First off, I want to remind my wonderful readers that until I resolve my keyboard issues, and because typing via mouse clicking is so much harder than normal typing with fingers, I will only be writing 500 words a day instead of the customary 1000.

I apologize for this unfortunate necessity.

Right now, the process of resolving my issue with keyboards suddenly having a stroke and getting their keys scrambled is at a standstill.

I am out of ideas for solutions and so for now, it’s clicky typing for me.

But I am getting pretty goddamned sick of it. In fact I am getting to the point where I would almost be willing to pay the $20 for a new Amazon Basics keyboard just to enjoy being able to type normally for the brief time before it too has a seizure and dies.

I am not there yet, thank God, but I can feel myself drifting in that direction.

The other bit of business is about the entries I wrote while the blog was down.

I will be slowly adding them in the near future. The important thing to note for my beloved readers is that I will be backdating the entries in order to maintain the integrity of the archive, and therefore those interim entries will NOT be appearing as new entries but rather just mysteriously appearing in the archive as if by magic.

The earliest one is from August 15, so my suggestion is to go to that date in the archive and read forward from there.

But um, not yet as there’s only two interim entries up right now.

I will inform you in this space when there are enough to bother with.

More after the break .

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My video game addiction

OK, let’s try this again.

Hello, my name is Michael B., and I am hopelessly addicted to video games.

They have colonized and infected my entire life. I play them all day and night. They are the sad and broken answer to the question of what I am doing with my life.

What am I doing? Wasting my life playing video games while my body slowly rots away from neglect because if it doesn’t keep me from playing video games, I don’t pay it any attention at all.

Random infections causing wounds all over my body? Whatever, can still play games.

Nurses bandage them and I just keep on truckin’.

Legs become too weak to support me forcing me to use a walker and greatly limiting my mobility? Who cares? I hardly ever went anywhere or did anything anyway.

And oddly enough, it hasn’t really changed my video game based life at all.

You don’t exactly have to be very functional to lie in bed playing games on your tablet.

The full and certain knowledge that this addiction has hollowed me out completely and stolen my entire adult life and won’t stop draining my blood until I am dead?

Including the knowledge that it will resume feeding on me the second I stop blogging ?

Gee, you’re right. That’s really depressing and totally true. Wo1.

Better bury myself in video games even deeper to escape it.

Avoidant Personality Disorder, AWAY!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve had this song stuck in my head lately :

Particularly this one line that really bugs me :

Rudy thinks / that all good things/ come to those that wait

Um, no. All good things come to those that actually do things to bring them.

Waiting doesn’t do jack shit. And yet I know so many people wasting their precious time on Earth waiting for some magical future to come while doing absolutely nothing to make it happen.

It’s like this dream of theirs is just a comforting placeholder that fills the need for some idea of the future with bothering them by prodding them to do anything.

And that makes me sad. I want to tell these people that dreams mean nothing without action and therefore if their dreams are worth anything to them, they should be worth taking actual actions to achieve.

I mean, that just makes sense.

But I don’t say that because I am still trying to learn the lesson of The Iceman Cometh, a play by Eugene O’Neil.

In it, a bunch of men are hanging out and drinking at the living end of dive bars. A place so lowly it’s not even indoors – it’s just the endcof an alley that’s been crudely curtained off, with sawdust on the floor and crates for chairs

And all these men have a story about how one day, they will get back to their glory days. The ex-prizefighter swears that any day now, he’ll get back into shape and get back into the ring. The broken down old stevedore ssys he is going to go down to the union hall and get his old job back. And so on.

Enter our plot mover and antagonist the Successful Salesman.

More after the break.

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Guess what? Now it’s a drama class lesson!

I’m as surprised as you are. I never know where I am going to end up either.

Anyhow, the Salesman is a guy who is successful now but used to be one of the tragic cases who drank at the bar. And he tells everyone that he came back to help all his old drinking buddies make their dreams come true.

So he pays for the boxer’s gym membership and uses his connections to get the stevedore a meeting with the local union head and does that kind of thing for all of the drunks at the bar.

So they all head out full of new hope and determination to make those dreams of theirs come true, dammit!

But while they are gone, the Salesman reveals that his REAL agenda was to bypass the drunk’s excuses for not acting on their dreams so they could try them out and fail spectacularly , realize how unrealistic those dreams were, and finally be free of the delusions that the Salesman thought were keeping them trapped in this sorry state.

Act break, then the drunks come back, and they all failed big time alright. But far from liberating them, the Salesman has only succeeded in killing the last shred of hope in these men who have absolutely nothing else left.

So they come back utterly destroyed and defeated. Broken men who have humiliated themselves and who now know, without a doubt, that they are worthless.

The Salesman leaves, discouraged and depressed.

The final scene is just like the first. The drunks, thank God, have gone right back to telling the same old stories about how they will get back in the game one day. Turns out the damage the Salesman did was not permanent.

And that’s what passes for a happy ending in a Eugene O’Neill play.

This play meant a lot to me when I first read it many years ago because when I read it, I was on the Salesman’s side. int

Yeah, free them from the delusions that are holding them back!

I was far younger and more naïve back then.

So when they come back all deflated and broken, I was still right there with the Salesman, stunned by what now seem like the obvious and predictable consequences of that plan of action .

How could we have done this? What made us so blind to what we were doing? How could we have been so sure of ourselves that we felt we could basically perform open heart surgery on these men’s souls and have our patients survive?

It taught me a lot about the perils of intellectual arrogance mixed with starry eyed idealism, and really helped me overcome my “veritas uber alles” “anything is better than a lie” attitude.

There are worse things to be than delusional.

Like being completely unable to function, for instance. I could stand to be more deluded if it closed my wounds and let me live again.

Not the sort of thing you can do on purpose, though.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(820+ words. Wow.)

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