Reality can be so weird.

I just reinstalled a game called Neverwinter^[1] on my PC, and played it for a while. Bit more than an hour. I was scrolling through my Steam Library for something newish to play ^[2] and saw it there and realized I didn’t remember a thing about it.

Not that surprising. According to Steam’s records. I hadn’t played it since early November 2018. ^[3] That’s forever in gamer time.

But I just played the damned thing for more than an hour and I still don’t remember the damned thing. Not at all. Might as well have been a brand new game.

At the very, very end of my session, I got the softest of memory pings from this ladder leading down into some tunnels, but other than that. nada.

This is especially noteworthy because according to Steam’s records, I played the game for 26.5 hours back then and got a character up to Level 26. ^[4]

You would think this would leave some kind of trace in my mind but… no.

Made me glad I had the prudent good sense to start a new character rather than try to pick up where I left off like an idiot and gotten totally confused and lost.

You know…. moreso than usual.

And I have to wonder if this is a sort of milestone for me. The official point where my long term memory is so overburdened that instead of trying to further compress its contents it starts just plain deleting shit I haven’t thought about in a while.

Well, they say the best thing about Alzheimer’s is that you’re always meeting new people, and I guess that works for books and video games too.

See, not that long ago I started “finding” books in my book collection that I wore I had never seen before and yet, there they were.

So if I had never seen them before, how the hell did they get there?

At first, I just told myself that I had bought them with intention to read them but then forgotten to do so.

This was plausible enough – but not by much.

But eventually it had happened way too many times for that explanation to fly, and I had to admit I was now flat out forgetting books.

Existentially, this is terrifying. It makes me feel like the foundations of my reality are eroding and I should really be super concerned about it.

Pragmatically, I just find it amusing. And potentially a big money saver.

I mean, forgetting a book or a video game is no big deal in the grand scheme of things. This is hardly mission critical information. It’s unlikely to impact me in the slightest.

I do worry about forgetting people, but I have already done that so much in my life that I am a pro at handling the situation.

I just tell people not to take it personally – I’m an equal opportunity forgetter.

More after the break.

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A few quick updates

1. Didn’t do comedy tonight. A bit pissed off at that because I was feeling relatively good when I took a nap at around 2 pm and then when I woke up a bit after 4, I felt like death nuked on low. Grr.
2. Bernie won California. Thank God.
3. Played some more Neverwinter. More of it is coming back to me now, probably because I am getting closer to where I left off in 2018. So apparently the memories are not totally gone, just de-indexed. Also starting to get an idea of why I might have stopped playing because despite being way better thought out than most of the MMORPG money-grabs, it still is one, and that means there is a lot of mindless grinding through enemies
4. Fanhattan is officially a sick house, as they used to say where I come from. We’re all sick here. Poor Julian was even throwing up earlier. Get well soon dear!
5. There is no 5. You are hallucinating. None of this is real. You are actually a Philip K. Dick character. Further instructions will follow. Remember the soup.
6. Our PVR shit the bed. Lost everything we had ever recorded. As far as I can tell,. they just do that sometimes. I’m mostly pissed off because we lost the Super Tuesday 2020 episode of Colbert. Plus I think episode 2 of Dispatches from Elsewhere was on last night. Which reminds me….
7. Dispatches from Elsewhere is freaking amazing. Words cannot describe how much I loved it. It’s exactly the sort of thing I would write if I was performing at the top of my talent and had the blanchest of cartes to write whatever the hell I wanted. It’s full of wonder and whimsy without being cutesy or quirky, touches on a lot of same issues of modern malaise that I have labeled as a crisis of the spirit, is wacky and weird and marvelously bizarre, and like I said on Facebook right after watching it, it has expanded my sense of what it is possible to do with art and the last show to do that was Arrested Development.
8. Still haven’t got my sleeping pills so I have not slept much lately and what sleep I have gotten is of very poor quality. That’s probably a very bad thing in general, let alone when I am already sick. I will get the pills tomorrow after therapy.
9. Emotionally I feel like I am on some stuck on some kind of theme park ride that takes me in and out of a dark cold cave and exposes me to various amounts of direct sunshine as a result and I honestly just wish it would stop so I could get off this goddamned ride and lay down till the room stops spinning and then settle down to be properly miserable
10. There is no 10. See : 4

Sometimes being sick makes me extra wacky.

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:I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.