Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
|
|
| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
|
|
Wednesday, September 08, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Wait Until Dark meets Glengarry Glen Ross! (One of the biggest surprises to me, by the way, is that I can actually spell Glengarry Glen Ross correctly? Two 'n's? Two 'r's? It's always a mystery to me, which makes it all the more shocking that I get right more or less every time.)I'm doing the overtime thing tonight and it's been very, very crazy so far. To paraphrase Willie the Shake, "for the want of a scanner, the gut was lost"--I've had to run up and down three flights of stairs three times so far, and I've only been at work for less than ninety minutes. I thought working overtime at night would be something cool to try--I've seen the night shift and know that there are times when they're insanely busy, and times when everything is deathly quiet. I gambled I'd show up when things were quiet, collect my time and half, and run. As long as I don't have to go up and down the stairs many more times, that might still be the case. But the real problem with this gig, whether it gets busy or not, is how I squandered my day waiting to go to work. I had planned to leave for work roughly around 3:15 or so, which meant I shouldn't try to undertake something engrossing or productive after, I dunno, 2:00? Somehow that became more like noon, leaving me reluctant to do anything other than play Culdcept. I had a little bit of a breakthrough the other day with Culdcept, I'm happy to say. After losing seven consecutive games, I finally won. And all the hard schooling I received allowed me to win the next match the first time out this morning. So it was a far less anguished me that sat down to play Culdcept today, one which took being beaten cross-eyed by a koala bear wearing a book necklace with a certain relaxed indifference. And yet, after kissing the wonderful girlfriend goodbye and walking down the open-air oven that is currently Mission Street, I found myself wondering: to what end? So I won the matches I wanted to win, and am that much closer to beating the game, and even won several medals (there are approximately fifty medals you can win, usually by doing things like rolling a high number eight consecutive times, or being the shittiest player for three consecutive games), and yet, I would have to say the only thing I really gained from it is a certain nearness toward my own death. About, I dunno, five or six years ago, I played a certain amount of computer solitaire, a little bit of freecell, a little bit of minesweeper--all those PC games. Somebody, sometime, told me these games had all been loaded onto Windows to get secretaries, word processors and other people who'd done all their work using just keyboards, comfortable with using a mouse. It's a pretty brilliant idea if true, and I can generally attest to its power--a lot of my co-workers are incredibly mouse-dependent on doing tasks in Word, I think because they never wanted to rewrite their brain's knowledge of keyboard commands in Wordperfect 5.1 (and Word seems to be unbelievably fucking stingy with information regarding its keyboard commands, maybe as a way to sell more user guides and training courses). I wonder to what extent minesweeper, freecell and solitaire became the computer equivalent of kudzu--an elegant solution that overshot its mark and became a horrible problem--at least as far as worker productivity is concerned. Why'd I bring all that up, particularly when I'm not sure I even believe in worker productivity (or at least as far as those studies are concerned)? Oh, right. Freecell, minesweeper, solitaire. They actually served a purpose at one point, which makes them "better" than most videogames in a pragmatic sense. But I had continued to play them long after that--and there was a feeling I had one day playing one of the three, a desperate lonely feeling, and an awareness that I was doing nothing but literally wasting time. That Modest Mouse line I quoted the other day is still half-haunting me: "You wasted life, why wouldn't you waste the afterlife?" It reminds me of a William S. Burroughs anecdote: someone at a reading asked Burroughs if he believed in an afterlife, and he replied, "How do you know this isn't it?" On the one hand, I actually think it's kind of nice I can, at the age of 38, take a mid-morning nap and play some videogames. On the other hand: wow. 38? Don't I have some literature I should be getting to? The writing conundrum is probably an entry for another time, since my byzantine rationale for not currently writing might add even more to this seemingly unending entry. As is, actually, some thoughts on whether you can actually waste your life, what with the lack of an actual objective standard and all. But more to the point is a feeling that regardless of a definition of worth, there may be activities one can do in life that are more efficient than others. And I think I mean "efficient" in a fuel-burning sense: things that burn cleanly and leave you feeling less befouled than other things might, or even improve you in some measurable way. posted by Jeff Lester | 5:14 PM | |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
