So it’s been, what, 3 weeks since I started taking new head meds? Something like that. I have definitely noticed a change; the mood swings are almost totally gone, and if I feel blue every once in a while it’s not an all-consuming despair. I’m also a bit more fatigued, which I suppose goes hat-in-hand with being mellow. I might be a bit more numb, possibly. Like: when the whole Hoboken train accident happened last week – an accident that I apparently missed being in the middle of by about 10 minutes – I felt a bit more detached and far less anxious than I expected myself to be. And even though my commute now involves having to go back to dealing with the pit of despair known as Penn Station again, I’m at least able to look at the bright side of it – my wife and I get to sit next to each other on the train, which is something we’ve never been able to do in the 16 years we’ve been together.
The flip side to all this is that, as I noted above, I feel somewhat more numb about almost everything. I bring this up here because, well, this is a blog that’s primarily about videogames and how I play them, and to be perfectly honest with you I’ve been finding myself somewhat checked out. I had some weird issues last week where my controllers weren’t pairing with my consoles – this is a thing that’s happened before with my PS4, but this was the first time it happened to my Xbox One, and it’s certainly never happened for both consoles at the same exact time – and I found that I didn’t particularly care, one way or the other, because I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything. The only console game I’m playing with any sort of gusto is Forza Horizon 3 – which is a game that is specifically designed to be played however you want to play it, and right now I’m content to simply cruise around, take in the sights, do some silly non-race stuff, unlock a few new cars, and then log off.
My rental copy of XCOM 2 arrived last week -a game that I’d been looking forward to for months – and I’m finding myself more or less totally disinterested in it. I finished the tutorial, but haven’t been able to get more than 15 minutes into the very first proper mission without finding myself putting the controller down and looking at my phone, or going upstairs to get a snack. I don’t know if it’s simply that the game is intimidating, or that I’m bad at it, or if it’s the head meds that have turned off the part of my brain that is receptive to the itch that XCOM was supposed to scratch – but whatever the reason, I’m just not feeling it.
Similarly, the wife and I have been watching Luke Cage, and even though we’re only 5 episodes in, we’re starting to run out of steam with it. We want to love the show, and certainly there’s a lot to love about it (the music, the casting, the idea), but there’s certain aspects of it that seem weird to us. More specifically, the writing seems all over the place. Why is Luke such a negging dick to Misty Williams? Why does everyone seem to deliver their lines in such a stilted, totally unnatural way? These are little things that take us out of the show, and we’re finding ourselves falling a bit out of its rhythm.
Anyway, this is all a long way of saying that I’m feeling a bit removed from the sorts of things I normally talk about on here, and if I’m silent in the coming weeks, that’s probably why. It’s entirely possible that one of the big fall game releases will come along that shakes me back into a feeling of urgency, and when that happens I’m sure I’ll be back here in a big way. But for right now, I’m enjoying a bit of silence, and I hope that’s OK with you guys.
Shouts From The Couch 