You know that song “Piano Man” by Billy Joel?

It’s 9 o’clock on a Saturday,
The regular crowd shuffles in.
There’s an old man, sitting next to me,
Makin’ love to his tonic and gin.

My intent in mentioning it here is twofold: stick with me now.

When I was growing up in Middle America, my mother forced piano lessons on all us kids … several years of piano lessons … until she let us throw off the shackles of piano slavery and take up the instruments we really wanted to learn, like electric guitar and drums.

Weren’t we glad then that she made us stick with lessons so long? (Not really, but hell if I’m gonna say that now.)

Anyways, every holiday season, each of us are pressured in turn to play the piano (not having a drum set handy), and the first request is always “Piano Man.” Because it’s so Christmas-y. Or something.

So, on the plane home, it occurs to me that MMOGs are very similar to the regular crowd in that odious song: almost everyone is on their way to somewhere else.

Of course, there’s all the college kids who are, we hope, working on getting somewhere else, but I’ve met plenty of others with their own stories of where they wanted to be a year or few hence.

There was the military wife with her husband who was stationed in Europe. She didn’t speak the language, had no relatives nearby, and no friends yet. She wanted to get back to America and was just killing time in EQ.

There was the recovering alcoholic and drug addict who hadn’t held a steady job for five years. He quit Star Wars suddenly one day when he decided he was clean and sober and didn’t need the distraction of a MMOG to keep him off the junk anymore. (Got an email last week from him — Still sober and working.)

There was the garage band guitarist that worked an occasional gig on the weekends. He’d sometimes play acoustic guitar over TeamSpeak, and if he was playing on the weekends, that meant his band didn’t have any bookings. He was looking for The Big Break, of course, so he could quit his day job: ebayer extraordinaire.

There was the construction worker whose wife left him after 15 years, and when he wasn’t looking for love in the bottom of a bottle, he was cruising the colleges and the female avatars. (Nice.) He needed a new wife … and I mean NEED … before he died of bad hygiene or a rotting soul.

There was the dude who ran his own web design and hosting service. Few people are more skilled in taking advantage of MMOG client/server sync’ing issues. *wink wink* He wanted to move to Vegas. That was the sum of his short-term life goals. Never got the story on that — I always assumed it was because he lived in this bimfuck town in the middle of nowhere and Vegas is, well, not.

There was the chick that had brain surgery the year before to remove a tumor. She just wanted to get well and have her old life back. She was hopeful that another year of physical therapy would do the trick. God, she was an awful player. Not even I, Slayer of Noobs and Dumass Players, had the heart to yell at her for the repeated mistakes, however. She could have made the whole story up, but in this case, I’d rather be a fool than a heartless monster.

I guess all this begs the question: where am I going someday? Even the Piano Man was on his way somewhere else.

I think I’m just the bar customer passing through, not headed anywhere in particular, just killing a few hours in a friendly tavern after work. To forget about life for a while.