Emotionless Zombies

I feel like calling someone a “hater” is an easy way to justify ANYTHING. Like if someone is suddenly on a workout kick and someone says something about how they’re posting selfies of themselves working out at the gym. No one is “hating” because you’re trying to be healthy. I’m just personally hating how you’re taking pictures of yourself and cramming 18 misspelled hashtags into that picture. If that makes me a hater, then yes…haters gon’ hate. Hate grammatical errors and sweaty selfies.

I’m not a guy that typically downloads games on his phone, but for about 6 hours on Monday, I played game called Blondies Killing Zombies. In case you can’t see the video, it’s basically a 2D game where you’re one of three blonde girls riding a motorcycle and killing zombies. That’s the point of the entire game. Start on the left, and run over zombies with your motorcycle until you reach the finish on the very right. That was honestly the most productive thing I did all of Monday.

I used to love video games. When I was growing up, my mom would never let me play video games during the week, so after I did my chores on Saturday mornings, I got to play for a couple of hours. And it was such a frustratingly exciting time. There was so much emotion, effort and mental energy put into advancing to the next level. I had calluses on my thumbs. My controllers creaked because I would bend it like pressing a directional button harder would make a difference. I would get so excited when I beat a boss on the hardest level, and get so frustrated when that boss was impossible to beat. I remember one time I got so mad that I more or less flung the controller at the tv. The reason I’m still alive today is because the tv didn’t break…

Now that I’m older, I don’t really make time for video games any more, which is probably a good thing. It takes up a lot of time. Not that I’m using that time to do anything productive, but the emotion that used to come out of that might have left as well. This past weekend, I was talking about emotions and said sometimes I feel like a robot, at which point, it was said that I might just be a grown-up to the core. And I think it really struck a chord in me. But it’s not like I don’t laugh and feel happiness or get pissed off and feel anger. I think excitement is a feeling that may not come out as much as it used to.

A couple of weekends ago, I made the 8 hour drive up to Lake Tahoe. The terribleness of a long drive is mitigated with great music or a great co-pilot. If you have both, then the drive just becomes a great memory.

On the way up, I was having a long discussion about happiness and I wondered how my life was filled with happiness. I think there are two scenarios.

1). Your life is constantly at a neutral emotion with spikes of happiness
2). Your life is at a state of happiness with dips of sadness.

One of those might be a “glass half full” statement, but I’m not sure which one is which. Basically the first one looks like a bunch of Stalagmites (which are like little cave boners) or the second one looks like a bunch of Stalactites (which are like little cave bangs). That might be like an “Alligator vs Crocodile” statement, but I’m not sure which one is which.

Maybe neither perception is a bad thing. Both of them use the base of happiness instead of sadness. Imagine if you had Stalactites with a baseline of no-emotion. Your life would pretty much have no happiness.

I realized that just because I don’t emote doesn’t mean that I don’t feel emotions. I think there is a lot going on behind the scenes, but they don’t always show.

Deciphering whether that last sentence was a justification or an explanation.

Thanks for reading.

– The Creaky Controller