It’s still sort of Spring, right? Late, late Spring? Summer doesn’t officially start till the Summer Solstice in June, right?

Regardless of the fact, I have been doing some Spring cleaning. This morning, I grabbed a garbage bag from the drawer in the kitchen and started clearing off this desk of mine so I will have some goddamned room for a change.

I have the garbage bag for garbage (natch), the paper bag from last night’s McD’s for paper, and whatever bowl is currently sitting empty after my latest meal for all the tiny little bits and pieces of organic matter left over from hundreds of meals.

There’s more of those than I thought there would be but it makes sense in retrospect.

It feels good to clean. Makes me feel like I am getting something done, true, but even more importantly, it makes me feel like I am making things better.

I have felt like I had no agency for so long. Like there was nothing I could do to make my environment more pleasing to me so I had no choice but to push it out of my mind and ignore the madness and chaos of my environment and live in literal filth while focusing on the world inside my computer extra hard.

With this computer, I can escape the reality of my surroundings. Or so it seems. But no matter how deep I go into this compu-box of mine, I am still here in the real world living in a human pigsty in a body that is falling apart.

Those two things might be related.

I mean, no wonder I pay so little attention to my surroundings. They’re awful!

And yes, folks, I see the relationship between my ignoring my surroundings and them being totally awful.

That is, in fact, the fundamental ironic cycle of my self-defeat. I ignore things because they are unpleasant and it would take work to fix them, so they get worse, so I ignore them all the harder, so I end up in the fix I am in today.

Well fuck that. I can change things. I can make things be more to my liking. I can control my environment and my life.

I can make myself happier.

Repeat until believed.

So yeah. I will clean this desk off. Not all at once, but in bits in pieces here in there. That way, I can dart out of safety of my addictive distractions, get some cleaning done, then slip the tit back in my life and return to the safety of oral retentive bliss.

All depressives are addicts. Only the drug varies. Whether it’s booze, gambling, or video games, every single one of us has something we have fixated upon as our source of reward center stimulation

Of course we self-medicate. We live in an untenable mental state caused by a lack of dopamine in our brains. This mental state is one of intense craving akin to that of a starving animal or one dying of thirst.

So if we find something that stimulates our reward center and hence triggers a release of that sweet, sweet dopamine, we are going to fixate on it hard, especially if it takes relatively little effort to do.

Hence, we are all addicts just struggling to get to something like normal. We will fixate hard on whatever lets us feel at least somewhat better, whether that is heroin, gambling, or hardcore crochet.

Or, in my case, video games.

And all these addictions can kill you.

Some are just a lot faster than others.

More after the break.

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More about junkie depressives

The thing about addictions is that they hollow you out.

Not all at once, of course. That would be obvious and you would fight it and win.

No, it hollows you out via a long, protracted series of tiny compromises.

“It won’t hurt anyone if I stay here for another couple o’ drinks. The kids are in bed by now anyhow and my wife has her crosswords. It’ll be fine. “

“So my mother won’t lend me any more money. Well FUCK HER, I never loved her anyway, and she never loved me. Besides, I have plenty of friends who STILL LOVE ME and care whether I am ALMOST DYING or not. ”

“Mom and dad will never miss that old wooden cigar box, and i bet I can get 50 for it easy. Then it’s off to the Golden Lasso Casino to have some fun! And then I can pay them back from my winnings. I’m sure they’ll forgive me. They always have before!”

“I should probably do things to look after my environment and my health. But that would mean less time playing video games. So obviously not. Guess I will just die, then.”

I am one hollowed out dude.

I wasn’t always this way. Before I fell down the Skyrim hole, I did lots of things other than play video games. I would hang with the fuzzies on Tapestries while surfing the web, I would play around with music and video, at times I was even productive.

By my standards, anyhow. I made things. I put them online.

Some people saw them. My friends. So, technically….

But then I feel down a deep dark hole called Skyrim and lost my mind. I went three days without eating or sleeping. I spent all my time playing Skyrim. It ate enormous chunks of my life that I will never get back.

And the fact that mods let me indulge my dark fetishes was a big part of that. When you have no other way to express certain desires, anything that lets you do that is going to be almost an object of worship.

Eventually, I manages to crawl out of the depths of that hole. I eat and sleep now. I have social habits. I go get my groceries most Sundays.

But I still feel the overwhelming urge to maximize my time playing video games, no matter what the cost.

And given how sick i am getting, the cost is getting pretty fucking high.

So I am going to exercise my resistance muscles. Spend some time in between blogging and video games just chilling on my computer.

Maybe doing some cleaning. Maybe just watching YouTube vids and chatting with the fuzzies. Maybe working on music or video.

Or maybe trying to get really, really good at masturbating.

Hey, it’s the only cardio I get!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.