Dauntingly Unsolvable / This American Life #364: Going Big

I woke this morning from an emotional dream. I was writing a response to someone from the dream and then got distracted. The response, the dream, they are gone. Few things recur in my life, and the ones they do are not "strong." They are not needs like air that strive to have themselves fulfilled. Those recurring interests in my life are closer to bright colors that no matter what I am or what I'm doing will pull my attention. A car crash is a car crash, and it is an amazing sight that will make you rubberneck where ever you are.

I feel silly admitting how much fighting and gaming take up my attention. Whenever I clean house the first things I move are my stacks of combat manuals and boxes of RPG books. Those books outnumber (and outweigh) the cumulative sum of every theatre and coffee book I've ever seen. I told a teacher about the things I'm into, my to-be voice acting lesson, coping with the stress of management, fencing. We talked more, or rather, I kept talking and realized she was flashing an analytical gaze at me.

"What's with the fighting?" She pegged me as an "8." I had her explain the preceding "7," and the "9" that followed. She had a psychology degree of some kind. She was also a teacher, so she's used to Terminator-style mechanical dissection of people, clothed in a warm gaze of interest and guided by a sense of improvement. I can't remember much about "8's" except that I didn't agree with the assessment. A combination of 7 and 9 is what I identified with (and no, it's not 8). She pressed the "fighting" question, and I held my tongue. It's been some days since my feigned ignorance; admittedly I didn't know what it was exactly, and I wasn't ready to talk it out to her. Who knows what the hell I would have said.

Gaming, as I know it, is an excapist activity for me. It's every possibility that isn't possible for me. It's every Action, Sci-Fi, Fantasy Novel, Comic Book-adaptation presented as something that I, or at least the character I'm portraying, could do. The games are the plays in which I always get cast, in the roles I want without any political or psychological compromise. Fighting, that's a different beat.

I've got a lot of packrat in me. That harmless, cute vermin whose mindset is, "what if I will need this later?" The ultimate conclusion of being a packrat is becoming rich and owning two of everything so I will never run out, or if something bad happens to a primary I will always have a second. Well I'm not rich, so it's more like, "I should hold onto this because not only might I need it later, I might not have the chance to have it again." Fighting is an extension of that packrat instinct.

It's not a survival instinct. My survival instinct is running. Gasping for air is a survival instinct. Fighting is my way to retain my druthers, my ground, my work terms, my girlfriend, my place in a grocery line. Fighting is my assertition. It's my way to keep what I have because... I have it now and I might not have it again. Yeah, I have some ways to turn fighting into a gainful profession, but all I want is what I got.

Escaping and Fighting. Ignoring the now, or nuking it into unrecognition. Those are options that I keep on my plate. Goodamn packrat.