Monday, January 11, 2010

Going to Hell

Yep, as if there were any doubt before, it's pretty much a done deal now. I'm going to Hell.* Here's the story of my inevitable damnation. We had an SCA event this past weekend that was hosted by our Shire. We typically do a small, relatively laid back event for 12th Night about this time of year. In this instance, my wife was tapped to organize things and we ended up holding the event at her church. Well, it was far to cold outside to do any fighting, so mostly it's a lot of Arts & Sciences classes. For us fightin' types, who have little interest in making fruit men or learning to knit period socks (not that there's anything wrong with any of that), it means a lot of sitting around and talking. Well, I had planned for such a contingency by bringing along some dice and card games. Not necessarily period, but fun. I was actually eager to try out a dice game that Duke Seth had shown us recently at a mundane get-together. It's a type of gambling game, but we could just as easily use tokens rather than actually gambling for money. We ended up using Hershey's Kisses. The dice we were using are simulated "bone" dice and I thought to myself "if only we had a nice wooden dice cup to go with these". You know, to add to the ambiance. Well, it just so happened that the only merchant in attendance had a rather spiffy looking wooden goblet for sale, cheap. So, I buys it and we proceed to have a rollicking good time playing at dice for a couple of hours. Sometime afterward, the merchant comes up to me and informs me that the goblet in question was made of genuine olive wood. That's pretty neat, says I. Yes, he continues, it came all the way from the Holy Land. Hmmm...., thinks me, that's a good shtick ya got there, pal. No really, he continues (apparently seeing the disbelief on my face), someone brought it over from the Middle East. So, in effect, I had us all gambling (for chocolate, no less) in a church, using an item that came from the birthplace of the Abrahamic religions. Wow! Maybe it was the Holy Grail itself! It was certainly, as others pointed out later, grail-shaped. Oh, yeah, I'm gonna burn. But, you know, it's ok. Most of the interesting people are going to end up in Hell anyway.

*this is provided, of course, that I am not already in Hell. A cold, frozen Hell that I just can't seem to escape from.