I don’t exactly feel bad or good today. Just sort of wandering around the middle of the mood spectrum, neither descending nor aloft, just browsing around the midway point like cows around an old fence.

I guess that’s OK. Beats feeling terrible, I guess. I am just feeling bored and sort of restless and low level anxious. That is increasingly feeling like my default mood. I really need to learn to find, and more importantly accept, more activity into my life.

I desperately want more meaningful action in my life. I want things to do which mean something to me, as opposed to stuff designed merely to make the passing time go more easily.

Hence all the video games I play, and the amount I read, and all that time I spend keeping up with my Facebook feed, and most tellingly, all that time I spend asleep.

I know it is wrong, but I find myself hoping it is as close to a meal time as possible when I wake up after a nap. And what do I do after the meal? I often go right back to sleep, so as to fast forward through time as much as possible and give myself the minimum number of hours awake with nothing to do but fill time as possible. It’s like I want to go through life sedated.

This is clearly a terrible way to go through life, essentially skipping as much of it as you can so you only have to be awake for “the good bits”. It goes a long long way towards explaining why I can be damned near forty without having done much of anything with my life.

How can you do things when you spend half your time asleep? When the hell would you do it?

Today, after lunch, I went right back to bed. And even as I was laying there, not sleepy at all but trying to get to sleep anyhow, I was saying to myself “I am not sleepy. I could just get up right now and get my writing done and maybe even do a few of the errands I keep putting off like phone calls and stuff. There is stuff I could be doing. Yet here I am, taking an entirely unnecessary nap.”

And yet, I still napped. I could do nothing else. I was actively afraid of staying awake with time to fill all afternoon. Afraid? Of what?

I mean, there are worse things than boredom, right? Might even stimulate me to do something productive with my time instead of just fucking around doing nothing and getting nowhere and hating myself.

Maybe that is what I am really afraid of, though. Doing something productive means leaving the comfortingly meaningless (and hence, zero risk) world of my cancerous little cocoon. And as we have discussed, that risks waking the angry giant of my free flowing anxiety. I might end up in one of those horrible states of mind where I feel incredibly scared of everything and I want to run and run and run until I can’t run any more and I don’t know where I am any more and therefore nobody can find me.

What am I running from? What am I so scared of when I get like that? Who is “coming”? I don’t know. Maybe it is my whole life that I want to flee. My whole self. Just run away and stop being me and work on becoming someone else, someone worthwhile, someone happy, even.

And leave this absurd mess of a life I have created via my patent neglect of myself behind. Just run run run down the road of life and never look back.

After all, why should I be stuck being who I already am? I didn’t ask to be this person. I had no creative control. I just ended up like this via the blind and arbitrary hand of fate. How fair is that?

I should get to start over and decide exactly who I am going to be.

I am not looking to re-roll my character sheet (because frankly, a few of my stats are very impressive) but I would like to start the game over with what I know now.

I actually dreamed that yesterday. I dreamed that I had a watch that let me access the saved games of my life, and that I could, via the watch, “load” myself into any point in my life where I had saved my game.

So I went back in my life, loading saved games and figuring out if I wanted to live my life again from that point on.

Eventually, for some reason, I settled on starting over from when I was fourteen years old. In the dream, I was walking up the street in my home town with both my elementary school and junior high on it (Summer Street, I think?). It was raining, and I was trying to figure out when and who I was.

I actually remember having the time traveler’s dilemma of wanting to know “when” it was but not wanting to seem like a crazy person by asking people what year it was.

So instead, I thought “Well I am fourteen, so it must be…. 1987?”.

Then I got a little depressed when I realized that this would mean that I had to go through junior high and high school all over again. But, I reasoned, I had no choice. The job prospects for people who do not graduate high school are not wonderful.

And it’s not like I could just take some test to prove I already knew it all and didn’t need school and they should just give me the diploma right now and save the taxpayers a lot of money, and me a lot of time better spent developing those social skills I sort of neglected before.

This made me second guess my decision to load this particular save point of my life, so I started fiddling with my watch (which was very cool and advanced for 1987… sweet!), and then the dream branched into a weird realm of trying to find the right options screen in an increasingly complex and improbable interface, and stopped being about the whole personal time travel thing.

Still. Wouldn’t it be great if life really worked like that?