My Entertainment Obsession

Flash back to the morning of the 21st. It's 6:25AM, which is exactly the time of day I will never, ever be awake. If I can damn well help it.

I'm lying in bed, clutching at my abdomen. In my head dances the images of a glistening black parasitic worm, the size of a human forearm, embedded in the lining of my stomach. It's twisting in place, fighting my will for it to be gone. It feeds heartily at the expense of my suffering, and my sanity.

Right about here I wake up, but the pain in my gut remains. I do the one thing any sane person would do. I vault from my bed, sprint to my bathroom, and I pray over a toilet bowl.

Here, between the godforsaken times of 630 to 7 in the morning, I vomit the vomit of the righteous. I expel demons that once competed with the Son of God. Through numerous, heaving convolutions, I exorcise the profound affect of last nights foray into BioShock.

In retrospect I imagine a great deal of my sickness was brought on by my last night's dinner, which consisted entirely of one of every new Monster energy drink coffee flavors.

There's three. That's like a gallon of that shit.

Now to the point of my ongoing story, one which I sort of intend for a wide audience and not just the sect of society I'm immersed in from day to day. But it's inescapable for me, not to occasionally lapse back into a state of mind where I derive nigh-euphoric states of elation from certain videogames.

I try to keep this under control. I do. Some years ago I can remember busting into some hapless Wal-Mart, nearly assaulting what poor soul had been assigned to the electronics section to "go into the fucking back and get me a fucking copy of Half-Life 2, godfuckingdamnit".

Priding myself on normally being a rational human being, I told myself those days were over. And yet, just before midnight on the 20th of August, 2007, I found myself speeding down a dark highway, wad of bills clutched in my hand, my destination a shining beacon in the distance. Wal-Mart, the assholes. The only goddamn fuckers that are going to sell me BioShock at this godawful hour.

This was the end of a sad journey, a blossoming obsession in its tender youth. Up until a week previous I had been able to ignore the siren song of BioShock, knowing that it, being out of reach, would only cause me pain were I to grasp for it. Then some fucker somewhere in the country sold the game to some other fucker somewhere at a Toys-R-Us.

What the hell is a mature game doing at Toys-R-Us anyway? I mean, not that I'm not all for the corruption of the minds of the innocent as early as possible, but seriously. Toys-R-Us? They sell videogames?

But I digress. If someone was selling it somewhere, I didn't see why they shouldn't be selling it to me. So I called every goddamn place in town. And every spineless, gutless gamestop piece-of-shit clerk I came across cowered at the idea of selling me a game prior to their precious 'street date.' It didn't matter that they openly admitted to having the product sitting right in the back, a tantalizing treasure balanced on a pressure-plate just waiting for some whip-toting hero to come nab out from under the threat of countless deadly boobytraps.

Oh sure, they all cited consequences, hefty fines and other crap. Honestly, do I sound like I give a shit? After I decided they weren't going to sell to me outright, I started hatching devious plans to impersonate the manager of some other gamestop moneytrap and tell them I was short on stock, that I had to drop by and pick a few up from their shop. I had my spreadsheet of store numbers and locations and the names of managers and schedules all lined up, got my very best douche-bag manager threads together with improvised nametag and tie and everything and-

And I had to take a step back. I had to take a long, deep breath. This was crazy. I was going fucking nuts.

It was just a game, and it would be out in just a few more days, available to all. I could wait.

And so I did. Under the guise of feigned patience I waited, desperately trying to ignore that the brightest beacon on the horizon of my future, the one thing that registered as a date that promised happiness and joy and countless hours of entertainment, was a game.

So there I was, nearly midnight of the release date, my long wait at an end. I was sitting in the darkened interior of my speeding car, and I just had to question the sanity of my elation. Should I be able to procure such an emotional boost from so small a thing?

Should I seriously re-evaluate my life and try to supplant my happiness with a more worthwhile pursuit? If so, then what?

But it's too late. Midnight has passed only briefly when I find my target, a blue-vest-clad middle aged man, obviously the man charged with whatever you do as an employee in the electronics section. I do my best not to carry the harsh tones of a crack fiend when I request my game (it not being on the shelves yet) and expect a fight (this is the second Wal-Mart on my hunt, and I'm fully prepared to do the hour and a half driving that would be required to visit them all in a single night) but no...he has it right behind the counter, all neat and tidy in a single box. He offers me the product as if there was no stigma, no limitation to it...as if it had always been available, and always would be.

I could hardly contain my joy. I was holding the product on which all my dreams hinged. I told myself right then and there, that if it sucked I'd jump from a great height with a double-barrel shotgun wedged in my mouth.

I've calmed significantly on the drive home, and I'm forced to reconsider my previous assertion: that my hobby was both far beyond a hobby and at the same time, utterly reprehensible.

But then, what am I to do? If I self-condemned my own chosen medium of entertainment, wouldn't I just be uselessly damning myself? Furthermore, who's to judge the worth of anything that gives someone else joy? A hobo on the street, his mind long since destroyed in the fires of psychotropic drugs and his own madness, might find screaming incomprehensibly at passersby the most entertaining thing in the world. So why then should I feel any stigma in my own joy? To my knowledge there is no universal scale of virtue when it comes to any pastime, is there?

And it could always be worse. I could be one of those D&D losers.