Something has happened.  I have been playing this damn video game, “Borderlands” for about a week.  It requires that I shoot and kill a number of different scum bags and assholes who are all either charging to eat me or hiding in ambush to shoot my ass.  The game allows the player to re-spawn or come to life again.  Each time the assholes and idiots who are tying to kill me succeed the character or avatar has to start from the beginning or some place where the accomplishments to that point were enough to start from there.  As if you set up base camp while hiking Everest and if you tie in or clip on while climbing and you fall you don’t die, or have to go all the way down to base camp, you simply have to begin again from the last place you drove pitons into the wall.

Well, after having died and been slaughter a number of times I so wanted to grab the piece of shit animals or goblins or bullies in the game an rip their heads off.  Who the fuck were they to kill my character or to give me a sense of weakness or shame for not being able to wring their necks.  Why these characters are all male is another issue.  But after levels that I never imagined because in the past I would have put the game down and said it wasn’t worth my time.  Sort of a sour grapes thing.  After investing so much into a characters accomplishments there was no way I was going to let some god damn pixilated two dimensional computer generated bully or demon to kick my ass or make me give up or leave the game. 

I’ve been out of work for a month so I have had plenty to time to play the game.  At first it was fascinating and fun to run around killing things with no invested interest or actual involvement on a personal level.  As days and weeks went by and I didn’t have shit to eat, the TV was only giving me a couple of channels because I had cut back on all but the network channels, and what I was reading was either trite shit I knew or the author couldn’t write or conclude a story without the reader explaining, Really, really, you wasted three hundred pages to tell me the whole fucking time it was the Butler?

So for hours and hours I was lost in this goddamn game.  I would wake in the night and fall into the chair turn on the console.  Immediately I was in peril.  There was no safe haven or time to rest and get a cup of coffee for my avatar.  As soon as the game started I was in the fight for my life.  Eventually I began to get to pissed and irritated that I was not able to advance to a higher level that I tried over and over and over until I was able to succeeded in killing the god damn mindless violent torrent of beasts and vicious animals.  After each advancement to a higher level I was given new weapons or abilities.  I was rewarded for the experiences, skills, and scars I had withstood and endured.  The feeling was huge.  And instead of stopping and taking a rest I settled deeper into the chair, poured my coffee, grabbed more cookies and ruthlessly reentered the game. 

This morning I was able to get to a point where I no longer feared or wondered how the fuck I was going to survive or succeed at killing the mother fucking things that were constantly shooting at me, trying to eat me, or simply standing in my way with some gun, club, or fanged teeth.  I gained more and more confidence.  The actual experience and skill from manipulating my character so that I was able to duck dodge and dive out of the way or stand my ground and shoot the god damn mother fuckers that were keeping me from getting where I needed to be.

I never figured out why some of the skills in a game constantly made the player begin again or lose because he couldn’t figure out where the object of the quest was.  I realized that in some cases it was not a head game of trying to be smart and figure something task out.  It was a matter of being able to make my character a mother fucking bad ass who could walk right up and to the demon or animal and shoot them in the face, reload and begin to shoot their friends, their family, and anything that moved that stood in my way.  At one point I began to hunt out and seek the opponents in the game just to wipe them off the map.  Other times I just went hunting and forgot the quest. 

In short I gained an enormous amount of resilience and confidence in my ability to re-spawn, reload, and regain my footing.  In fact, I was able to count on my ability to survive a battle or an attack.  I learned which weapons worked best in each situation and I learned how to prioritize my time and energy and resources so that I could hang on with one last bullet or defense shield, wait and slaughter the piece of shit that was lurking in the dark.

See, as an adult I took the game way to causal.  I had no vested interest and I had no reason to want to keep playing.  But as days and days went by with no phone call for an interview and fewer and fewer commodities in the cupboards and the refrigerator the time spent playing the game was a perfect diversion.  I would play until the light from outside faded or the sun came up.  Hours and hours passed by while I was in the bad lands killing and fighting for my life.  It was a perfect transfer of aggression anger and rage that I could not express or manifest in my real life. 

Then this morning, Sunday, about three in the morning I was kicking some serious shit in the game, I mean I was killing things jumping at me coming from behind and all the time I was fighting for my everlasting ass.  I was winning and beating them and taking names.  I occurred to me what I was feeling and what was going on this side of the screen.  I began to feel confident and resilient.  Some of the warrior traits and the survival confidence was coming from my avatar to my myself, the guy sitting in the chair. 

Ah ha, I said.  So like an avatar myself I could see that the player in my game, my life, was some mother fucker who wasn’t going to let me die. The one pulling my strings and putting me in harms way k new that I was ultimately going to survive to the next level.  And in the end it didn’t matter because I was going to re-spawn again and again and again.  That player wasn’t personally invested in me but he or she wasn’t about to give up on me after all the levels and achievements I’ve made.

For the first time I genuinely wasn’t afraid.  In fact I was steeped with confidence.  I’ve never been in a fight in my life.  I now know that all the shit I’ve endured, all the crap I’ve swallowed and all the times I was too civil or afraid to fight back or stand my ground, I was being a pussy.  I want a fight, I enjoy a battle, I know now what possess a man to want to succeed earn more money, get a better job, get the woman he wants.