Control: Losing Badly…
I, Daniel Trump, have a problem.
I don’t always win at everything.
That’s a tremendous understatement.
My life is perfect except for failure.
I play strategy games. They are a blast.
I write novels. I love to write books for people to read.
I watch football. I love to watch my favorite team, the Chicago Bears.
Those are the primary three elements in my life right now: strategy gaming, writing, and football.
They are, all three, a disaster, a total collapse, an absolute failure of effort, execution and ability. I have screwed up all three in a colossal inability to get anything right.
Let’s review these three abject problems, one by one.
First: strategy gaming.
I play Warhammer 40k. I love Warhammer 40k. It’s a game where you build wargaming miniatures and then play a dice game with them. It’s a fun strategy game that takes two to three hours and a lot of mental energy to do. I recently switched to the Death Guard faction.
I went to a tournament recently with said Death Guard faction. I arrived early to see half a dozen nice geeks standing around, getting ready for some games. In the first game an Imperial Guard player fought against me with a dozen or so tanks. He pelted me from a distance and had zillions of shots that wrecked my slow-moving army. Meanwhile I was able to kill a few of the light tanks.
0–1.
The next player was a space marine player. He would run away with a strategem every time I would try to charge him. I couldn’t get into melee with him — with my slow-moving melee army. I killed maybe two units and lost everything to him.
0–2.
I then was dejected and down and not feeling well. I felt upset. I didn’t want to play in the last place game, but that’s where I was, against a Chaos Knights player. I found myself losing to the Chaos Knights player by a significant margin. I couldn’t beat a Chaos Knights player with Death Guard. I know — that might not mean anything to you. It meant to me that I wasn’t playing well. I didn’t do anything well.
0–3.
I won zero games at my first tournament with these Death Guard miniatures. I didn’t know what to do. I bought a few new units so that there would be some new strategies to try. I tried switching around a few characters from some less successful ones to some better ones. I pretended that this would fix things — that now I would do better.
It’s a nice lie.
Second: writing.
I wrote a novel recently, a book called Siphon’s Wrath. It’s about a cult. I researched cults and learned a lot about the scary real-life practices of people who controlled other people and pretended to be heroic to them and who were actually awful to them. I wrote what I considered to be an excellent book about the subject — showing how someone who seemed like a hero could turn out to be a monstrous villain, a terrible person who hated everyone and sexually assaulted women because he thought he had the right to do so.
No one read it.
Oh, a thousand or so people downloaded it. But no one read it and gave it a rating on Amazon — meaning no one bothered to give it a chance. No one cared. It was damned with indifference — the worst faint praise.
Then I rewrote one of my old books. I do that sometimes — rewrite some of the books that I released in previous years that maybe weren’t perfect, that maybe needed another look. I spent a month and a lot of time and energy pouring through an old sci-fi horror story about a slasher villain on a space station, a story about heroes and villains and first contact with aliens and a whole lot of characters that I loved very much. You can guess what happened.
No one read it.
Amazon still lists no ratings or reviews. No one bothered to read it. A thousand downloads and no one cared to respond to it. I’m not writing well. I’m scared by my inability to write well.
Third — and most important — football.
I am a huge fan of the Chicago Bears football team. I don’t need them to be great or win the Super Bowl. I just want them to give a good effort and win enough games to be competitive, to be decent, to put up a good showing.
Last year was the first year with a new coach, Matt Eberflus, and a new GM, Ryan Poles, and it was a rebuilding year, so there were significant hurdles. I knew that it would be hard and there might be difficult games in which some teams would have more talent than them. I didn’t understand how bad things could get.
They can get very, very bad.
Then, halfway through the season, they traded their best defensive player, Roquan Smith. They then fell into a freefall and lost ten games in a row.
2022 record for the Chicago Bears: 3–14.
They were the worst team in the league.
I got myself to the television seventeen times that year, telling myself that this week would be great, would be different, would be a win, and fourteen of those times they lost. Ten times in a row they lost.
Then the off-season happened.
They got better.
They added a lot of good new players both in free agency and in the draft. They had another year with the young players that were getting better. The coaches knew a lot more about how to coach now. They were going to be better this year. Predictions varied from 8–11 wins for the Bears this year. They were expected to beat the Packers easily on the first game of the year.
They got broken by the Packers in the first game of the season. It wasn’t close.
The Bears are now, as of this writing, 2–7. They are expected to win a couple more winnable games, maybe against Carolina or Arizona, but they aren’t expected to win eight or nine games.
In fiction people usually win. They get the girl. They save the day. They win the award. They build the mech. They win the big game.
In the real world — in reality — I often lose. I don’t always win.
I don’t know why or have anything intelligent to say about that fact except to notice it and pass it along to you, reader, and express sorrow that things don’t get better from year to year.
I can only continue to try and hope that I can make things better, a little better, year by year. I certainly have more downloads than I used to, and I have more strategy gaming acumen than in previous years. I just need to get better. And the priority, of course, is the football team. The Bears just have to play better football.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
