I should begin by saying, “Check out these hot models.” Confusing googlers is a bona fide hobby, is it not?

When I was – oh – 18, 19, 20 I was still living at home, or living back at home I should say, having returned from a disastrous mission to explore the world outside which it turned out was not to my liking. What I did then was to isolate myself, isolate and heal. It was really quite blissful. I know I must have understood by then that my world no longer existed, - my friends were gone, - and that my parents’ world no longer existed. The 40’s were over. The twisted, demonic, spoiled, materialistic, foul-smelling baby boomers had taken the field. One by one, everything good and everything pure, and everything beautiful, was being replaced by the corrupt, the ugly.

It was a matter of developing discernment, that which I did not yet have. No – by staying locked alone in my room day after day it would not help me to form the armor and ammunition necessary to return to the world; no, it was merely to hide. The power of Mordor had descended in black shadow over my Shire – everywhere except inside my room. During this time I obsessively drew a map of Fenrocia.

Night after night I added more 8 ½ by 11 sheets of typing paper depicting the land inside my head, its roads and cities, mountains, to my ceiling. My room was under eaves, and the ceiling on both sides followed the line of the roof at the same angle to a knee wall. It was only really possible to stand fully upright in the center. Along with the map – roads, rivers, desert plains – there went a story, an epic story of a ruling family at war. It would later become a graphic novel, with the help of a few friends – much later, though.

Now that I think of it, I dream of a house, a good house. I call it the White Lodge and it is the whole universe. And – before I entered into that obsessive phase of drawing Fenrocia, when I was younger still, I clearly remember loving model railroads. I visited the public library often to pore over articles (and better yet, pictures) in Model Railroader magazine. I drew endless layout plans. I bought dozens of model buildings, modeling materials. I built scenes, little worlds, never having the space for a complete layout. The pictures which are peppering this post are the kinds of pictures that I would have preferred over the most salacious offerings of Penthouse magazine.

I like buildings much better than people, as you know.

There are several 3-D architect programs on my computer. I play them, as if they were computer games, recreating the world. As I write this blog I often have a window open to alter a creation of mine, whenever the spirit moves me, as I am writing. And at last, my approach towards writing is itself a computer game: what we all do here is really just a game to me. Life has become like a game – and that’s precisely the attitude I needed to acquire if I was ever to leave that room and rejoin the world in progress. Rejoin? Yes, but never completely. I had to learn how to be in the world without being of the world. I had to learn how to discern, how to reject and rebuke all that was rotten with kindness – all that was rotten and not of my doing. And, it wasn’t sitting in my room drawing Fenrocia that taught me how to do that; it wasn’t model railroading, either – it was everything that happened between the time I was removed from that room by force and now, right now – today, this minute.

I’m still learning.

Isn’t it odd though that I had forgotten all the joy I once derived from model trains until just now, just a few weeks ago. I was reminded of my former hobby by something in conversation. It was a key which unlocked a particular door in the White Lodge, a door that has not been open for a long time. Within the door there is a beautiful train layout, with mountains, cathedrals, a river, and – oh yes – a train. The rail company is the Gastonaaga – Berwick Railroad, the same famous line that Suada Graene Alexi defended in order to keep the supply lines open for the Nefarians’ war with the usurper Rhumineetahuck – (as no doubt you will recall) – in vain, as it happened, for the usurper would reign another 230 years, famously exploding when at last the life force left him.

Ah – good times.

The pieces of the body of Rhumineetahuck remain uncorrupted – why? – so that each ruling Suada, from Estare to the Great Bank may have a piece of it to insure that it will never be reassembled, and of course, to remind the people – Huck, Nefar, Harlock, all – that the Darkness never shares power with mortals; it exists merely to consume and to destroy; it fornicates endlessly with no hope of having issue; it spreads like the black smoke of Agnalbo from mind to mind.

Well, I don’t know. Do you think I should revisit this old hobby of mine? I would have to begin entirely from scratch, just in the same way I rebuilt my music collection, in just the same way I rebuilt my life – one piece at a time.