My new hobby is making me very happy lately. Nuff said.

It’s taken over my life. I am beginning to feel kinda weird about it. Guilty, almost. Like, “this is not normal” kind of guilt.

But before my new hobby came in, I would spend all that time. playing video games or reading. So it’s not like there’s been a drop in productivity or anything. I still do my episodes and my blogging.

My copious free time is just spent differently. I have this one thing that I do all the time, but that’s no big deal. I used to play video games for hours on end. And I still do.

The only difference is that this video game has a huge number of fun things to add to it that make the experience… special.

Special in a simply amazing way.

I do worry about some of the little things. I don’t socialize with the fuzzies online nearly as much as I used to. That’s not good. It used to be that a lot of my free time went to checking out stuff on the Web, and that easily multitasks (well, job swaps) with hanging out with my furry friends in our virtual world of text.

Anything that makes me even more socially isolated has got to be suspect.

On the other hand, I haven’t felt this engaged and alive in a very long time, if ever. And I hardly ever nap any more, which is a very good thing.

I also hardly ever sleep any more, and that is a very bad thing.

The problem, as I have said before, is disengagement. When I am hunting mods or playing the game, my level of engagement is at peak levels. I am seriously more into it than I have ever been into anything in my entire life.

Which is a little scary, to tell you the truth.

And when I am at that level of engagement and mental stimulation, stopping seems like absolute madness. Like the worst thing ever. Why would I stop if I am having so much fun? And so I just keep going and going and ignoring the limitations of my body in order to stay in this happy place filled with so much to see and do.

It is truly the greatest playground ever for a guy like me. All that is missing is the other children. But that’s fine by me.

I never got along with the other kids anyway.

When I look back on my childhood (as depression forces me to do constantly), I find myself wishing I had just given in and been an asshole. A smug, sarcastic asshole who liked to show off how much smarter he was than anyone else by running rings around them logically, mocking them in ways they don’t even understand, and generally being an intellectual bully who is way, way too pleased with himself.

Yup. That’s an asshole all right. I could only hope that over time I would have enough bad life experiences to realize that I have serious problems.

And yes, that person would be a horrible person in many ways. But you know what he would not be?

A loser, that’s what.

I know how bad that sounds. It is exactly what assholes tend to say and think. And it is the opposite of who I really am,. Perhaps that’s the appeal. I don’t like being myself and I resent being stuck with being me till I die.

So why not go whole hog and embrace the dark side?

Luckily, the thought of actually being that person disgusts me. That’s everything I hate in the world. I can picture being that person so clearly in my mind that it makes my skin crawl and I feel a cold kind of contempt.

If I had become that kind of person, I would be a nightmare. Someone who toys with people for fun then throws them away when the fun level started to fall.

The perfect oral retentive villain, actually.

I already know how downright diabolical I can be. My mind is devious and powerful and possessed of great insight into what makes people tick.

That is a very dangerous bag of tricks to put into the wrong hands. And these would be some very wrong hands indeed.

God I am sleepy right now. I have not been getting nearly enough sleep, and now it is catching up to me. Not five minutes after disengaging from my new hobby, I felt like I wanted to lapse into a 20 year coma.

I should have counted my chickens when they were flying the coop, not when when they came home to roost.

So the words at not coming so easy today. In fact, I have to battle to stay awake. O am constantly having to wake myself up because I keep falling a little asleep whenever I stop typing for more than few seconds.

I want to sleeeeeep. But Felicity is on her way over.  This is one of our social periods. I can’t miss out on that. I would feel so guilty.

When I woke up. But before then…. sigh. Bliss.

I wish I could borrow one of those stasis cells from Red Dwarf but have it work in reverse. Instead of my being frozen in time, the world would be, and I would be able to take a nap whenever I wanted and be able to go right back into normal timeflow when I was good and rested.

That better be the only thing I can do there, though. Otherwise I might never come out. It would be way too easy to slip into thinking that reality is too much of a hassle and preferring to stay where it’s safe.

In a sense, that’s my life turned into science fiction.

Trade secret : that’s what a lot of science fiction writers do. We take our life and translate it into science fictional metaphors in order to make the ideas bigger and thus easier to see.

Well, time for me to go make myself some supper.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.