Blogging while impaired today.

Not by alcohol or drugs or anything fun like that. Just bad sleep, like usual. I am in that fun mode where I am dizzy, disoriented, achey, breaky, hearty, and unable to resist the urge to make dumb jokes about annoying songs from the 90’s.

My mind is floating in a treacle-thick clinging fog and it feels like my eyes have two different and incompatible ideas as to where they wanna focus. Tastes like something died in my mouth and I am pretty sure it didn’t die of natural causes.

More like something gruesome and lingering. With “black” in the name.

So the words, they do not come easy at the moment. But I, of course, will soldier on. After all, I owe it to you, my reading public, who no doubt await each each daily missive with the breathless anticipation of a child on Xmas Eve, or a bride awaiting her first night with her husband and hoping he remembered to read that article about anal.

Plus, honestly, I am too mentally fried to do much else. I certainly couldn’t get very far in any of my video games.

Hell, right now I wouldn’t even be abe to follow the plot in a game of Pong.

I wonder why they didn’t call it Ping?

Even though I just cashed my cheque on Thursday, I continue to stress out about money because my expenses have magically outgrown my budget.

Don’t they always? Income rarely idles.

So I have been wracking my brains for ways to economize. Luckily, said brain happens to be really good at that kind of optimization,

And it can’t come too soon because I am so tired of worrying about money. It raises my background stress level and thus drains my mood and makes it hard for me to ever truly relax because it makes me feel paranoid and defensive and restless.

Damn I need to go back on UpWork and get some paying work. It would do wonders for my mood on so many levels.

Oh, but that might cut into my oh so precious video game time. Try as I might, I can’t entirely stop imagining my life as a video game time optimization exercise.

That’s what addiction is like, I suppose. Without video games to fill all available time gaps, I would have to face that infinite corridor of infinite doors and actually figure out what the hell to do with myself.

Much easier to keep that eletronic tit in my mouth and hide from time and life in a world where I feel safe because it doesn’t matter and isn’t real.

Not better. Just easier.

And now, here I am back trying to figure out how to improve my lot in life without ending up in the jaws of my self-hatred.

In order to change things, I have to be aware of what is wrong, and that means self-examination and introspection.

But that is just the kind of opening my malicious superego adores. Once my laser-like mind is set to seek problems, it is easier than anything for that to turn into a fault finding mission with the inevitable result that instead of positive change, it just leads to my hating myself and giving up.

And yet, if I do nothing, nothing happens, and I just keep floating down this long and lonely canal towards an ignoble and senseless death.

Perhaps the happy medium is to simply concentrate on buidling my strength and my health and my happiness, and forget all about plans and goals and such. Take the energy of that restless desire to be going somewhere in life and use it to reinforce my mood and my mental health.

I definitely feel like there is a stronger, healthier. happier version of me lost in the mists of my poor mental health somewhere. That version of me knows how to channel my natural wellspring of enthusiasm into positive action and a positive mood instead of having it all twisted up and impacted inside me and causing me pain.

That part of me got crushed by life but it is still there. The happy little redheaded kid who was cute and charming as heck and loved by all didn’t die when I was raped at 4, it just went away for a long time, and it is within my power to bring it back.

That is, indeed, my goal. Not a regression, just a return to a purer, stronger, cleaner mental state from before one random pervert wrecked my life forever.

That ended up in a darker place than I intended.

Enthusiasm is definitely a big part of the solution, as well as its fraternal twin, inspiration. I think my natural, healthy mode is to let my big waves of emotion carry me forward instead of suppressing them harshly and having all that energy crash against the seawalls in my mind, doing a lot more harm than good.

That would involve way less worrying about where things are going, methinks. And getting over the need to know where the road leads before setting foot on it. And that,l in turn, would require a lowering of my usual state of eye-bulding freaked out paranoia into something a little more reasonable and trusting.

After all, I know that my fears are mostly irrational and that for the most part. that hidden hypervigilence costs far, far, far too much to justify its occasional successes.

I just want to pick up that poor scared little animal inside me and cuddle it, stroke its fur, rub its ears, and tell it everything is going to be okay now because now I am here for it and I will keep all the bad things away and it can relax because it is safe.

That poor little critter has been running for a very long time, and it is so tired and so scared but also too scared to stop because that’s when the monsters will GET it.

Not any more, little critter. I will keep you safe and warm and dry and no monsters will ever be able to get at you again.

I love you so much, little one, and know this : you will be safe in my arms forever and ever and ever.

Because I’m here now, and everything is going to be OK.

Now let’s go home.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Finally, there are the games I disliked so much I immediately uninstalled them.

Although in the case of this first one, it’s not really the game’s fault.

I hereby present : Tooth and Tail.

The caption expresses my first issue with the game, which is entirely personal and does not bear on the enjoyment of anyone without my particularly sensitive temperament : the furry animals are killing each other.

And with a downright lustful brutality too, and an amoral zeal I find highly disturbing. I am the guy who refuses to watch Watership Down because he heard bunnies die in it and I just can’t handle that.

The fact that roadkill is a thing that could keep me awake nights if I let it.

Make love not war, fuzzies!

But I was prepared to give it a shot anyhow. So I booted it up and started a game, and then my second issue popped up because it does not work like other RTS games I have played and I am simply not in the mindset to absorb a bunch of new rules for a game with which I already have emotional issues in a genre I don’t like anyhow.

So mostly, it’s because I am too damned old to learn new things rapidly any more;. It’s the same thing that happened in what turned out to be the Linguistics Class From Hell.

So between oldness, squeamishness, and not liking RTS games, this game never really stood a chance with me.

Ergo, I am not going to give this one a rating. I barely played enough of it to have an opinion let alone an actually qualified and coherent one. All I can do is relate my experience and hope you, gentle reader, can get something useful from it.

So my review is basically “not the game for me.” Moving on.

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Then there is this monstrous oddity :

I wish I had watched that trailer before I bothered trying to play the goddamned thing.

As is, I have to admit that knowing it was made specifically to hurt a certain kind of person (my guess : he wanted to hurt mastery-oriented fanatically persistent “must conquer” types) makes the game make a lot more sense.

Not the naked dude in a kettle thing. That remains something best left between Bennet Fodder and whatever fetish message board he hangs out on.

But I can grasp the sort of pent up bitterness that would lead someone to design something specifically designed to hurt the kind of person who tends to get ahead in life because they happen to have the sort of temperament that works in this world.

In fact, the whole game seems like something I would invent…. in my mind. But unlike Bennett Fodder, I would never actually make it because the sane part of my mind would remind me that the people it would hurt are innocent people who have done me no wrong and have comitted no crime so there is no justification for hurting them.

So while I “get it”, Bennett, I don’t approve.

Ergo this game gets a 2/10 for me. It sucks. It was meant to suck. It fulfilled its mission of being a game that punishes you for playing it, ergo – do not play it.

It would have been 1/10, but I have to grudgingly admit it’s a clever idea.

But seriously. Even if you get it for free. Don’t play it.

It can only lead to pain. And the whole time the game will be laughing at you for being stupid enough to keep playing.

Don’t play it. Moving on.

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And that’s it for the whole bundle. Mission accomplished.

I know that my reviews are not exactly professional quality. I go on and on about my own personal experiences with the games and nobody wants to read that in a game review, or anywhere else for that matter.

Still, it was an enjoyable exercise and I think that if I can keep at it,. I will internalize what is and is not worth including, and thus free my writing skills (which are awesome) from my need to express my innermost thoughts (which is far less commercially viable).

Although I dunno. Maybe if I was blogging on one of the platforms like Tumblr and did the groundwork of commenting on other people’s blogs, I might attract some kind of following. The kids these days seem to really go for intensely personal, confessional type writing, and I can certainly do that.

The fact that I have done all this blogging – millions of words of it – on a private platform that doesn’t even link to other people’s blogs and is thereore my own little fully controllable ‘world’ is very, very… me.

It’s tragic how often those of us capable of great art are saddled with serious social and psychological issues that keep us from drawing attention to it.

That’s what agents are for, I suppose, but in order to get one, you have to put enough of your work out there so it can be published and therefore prove you do not entirely suck, and of course, if I could do that, I wouldn’t need the agent, would I?

I am such an odd bundle of contradictions. On the one hand, part of me truly thinks I am an amazing author with a lot of things worth saying to say and a lot of stories worth telling to tell, and that if I could connect with an audience, I could make a lot of people happy with my words, and that is fundamentally what I really want to do.

Would be nice if that also paid at least as much as welfare, but it’s not strictly necessary. I could be quite happy as someone with a dedicated group of fans he writes for every day and engages with on a regular basis.

At least for a while. Eventually I would get ambitious and restless.

But it could be very, very nice for a while.

But that auin’t ever going to happen if I hide away in my private little world hear. .

Has anyone seen the exit lately?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.