The characters of Rex Hall that I’ve touched upon already were more or less a normal bunch: Alan and Michael Arthur were pretty easy to get along with and for all of Kenny Jones’ quirks and crotchets he was, at the core, an all right guy. But on rare occasion our dinner-time get-togethers were not with the already established Rex Hall Trio but the Rex Hall Quartet, and that’s when some of the fun got sucked out of the Octumvirate’s table.
On those nights we were blessed with the presence of Mike Smith – who had come out of his hole to eat with us. Mike was the bespectacled roommate of Kenny and (obviously) the other suite mate of Alan and Michael. We had heard rumors of Mike long before we first saw him, when Kenny had casually mentioned this roommate of his with great dexterity and a superb knowledge of video games. Alan and Michael had tales of how Kenny and Mike’s room was void of any light (trash bags covered the windows) and of the number of guests they regularly received for video game competitions. From these stories we sort of had our ideas of what this “Mike” must be like. We were a bit off the mark when we first saw him face to face.
I still remember my first encounter: I was late, lagging behind, and arrived at the cafeteria a minute or two behind everyone else. A handful of students separated them from me and I stood and watched Morty, Alan, Leonard, Phil, Michael, Kenny...next to Kenny was the surliest looking fellow I’d ever seen, staring off into space while the other six chatted aimlessly. In a nutshell, Mike’s facial expressions seemed to say that everything was bothering him, be that his roommate, the dining hall, the people in the dining hall, the people not in the dining hall, and or whatever else crossed his mind. To him, everything that tore him away from his own little world was just an inconvenience. How he was ever talked out of his sub-ground level room of Rex Hall I never knew.
Our first meal with Mike wasn’t that great and the subsequent times he appeared danced around the same level of comfort: yeah, sometimes he was bit more civil but then seemed twice as snide, so for the most part you knew you weren’t going to get anything of any merit out of him. That attitude didn’t go over well with the rest of us and as a result we often didn’t pay much attention to him when he showed up – which is probably why I remember very little about him. But even in the midst of Mike’s standoffish mannerisms, Kenny still tried for weeks to get some of us to come over to play a couple rounds of video games with the two of them before they started in on the competitions the two hosted nearly every night. Those of us invited usually excused ourselves by saying Stan had invited us to a recital and...well, you get the idea.
Still, for all the “fun” Kenny was having with random acquaintances and perfect strangers showing up a couple times a week to play video games well past midnight, you got the impression he tired of that environment quickly and liked having these “social” outings with other people. They were awkward interactions, at best, but it was painfully obvious Mike did not share the same level of enthusiasm as Kenny. It should come as little surprise that Mike’s meals with us in the dining hall became less frequent as the first semester wore on and he was nothing more than a distant memory by the end of the school year the next spring.
But we all became distant memories by that point in our lives, with the eight of us moving onward to better and bigger things. Our little “group of ate” had served its purpose by that time and we needed to focus on more important issues – schoolwork, graduation, life, and so on.
In short: game over.
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Game Over
(unknown)
Overcome
From the album Blessed Are the Persecuted
1996
Deep inside your life, there is a void to fill with what you cannot find.
Lonliness finds you, you find there is a need, there is a need to kill.
But who's life is at stake here now, when did your own life become such a threat to you, you lookd around, is there nothing left, nothing left for you to do.
Is this the end of you string?
You find a welcome mat of death's sting.
Sorrow. Pain.
Coming closer to the end of your game, and no one seems to care.
Need something new, a breath of fresh air.
Done it all, nothing left to try.
It's time to see your life is a lie.
Lie.
It's time to change your life.
And a new gift has been offered to you.
A gift of peace, a gift of new life.
And new doors have been opened for you.
Jesus is waiting there to see you through.
The one who does give more than anything this world could give.
The one who does give more than any lifestyle you could live.
Anything this world could offer you, anything this world could ever give.
