Well that was stupid.

I just spent a grueling three hours playing ESO when I had only meant to play for an hour and then have lunch.

Why? Because I has formed the intention, “I am going to finish this quest line before I eat” and it ended up being really, really, really long.

And that meant, sadly, that in my little world, I was almost totally incapable of doing anything else until I fucking finished the damn thing.

Why? Because I got pit bull teeth.

Back in the day, part of the common lore about pit bulls was that their jaws were shaped in a way that once they bit down on something, they could not let go.

They had to bite all the way through it or be stuck there forever.

This is probably not true, but it’s true enough for a metaphor.

Because I, too, have that problem. Once I sink my teeth into something, my Taurus (aka non-pit bull) need to finish what I started kicks in and I just can’t let go of the task until I finish it, no matter what happens or how good the reasons to stop are.

A classic example would be that time, many years back, when I took on this crazy ass job of rewording and cut n’ pasting these bits of trivia about various forms of collectibles in this huuuuge spreadsheet.

It was such an insane job that I had to work on it for nearly all of my waking hours for ten days just to get it done in time.

But I had agreed to do it. So I did it. The whole thing paid like $90, but the lady in charge topped it up to $120.

Not nearly enough for how much work it was. But I had agreed to do it. So I did it.

A sane person would have looked at the amount of work and said “Um, no thanks, you are not paying nearly enough for the amount of work this is going to be” and saved themselves a lot of effort, time, and toil.

But nope. I did it.

The lady in charge of it told me, when I asked about the workload. that other people had done it without any problems.

I have thought about this and I can only conclude that these people cheated somehow. Like they didn’t actually read the entries at all, just did a find and replace to change key words into their synonyms and that was enough to fool her.

Or they were really, really desperate for cash. But even then, there are so many wyas to make more for less work.

Me, I did the job as described. Lunacy.

So yeah. I know all the sane reasons why I should have stopped way before I did, including but not limited to : my blood sugar was dropping, I was getting sleepy from all the mental calories I was expending and that was making things even slower because I kept getting killed by boss monsters over and over again, I hadn’t gotten dressed yet and was feeling cold, the muscles in my right hand were starting to spasm, and so forth and so on.

But none of that mattered. I just had to finish it. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t even pause. And going backwards was doubly impossible. I do not have a reverse gear.

It was finish it, or nothing.

One day this sort of thing will get me into serious trouble.

But on the plus side, it means I can do amazing amounts of work.

And that’s a good thing, right?

More after the break.

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Dispatches from Elsewhere continues to be an astoundingly good show. But I don’t want to talk about that right now.

For one thing, it would take forever to even begin to explain the plot.

But there’s a character in it named Octavio with whom I am utterly fascinated.

I could try to explain why, but it’s far easier to show you.

He is the guy you see at the very beginning of this :

The actor is Richard E. Grant and I find every single frame of him absolutely riveting. It’s an extraordinary performance which packs so much power that when he leaves the screen I feel like I just woke from a very strange dream.

Now here’s the scary bit : I feel that way because I identify with him.

The icy intellectualism, the calm controlled demeanor, the great precision with which is communicates and acts, the eccentricity, the whole strange head space he occupies…. I feel like he is a side of myself made flesh.

And yes, this means I identify with the villain in the show. The big bad whose shadowy machinations are behind everything and who controls the whole shebang.

Believe me, it ain’t the first time I have had more in common with the villain than the heroes. People like me are almost never the heroes of the tale.

Whether we’re the evil sorcerer, or the flamboyant supervillain, or the Machiavellian patriarch of a rich and powerful family, and even when we are just the asshole boss at work, somehow being good at organization and systems building is always seen as being evidence of moral inferiority.

Another example : Trevor Goodchilde from Aeon Flux.

Here’s an audio sampler :

He is the villain of the series though not an entirely unsympathetic. The world of the show does not allow such easy moral clarity.

Not to me, at least.

Aeon is the heroine of the show but her reflexive, emotional anarchism and blanket defiance of everyone and everything is not always right.

And finally, my ultimate alter ego, Adrian Veidt.

Another eccentric icy intellectual who is good at planning and organization.

And I admire him greatly. He saw Armageddon coming and knew he was the only one who could stop it and did whatever it took to do so.

Including a lot of things which are massively offensive to all common morality, including killing millions of innocent people.

Sacrificing millions to save billions. It’s not something most people would do. It’s not the sort of thing most people would even be capable of doing.

And the fact that Veidt is capable of doing it and does it makes him an unspeakable monster in most people’s eyes, including those honest enough to admit it was the right thing to do.

But to me, he’s a hero, one hundred percent.

He saved the world.

He just had to get his hands (very) dirty to do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.