They are very shiny.
My Fallout 4 problems have been resolved. So that’s good.
And while they were unresolved, I finally got around to playing Planescape Torment, a super old game I bought a less old time ago.
I had tried it once before but I was super deep into another game I got in the same bundle, Baldur’s Gate II, at the time and that took up all my time.
Trying it again, I can see why it has such a huge fanbase. It is loaded with imagination and fresh ideas and seems determined to be as interesting as possible at all times.
I mean, right from the start, I am a nameless dude with no memories who is covered in scars and who wakes up on a slab in mortuary in a world where, if they have signed up with a certain group, they are re-animated as zombies when they die.
You then meet your new traveling companion, a floating skull who talks like a fast talking character from the 30s. He tells you that you have a note to yoursel carved into your back, and reads it to you.
And that’s just the first few minutes!
So I will likely be alternating between the two for a while. I am usually a one game at a time kind of dude, for better and for worse, but I have been known to alternate now and then rather than have to choose between two good games.
Riveting stuff, I know. Look,m I am barely awake. All you are going to get is whatever happens to be in my brain right now.
For example, it is so annoying to look stuff up on the Translink website right now.
All I want is instructions on how to get from my bus stop, Stop #
56479, to the Riverport complex so I can go see Secret Life of Pets 2 with William.
But no matter what I put in, it has me walking to a totally different stop blocks away to catch the freaking bus.
It’s only a few block’s walk, so it’s not THAT huge a difference (except for those of us so fat that walking causes pain), but three buses stop at my stop and I am positive at least one of them goes to Riverport, dammit.
So it’s a matter of principle.
In other words, I am being irrationally stubborn. God damn it all.
At this point, I am half tempted to take a cab. Cabs know where to go. I don’t have to figure it out myself. I just tell the cab “Riverport!” and it takes me there.
Sure, it would cost a lot of money, but at least I wouldn’thave to deal with this bullshit.
I will hold that solution in reserve.
Oh wait, I just got it to spit out routes that start at my stop!
And take two hours to get there, and involve three transfers.
What, the fuck, Translink?
I wonder if they have a number where I can just call someone and ask them.
I ended up taking a cab.
So yes, I spent $23 in order to avoid having to walk two blocks. This was neither logical nor sensible nor justifiable in any way, shape, or meaning.
It was an irrational act based entirely on a heady concatenation of stubbornness, laziness, and a sort of kamikaze glee.
And you know what? I am okay with that. I’m crazy and crazy people do crazy things, often for even crazier reasons.
And it’s not even all that crazy. I need to remind myself that there is a vast difference between the irrational and the insane.
In fact, the true insanity is holding myself to an utterly illogical and inhuman standard of rationality and justifiability. Healthy, normal people accept that they do dumb shit sometimes. They accept their own fallibility and frailty.
Thus, they avoid the trap of supposed rationality and the illusion of control it can create. They don’t tear themselves to pieces over logical “errors” (otherwise known as ’emotions’), nor do they fall into the other trap of having to invent elaborate justifications for their purely emotional actions.
Hello, my name is Michael Bertrand, and I am a recovering rationalist. (Hi, Michael!)
I feel in many ways like I am just now being slowly and painfully born. Or rather, that other half of me that died when I was raped is finally pushing its way through the dirt so it can rise, shakily, from its grave.
Growing up is like getting the measles – the older you are when it happens, the worse it is going to be for you. I feel like right now, I am finally getting a true glimpse of what it means to be truly alive and real and present, and not just a pale and shimmering shadow dancing on the edge of nonexistance.
For all those years, I felt like I was less than real. Like I am not really here. Like I am less than nothing. Like I am an obscure scrap of code in a language with no existing compilers stored in a lost file format on an abandoned hard drivein a broken workstation in a forgotten store room of a defunct company.
Like I only minimally existed at all.
And now I know why I was possessed of this strange and irrationational notion : I wasn’t really alive. My cold circuit was supercharged but my hot circuit was down for the count.
And now I am finally waking up. It’s early spring yet, so there is still a lot of ice and snow around and a lot of gross things which have lain dead in the ice for a long time are thawing out and raising a stink.
But I will live again. This I swear. Winter will end and I will be whole and warm and strong and happy and able to embrace life’s fullness with both arms and a song in my big happy heart.
I have seen the echos of my futures self. And he’s one hell of a guy.
I can’t wait to meet him.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.