Or something like that.

Writing earlier than usual – as of this moment, it is 12:31 pm. Usually I write when I eat supper, which is usually somewhere nearish to 7 pm. But today, I am writing as I eat my lunch, which I usually do around 1 pm but I got sick of playing Skyrim so here I am.

See if you can detect the subtle differences in range, tone, and style between evening Fru and afternoon Fru. And if you find them, please tell me, because I’d love to know what the heck they are.

Feeling a little restless. Annoyed at a Skyrim mod I added recently. It promised to be 16 long quests, all in the same storyline, and that’s exactly what I want.

But the very first frigging quest is to gather ten Vampire Dust (easy to get, vamps are not hard to find) and ten Daedra Hearts (which are really fucking rare and I have no idea where to go to find them).

I hope this isn’t what makes the quests “long”.  Any fool can make a quest that takes a long time if they just make the goals damn near impossible.

Oh well. Perhaps there’s a trick to it that I am not seeing. I might look up a walkthrough and see how that person handled it.

Feeling relatively okay at the moment. I am still dealing with a lot of free floating anxiety that hovers like a shadow at the edge of my consciousness, waiting to strike. And that is no fun at all.

Most of the time, when it strikes, the point of entry is my obsession with time as a resource. I am a compulsive clock-watcher – I have been all my life – and for most of my life, it’s been a nuisance at worst and a valuable skill at best.

It’s amazing how neuroses and valuable skills can be two settings on the same dial. A neat freak might become a top notch researcher via their impeccable filing system. Another person’s sense of inadequacy might lead them to be a top ranking athlete. A third person might become an excellent marriage counselor because their childhood was forever marred by a nasty ugly divorce.

And who knows, someone’s shyness and difficulty expressing emotions and voicing his needs might lead them to hyper-focus on verbal skills and lead them to being a pretty darn good writer.

Nah. That would never happen.

Anyhoo, back to time. My obssession with time and clock-watching wasn’t a problem until fairly recently and it’s connected to my Skyrim addiction.

Because I’m an addict, I am constantly worrying over my supply. This being a video game and not heroin, the supply in question is the time I have to play it. So I will be playing the game and watching the time to anticipate when the next thing – like going to therapy, or blogging, or whatever – that will take me away from the game will be.

And that’s not crazy. Well, no crazier than my baseline level of lunacy, anyhow.

But the problem is that my neurotic mind takes that “time left” quantity and turns it into a resource in my mind – one which, by its very nature, I lose constantly.

Now here if where this gets tricky because I feel like I have to explain some fundamental things about my psychology and that can be a dicey proposition.

The core dynbamic here is oversensitivity to loss. It is a common problem in those of us of a resource-based mindset – it’s even one of the prime mechanics of hoarding.

It comes from a sense of scarcity and a lack of a feeling of security. The feeling of the world being a dangerous place and of never having enough of what you need combine in a nasty cocktail of fear and paranoia.

So someone like me, therefore, having time valued as a precious resource in my mind is disastrous because it’s a resource I can do nothing to preserve. It will disappear at a minute per minute no matter what I do.

And if I were a healthier Bull, I cojuld be philosophical about that. But lately I have gotten into this very unhealthy pattern of watching my remaining Skyrim time dwindle and reacting as if something very precious was being stolen from me.

That triggers feeling of helplessness and despair and pushed my anxiety level towards the freaking out mode when all is happening is the passage of time.

That’s clearly maladaptive. To put it mildly.

So I have been trying to attack this problem on a cognitive level by telling myself that running out of Skyrim time and having to stop playing is not some earth shattering dislocating trauma but merely the putting down one thing I like in order to go do another thing I like.

And it’s beginning to work but it’s pretty rough going. Addictions don’t die that easy and a big part of my mind still feels like every time I have to return from Skyrim to reality (so to speak) is like being plucked from your mother’s arms and tossed naked into a snowbank in the middle of February.

It’s a harsh image but it’s how I feel.

So overcoming this time torture will take some time. As will overcoming the Skyrim addiction itself. Skyrim sucks up most of my time, and to be honest, I am not getting all that much reward out of it most of the time.

But I keep playing because I am scared of going back to a life where I had to figure out what to do with myself all the time, day in and day out.

It’s so much easier to fill the hours with Skyrim.

But I have a plan to dig myself out, and it started with getting one of the previous games in the series – a game called Morrowind.

That will be my methadone. After that, I will transition to something else in the same general vein, like Fallout 4 or Witcher 3.

After that, I might even try something totally new!

And I will start right after I play through this quest mod… oh, and this archery mod looks cool… plus, I want to go back to Enderal…. and….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.