Eccentric Flower:199812/half alive

eleven twelve eleven

half alive

I am still shaking and sweating. That's how good this Half-Life game is. The depth and complexity of the game amazes me every time I start to play, but it never feels like some big maze - in fact, it doesn't feel like any game I've ever played, period. Last night I snuck out of a building, into a clearing - and for the first time since I'd started to play the game, I saw the sky. It was night; there were crickets. I could almost feel the cool breeze. And then, of course, someone threw a grenade at me.

-- Lileks

I got up from eight hours in front of the screen, eight hours with perhaps ten minutes away, ten minutes spent tending to minimal body function and minimal acknowledgement that there was another human in the house with me.

Eight hours. My hands get extremely cold when I work on the computer. You'd think they'd stay warm, since they're almost the only part I'm using.

Eight hours. I was cold all over, but it was nearly seventy degrees in the house. I looked at my cold dregs which used to be hot tea, and I couldn't remember how long ago I had made it. I was ravenously hungry.

My head was divided in half by a sharp agonizing throb from the bridge of my nose to the nape of my neck. Every time I refocused my eyes, I had to stop and wait for the pain to quit. Move. THROB. Blink. THROB. Two ibuprofen. I swallow pills without water.

Cleaned up a bit, tried to make myself look a little less like the pre-civilization Nell, or - if you'd prefer a more accurate but less female image - less like Ted Kaczynski coming into town on a supply run from my four-by-six shack in the wilderness. I hate it when people in the grocery store look at me like I might pull a shotgun from under my coat at any moment.

Midnight. Forty degrees. I was shivering so hard in the car that it was hard to hold the wheel steady. Why am I so cold? Why does everything look so distant? My body was numb and my brain wasn't focusing on anything useful. Fortunately no one else was on the road.

The supermarket was an artificially lit hallucination. I think the clerk thought I was under the influence of something. Well, maybe I was.

By the time I got home, carrying my bag of food and my gallon of milk, the forty-degree weather was no colder than it usually is, and my headache was gone. Painkillers don't work that fast. My brain was finally getting blood, that's all.

Eight hours. Eight hours with virtually no part of my body in motion except my eyes and my hands. Eight hours with all my other vital systems slowed to a crawl.

Did you ever wonder what it feels like to be dead? I don't think I will, not anymore.

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