I thought about it, and I've had Magic: the Gathering in my mind for more than seventeen years now. For ten of those years I've been trying to craft this RG Madness deck (for those interested, the final form of the deck is here). It took that long because the sets the constituent cards belonged to were a long time apart. I did not find the cards that were being used by other players to my liking, so I decided to hold out until I could come across the cards that I felt did deserve to make it in. 

I wanted a deck that fully abused the madness mechanic, yet had a complementary strategy in case the key cards enabling the mechanic were dealt with during a game; I also wanted that complementary strategy to stand pretty well on its own. 

I tried out a lot of cards, playtesting and goldfishing and then analyzing in my head. I read up on current strategy and trends on what cards to use. I posted on forums, even emailed the professionals to ask how to improve my deck.

Through most of it I knew that the cards I was using were subpar - I knew that if I really wanted to win games I should be playing the best cards that other people were playing. It was hubris to think that I'd be on to something the pro players weren't.

I went for it anyway. It was an obsession.

I learned recently about Walt Whitman, and about how he worked on Leaves of Grass up until two months before his death. All those years spent revising, adding to, reformatting, all to create the definitive opus. And all those years he must have held two things in his head - the confidence to keep going, even when often he had to self-finance his project. And self-awareness, that what he was doing just may amount to nothing more than grass - a publisher's term at the time for works of minor value.

He did live and write about some of the most historic moments in American history. I think him sending out editions of his book turned out for the better; the work benefited from the critique and it also made the work at the very least noteworthy for having provoked reactions from the era's literary luminaries. Maybe the taboo surrounding some of the topics helped out.

I don't care about that really. I am awed rather by the dedication he had. He acted as if the end was self-evident, when the future is clearly anything but. Obviously, obsessions aren't equal. I clearly won't be winning any games with the deck I thought up - I'm not part of that scene anymore. But I still do have other hobbies I'm working on. They bring me joy but I can't see myself going all the way, in the manner of Walt Whitman. 

Writing in this blog does help me express myself and it has made easier writing the occasional paper or presentation. I'm doing quite well in my martial arts training, I'm up to an hour of zhan zhuang. I plan to study programming some more, Go, and Japanese. I also take the occasional online course. I'm not sure what all this amounts to, or what they will amount to. Really, I get the feeling of being lost at sea sometimes. 

It took me a decade to focus my deck to what it is now; I don't think I have the leisure to do the same for my life. It's not so much the comforts - I want to feel the forward movement, the sensation that things are changing as per my intention.