Don’t bring a knife to a…? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

Gun fight. Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. That’s what I have been doing in Fallout 4. And it’s not going so great.

It was going okay, this whole idea of being the post apocalyptic barbarian swinging his sword to kill the bad guys and protect the innocent people of the Commonwealth. Sure, I got shot up a few times, but not so much that it made the whole thing seem impossible.

But then I came across my first large area full of bad guys (fucking Raiders), and that’s when having to be close to the enemy in order to strike really started to suck. When like eight people are shooting at you at the same time, you die pretty fast, and when you can’t take enemies out at a distance, reducing the number of shooters takes too long.

Honestly, if I hadn’t picked up a companion who can fire a pistol, I probably never would have made it through at all.

As a result, I am seriously considering starting over AGAIN and this time designing my character to be less “post nuclear Conan” and more like “silent deadly ninja”. I think there’s a fairly good chance that I could get good enough (both in game skill and personal skill) at being sneaky to take the enemies out one by one, commando style. And you have to admit, that would be awesome.

Or, I could stick with my current dude but devote all my levels to making him into a living tank. Build up his personal damage resistances to the point where he could be running around nekkid (murr) and still seem like he’s bulletproof.

And, of course, devote resources to modding his armor up in the same way.

It feels a little lame to have to do that, and kind of makes me feel like this whole idea was ill-advised. But I can be very, very stubborn, and as long as I feel like I can make it work, I will stick with it. Nothing wrong with realizing you maybe didn’t think things through all the way. Especially when there’s still a chance you can fix it.

Meanwhile, in the real world (that pesky thing), today has been very, very quiet. Julian has been off dog-walking, and Joe is, of course, at work, so I have had the apartment all to myself since 3:30 pm or so. Long enough for the silence to go from soothing to kind of creepy.

And, as usual when I have time off like this, I have been battling depression and the resulting sleepiness. I’m never that far from the void, it seems, and while I haven’t been sad per se , I haven’t exactly felt wonderful either.

Mostly I have felt… adrift. Unmoored. Directionless. I know damned well that I have work to do on that final draft of my short script, but it’s hard to get myself moving in that direction. It’s so much easier to go back to the life that stole 20 years of my fucking life : eating, sleeping, and playing video games.

And chatting online, although I am less and less inclined to do that, and that frightens me. No matter how bad my depression has gotten in the past, I always spent time hanging with the fuzzies and doing Facebook and such.

And now it seems like it’s more hassle than it’s worth. So much easier to keep to myself and not have to deal with people at all. Even fictional people who only exist in text. Even that seems like too much of a burden, especially when I have a deep and involving video game I could play all by myself.

It’s like my urge to isolate myself has been building up all the time I have been going to school 5 days a week and having to suppress it. And now that I have just a little time off school, I just want to shut out the whole damned world and sink into my inner sanctum where I don’t have to deal with things at all.

Bye bye world. Hello shell. I sure wish I could quit you.

Oh well. No matter what, school resumes on Monday, and I will have no choice but to snap the fuck out of it and get things done. I realized today that my resistance to school has been building for quite some time now. IT’s that same voice that was causing troubles for me in my last 2 months at Kwantlen. The voice that says “Why are we sitting here doing this boring ass shit when we could be doing something fun? instead? This shit is so laaaaaaame!”

Needless to say, that voice (and the impulses that go with it) don’t exactly make life easier for me. But I resist the urge to suppress it because it’s an id voice, and I am trying to cultivate my long neglected id. If I am to bring myself back into the land of the living, I will need to make peace with and hopefully integrate my id, because that’s where the life force comes from.

Despite what Western traditional Western thinking tells us, we are not egos and superegos afflicted with the disease of the id. We are ids with egos and superegos installed, somewhat sketchily, and all we do when we suppress our ids and push them out into the cold is deny ourselves any chance of renewal while letting our ids turn into out of control monsters or soul destroying demons.

And if it goes far enough, we end up with depression and/or anxiety and/or a ton of other mental malfunctions.

All this Freud talk is making me think I need to get back into regular therapy. I still have a lot of shit to deal with. Stuff needs to be unpacked and aired out and dealt with.

Otherwise I might end up too ill to go to school.

And that would be way too depressing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.