The thing I miss most from the golden era before this plague-ridden era we are living in is getting to do my standup comedy.
I was really starting to bloom. The last performance I gave went super well. Everyone in the bar was paying attention and they all laughed. Afterwards, people from the audience spontaneously told me how funny I was. I was finally doing something with my talents. I was even beginning to come out of my shell.
So of course, life had to shut that shit down. Just like when my parents took me out of college. As soon as I start getting somewhere, the fickle finger of fate fucks me over.
And it makes me so mad. It’s so unfair. I have so much to give the world. My wit, my point of view, my insight, my inspiration, my provocation.
And quite frankly, the world needs what I have to give. It’s in a pretty sorry state right now and I would love to be able to help.
But I am still locked away in this cage of depression, anxiety, dread, and fear. And I know it’s mostly to keep the world out and only sort of to keep me in, but it amounts to the same thing in the long run.
And I am just so tired of this bizarre life of mine. I know that there is so much more to this existence than my cramped little world of video games and blogging and sleep.
Yet here I sit, knowing damned well that when I am done blogging for now, I will take a nap and then be up and playing ESO for hours on end.
And it’s so hard to get a grip an how I should feel about that. I want to feel the restlessness and discontent as that is the only thing that might motivate me to actually do something to improve my situation.
But it hurts and the hurt doesn’t feel like it is going to go away any time soon. And it so easily turns into self-destructive judgment and yet another way my overactive superego tortures the life out of me on a daily basis.
And what do I do to escape that torture? Play video games.
It’s a self sealing system. A Catch-22.
I don’t know how to disarm the Prosecutor Within. Self-loathing is a hard habit to break. All that anger has to go somewhere. If not within, then without, and I can’t imagine it ever being okay for me to take it out on others.
Maybe I can channel it somehow. Learn to harness all the pent up steam power inside me and make it do work FOR me instead of working AGAINST me like it usually does.
Sounds good in theory but right now, I am too tired to give it any serious thought. My sleep has been even more fragmented than usual lately, and I never know when I will get the urge to nap.
Better grab that bus while I can.
More after the break.
Meant to be here half an hour ago, at 7:30 pm, but got so wrapped up in the plotline I was following in ESO that I lost track of time entirely and now it’s 8:02 pm.
In ESO, I decided with my new character I would give steal yet another try so my new character is a thiefy sneaky time.
An assassin, more or less, seeing as I almost never steal anything. Not quite never, because there’s been a few times I gave in to the temptation to steal something really awesome from people I figured could stand to lose it, but for the most part, no.
But I do enjoy getting all sneaky and stabbty, and lately, I’ve even starting sucking slightly less at the stealth.
My two main problems with stealth are patience and attention to detail.
I don’t have the patience for stealth. I don’t handle a low stimulation situation like stealthy approaches well. I want to be doing things. Slow, stealthy approaches are too boring for me to maintain focus.
Which leads to the other problem, attention to detail. I tend to have a highly focused POV when I game, to the point of having tunnel vision. That’s fine for my usual gung-ho frontal assault type gameplay, when details don’t matter nearly as much as delivering the damage as fast and hard as possible.
But stealth requires a high amount of situational awareness, and to put it extremely mildly, situational awareness has never been my strong suit.
I am what pop psychology calls “inner directed”, which means I spend a whole lot more of my mental resources on exploring and developing my ideas, thoughts, and emotions, and very little on exploring my physical environment.
In other words, I’m a head in the clouds dreamer who spends most of time in the world between his ears and only interacts with the so-called “real world”[1] with great reluctance, and with the goal of retreating back into my mind ASAP.
Not claiming this is the only way to be. Those of us with our head in the clouds are proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road, after all.
But it has a lot of good points too. The world needs us deep thinkers. We are the ones who come up with the ideas that move us forward as societies and even as a species. We’re the one with the inner vision to be able to see possibilities that are invisible and inaccessible to the busier, more energetically engaged types. We are the ones who, by reaching so deep within ourselves, can find the place where all things come together as one and by doing so, find the common ground that touches everyone.
That’s why I like the metaphor of the blind soothsayer. The old blind man who can see the future but can’t see the present at all.
I identify with that kind of thing. I feel like it captures my own sort of savantism.
I’m not blind…. but I don’t see too good.
And I don’t have prophetic visions… but I sure as hell see a lot of things about the present and future that appear to be opaque to the less visionary types.
And all because I have developed my inner vision through all that dreaming.
Dreams are powerful shit, y’all.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.