Just today, I started playing a game called Blockheads. It’s a lot like Minecraft (or at least, what I imagine Minecraft to be like. I’ve never played it). You control a little dude who lives in a highly interactive environment where you can dig up dirt, use that dirt to make tools, use those tools to get things to make other kinds of things, and so on and so forth.

I never thought I would enjoy this kind of game. People would tell me about what they did in the game and it all seemed so pointless. I figured it would be the sort of thing that only people with the “builder” or “maker” dream enjoyed. The people who took great pleasure from working hard to make something then standing back, gazing upon their creation, and saying “I made that!”

Yeah, I am totally not that kind of person. I will work hard towards a goal, but there has to be a clear and worthwhile goal. I read about people building amazing, complicated things in Minecraft and think, “Good for them. But why?”

So odds are, I will get tired of the game as soon as I have basic survival for my little dude down. Or at least, have run out of ways to make his little dude life better. Improving life for my little dude (I named him Charlie, can you guess why?) seems like enough of a goal to keep me going for now.

Plus, there is exploration, which I do enjoy. And I am always hooked by the challenge of building and advancing civilization, which is more or less what Charlie and I have to do. (Charlie starts with nothing but a few tools and a little food. Everything has to be built up in stages from there. )

So it turns out that I might enjoy this kind of game from a Robinson Crusoe point of view. I was actually craving a game where I got to rebuild civilization and couldn’t find one that I considered satisfactory.

Then I download this game on a whim, and lo and behold, it’s exactly what I was looking for.

I love when things just work out like that.

There’s some birds wheeling and floating in the sky outside my window. About thirty or so. They don’t seem to be heading anywhere in particular and it is way too high up for them to be circling a food source. So I guess they are doing it because they are birds, and birds like to fly.

Back to the game. Well, nothing good comes without a price, and this one was particularly deep and personal (though not terribly important or dire) for me.

See. the makers of the game used the tried and true method of using good public domain music as the music for the game. And one of the pieces of music is a very old tune called Coming Home.

Not many people seem to have heard of it these days. But I know it, and know it well. Usually when I have experienced it, it has been in this kind of form :

Remembrance Day. Remembering fallen soldiers who never did come home. We bring them home by remembering them.

So it’s no wonder that the song always goes straight to my heart and fills me with solemn melancholy and quiet Canadian grief. And it’s an absolutely beautiful tunes, in my opinion. Simple, elegant, deeply moving, and of course, incredibly sad.

But not hopeless. It mourns but it does not despair. It says “I grieve for those lost to us, but I will hold my chin up high and go on, in their memory. ”

And that’s why it really gets me. Just like Remembrance Day always gets me. Even as a kid, I never wondered why we went to the park with our town’s WWII memorial every November 11. Once I was old enough to understand it, my mother pointed out the names of uncles and cousins she never got to meet because they died in WWII, and I understood it right away. We went because there were some of ours on that memorial. We went because we were part of it.

And now I am far away from that memorial, and so I don’t do Remembrance Day any more. I can’t go to a memorial for someone else’s dead. It seems obscene and impossibly rude. My people are not on that memorial.

So to some up, some video game people put some public domain music in their game and now I am grieving.

Told ya being sensitive wasn’t for wimps. There’s a reason one must suffer for art.

It’s because you have to be the sort of person who might be thrown into deep sadness by a random song from a video game in order to develop the depth of feeling and understanding that goes into making great art.

You have to have something inside you that you really need to express.

What else…. made peanut butter cookies last night. Yum. Stuck with leaving them in the oven for exactly nine minutes, as my experiment with nine minutes fifteen seconds resulted in burned and dry cookies.

I still want them to be a little more tan for purely cosmetic reasons, but when baking, the overwhelming priority is always that the product be edible and taste good.

Cosmetic concerns come way after that, especially if they are minor.

Feeling pretty sleepy today. But I am doing what I can to stay out of the bed this afternoon. So far I am not crushingly sleepy, just kind of tired around the edges. We’ll see.

(the next day)

Oh shit, forgot I wasn’t quite finished…. well this is embarrassing. Sorry for anyone who wondered why there was no post yesterday. Seems like my absentmindedness has taken yet another unexpected turn.

Because if you expected it… you would remember.

Anyhoo, Sunday with Le Gang (sans Julian, who is dogsitting) was awesome as usual.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. Today. Whatever.