7/27/2022

On Monday night when the marijuana started to kick in I thought to myself, "Am I afraid of success?"

The genesis for this thought comes from my Nethack game. My orcish barbarian has acquired the Amulet of Yendor and he's trying to escape Gehennom so he can reach dungeon level one, escape to the elemental planes then reach the astral plane whereupon he can sacrifice the amulet to his god and win the game.
Thing is the Wizard of Yendor keeps coming back after killing him with my wand(s) of death. The Amulet of Yendor creates a 'mysterious force' which can send a character back down a few dungeon levels while tryinig to climb up to the next dungeon level. For an hour or more, my orcish barbarian was struggling to escape Gehennom, I realized I was repeating some levels, then read spoilers for the game which brought me back up to speed with the 'mysterious force'.
What's worse is my orcish barbarian accidentally converted to a lawful alignment, negative piety at an opposite aligned altar and wound up sacrificing something to convert the altar but instead converted himself. The alignment change is relevant since lawful characters are more frequently affected by the 'mysterious force' than neutral or chaotic aligned characters.
In the course of play my bag of holding became cursed which is a bad thing. Opening a cursed bag of holding means the items contained within will vanish, do not pass "go", do not collect $200. Also a cursed bag of holding is heavier than a an uncursed or blessed bag too, and to quote Vladek Spiegelman from Maus, "And here my troubles began." My bag of holding became cursed, my orcish barbarian was overburdened not stressed nor burdened which meant he had to drop the bag of holding in order to pull something out. He dropped the bag, took out a wand of death, killed Rodney (a.k.a the Wizard of Yendor), and escaped upstairs from a horde of monsters summoned by Rodney.
Upstairs I realized I forgot the fucking bag of holding. The fucking bag of holding is still cursed. I don't remember if I took out a blessed scroll of remove curse to remove the cursed status from the bag.

In short: the endgame of Nethack is becoming a job. I am wondering if I should just give up and move on with my life, maybe start a new game. I keep thinking I'm going to fail before I even try. There doesn't appear to be any end in sight nor relief, leading to frustration and a defeatist attitude.

Yet if I just try, then I have a chance. Goes back to the cliché of, "You miss every shot you don't take."

And I think about the game and this seeming parallel to my life.
If it's not going to be perfect, just start at square one, try again, and see if this time is perfect.

I know there are no guarantees in life, except death. Yet I think about when I've done things in the past whether mowing the lawn, completing a title search, or writing that if I made a mistake I got called out for being half-assed or for having a mistake. Those incidents always strike me deep even if that's not their intention. Somehow I have a deep wound and those slings and arrows always find that particular mark and keep it from healing. In the meantime I just become defensive, angry, and resentful.

I don't want to blame other people for what they did to me. They're really not part of my life anymore and some more than others, like my biological parents. It's like when I talk about this in therapy and my therapist says the onus is upon them, not me, and I'm trying to recover. As if setting the blame on them will make me feel better, but I can't stop fucking blaming myself and leaving them pristine (so to speak).

From here there's my internal monologue: Don't try unless you know it will succeed. And you need to succeed the first time around. Kinda like Karen Carpenter nailing a song in one take. Then again she killed herself with anorexia.
Maybe a bit more like Jonathan Frakes from Star Trek: The Next Generation earning the moniker of "Two-Takes Frakes" since that's as many as he needs while directing a television program. My assumption is he nails a scene the first time, but does a scene again just to be certain.

Riffing on this theme, I am still stymied by how to create and season an LLC. I asked the president of a real estate investor group who only gave me a link to a free online course about investing in mortgages. Tried asking an associate but didn't get an answer and just gave up thinking they want me to find out for myself rather than help me. Only thing is asking the associate and how I know them makes it awkward since they're my therapist's companion. Yet if I get this ball rolling and begin to invest in mortgages, it would mean more money, hopefully moving away from title searching, and getting the life I want with a modest home, a paid-off car, being able to do a little travel, and cats. Maybe even meet a woman. Yet I keep freezing up. I keep procrastinating. Rereading what I just wrote feels like I'm blaming someone else for my own shortcomings and that's unfair.

On top of all this rumination, sober and stoned, was finding a particular photo on my hard drive. Monday night, the night before Esperanto Day, I was looking for Esperanto memes and a certain photo where an astronaut is raising the Esperanto flag on the moon. While perusing my pictures folder I found this photo:

Didn't even know such a photo existed, let alone on my hard drive.
I crumbled to pieces.
Especially in context with my most recent dream as of this writing.
Then I listened to Ĵomart and Nataŝa sing their Esperanto cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.

on top of all this...

I wish I could be a soulless vampire like many of the people who use Fetlife. By vampire I don't mean the bloodsuckers of legend but rather the vampires from Larry Niven's Ringworld novels. From a Larry Niven wiki:

The vampires are a non-sentient hominid species of the Ringworld.

Described as having very white skin, with silver hair and slender bodies. They are pretty, with fine chiseled features, even male vampires are more pretty than handsome and beardless. Their heads are smaller than humans'. They wear no clothes.

Descended from Pak breeders, the vampires didn't develop sentience like other Ringworld hominids, instead they have developed a powerful release system of hominid sex pheromones that causes in other hominid species a crazed urge to mate with the vampires. During the interspecies mating act the vampires sink their teeth in the victim's neck and start feeding on their blood, killing them.

In short their sole purpose for living is fucking and sucking. They have no care, no affection, nor bond with their lovers or victims beyond the nutrition from the victim's blood. A few people who I friended on Fetlife, at least the ones who are most active on the site, have that kind of bearing based upon their updates. My prejudice is compounded because this one person, a mutual friend of my dealer and someone I knew back in my roleplaying game days, is an idiot who can not spell nor write coherently.