The Next Level...?

I've been spending a bit of time contemplating the here-after of late. It's something to occupy the time, on those nights I lay alone in the dark, utterly unable to fall asleep anyway thanks to the lingering anxieties that plague me day to day.

What becomes of you after death? Death is something that comes for us all, in the end (so to speak). We are by nature mortal, and so our times upon this earth, both our fleeting joys and our tragic suffering, are limited. And once our physical bodies lay lifeless, food for worms and grubs (or ashes scattered across the waters to provide nourishment to algae-blooms, or whatever other rituals we humans undertake upon the death of a loved one, to find some solace at our loss), what then?

Is there such thing as a soul? Or is the "soul" but a conceit, a clever fabrication of fiction and fantasy, constructed in order to allay our fears of the impermanence and ultimately the insignificance of our own paltry lives, in the greater scope of history? Is the "soul" nothing more than consciousness, a result of firing synapsis triggering cells in our brains to regurgitate certain thoughts, feelings, and emotions associated with certain people, places, and events?

What is it like, to die? Is it painful? Is one aware? Or does one simply grow too tired, eyes drooping in exhaustion, as awareness slips away quietly, and the body shuts down into a final slumber.

Is there time for fear? Sorrow? Regret?

Death, a black chasm waiting before you.

Will you leap? Or will you be pushed?

It doesn't care either way. I'll still end up at the bottom.

On Blizzard and the Power of Poo...

I am a gamer. Not exactly an obsessive gamer (although some may disagree), but an avid gamer. Since my introduction to MMORPG’s (anyone out there remember Asheron’s Call?), I have been the victim of a few other like-minded fantasy-based games of this nature. And for the past 2 years, the MMORPG of choice has been a somewhat popular game by the name of “World of Warcraft.” It is from a company called Blizzard, and is based on their lucrative Real Time Strategy series “Warcraft.”

It’s really rather a fun game. You select a race and class, run around killing pixelated enemies and monsters, raise in levels and obtain new weapons and armor with which to slay even more powerful enemies and monsters. Oh, and if you’re on a Roleplay server, you get to pretend to “be” your character in your interactions with other characters. Like dress-up, but without spending a couple hundred (thousand?) bucks on a nice sword and shiny armor too heavy to walk around in comfortably.

However, there is one little small thing I have to say about some of the quest lines presented in the game. Specifically, quest lines that somehow involve … poo.

No, that’s not another one of the “gamer-speak” acronyms that represent some turn of phrase or game-related term (like xp, mp, hp, oom, pat, inc, or countless other terms no doubt incomprehensible to most non-gamer peoples). By “poo” I mean excrement. That undigestible material which exits out the backside of most multicellular Earth-based organisms of non-plant origin after processing. Otherwise known, in more crude terms, as poopies, crap, doo-doo, and shit.

Someone at Blizzard has an unhealthy obsession with the stuff, it seems. I have so far experienced no less than three quests that somehow involve your character scurrying off in search of some form of poo for some reason or another. Collecting the crystal poo of giants to make a demon-slaying sword… ew? Poo-sword? The collecting samples to determine the diet of monsters is a little more feasible (if no less icky, imho), but yeah the mighty Poo-sword of doomzorz (+5 vs demons) is a little much, don’t you think?

…and I won’t even go into the poo-cherry tablets… collected from large piles of what look like doggy doo-doo…

*sigh*

As if eating spider-kebobs and clam-bars (chewy and delicious!) wasn’t bad enough…

otanjyoubi omedetou...

ひとりぼっち。さみしい。くるしい。こんなきびしい気持はこころからはなれない。じぶんの手できったきずはなんねんかかってもなおらないんだ。このいたみはいつまでものこっている。でも、みんなに心配をかけないように、にこにこして、笑顔を見せたいあげたい。本当の気持、誰にもうあわせたくない。そのために、みんなからはなれて、このまんまひとりぼっちにしたほうがいいと思う。なみだを川のようにながれても、泣き声きこえないようにこころひそかにしか泣かない。

(birthdays are life's cruel yearly reminder that death is still stalking you...)