Impulse Control

Recent headlines:

World: UK basks in warmest February day on record (It is gorgeous today. It’s almost nice enough to make me forget that this is the result of us punching the throttle and going full nosedive into climate apocalypse. Yay!)

Gaming: Reggie Fils-Aime retiring from Nintendo, will be replaced by Bowser (I miss you already, Reggie. I’m sure future Kristian feels the same.)

I’m walking through town at the dead of night feeling like my world has ended. Not only did my crush turn out to be interested in somebody else, but that somebody also happened to be the worst person possible. I look up, and a lanky man who is the main cause of my unhappiness stands at the other end of the street. My stomach knots. As I consider what to say, my friend Mika comes barrelling down the street in a gunship and rains death on him from above. I gawp, and flee down a nearby alley to consider what this means for my situation. In the ensuing chaos, I use my spider powers to hide from the police. This, it may be a good time to mention, all occurs inside my head.

Dreams are funny old things. They often reflect our emotional states. Other times, they mean nothing at all. Some people believe that our dreams predict the future, but I’d certainly be alarmed if this turned out to be some sort of prophetic vision of what’s to come. Mika’s rampage only made up one portion of last night’s insane dream though, which lasted an unusually long time and included an all-star cast of many friends, and a colourful heap of emotional complexes from the past. It was a kind of personal Infinity War cooked up by my brain, just the latest in a long line of attempts to make me regret waking up after a night of opening old wounds.

My brain failed, though, because while the dream did give me that lingering feeling of bleakness that many emotional nightmares do, it mostly served to remind me that I have awesome friends who will go to great lengths to keep me afloat. The dream didn’t even end there; it went on to have me rejecting the notion of the lanky man deserving death, and persuading my friend not to finish the job when he turned out to have survived. If that’s not a metaphor for friends bringing out the best in each other, I don’t know what is.

But enough patting my psyche on the back, whilst also detaching myself from it and personifying it as the enemy. In far less dramatic and far more realistic news, I’ve made the decision to quit picking and biting my nails and fingers. After twenty-three years of bloodying my fingertips and failing to open simple tins, I have had enough. Not only will quenching this habit stop me looking like I stick my hands in the blender every morning (I’m going full hyperbole at this point), but it’ll be a small victory in the war against succumbing to my impulses. He wrote, as he reached for another Squashy. Pick your battles, right? Munch munch munch. Anyway, it’s funny how often I find myself going to pick at a bit of loose flesh before stopping myself. It’s not as difficult as I feared, but it does require a quiet vigilance. So, future Kristian, have you developed healthier looking fingers in 2020? Do write back.

I’ve had a fairly productive week back here in 2019. I did a bit of livestreaming, made an edited video (bonus content aside from my Weekly Deathmatches), finished the bulk of my soundtracks playlist, and began writing a fun entry over on 32 Bit Brain about trying to play Crusader Kings II. I say trying because that is entirely not my genre, and the hundred million different pieces of UI easily scare me away. I’m 382 words in and I’m having a fantastic time, but if the blog post never came out it’s because some peasants got grumbly and the tutorial threw seven new interfaces at me and I panicked. They had pitchforks! I’m bad at this.

Anyway, I was inspired to write this after finishing a PC Gamer book containing their best ‘stories’, those being excerpts from the magazine section containing their tales of emergent narratives in games like Crusader Kings and the Sims. It was genuinely hilarious, and if I get any kind of motivation to write then I am loathe to pass it up. Still no novels, but if we’re really lucky I’ve written about some farmers getting angry and their king hiding under a duvet in some videogame. Progress?

We’ll call it progress. Helps stave off the existential dread.

It’s 17:52 and I still haven’t written this week’s journal entry. This is for two reasons. The first reason is that I’d initially planned to write about my poor impulse control, but thinking about it caused me to spiral quickly into despair from which there seemed no escape or recovery. The other reason is that Netflix cancelled Marvel series Jessica Jones and The Punisher.

The fate of these two shows was determined months ago, when Netflix shelved Daredevil, Luke Cage and Iron Fist, all set in the same universe as Jessica Jones and The Punisher (and the Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, which is really quite mental when you think about it). But when I heard the news, I immediately delved into reactions, discussions, explanations and theories. Sated, I then took to Spotify to listen to the soundtracks of each respective show, adding the best of them to my soundtracks playlist as I went. Before you know it I’m tweeting about the soundtracks, then browsing my feed as I wait for a response (if any). I stumble onto a post, ‘”Your Brain Is A Forest” by author E.K Johnston. It’s about depression and writer’s block, and I’m struck by the surprising familiarity of her discovery of fanfiction as being a doorway back into motivation for writing. I went through this exact same thing in 2018 during what I named ‘My Creative Resurgence’ on my blog, and oh, crap, it’s 17:52 and I still haven’t written this week’s journal entry.

The point, then. I currently live in an unhealthy cycle of acting by impulse – usually in regards to food and videogames – and whenever I try to face my shortcomings, I’m hit with a wave of unhappiness which I can usually fix by fleeing from the problem, probably by indulging in the cause of the problem in the first place. Honestly? I’m getting fat. You might not tell by looking at me (or maybe future Kristian buckled up), but I’ve got a hefty lil’ gut hiding away nowadays. It’s not imaginary. It gets an ‘oh’ whenever I’m asked to prove it exists.

This morning I was debating creating a spreadsheet to document what I eat and drink each day, but ultimately I was concerned about the hit my mental health would take if I grew too obsessed with this idea. I also considered simply resolving to eat healthier, but by this point I was spiralling so quickly that I decided to avoid the matter entirely. I’ve since eaten a 100g bar of Malteasers Teasers and I’m drowning my sorrows in Coke Zero. (It’s better than Diet Coke. Fight me.) Honestly, I’m not sure I possess the fortitude required to handle this aspect of self-improvement right now, and for the sake of my sanity I’m telling myself that that’s okay. So I’m in a better place this evening. I’ve avoided the weight problem until the next time I glance downwards and go, “ah.”

Funny thing is, I never used to care. As a teen I was lucky enough to have one heck of a metabolism for junk food, and I didn’t really put on weight until I hit my twenties. Having heard that this can happen, I remember replying that “I’ll just exercise at that point”. Easier said than done, pal. Gosh, I sure was determined to be ambivalent about matters which most people find concerning.

So if you are reading weekly, you’ve probably come to realise that mental health is going to be a continuing theme for this series of journals, and to be honest, I didn’t exactly intend for this to be the case. All I wanted was to write about the aspects of my life which are more grounded in reality, as opposed to videogames and other media. As it turns out, reality’s as rude as a bunch of Netflix executives deciding not to continue my favourite series, and much of the more ‘real’ aspects of my life are shaped by the lame-ium in my cranium.

That was a low-effort pun. I’m not proud of it.

Perpetually Perturbed

Kristian Richmond's Musings and Meanderings

Year to Year: A Journal Through Time #6 – One Hell of a Ride (25/2/19)

Recent headlines:

Further reading:

Year to Year: A Journal Through Time #5 – Stomaching It (18/2/19)

Recent headlines:

Further reading: