the greenery breathed back at me.

I walked past the changing lane of intown restaurants built in renovated houses, smelling everything among them (cucumber salad, dill, fresh fish, olive oil, rosemary, table wine).

I walked past a midrise where I went to a party years ago before a concert. I made some interesting friends there, most of whom were regrettably transitory.

I walked past the high-rise where I’ve had drinks on the roof and shared a jacket with someone special because it was so cold outside.

I walked past the hotel where a quartet of hospitality folk were playing cards at an impromptu table in the service garage. Not a bunch of salty dudes, either, but a pair of men and women, each of whom looked distinctly not like the kind of person who’d be playing poker in a parking lot just after the dinner hour.

I walked past the terrace where I loaned Evander Holyfield fifty bucks and met a mediocre Cindy Crawford. The erstwhile champ never paid me back.

I walked past the Fabulous Fox Theatre, currently hosting (ugh) The Phantom of the Opera. I don’t hold that against it, though, as the place is dazzling even if its offerings aren’t always.

I walked past the little Italian bistro with the city’s most striking staff.

Guiltily, I walked past St. Mark and the Church of the Redeemer, hoping that I could sneak past with my truancy unnoticed. Maybe someday again, when I have a weekend that I don’t have to work.

I walked past Bulthaup, vowing to resume cooking for the joy of it, oh, and to build a kitchen like that.

I miss so much of this, even though I’m right here among it. I never see it. I go to work, I come home, I read until I fall asleep. Days don’t matter. I never taste the food anymore. I don’t hear the hymns. I need life back. What I’m doing isn’t living.

That’s a maudlin sentiment, and of course I’m overstating. I’m as much to blame as any outside influence. I spent last Friday after work drinking myself blind, pitied by my Dutch girlfriend and pulling over at the side of the road to vomit so I could make the rest of the trip home. I didn’t walk my neighborhood last Friday, even though I might have made the time.

It’s odd that life becomes a series of rote maneuvers unless you actually change what you’re doing of your own accord. I’ve made my own routine and I keep to it. Occasionally, it pays off — I’ve read more in the past few months than I have in years and I just finished a television miniseries that really ignited the creative urge in me. (Bully for me, I’ve even progressed a bit on my outside fiction work. Not much, but any progress at all is better than no progress and another pointless hangover.) On the other hand, I’ve let things pass me by that… well, that I shouldn’t. I have a few bits of correspondence laying fallow, friends who seem to be growing distant, and other things I should be happy for that pass me by as I remain locked in my stasis. My brother got married this past weekend and where was I? In a conference room, then at DragonCon — DragonCon — and then throwing up on my shoes while those Dutch dimples frowned disapprovingly.

I need to be two places at once. I need a low-impact methamphetamine substitute so I don’t have to sleep but it doesn’t wreck me. I need time to myself and time with everyone else and the wisdom to realize that nothing happens but what you make of it.

Unfortunately, all of that stuff I want is made up. Like my Dutch girlfriend.