Tom: We started somewhere around 1986. We would rent a hotel in the Catskills and play D& D for the entire weekend.

Michael: Eating every junk food known to mankind. And I remember, my wife is eight months pregnant and the phone rings.

Tom: We’re all sitting there knowing what this could be. And he’s like, “are you sure?” 

Michael: “I don’t really want to give up the game right now, we’re in the middle of something”. 

Tom: “Yeah, we’re in the middle of a battle.” 

And we’re like, “are you kidding me? Get off the phone! I’m driving you home.” 

Michael: But these are the things that actually make us closer as a group. 

Tom: Absolutely. 

Michael: You have a fight with the wife or whatever. So we became our own little group therapy with each other, too. 

Tom: That’s right. Uh, the dungeon master, Steve and I were always close friends. He was the best man at my first wedding. I would use uh, combinations of his name as my passwords. 

Michael: [laugh] Can you tell me then, what I call the divorce, or the schism that happened during our last time we played?

Tom: Well, you’re talking about, we’re playing one time on Zoom during the COVID years. And Steve and I, he never called me Tom and I never called him Steve. We had a nickname 

Michael: [laugh] That we can’t say on radio. 

Tom: that we won’t say on the radio. 

And he said to me, “Tom, it’s your turn.”  Who the hell is Tom? 

Michael: Yeah. 

Tom: When he used my name like that, something was wrong. 

I immediately called him up. He didn’t pick up. And then he sent me an email. And the first line was, “Obviously this is about Trump.” 

The gist of it was, how my support for Trump was unacceptable to him and, basically, “I can’t be friends with you right now”. 

At that point, partly out of anger, I’ll admit it, I decided to remove myself from the group. 

Michael: When that happened, it caught me totally off guard. 

Let me tell you how I deal with this thing. Because I look at our country, I look at me and you, and I would only focus on the differences. But then I go, wait a minute. Of the 10,000 things that make up a human being, we have 20 things that we strongly disagree with, the other 9,980 things that we both agree on. 

Tom: Yeah. If you live in certainty all the time, and I’m not talking just politics now, I mean certainty about anything.

Michael: Yeah, sure. Yankees versus Mets, right? 

Tom: Yeah, Yankees versus Mets, whatever it might be, you’re cutting yourself off from…the possibilities 

Michael: Yeah. Thomas, I love you. Um, and I want to get you back in the game because the group could use you. Another character to get hit by arrows. 

So, I’m glad we had this opportunity. 

Tom: Yeah. Thank you buddy.