I’d already graduated high school and was waiting to start college in the fall. I had no desire to sample the hospitality of the foster care system, so, rather than take my chances with social services, I fought to become emancipated by court order.
It was easy. I represented myself. They don’t recommend it, but what do they know? Trust me, there’s no way you would have said no either if you’d seen me up there, just seventeen years old, arguing my case in legalese like the main character in a coming-of-age comedy from the early nineties.
I received a modest amount of money from my parents’ passing, which I eventually invested in the stock market.
I did a shit ton of research and practiced using mock stocks in a simulated investment environment for a full year before I did any real investing. My ability to pick out deeply embedded patterns and causal fluctuations resulted in my turning seventy thousand fake dollars into almost four hundred thousand fake dollars. The following year, I invested my money for real. Then I sold my parents’ house and purchased a modest apartment in Capitol Hill.
I was a young adult living in a hip neighborhood in Seattle—in a home I’d purchased with my own money—coasting through college with a GPA much higher than I deserved.
I should have taken things more seriously, put more work into my studies, but what did I do instead?
I played games.
And after graduation, while everybody I knew was taking global surf trips, pretzeling themselves into enlightenment at an ashram in India, downing ridiculous amounts of cheap beer with the other American tourists in Prague, or going on any number of other adventures, I was doing something else.
I was playing games.
I’d played games when my parents had been alive, of course, but after they died, I spent every minute outside of work and school devoted to nothing else. Focusing my attention on games resulted in my becoming a little bit more social, and it had another added benefit; it helped me avoid thinking about what had happened to my parents.
At first the games were effective, and I was able to use them to not only calm my racing mind, but learn how to better interact with others. But, similar to a longtime drug user, the games I’d been playing began to lose their efficacy and I needed more.
So I started playing longer and sleeping less.
From role-playing games to first-person shooters, online to dice on a table, I played them all. I became so obsessed that I was lucky if I managed to get two or three hours of sleep a night.
It was during this period that I joined an active online community of role-playing gamers, discovered alcohol in a big way, and narrowly avoided doing a long stint in a psychiatric facility.
* * *
—
The court referred to it as a trespassing incident, but it was full-on breaking and entering. By the time I was finally arrested in the basement of the Harvard Exit Theatre, I hadn’t eaten or slept for three days.
The arresting officer claimed I’d told her I was there waiting for someone—that I’d been following important signs, and needed to be in that theater at a very specific time in order to meet somebody I referred to as The Passenger.
Full disclosure, there were a couple of things that had happened during this period that may have added to my confused state of mind. My psychiatrist had recently changed my medication, and our family dog had passed away from complications during a routine dental surgery. My dog was older, but she’d been completely healthy at the time of her accidental death. I was crushed. She was a little brown Chihuahua named Ruby, and she was the last living connection I had to my parents.
Ruby had been there for me when I came home from the press conference where they’d announced that the rescue operation—which had eventually turned into a recovery operation—was now strictly a salvage operation.
When my parents were finally pronounced dead, having Ruby there needing to be fed and walked helped me make it through the seemingly endless days.
When she died, I was well and truly alone.
* * *
—
One night, shortly after Ruby died, I was playing a brand-new massively multiplayer online role-playing game （MMORPG） called Underlight, when another game popped into my mind. It was something my parents had played with me when I was a kid, something called Connections.
Connections was all about trying to find patterns and relationships between a number of seemingly disparate and unrelated images.
My parents had introduced me to Connections on a weekend evening, sometime in the late summer. We were getting ready to go to the drive-in, and it had started raining really hard. I was angry, because for the first time I’d managed to persuade my parents to let me pick an R-rated movie. I’d chosen Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners, and they’d reluctantly agreed.