Bad Days

Bad days: that quintessential collaboration by anything and everyone to just make your day go wrong. I’d go as far as to agree that all gods or spirits must enjoy a laugh at the expense of us humans; but why must they choose a Tuesday?

I guess you could say I got out of bed on the wrong side, however that would technically prove impossible as to my right is the small walkway I have between a wall that cries and my bedside junk depository, and to my left is my darling muse, usually a sweet thing, but liable to flinch and swing with a sleep empowered strength impossible to come from one so dainty. So to say I got out of the wrong side would be to suggest I always get out on the wrong side.

Bad days can usually follow bad dreams or indeed bad nights. Now were getting somewhere- I had a bad night brought on by the realisation that a hobby and source of fantastical escape no longer held a special place in my heart.

I’ve played video games since I was old enough to hold a pad and realise which of the bright coloured dots on the television set had to be stomped on, shot at or raced past, and that initial foray into the fantasy land stored on those first few cartridges had me sold. As I got older and the years brought new advances from the land of the rising sun, I got sucked deeper down that green pipe, swept into cosmos where I was saving the world from the cyborg menace and getting to defeat the evil mastermind with a final dragon punch- uttering the immortal cry “ shoryuken”; the result was more time spent in these lands of fantasy, because what hope did reality have of offering me excitement on par with this? To an overweight yet hyperactive child suffering from asthma, what chance did reality have to entice me back into the daylight?

Zero. Sure I loved to run around with my friends (run, wheeze, stop, click, suck, run-repeat), I had a fearless nature as a cruel blessing so I always wanted to try out any new craze-roller-skating and roller blades, BMX and mountain biking- you name it, I was eager. But though the will was strong the flesh was weak- I tried all manner of different exercise: ranging from weight lifting and aerobics to martial arts. But these all brought me little in the way of a solution. To my mind video games were the answer!

I played them endlessly with my friends; all of who was into video games, so the habit wasn’t just a private thrill, it was a social experience. Multiplayer was where it was going to be at.

This love followed me like my asthma (and weight) into my teens and early twenties, still the games were played, new galaxies were saved or pillaged on my whim, or with the help of my close circle of gaming friends. Technology advanced at a rapid rate and the improvement of the visual L.S.D we were consuming got stratospherically high. Thanks to the rise of the Internet and online gaming services you didn’t even need to interact in person with your friends, you only needed the game.

From around 7 years of age to 29 years of life, I spent far too much of my free time in the fantasy zone, and the dawning of the online age broke that spell. It hurried in a rise of popularity in the games industry, and with it the corporations smelled money. Sure they financed and drove a boom in new technology, creating cinema quality stories, epic firefights and musical scores worthy of savouring in their own right, but they also homogenised the experience. It turned what was once the outcasts favourite respite from reality, once the elite club of space cadets of the mind: the excuse to socialise with friends, into a soulless and mindless ram raid on the senses. Television reinvented for the techno generation. You no longer had to learn any real skill or use your imagination to abscond from reality for a few hours, your now shovelled it to your ever twitching fire button as you rattle off your 8^th consecutive hour on Modern Warfare 12. Oh did I mention that’s with your twenty-four hour friends across the globe.

Twenty-nine years of age I finally realise how much apathy I’ve been slowly festering inside for this once loved hobby, gestated on a decade of bitterness and nostalgia. I’m no longer the fat, wheezing (for the most part) and excitable dreamer, I’ve a passion for motorcycles that has been steadily nurtured into an all consuming addiction (don’t we all trade one addiction for another); I’ve a steady girlfriend of 9 years and a creative side to myself that won’t stay subdued any longer. But it still came as a shock last night. I’ve built a lot of my friendships around videogames, and now I need to take them forward with less emphasis on fantasy and more in reality.

Bad nights dreams always follow into bad days. So Tuesday has been one grumpy lurch after another.

Here’s to Wednesday-also known as ‘Hump Day’. Get over that and it’s all about the weekend baby!