Monday Morning Commute: Hallucinating Barbarians

Let me tell you something, I ain’t no spring chicken anymore. I spent Saturday evening at Foxwoods casino, and Sunday morning sleeping on a hotel floor for three and a half shitty hours. By the end of the day I was in such an stupendous state of exhaustion I think I was drooling on myself staring at my monitor. While I don’t imagine I ever would have felt one-hundred percent after such an adventure, I can’t help imagine I used to be more resilient after such an evening.

Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me the arts that you’re indulging in, to stave off suicide.

Playing / Fallout 3

No, I ain’t done beat God of War III or Final Fantasy XIII yet. However, until March 29, all the Fallout 3 expansion packs are half fucking price. And that can mean only one thing: I’m going to buy the three I’m missing and dive into those son of a bitches. Fallout 3 is one of my fave games in the last ten or so years; I think I could walk around the wasteland for hours shooting radioactive douche-dogs and be perfectly content. There’s something zen-like in just detaching and wandering about. It frees up my brain to concoct all sorts of the insanity that I puke onto this site.

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With an aging grandparent in the house, it’s hard for me to not hyper-fixate on the fact that I’m also rotting into non-existence, albeit slowly. I’ve got a touch of the morbid in me, and these days with the continual din of an oxygen machine pumping air into my nana’s lungs heard throughout the silence of the house, it’s got my brain all wrapped up in tithers. I oscillate between using it as motivation to get off my ass and concentrate on graduate school, and a nihilistic explosion. Given the day, I’m like, man I need to really seize the days before I’m hacking up phlegm rockets and stuffed to the gills with pills, or I’m just sitting there stuffing Chez-Its into my face wondering who the fuck cares.

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Reading / Joe the Barbarian, Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy

Read Joe the Barbarian. Just take my word for it. It’s a mini-series through Vertigo by my buttcrush Grant Morrison, and penciled by Sean Murphy. It’s a neat turn for Morrison. While he’s usually meandering in the absurd and bizarre, he uses those typical tropes of his in what is really a story about a disenfranchised boy. Through a twist too enjoyable and unique to mention, our boy Joe is transported to a world where his childhood love of toys and action figures become real. A world where he’s what all nerds desire, the key to salvation.

It’s dark, haunting, funny, and relatable to me. And I’m guessing to a majority of people who grew up with their eyes in the clouds and their noses in comic books.

Watching / Flashforward

Flashfoward is LOST for retards. It’s less subtle than the LOST recaps prior to new episodes. You know, the ones that have the scroll at the bottom explaining exactly what’s happening. Instead of a scrolling bar, all of the characters are super expository. But you know what? I’m cool with that.

Not every television show needs to be super-dense to be rewarding in its sci-fi nerdiness. Sometimes I like to mouth breathe.

This shit started up again last Thursday, and I’ve been looking forward to getting to it on my DVR. With BSG ending last year, and LOST wrapping up in a matter of weeks, I’ve been looking to something to feel my geek void. And while V and this aren’t likely to fill the void in my heart, they are neat distractions.

Now that I think of it, they seem like the equivalent of rebound girlfriends. I’ll be secretly missing my ex, and waiting for something legitimate to replace them. But in the mean time, they’ll be cool for the moment. Which I guess means, following the simile, I’ll ultimately get bored of them and throw them to the side.

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I actually haven’t begun pondering the end of LOST yet. I’ve been wrapped up in recapping every episode and scavenging nuances that probably aren’t there, that I haven’t begun to contemplate the length to which it’ll bum me out when it ends. Whether it be girlfriends or video games or television shows, I’m prone to the proclamation, “Nothing will ever be able to take its place!” And as life is wont to do, it usually proves me wrong. There’s always someone else foolish enough to date me, or   a video game to woo me, or a television show to find myself engrossed in.