Yup. More water imagery!

Today is going to be an adventure. I am setting out into the still and dark waters of my sleeping mind with no idea how far I will go or where I will end up.

Should be interesting,

Yesterday, Joe and Julian and I watched the Albert Finney version of Scrooge.

It’s a musical version that I remember quite fondly from my childhood. I adored it back then. It was so colorful and musical and expressive and full of Xmas spirit. It always left me feeling positively aglow with the spirit of the holidays and I looked forward to watching it will my family every year.

And now….. eh.

Now it is an overblown, overdone, overly ornamented overwrought bit of corny, cheesy excess that I now find quite frankly embarrassing.

Albert Finney is still a damn good Scrooge, radiating bitterness and malice and rapacious greed, and that’s still my favorite Ghost of Christmas Present, all giant and jolly and Jovian and, best of all, absolutely mercilessly sarcastic to Scrooge.

It’s like he shows up in the movie to be the voice of us, the audience.

And it’s that great green pagan figure I want to talk aboujt today because it is he whose lesson I so deeply want to learn.

See, even though we’re pretty unalike on the surface, I have always identified very deeply with ol Ebby Scrooge. It’s a story I never tire of because I consider his journey to be mine as well, and I can very easily imagine my falling into the miser’s trap.

And I have figured out why, I think : it all stems from a derangement of values that causes one to put far too much emphasis on what one sees as “real” and “solid” and “reliable”… like money.

At its root, this disorder is about security. The miser has had some traumatic experience(s) that involved losing something precious (a person, a home, a love) and caused them to cast about for something more “real” etc.

And I can dig it. I grasp the falsity of golden idols so that’s not a route I would have been likely take, but I am scarcely better off as someone who gave up on absolutely everything and withdrew from reality into the realm of the mind.

A counting-house or a bedroom with toys, either way we’ve cut ourselves from all sources of the warmth and connection and light that could cure our dreadful loneliness in a very wrongheaded attempt to be “safe”.

It’s like locking oneself in with a lion to escape a mouse.

That’s why I want to learn the Ghost of Xmas Present’s lesson so badly. I know that I would be far better off being more open, expansive, welcoming to life, and overall just plain happy because I am so much more capable of celebrating life.

That’s far preferable to my usual turtled up and suspicious attitude towards life where the real world is always seen as a cold, hostile, brutal place whose tortures can only be escaped via total physical, intellectual, and emotional isolation.

A state in which all that is trust is the world of the mind and all that can get in must get in via that electric pathway known as “the media”.

So video games, YouTube, TikTok, and so on.

All things which entertains the brain but chill the heart and starve the soul.

Junk food, essentially. And like with real junk food, the main problem is not the bad that comes in, it’s a good that it displace.

So let me hereby embark a quest to look for soul food and heart’s true joy and all those other marvelous things that my being needs so badly.

I need emotional nutrition, dammit.

And that means gently and carefully letting go of my grey growling glare that refuses to let my mind create any of that which it needs because that would not be “real”.

Well fuck real. I’m a pragmatist. Give me whatever works.

And if that happens to be candy coated illusions and delusions of grandeur, so be it.

More after the break.

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Some recent acquisitions

Recently bought and tried out Persona 4 Golden. Then returned it without ever having made it to the actual game.

That’s because the fricking thing is 50 percent visual novel. And I can’t stand visual novels. I like actual video games.

Like I always say, I love to read and I love to play games but I don’t play games to read.

But I was on the cusp of crossing the two hour limit for returns and thereby committing to the damned thing because the reviews are orgasmic and everybody and their little blue budgie praises the games in that series for being AMAZING and I decided to restrain my usual flightiness when it comes to games and dig in for as long as it actually took to get to actual game content… then it started crashing all the time.

Well don’t that just figure.

So I returned it and now I am back at square one. Still looking for my New Thing.

I did get some new games from one of those Humble Bundle deals. Six games, $12 or so, what the hell.

The star of the pack was the third Wastelands game, a turn based post apocalyptic sci fi RPG with a good reputation.

And a hell of a learning curve. They throw you right into a pitched battle at the very beginning of the game, with hordes of redneck cultists trying to kill you and shit exploding all over the place and a huge robot scorpion.

All before I even know Thing 1 about playing the damned game.

I get the feeling they assumed new players had played the previous games because the tutorial is minimal and way too stressful for my old ass.

It’s suppose to hearken back to the strategic RPGs of the past.

I never played those.

There’s a reason for that.

So right now, the only thing keeping me dragging myself forward in the game is the promise of more of its “all the awards” winning writing.

So I probably will give it at least one more time.

But jeezly fuck, give a guy a break!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.