Keko Chronicles - Journal
Origins: Part Three
The Pink Box in the Closet
Apparently, making a card game can give a person a hundred metaphors about life. I suspect that a large number of those metaphors will eventually show up in these journal entries. If I’m around long enough to write them. And if you are around long enough to read them.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you card game metaphor number one:
“If you don’t like the hand you are dealt, get some new cards.”
Okay. So that’s not really a metaphor. It’s more like a pithy saying or a better than average fortune cookie fortune. Let’s call it a life lesson.
Keko Chronicles was a really bad game for a really long time. But we kept changing the cards until, at some point, the game went from really bad to really quite good. And it really only took a few cards to move it from the former category into the latter.
Lots of people like to murmur and grumble and complain about “the hand life has dealt them.” But not nearly as many do anything about it. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t one of those “you can be anything you want to be if you just set your mind to it” type things. I mean, people like to say stuff like that. It sounds good and everything. People like to hear that they can be anything they want to be. But (big dose of reality here) it just ain’t the truth.
No matter how hard I try. No matter how much I set my mind to it. I am never, ever, ever going to be an opera singer. It just isn’t going to happen. And the world is a better place because of that.
So, what am I saying?
If you hate everything about your life, stop complaining and try changing something. It doesn’t have to be a big something. It probably shouldn’t be a big something. Completely starting over is over rated. Maybe your life just needs a little tweaking. If we had scrapped the idea of Keko Chronicles completely and started over from scratch, there, most likely, would not be any Keko Chronicles today. We just changed a couple of things. A little bit here. A little bit there.
The difference from really bad to really quite good might just be smaller than you think.
It might just be changing your priorities. Or attitude. Or perspective.
It might just be realizing that there is more to life than the here and the now.
And so ends metaphor/pithy saying/better than average fortune cookie fortune/life lesson number one. Back to the journal entry.
At some point, Keko Chronicles went from really bad to really quite good. And I got pretty excited. So excited that I made a boxed set of Keko Chronicles for my youngest daughter for Christmas. It was this pretty pink box that I doodled on. Inside was the latest edition of Keko Chronicles, a copy of the Keko Journal, some pins that said “I love Quiggs,” a stuffed animal that looked like one of the characters in the book, and an additional expansion set of cards called “The Galurian Marketplace.” It was more than kind of cool. She seemed to like it. The whole family seemed to like it.
So we played it and played it and played it. And we laughed and we talked trash and we had fun playing a game as a family.
And then...our lives changed. The kids got older. Interests changed. Life happened. Hanging out at the kitchen table playing cards with Dad and Step Mom wasn’t such a high priority. The pretty pink box with the doodles got stuck in the back of the closet and we all sort of forgot that Keko Chronicles had become a really good game.
Truth be told, we all kind of forgot that Keko Chronicles had even been a thing.
Next: The End of the Beginning