Fuckin' A, these are some great drabbles!

Kalshane, I was thinking about writing about gaming also, fwiw.

OK a piece of nonfiction:

The U.S. invaded Iraq to free it? While Saddam's old torture pits are filled with screams again ... While women are hacked to death for daring to love without their father's permission, for daring to walk without a veil or male relative... While journalists are murdered for daring to write what someone, anyone doesn't like. Insurgent or occupier - displease them and you die anyone. For most Iraquis there is no escape from 'freedom.' Thanks to the occupation, in Iraq an old Kris Kristofferson song has finally come true: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose”.

"God damn, I miss D&D."

I miss D&D, too. In theory, I'm currently involved in a game, but the DM has cancelled something like 7 out the last 10 times we were supposed to play, so it sure doesn't feel like it.

Hell, where's my DM shield, I miss the joy of half a dozen grown-ups staring at me in dread while I rattle a handful of dice that will decide their fates.

Reminds me of the time my DM (same guy, different campaign where we actually played regularly) was rolling for damage against my character and had added a bunch of blank dice to the pile just to screw with me. It sounded like he was rolling a half-ton of them at once and I got really nervous.

Kalshane, I was thinking about writing about gaming also, fwiw.

It was one the first things that popped into my head when I thought about "escape".

Fuckin' A, these are some great drabbles!

Seconded.

Wow, I love it when a topic causes folks to pull out all the stops. I had an idea this morning with no time to play and I'm not sure I want to go revisit it now. My mood has changed and I think I would feel more than a tad melodramatic to write it now. Epiphanies suck for writing upon occasion. Turns a perfectly good idea into chopped liver.

I don't think this is very good, but at least I wrote something...

Escaping

I could just keep on driving.

The road that went past school was a long country one-lane, and I didn't know where it went. In my mind it didn't end at all, ever. Every morning as I went to school, every evening as I went home, I paused and thought, I could just keep on driving. The thought made me feel almost free, as if I had a real option.

(One day I actually did it. Turned out the road didn't go much of anywhere, but I savored every backwoods mile, because for a little while no one knew where I was.)

I'm not happy unless I know I can leave. Sometimes, even when life is good, I still think, I could just keep on driving.

Ooh, Zenkitty, I like that. Heavens only know there's times I'm on my way to work and I just want to keep going, not make the turnoff. Yet, the car seems to know where to go on its own. Wierd, huh?

Honey Roasted Oats (hey, the mice like it!):

Ouroborus

We look for escape in so many ways: books, role-playing games, gambling, charitable work, chat rooms, MySpace, drugs, sex, too many things to list without making it a compendium of virtues and vices that would put the Bible to shame. After all, doesn’t it list only seven of each? As for escape, I’m sure the roads to and from Sodom and Gomorrah were paved with the same things as that road we pat our own backs for building with our virtue. But, it never leads to where we think it does and where it goes, there is no escape. Ourselves.

Great title for that, Sail!

I'm trying to figure how to drabble the interesting point that "am scapat" means "I escaped" in Romanian, but if you make it reflexive ("m-am scapat"), it means "I wet myself."

And I was also thinking about drabbling the recent jailbreak here, where a former escapee came back for his brother, setting a helicopter down in the prison courtyard. But that's really a movie.

Instead, this:

==========================

No More Cages

(AP) Nicosia – A young Russian woman died last night while escaping an apartment where she was being held prisoner. Like many young women seeking escape from crushing poverty in Russia, Nadezhda Gurov, 18 years old, responded to an Internet ad for a waitress job in Cyprus. Instead, she found herself at an adult club where the owner withheld her travel documents and forced her to have sex with customers. Gurov escaped by tying bed sheets together and climbing down the balcony. The sheets slipped apart and she fell to her death.

Damn, Raq, I think you broke me. It makes good TV/movie fodder, but when you realize it actually happens...makes me want to kill. I have to settle for the mice in my condo.

Yeah, that faux news article is an amalgamation of several true stories. The story of the girl who tied the sheets together about killed me; I've had to think of it in terms of her finally getting out of a sucky life. Another girl, who was "rescued" and deported, had been rented for the night by a guy who took her to his farm, had sex with her, and then made her clean his barn.