A month and a half ago,
I stood at the window of "my" two-room apartment, with a stack of
computer game CDs on the thick
windowsill.
All of them. All.
Trams rode by below infrequently, but there were too many people to throw more than a quarter of them out the window. I'd wanted to throw every last one out. The ones I did throw exploded like rainbows. I could make out the little explosions feet... meters... below. Amazingly, no-one turned and looked. Perhaps the CD's each entered an
SEP field as they left my window. I polluted.
I was not arrested. No trams were
derailed. For every CD I sheepishly threw, I cut up 3 others with scissors unfit for the job: dull and weak. My hands were in agony. Less painful methods would have worked, technically. But I had no choice:
it had to be a ritual or nothing at all. I then went down to the
courtyard and dumped the ruined CDs in one of the giant
trash bins. "Well," I thought, "I've just reaped a dozen or two empty
jewel cases..."
I was leaving many worlds, above all Alpha Centauri, and entering Cejl street, Brno, Czech Republic. I called up my addiction therapist, with whom I'd spent an hour about two hours before, and told him I'd decided yes, I WOULD throw them out. He congratulated me.
Within a week I was saying to myself: "This isn't how it was supposed to be. Yes, there are no magic solutions, there are no ideals in life, but did I really have to go straight from losing 50 hours a week playing to losing 50 hours a week reading, 'netting, creatively writing, family life, pub-crawling... everything but being what I officially am: a freelance translator? It's beautiful, it's so many times more complex, but I'm still dodging my life, still living off my financial reserves, still heading towards a fall."
It's still that way. It's been a week since I've worked an eight-hour day. I feel like such a child. I need to find that truth in me, that if I could overcome one obstacle, I can overcome another: my aversion to order and an ordered life. And to the momentary pain that brings later pleasure or prevents great future pain.
Now it's worse than in the first weeks, in fact... I find myself drifting again and again to discussions of others' harmless or acceptable pastime, my beautiful poison, the Civilization series. A new one has been released. It is no joke, it is not funny, it is not trivial, it is the heroin that stole most of the last 5 years of my life. If you've seen Milos Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt and remember the bed scene where the years are rolling by on a sort of giant television screen... that was me. Even my current dilemma is better.
On days like these, I wish I were of my grandmother's generation. Sheer, endless hardship made this sort of dilemma unimaginable for them. And they'd never understand the perils of abundance. Perhaps my grandmother, off of whose inheritance I'm now in essence living, is looking down at me from beyond the grave and saying:
"This wasn't how it was supposed to be!"