He is okay, he was able to get to a hospital, but the event has been stewing in the back of my mind the past several weeks.
Outside of a few people, I didn't tell anyone, let alone posted about it. I guess I wasn't sure what to do with that information. It's reasonable to expect sympathy from friends or even strangers when a medical emergency hits. It's not that I don't want the comfort—I do, but...maybe some things can't really be soothed, even though we might come to grips enough with the reality of a thing to move on from it.
In the wake of the emergency, my brother and I have been sifting through boxes and drawers and cabinets and desks at our parents’ home. All of this was a shot across the bow for everyone involved, and it was agreed that we should track down every bit of life recorded on paper, important documents, etc., and put them in a safe place, just in case. If the worst happens, it's not like we can ask the recently departed where the deed to the house is.
It's been tiring work. There have been good moments reminiscing, especially over stashes of photos. Embarrassingly, my parents have kept a comprehensive store of my school assignments from when I was a kid, and even some crafts I don't at all recall making.
The majority of it, however, is drudgery. Life according to the government or a bank or another institution is boring. There is almost zero metadata tied to a bank statement, when a dip in funds might be blandly labeled as a hotel stay, but the associations of the experience are vivid as kid-me happily pressed the alarm in the elevator, or how we ate pizza nearly every night of our vacation to the point we were sick of the meal of choice for Ninja Turtles everywhere, or how I would fake being an inexperienced swimmer in the hopes that a cute gal nearby would stage a pool rescue (even at that early age I guess I was gay, heh).
A posthumous biographer would face a similar issue, albeit with more sympathetic intentions. My father wasn't exactly the type of guy to exhaustively document his life in a diary, let alone in social media posts (he never trusted computers; probably for the best. Fuck Facebook). Even if he did, that biographer could only ever tenuously imagine what those experiences must have been like. Empathy might be strong, but empathy will always lose out to the biological neurons who have been there, done that. What few stories my dad related to me about his own life in his own words still fall short. They're imprinted on my neurons, but in an entirely different way. My memories are of the telling, not of the events themselves.
I'll be glad to never see another banker box again.
All of this has brought thoughts about my own life to the fore. What exactly am I doing with my existence? It's not like I'm unaware of mortality, or was previously unaware up to this point. Life's little maintenance tasks have a lot of inertia, and it's difficult to slow down and consider alternate trajectories, if trajectories can be modified at all. We all had dreams as to what we'd be. Those plans necessarily changed as we became older, gained more experience, and uncovered talents and opportunities, but by our teen years, it feels like we're locked into our destinies, and no matter how much we want different scenery, it takes nearly all of our effort to not starve on the streets somewhere.
Was art the right choice for my life? Could I have done something better with it? Will I be satisfied looking back on my decades of existence? Be proud of how well I drew sergal porn? Is gamedev stupid as hell? Is this the path I truly want to stay on?
I've been dabbling in programming subjects. Life happens, but here and there I've been nibbling at tutorials and such, like that Rust course, or Harvard's CS50 class. I still worry that it's too little, too late. What do I hope to accomplish by having the most rudimentary of experience with whatever programming language I stick with? I genuinely have no idea. It's starting to feel more and more like it's a "just because."
Maybe I don't really need a reason. After all, it's my life, and I can tinker for the sake of tinkering. As anti-Capitalist as I am, I still have been shaped by Capitalism with the expectation that every act I take must have some kind of value attached to it. Accomplishing absolutely nothing with programming might very well be an acceptable act of rebellion. I should take joy in accusations that I "wasted" my time with something.
I just wish I had more time to waste. I wish my parents had more time to waste as well.
Sigh.
I need to get back in the saddle on work with DNF2001, but I'm tired.
