Dungeon Crawl After Dark

Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless.

If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you’ve joined me before, welcome back.

Here’s a question to start us off: have you ever had a day that started before most people’s alarms go off and didn’t end until most people were already asleep? And if you have, did that day leave you empty and drained, or was some part of it worth the tiredness?

I ask because I had one of those days recently. It started in the dark, and it ended in the dark, and somewhere in the middle of it I taught, I parented, I disappeared into a hobby I probably spend too much time on, and then I spent three hours pretending to be a stranded engineer at the end of the world with three of my closest friends. Somehow, all of that fit into a single Wednesday.

This brings me to today’s first expression: around the clock. Around the clock.

Picture a clock face. Not a single hour on it, but the whole circle, hour after hour until you’ve made it all the way around. When something happens around the clock, it isn’t happening for a moment or an afternoon. It’s filling the day, start to finish, sometimes even through the night.

Hospitals run around the clock, because people need care at 3 a.m. just as much as they need it at 3 p.m. A news station might broadcast around the clock, always ready with the next update. In my case, I teach English lessons around the clock, kinda. Some of my students live many time zones away, so my workday starts hours before the sun is fully up, just to catch them at a reasonable hour on their side of the world.

Here’s an important distinction to keep in mind: around the clock does not automatically mean exhausting. It just means full. A day can be filled from early morning into late night and still leave you standing at the end of it. Whether that day empties you out or fills you back up is a completely different question. So keep that phrase in mind. it’s one we’ll come back to before we’re done.

We’ve been back in Texas for a while now, ever since we returned from that long stretch of family, weddings, and a rather memorable minivan purchase in Utah. Life at home has its own rhythm, and lately that rhythm has been rather complex. Emma has started teaching theatrical design at Texas State this semester, and on top of that she’s the scenic designer for their fall musical, which means her evenings can be just as full as her days.

Now that she’s working full time, my schedule bends around hers. I work for 5 hours in the morning from 5 to 10. Then once Emma needs to leave for campus, Eliana and I drive her there. After that we come home and spend time together until it’s time to pick Emma back up from work. After we’re back with Emma, on Mondays and Wednesdays, I go straight into another block of evening lessons. Four more hours of them. Add it all up, and my day genuinely does run around the clock, early lessons on one end, evening lessons on the other, with parenting stretched across the middle.

You’d think all of that would fill every spare minute I have. It doesn’t. There are still gaps, small pockets of time here and there, and lately I’ve been pouring almost all of them into a new hobby I mentioned a few episodes back: building out my own home server. I won’t rehash the details, since I already walked through the project itself, but I do want to highlight a pattern that comes with it. Once I sit down to work on that server, It’s easy to get tunnel vision. The rest of the world goes quiet, and an hour disappears before I even noticed thirty minutes have passed.

Left unchecked, that kind of focus doesn’t just eat time. It eats connection. My responsibilities to Emma and Eliana keep me from disappearing into an all-nighter, which is its own kind of blessing, but even in small doses, hours alone with a project can leave me feeling strangely isolated, even inside my own busy house. I’d actually built up a nice little backlog of these episodes, written ahead of schedule so I wouldn’t have to scramble. And that backlog is exactly what I burned through, one server upgrade at a time, which is part of why I’m writing this one a little closer to the wire than usual. If you’re ever confused about the timing of something I mention, by the way, every episode description lists the date it was recorded, so that’s always there to sort things out.

So that was the shape of things when Chip texted me about a week and a half ago, asking if I’d be up for a new game with a few friends. Chip, and I have played Dungeons and Dragons together before, so I already knew the rhythm of a table like that. But this time, Chip wanted to try something different: a game based on a book series a few of us have read, called Dungeon Crawler Carl. It falls into a genre called LitRPG, stories that happen in a game like world, complete with levels, skills, and quests. It’s usually a pretty niche corner of fiction, but this particular series has found a wider audience than most, enough that it’s even had a successful tabletop Kickstarter behind it.

Chip took on the role of dungeon master, which just means he’s the one running the world, controlling everything in it except our characters, and guiding the story as we go. Joining me at the table were Chandler, his brother Tate, and Tate’s wife. Getting five adults with four different schedules to line up would be a miracle, so we kept things realistic. We had a short session zero first, just to build our characters rather than jump straight into playing, and then traded messages with Chip through the week to finish the details.

But here’s the small complication for me. Chip and most of the group live in Utah, so they planned the session for seven to ten in the evening, Mountain Time. I’m an hour ahead in Texas, which put it at eight to eleven, Central Time. My evening lessons wrap up at eight, right on the nose, which means the timing actually works, but I’ll be having later nights than usual when we get together.

So let’s walk through that Wednesday, start to finish. Lessons from five to ten in the morning. Eliana from then until about four in the afternoon. Another block of lessons from four to eight in the evening. And then, right as that ended, three hours in a dungeon crawl with old friends, eight to eleven at night. A long day. Also, as it turned out, a great one.

Our characters got pulled into this crawl right after the end of the world, thrown into danger together and expected to figure it out. We fought things we had no business fighting. We explored the narrow corridors of a dungeon built to kill us. We helped people who needed help, and we walked away with rewards for it. My character happened to be an American working for a Japanese engineering company before everything fell apart, which is not something I’ve ever actually done. What I have done is live in Japan, back when I served as a missionary there, spending my days teaching people who were interested in learning about my faith. I never sat behind a desk at a Japanese company. But being the foreigner in a room, learning a culture that wasn’t originally mine, choosing what to adopt and what to hold onto, that part is exactly my life, just wearing a different job title.

My friends have never lived that experience the way I have, so there’s no shortcut to really explaining it. But playing a character shaped by it gives a way in. A few times during the session, when my character hit a tight spot or got frustrated or confused, I’d slip into actual Japanese. My friends had no idea what I was saying, but they didn’t need to. They just needed to see it land, watch me laugh about it afterward, and ask what it meant. It put a little piece of a life they’ve never lived right there on the table with us.

The high point of the whole crawl came near the end. Our group was protecting a fortified camp of survivors from a large group of attackers, and things were not looking good. Using my character’s engineering background, I found an old motorcycle, rigged it to blow, and rolled it straight into the middle of the attacking force. It went off exactly the way you’d hope, taking out a huge chunk of them in one shot and turning what looked like a losing fight into a win.

That’s the kind of moment I love about games like this. Real life rarely hands you a problem with a clean, dramatic solution. A game will. Give me an unusual obstacle and a pile of half-useful tools, and I will find a way to make something explode. Chip runs a tight table, too, which matters when everyone’s schedules are this tight. He respects our time and keeps the story moving. We’re hoping to turn this this into a once-or-twice-a-month thing.

All right, let’s take a closer look at a second expression, one that pairs directly with our first: burn the candle at both ends.

Picture an actual candle, lit at the top the way candles usually are. Now imagine lighting the bottom of it too. You’d get twice the light, sure, but the wax would disappear twice as fast. That’s the image behind this phrase. When you burn the candle at both ends, you’re using up the early part of your day and the late part of your day, working both edges at once, and your capacity to keep that up is running out faster than it looks.

Today’s two expressions sound like they might be saying the same thing, but they’re not. Around the clock just describes a day that’s full, hour after hour. It says nothing about whether that pace is sustainable. Burn the candle at both ends is specifically about the cost. It says the pace can’t continue forever, that something, sooner or later, is going to run out.

My Wednesday genuinely ran around the clock. Early lessons, evening lessons, a full day of parenting wedged in between. If you look closely, you might see the candle burning at both ends too, five in the morning on one side, eleven at night on the other, wax dripping away from two directions at once. That server hobby I mentioned can make it worse. When I let myself hyperfocus on it late at night, after everyone else has gone to bed, I’m lighting that same candle from both ends completely alone, and nobody’s there to notice how fast it’s melting.

Those last three hours, the ones spent in a dungeon making questionable decisions with a fake motorcycle bomb, did not burn me down the way trouble shooting my server late at night often does. They gave something back. I ended that Wednesday tired, absolutely, but not hollowed out. Not isolated. The difference wasn’t the number of hours. It was who I spent them with, and whether the activity pulled me toward people or away from them.

That’s really what I brought into the game without even planning on it. Not a job I never had, but a life I actually lived, being the outsider somewhere new, learning what a place valued, deciding what to keep from my own life and what to let this new place teach me. My friends can’t share the memory with me directly. But for three hours on a Wednesday night, they got to sit across the table from it, laugh at a few words of Japanese they didn’t understand, and watch me improvise an explosion out of pure desperation.

So here’s something to sit with this week. When your days are already running around the clock, what’s the thing that restores you at the end of it, and what’s the thing that only looks like rest because you’re doing it completely alone? They can wear very similar disguises. The only way to tell them apart is to notice, afterward, whether you feel more connected to the people in your life, or a little further away from them.

My Wednesday ran around the clock, but at least this time I was not burning the candle at both ends. What made the difference, in the end, wasn’t the hours. It was the table I got to sit at when the hours finally ran out.

And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.