Why I Can No Longer Play Morrowind

After a good year of Morrowind, a relapse into Oblivion, the discovery and descent into Mount and Blade, and Dragon Age, I've come to terms with my condition. I am too greedy to play such free-flowing RPGs. Here is a brief illustrated narrative of my path to ruin.

First, the character questions.

Talk about an existential crisis. Do I want to virtually assume a strange and unfamiliar gender? Stick to my roots?

Then you get to designing the character. This is somewhat time-consuming for me…

Once I've spent a good many hours matching the facial proportions of Queen Latifah or Patrick Stewart, I still have many important decisions to make. Rogue or Paladin? Skills? Weapon points? Do I want to be ironic—a small framed woman with a greatsword? A wood elf Arnold Schwarzenegger? This typically takes another hour, and often results in me going back to alter the face to accommodate the class.

Finally I’ve been released into the game world. I’ve selected a rogue, or a mage with all my skills in secrecy and lockpicking. I bypass the first friendly guard who tries to approach me with a plot relevant quest, break into the first hut I see, and loot their meager life possessions. Then I trade the plates and sack of potatoes for a few coins and keep at it until I can buy myself a sexy suit of armor or weapon, both of which will make it easier for me to loot.

I spend hours prowling from house to house searching for chests of jewelry left untended. Slowly but surely I build up my small stash of coin using varying levels of thievery from Robin-hood style to shanking them in the street for a brass bracelet.

After days of stealing from the NPCs, I find I have no more strength to hold my gains. I put more points in strength the next time I level up, but I can’t keep up with the burden of my riches. So I kill someone that lives in a likely looking house and start dumping my ill-gotten gains there.

This pleases me to no end for roughly 80 hours. Then I start to feel guilty every time I pass the friendly guard, the reminder that though I’m at the top level and have raided every tomb and slayed many a creature, I still haven’t taken care of the rats back from the beginning of the game.

The guilt starts to eat at me. “Well, maybe I should just talk to him,” I think. But I procrastinate. There’s a new area to explore! I can go all the way north by this ship! Finally I’m squirming with guilt and I approach him for the quest, to find out I’d killed the rats and the owner of the building and stolen her pitiful payment in the same swoop as I stole her dress.

Only then I start asking myself important questions. Like what exactly I achieved by owning all magical glass armor and the highest level enchanted battle ax. I hadn’t spoken to my grandparents in days, written a paper, or made my bed. I didn’t follow the plot of the game, so I wasn’t even any nearer to accomplishing an imaginary objective.

What I learned from this experience? 

Not much.

The Bridge of Khazad-Dum

Generally when I drive home from D.C., I like to take a backroad that lets me drive two hours straight to my house, and has a peach farm halfway. This has less to do with romantic ideals of lovely backroads (though that is an advantage) and more to do with the fact that I really like peaches.

Unfortunately, I missed the exit. I toiled along 95 and then 64 in a sort of meandering sleepy stagger. I had just found my iPod (with 958 songs I did not put on there--likely remnants of hipper kids sharing their hipper music on my computer years ago) but couldn't recognize any of the songs on shuffle. I moaned, I drifted, I wanted a peach so badly I could almost taste the glorious things. When I grabbed some on the way up, Farmer Joe told me, "These was picked from a tree this morning!" while he handed the boxes of peaches off to me, shotgun over shoulder (I wish this was a caricature. He really greeted me with a shotgun). I didn't care how campy it was, it was goddamn good. I ate one while I was driving up, and my whole chin and chest and stomach, as well as the steering wheel and a few spots on the windshield were sticky with peach. It was the juiciest sweetest thing I had ever enjoyed.

So maybe I was sulking a bit. Grumpy, sleepy, and generally unpleasant to be around, I wandered listlessly across the interstates, staring at the TomTom while it clocked down. My iPod played random, unknowable songs left by hip kids, or 80s hits left by a younger, less-hip me. 

But then a new song shuffled onto my iPod, and everything changed.

__________________________________________

So you, too, can experience the transformation:

Misconceptions

I recently found out I can no longer consume caffeine. I think I overloaded my heart with it, and now it's on strike and spazzes whenever I have so much as a coke. I go all shaky and pant like Fletcher after a wild night on his wheel, and my heart pretends I'm running. Considering my resting heartrate is 135, I guess I can't blame it. So I'm on beta-blockers and off caffeine, and feeling sad.

To make myself feel better, I made a list of tragic realizations I have had in the last 15 years! Some more recent than I'd like to admit.

The list didn't actually make me feel all that better, though. I kept remembering other things that broke my heart-- Ernest Hemingway was actually a chauvenist jerk, I will never sing like Aretha Franklin, my cat doesn't understand Human and won't defend me against a robber (we're close, so I sorta figured), the magnolia tree in my backyard isn't a banana tree like dad told me when I was six-- I can list painful epiphanies all day, and it doesn't make me any closer to that Baja Blast Mountain Dew. 

Baja Blast Haiku

Taco Bell's Baja Blast

Like tasting rain swollen sky

Or God on my tongue. 

Seriously that's how it feels. It kept vigil next to my worn, broken body every night after waitressing. I'd crawl whimpering to my car and slump in the seat all the way to Taco Bell, where it's taste-- liquid joy-- would revitalize me and transform me back into a human. 

I guess a part of growing up is losing these things. I imagine this is probably what my parents feel as their youngest leaves for college (at least they get to visit), or when you move from a loved home. You're moving on, but you are growing as well. Perhaps I will be a better person for overcoming this, albeit sleepier. 

A montage to Baja Blast. So I can say goodbye.