loop, infinite

I feel like it’s still 2007; it’s been 2007 for about twenty-eight months. It could very well be 2007 forever. Time has stalled and the more I try to tell it to get moving again, the more it sits there and glares at me. It’s glaring at me because it knows I’m being retarded; time never stopped, I did.

See, when shit goes down in my life, I don’t know how to deal with it; I never learned to cope. Instead of coping, I do the exact opposite; I absorb and internalize. I never take decisive action. I never try to repair. Oh, sure, in my perverse way I might believe I’m fixing things, but I’m actually exacerbating them.

I consider my situation from as many angles as possible, and every analytical pass cuts a deeper groove into my psyche. The self-loathing and depression start to feed into and amplify each other. They get their energy from me, so as they grow stronger, I get weaker.

The net result: a self-sustaining parasite of pessimism cyclically eats and regurgitates my brain every couple of minutes while I sit around, confused, and wonder whether time’s come to a standstill.

I started college in 2005, and, yeah, ever since then my life has been kind of a nightmare on one level or another, but it didn’t get really bad until 2007. And then 2008, well, I guess my shit then was so fucked that I kind of have a hard time believing that year even happened. Maybe this is post-traumatic stress disorder.

Our brains remember events that had strong emotional associations better than anything else, and I guess that’s why April 2007 seems closer to me than April 2009. Man, 2007. April and May and June and July . . .

I remember waking up at 3 pm and doing nothing all day; sitting in my apartment, hemmed in on all sides by people and noise and life. Two years later, and not much has changed; now I feel a kind of wistful numbness that wasn’t there two years ago. That and a sense of powerless regret.

Going to school in this fucking city was not the greatest idea in the world. There ain’t much I can do about that now. And since I have no options, the cycle just perpetuates. Time won’t get moving again until I do, and I won’t, because I can’t. I don’t know how.

I’ve got a burning in my head that acetaminophen can’t touch.

It’s Friday night and there are so many fucking people here. I can sense that. I can hear the television next door and I can hear the chatter upstairs. I can hear everyone walking past my front door. I can hear the cars that are always whizzing past.

Why the isolation? It’s not like I live in the middle of nowhere. This is a pretty big city.

I think my brain’s about to implode. So many cars. I should go close the blinds. Maybe I should go ahead and glue them shut.

I’d like to squeeze myself down to nothing and disappear. Maybe I could pop up somewhere else, halfway around the world. Maybe I could start over.

But that wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be enough. It’d get me away from all this, but it wouldn’t get me away from myself.

This headache wouldn’t go away. The recursive spiral of my thoughts wouldn’t disappear. The infinite inward folding wouldn’t stop. I’m going to turn into a black hole someday, and there’s nothing I can do about that.

Another test down, another evening of lying on my bed without the energy to actually get up and clear away some of the chaos in my apartment. There’s a huge stack of notes right here next to me. Just looking at it makes me queasy.

Whenever I have too much shit going on, my mind automatically shuts down. The more shit there is, the more I just want to sleep. I react to pressure by pretending it’s not there. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get away with this for much longer.

Sacred is an awful game that I’ve been playing a lot lately. I’m not playing it because of any redeeming qualities it might have. I couldn’t be, because there really aren’t any. Sacred is a watery and inferior Diablo II clone, and I speak as a guy who thought Diablo II was pretty weak and lame compared to the first Diablo. Sacred isn’t just a pale copy, it’s a pale copy of a pale copy.

It’s not really hard to see why Sacred sucks: it’s sloppy and underdesigned. The mechanics are more or less identical to those of Diablo II, but without any of the streamlined finesse. The menus are clunky. The character animations are awkward and often unintentionally-hilarious.  The overworld is relentlessly generic: it’s some kind of sub-Terry Brooks “fantasy” “realm.” The dialogue was probably not written by someone whose first language was English.

You play Sacred by running through sparse, empty fields and killing various cookie-cutter fantasy monsters. Your health is constantly regenerating and your weapons never seem to break, and consequently the game manages to be even more brain-dead than Diablo. You don’t have to think about anything. You won’t ever die. And if a villager sends you out on a quest, a map indicator will guide you every step of the way.

Sacred doesn’t really need me; my only role is to move the mouse a lot. This is why I keep playing this shit. It’s a way to zone out, to turn off my mind, to marginalize and push away the creeping depression that oozes into my brain if I leave myself to my own thoughts for too long. That’s kind of pathetic, but there you go.

It’s also a way to pretend the pressures of my actual life don’t exist. I have another fucking test on Wednesday and I need to study, and I’m sitting around playing Sacred instead.

There’s something sick and nauseating about this, and I’m not just talking about Sacred, I’m talking about all the hours I’ve sunk into videogames ever since I was a kid. Was I only doing that to escape? How did this start? Do I play the games because I’m lonely or am I lonely because I play the games?