spncryn/log

The past month has been more eventful than I have patience to properly recount here. I’ve found myself once again in the midst of a vague peace. I’ve been feeling more motivated to return to working on games, although it’s hard to find time for it after work. No, that’s not true at all: I have plenty of time, I just spend it other, far less productive ways. The truth is that with Work, I don’t feel like I’ve made any material progress at all in the last half-year at least. The bulk of the progress made on it has consisted of fixing old mistakes, and refactoring assets and code to a (hopefully) more legible standard, that ironically, I have yet to put in practice for any other project.

I have been working on the document for Plan though. I keep vacillating between different approaches for the project, and it’s got me trapped in a cycle of indecisiveness. What I know I need to do is just commit to any one of those plans in implementation and force myself back into the rhythm of actually doing things in-engine, instead of just thinking about concepts… I hope I’ll be able to make some progress soon. I’d like to find some time in the upcoming week to work on a prototype for the foundational mechanical systems.

I write this on the cusp of yet another year. A year ago — Ana and I were at the theatre, probably the Metrograph, we watched Phantom Thread and as we spilled out into the cold, damp streets, there was a buoyant feeling hanging in the night sky, like everything would be ok. We drank this bottle of limoncello she’d brought some months back, and shared a shot of it with a passerby whose name was Luca, whose grandmother had cautioned him and his siblings throughout their youth about the simultaneous perils and pleasures of too much desert. I swore to God as the minute passed that I would try my best with her in the days to come, not knowing then how few there’d be until it was all over and she was gone.

Except it wasn’t over. I thought Ana leaving me would destroy me, but I kept on going. Slowly at first, somehow, and then all at once. I sat in my room until I couldn’t take it anymore, and then I got on a plane and went to Portugal and met Martin for the first time. We smoked a bunch of cigarettes, ate some bread, drank a few too many beers, went on some walks, sang karaoke and stumbled drunk five kilometers back home. I wish we had more time. I met Oxana my last week there, and we went climbing. I fell very deeply, irresponsibly for Lidia. We almost met at last, but then I said a little too much, and I got scared, and I ran away from her because I could not bear the weight of all of it building up inside of me. At the same time I lost her I learned that I was still capable of feeling that ancient, obstreperous feeling, all too well. In my sadness I thrashed about and met some others, whose hearts I did not treat with the patience and kindness they deserved, probably needed. I tried to guard my heart and in doing so I fear I just became for them yet another statistic. I reached out to my friends for help. To my surprise, they reached back, with understanding and grace. I became more involved with the church at large. I became inspired to start believing more seriously in the goodness of others. I finally landed a job. I made some new friends, reconnected with old ones I thought I’d lost for good. Day by day, the sadness receded, and then surged forth, and then receded again.

I’m alone again. The sadness I feel now is not the bitterness of unfulfilled longing, but the unbearable fondness of realising, with stark acuity, that none of this is ever going to come back, and this is all I have. As I get older I understand more and more the inevitability of things. How surprising it is when they come; how heartbreaking it is when they go. The things that come back in the tide and the things that never again surface. I remember all of it: every face, every name, every grain and sinew. I miss it all, you know, more than you can ever know. And the Lord remembers even more. Everything, every moment, all at once. It is to the Lord that remembers, then, that I pray to remember me, and everyone I have loved and do love and will love, not enough and a bit too much and every once in a while just enough, and all those who have loved me, in their own special and particular ways, and the things we have shared as we shed the memory of this year and pass on to the next. I pray that we may be able to share in them again, in the days to come, and in the fullness of time.

O Lord, support us all the day long through this trouble-filled life, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in your mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last. Amen.

Useless vanity, the lot of it. Just this terrible sinking feeling in me that seems to spiral into the very foundation of my existence, a horrid emptiness. Too cold, too dark, too lonely, I don’t know. I don’t know why it came back, but it did. My friends are all away somewhere else. I longed for familiar warmth, then I remembered why it departed. Over the past few weeks it’s just been accumulating steadily, observed but unchecked. Last Sunday I took my confession for the year; but it was not enough to steady myself of this, because the truth is, I did not confess aloud what I really meant to say, in the most naked of terms, although I hope, I know the Lord knew it anyway, all along, from the very start. I’m trying hard to get better but it’s been almost two years since I thought about shooting myself in such a way I’d be unrecognisable but lately it’s just been this growing feeling. I’ve come to realise that suicide for me was never about ending an interminable feeling but about inflicting interminable punishment. Who am I kidding? I always lacked conviction. How ironic how consistently and thoroughly crippled by fear I am when most of my life heretofore has just been a steady string of one failure after another. Goddamn this wretched sickness in me; if I could just reach inside of me and tear out all the infected vessels in my soul that animate this coursing repulsion, this insatiable loneliness, I’d hope I’d feel better; but probably not. I’m sick of being told about my virtues by people who cannot stand the rest of me. I don’t even bother asking why anymore. Theodicy is a wheel that keeps on turning. Where is he in all of this? Did Christ suffer my selfish brutalisation? Every week I stand up there and recite my affirmation of the totality of it all. I’m the common denominator of all of it: Ana, Lidia, the rest of them, everyone else. Pathetic. You lose and then you keep on losing. There’s no reason why. Just sheer dumb bad luck, I guess. Something wrong with me. Not a single goddamned resolution I made last year came into fruition, and not for trying. I ask myself now the same thing everyone else always asks me: what good is prayer if the only time you can convince yourself it might works is when you force yourself to limit it to the ineffable? In three days Christ will be born again but I will still be here, same as I was, always am. Disgusting. So disgusting.

Slowly resuming progress. Every day I try to get a little bit done. Nothing tangible yet in terms of forward movement, but I have been working consistently on the game every day for the past week, refactoring and rewriting old code. I feel like I’m about to crest the cusp of a new inspiration. I’ve been feeling very lonely, which has helped to intensify my concentration. I owe much of the calm to my new job schedule: every morning I wake up, drive to work, sit at my desk, and drive back at night, with little to differentiate or interrupt the rhythm of things. It helps to inculcate a peaceful predictability in which my emotions become dulled to the point where I am able to work without significant external disruption. During the day, the constant presence and activity of others keep me occupied and prevent me from thinking about the past. I try my best not to think too much or hope for too much for the future, too. I am learning to manage my expectations about life carefully.

A calm, pleasant Thanksgiving. I finally decided to start working on the template project today. Got basic movement and tile-based collision set up. Most of this, honestly, is just me trying to figure out new techniques. The main project has become too unwieldy to start experimenting with radically different approaches to structural design and implementation. I feel for the first time in a long time that I’m not only capable of improving my technical skills, but actively interested in doing so. There’s a certain pleasure I’ve been rediscovering as of late in sitting down and learning these things that in the past I was so loath to do now that my ability to grasp it is no longer tied directly to a graded assignment, and no one is watching. I want to start setting up the inventory system tomorrow, and see if I can figure out this business with structs.

Steady progress refactoring asset and variable naming conventions. The problem with this though is that it grants the illusion of meaningful progress — which is not, of course, to deny that meaningful progress is being made, just not visibly — when in reality there are far more pressing things to work on that would visibly and structurally advance the game, that I’m deliberately avoiding because… I don’t know.

Something that I’ve been quietly frustrated about for a very long time but which I only just now realised in full is how slow the game is to start and test. Every time the game launches it feels like it takes forever to get to the parts I’m actually working on, which has gradually but steadily sapped my desire to work on important plot-related implementations. I need to develop a better system for testing moving forward, or run the easy risk of burning myself out again on invisible back-end work, for which I have little to show at the end of the day.

During the process of refactoring, I’ve also come to realise how many systems there are in the game that are just outright redundant, if not entirely irrelevant at this stage, that are eating up time and energy in maintenance. The logistics of this project have become, if not outright unmanageable, far too bloated for my comfort, to the point where they’ve become an active distraction towards future developments.

I was seized this afternoon while sitting at my cubicle counting out the parentheses in a preposterously long Excel formula with the sudden desire to revisit a plot for Plan. I rather hastily sketched an outline for a revision and found myself contemplating for the hundredth time this year whether this year would finally be the year I committed to learning Unreal Engine. This feeling dissipated some hours later as I sat in front of the IDE repeatedly trying to click on a dropdown element that refused to stay open longer than a split second, rendering my newfound optimism rather dull. Nonetheless, it got me writing again, and I opened Gamemaker for the first time since apparently September.

I want to get back to making games again. I don’t know how I’m going to make it work logistically — the commute on this new job is a terrible time thief just on its own — but the more I think about it, the more strongly I feel that this is the right thing for me and this is the right time to feel it out again. No distractions in my life anymore, for better or worse. With everything that’s happened this year, maybe that’s not the worst thing.

The days have been calm and uneventful. I’ve been living in an unhurried, maybe undisciplined manner. The days flow by evenly and without much disruption or texture. I haven’t worked on the game in some time: nearly all of last month, I reckon. I’d like to get back to it soon, but honestly, I feel really tired these days, and too distracted to do anything meaningful. I’ve come to realise lately that when I started working on the game, part of me was convinced still that I could produce something extraordinary. That feeling has long since past though, and most of the day these days I barely feel like I’m even able to just live in an effective, let alone productive manner. I’ve gotten so used to letting things slip away from me that it’s become a real problem, that’s begun to affect other people as well. A certain kind of carelessness about things, although rarely, unfortunately, the concomitant indifference to render such casual cruelty bearable. I feel so creatively dead.

Truth is, I’ve been slacking off. I don’t know what it is but I’ve just gotten so lazy again. Listless and complacent. I know my life isn’t a mess right now, but it feels like it is. No, maybe “a mess” isn’t the right phrase, just… half-hearted. I’m living in a very half-hearted way, just drifting day to day, week to week, buoyed by a steady stream of dopamine surges. I always find myself back here: maybe this is just how everyone lives? Carried along by a current of cheap, undemanding entertainment and mild but pleasant surprises, the gentle swell of anxiety humming freely, soundlessly just beneath. It doesn’t sound too bad at all. But man, I just want to make progress on my game again. I want to finish this thing before I let myself go.

It’s been a while since I’ve made an entry. I haven’t really been working on the game much these past few weeks, although I very much want to. I’ve been too distracted with other things lately: the various businesses of existing, I guess. I find myself longing for the simplicity of my days in Lisbon. I’m tempted every day to just give all of this pretence up and go back: not to a specific place, but to a moment in my life where I had no greater goals or context for my life beyond the immediacy of my work. In an odd kind of way, although my life is quite alright these days, I miss the single-mindedness of it all. I feel like I’ve lost focus in my life.

I guess I’m not going to London anymore.

Another year on this earth. This one has not at all gone as I had either expected or planned, but in a strange, sad way, I think I’m really happy it didn’t. I feel much calmer these days, more at peace. More forgiving and more importantly, more convinced than ever in my desire to forgive. I’ve begun to realise the true scale of the beauty and catastrophe within myself, within those around me. I feel surer in who I am and the things I truly value. It’s like a light has just been cutting through me, burning away the darkness that clouded my eyes before. I read somewhere once that love is not consolation, but light. I don’t know how to make sense of that, even as it tears its way through me, the assumption of me. A brightness that was always there, dwelling in the darkness. I don’t understand it. There are some days where I feel so overwhelmed that I want to cry. Not out of sadness, or pain, or even joy, but the sheer fucking sensation of all of it, all at once. I feel ready to face what’s to come. I feel ready to place faith in it again. The ongoingness of it, all of it.

Saw Jeff Rosenstock and PUP last night. It was a rather moving show, and quite enjoyable. I haven’t really been working at all since I got back, but I do still feel a lot better. I have to re-establish my routine though. It’s a lot harder to do so without someone else to hold me even minimally accountable. Just having a friend in the room to remind me to stay on target is more helpful than anything else I’ve tried on my own…

Home again. It feels strange to be back. It hasn’t even been a full day, and yet I already feel in a strange, sad way that I never really left at all. I guess only time will be able to tell what will endure and what will be left behind, but even still, it’s kinda disheartening how quickly you just get used to things. Maybe the optimistic way to look at it would be to remember the inverse as well: that things can get better just as quickly and materially, too. Well, I sure hope so.

Took a break today from working on the master document to focus on grad school stuff. As long as I remain optimistic and clear-headed throughout the process, I believe that it is possible to achieve the things that I previously thought unlikely, if not outright impossible. I have to take it slow and steady though instead of rushing into conclusions.

August is about to draw to a close, which for all intents and purposes, means the summer’s now over. I’ve been making good progress on the game. It feels more complete now than it ever has. I think I will be able to achieve my goal of finishing the plotting by the time I leave here. I feel optimistic again, in a calm, measured way, free from the urgency of mania or neurotic impotence. The work comes to me naturally and unhurried in its inspiration, like it did at the beginning.

I’ve been feeling better these past few weeks, about both my work and the things I want in my life. I’ve achieved a degree of clarity and peace that I’ve been missing this whole time. I don’t think it’s the change in place so much as it is the change in circumstance, which simultaneously gives me hope that I will be able to feel this again and that it is well within my reach; yet also makes me fear that it will not endure the return home.

Turns out the save system that I spent two days working on ended up being a complete waste of time because I fundamentally misunderstood how the systems underlying it worked. I decided to just completely revert it, and instead focus on cleaning up the existing variables based on the lessons I learned from setting up the struct system, to improve legibility and ease of declaration and save-load in the future.

Also reworked and cleaned up the animations for the notebook, and implemented full interaction for them. I have to figure out how to lay the text out on each page (as well as what to actually put down text-wise…) and how to handle the page transitions. I’ve been working steadily but slowly as of late. I’m not optimistic the game will be done by the end of this year, but I am not actively not trying to think about that right now, and instead just focusing on work I can do.

Working on rewriting the save/load system. Migrating from using a whole bunch of manual ds_map read/writes to a (hopefully) more succinct system based around reading structs from a buffer. Converted story variables and config so far. The most difficult challenge has been locating everything and remembering what controls what. I need to develop a more effective system for managing this type of shit in the future.

The sadness has gotten worse. I feel terribly empty and alone, and I’ve started thinking regularly about killing myself after the game is finished again. The worst part is that I truly have no excuse here. I’m eating a lot better, going out more often, in the company of my friends. And yet it still not only persists, but has gotten in some ways palpably worse.

It’s been a week now since I’ve arrived in Lisbon. It’s startling to think how quickly it’s gone. I’m not displeased with the amount of progress I’ve made since, but I just get the sense it’s not enough. Enough for what? Of course, I mean by this “enough” to cast away this senseless stupor. It has felt like a dream of sorts but not the dream I had hoped it would be. What a stupid and recalcitrant sadness. Ungovernable emptiness.

A quiet sense of disconsolate dread. I’ve been feeling a terrible sense of loneliness and uselessness lately. I’ve stopped making much of an effort to go out and do things: the lot of it feels empty, and misguided, although I know it isn’t. “Drained” is a better word. No energy or motivation to do anything. I don’t feel like I’m capable of doing anything anymore. Calcified in place. I hope things will get a bit better, at least for a little bit, in Lisbon. Maybe the change in scenery and pace of life will help shake things loose. I hope so. I really hope so.

Went and saw Superman tonight. I’ve been feeling pretty down these past few days, but I decided that I needed to change something up, so I bit the bullet and spent the $30 on the IMAX screening and at 22:30 I went to the theatre and even bought a dramatically overpriced bucket of popcorn and in the end, it was absolutely worth all of it. It was a genuinely moving and beautiful film, and spectacularly heartfelt. I feel a little bit better, and I am reminded of my commitment to goodness and grace in this world.

Ever since installing the AC unit, insects of various kinds have been making their way through what I assume is the slight gap between the base of the unit and the window frame into my room where inevitably, they congregate around the false glow of my computer monitor. I usually keep a few sheets of toilet paper on hand to kill them. Tonight though I killed a firefly in such a manner as it was alighting upon my mirror. I only noticed it because I saw the flicker of a glow in the corner of my eye as I leaned back to stare at the ceiling, awash in a sheen of dim, disconsolate dread. I thought nothing of it as I reached out and crushed it. But when I went to dispose of it, I noticed that it had begun to glow. I know it is probably foolish to ascribe human significance to animal phenomena, least of all to that of insects; but I felt suddenly a very deep and cutting sense of cosmic cruelty and a great sadness passed over me as I watched its light fade away, crushed in a wad of single-ply toilet paper.

Another week gone. I’ve fallen full and well into an unsteady sadness. Just can’t maintain. I smoked my last cigarette today and bought a 30-pack of Coors Banquet. Fit for kings. When I was younger I would think often about killing myself but I’m too old for that to feel like it’d be worth anything and worse yet, lately, I’ve really started to believe that hell is real — if not for anyone else then at least for me. I have this feeling that something has gone horribly wrong and I just don’t know it yet.

Stopped working again. The past several days have just slipped by in an indistinct blur. Why do I have so little discipline these days? Was there ever a time when I did have any at all? I can’t remember the last time in my life when I just pushed through something that was difficult or unpleasant. There are no consequences to giving up, or at least none that I meaningfully feel. I feel like I feel so little. Falling down is not so bad, it’s just the normal state of things. I don’t really want to get back up. Did there ever exist a version of me that was not like this? There are things that I have accomplished in the past which remain with me in the present that I know for certain required not just a moment of inspiration but long, long hours and a certain kind of rote repetition. Who was the me that put in those hours? Where did I lose myself? Why do I no longer feel any desire? But only the slow, long dread of shame…

The days have started to bleed together in a fragile, viscous sludge, of mottled greys and other pallid hues. I was actually able to get some work done today despite this, but by evening, I was already well down the spiral of a fatal funnel of feckless, frustrated dejectedness, and as the night progressed I only found myself becoming further and further seized by that awful despair. I don’t understand how things can turn around so quickly. I’m pretty sure just last week at this time, I was terribly optimistic and full of inspiration about the possibility that I could turn things around. Where did all that go, that it feels little more now than a receding, distant memory? And further, what hope do I have at all then if I am so easily defeated by even the most trivial of setbacks? Everything I’ve experienced these past few years has just confirmed, again and again, in increasingly obvious ways, that my interiority has been reduced to a flimsy, tattered scrim. Nothing catches that holds. I don’t feel like I’m able to actualise anything. I don’t feel like I am capable of anything. What remaining talents I do still possess are not really mine, but vestiges of an earlier self who still believed in things and wanted things and expected more of this life. But I can’t do anything with any of that. I can’t do anything at all.

Pentecost. That old familiar sadness has seeped back into my life. I had another nightmare about Ana last night and woke up confused and disoriented and covered in a cold damp sheen of sweat. I haven’t been sleeping well these past few days on account of the heat and I can’t tell whether it was the heat that’s to blame for precipitating this precipitous decline in my mood and thus plaguing my already restless sleep with these feelings or if something inside me had already sufficiently slipped without me noticing and it was the heat that simply created the conditions through which these things were finally able to take full purchase. I am haunted by a pervasive shroud of worthlessness. Why is it that this feels like my baseline state, and not instead the near-obstreperous joy and amazement I felt so sure of just days ago? Someone told me recently that it’s not that my setbacks are particularly severe, only that I have experienced them particularly severely. It’s begun to dawn upon me lately how shallow my sadness really is. This is the thing I hate the most about myself.

It rained throughout the day, and it’s now once again cool, almost cold. I’ve been smoking more again recently. Martin and I get on calls and we walk somewhere and sit down next to each other across that thin virtual thread and we smoke. Months-old packs from winter of last year that I bought with the intention to finish with Ana only to find out not just once but then in the mornings and then in the evenings and then at night and then seemingly every goddamned time I would ask, when I still cared enough to ask, that she apparently just didn’t want to do it anymore, at least not with me. I don’t believe in metaphors anymore. I have been thinking of ending things with Ada soon. It’s not that I don’t believe in metaphors anymore. It’s just that it’s exactly like everyone says. There’s nothing wrong with me except me.

Stumbled around Brooklyn till 5am, then passed out until the afternoon as soon as I got home. It cooled down significantly today after some rainfall this morning, so it was fortunately much easier to not only fall asleep, but stay asleep. Haven’t worked in a few days, although I have been keeping pretty disciplined with the haikus (at least relative to any other kind of output recently). I’d like to get back to it next week. Should start simple and concrete: I think the worm powder fabrication process would be a good place to start.

We’ve now reached the point of the year where it’s quite suddenly become very hot and rather humid. I’ve been trying to force myself to work on my portfolio these past few days. Today was not so good: I ended up falling into a spiral of despair after becoming fixated on the possibility that I had no chance. I was able to shake myself out of it eventually, which I think is good progress in the larger scheme, as usually I just fall into states of irresolute anger which persist for several days afterwards, and end up tanking my motivation completely. That I was able to recognise for myself that I had begun slipping and not only terminate that thought before it seized me completely, but reverse it, I feel, is a significant improvement from before.

Got back from Salem last night. I had a very good time there. I did not expect to feel this way, but it made me feel a lot better about myself, at least for a bit until I woke up today. It made me realise just how isolated I’ve been, both from a greater sense of community, and my own feelings about my work. There was a time, before I learned shame, when things genuinely excited me and the work felt not just purposeful but inspired, and inspiring. I think when I first met Ana, it was what drew her to me, and me to her: a tide of unfettered will and vivacity, an intense curiosity about things and a sense of determined grace. I was so happy back then. For the first time in my adult life, I felt like I had people around me who understood me, who saw the value in my work, in my values. There was neither pride nor pretence yet. The work mattered to me, and was dignified. I felt real in a very real and unabashed way.

This place that has kept me alive for so long is also killing me in a different way. Slower, subtler, more certain. I’m sure of this now. People have been telling me this for years but I’ve always been too scared, too ashamed of my own inaction and complacency to admit that they’re right. I am decaying in this place, and most days, it no longer feels much like a home but a cell. If Tawanda wasn’t around, I don’t know what I would do. I have finally begun to feel the nascence of growth, I think. The emergent possibility that I not only must but can outgrow this if I want to have any chance of living a life worth living. I miss Ana terribly. I have no choice but to relearn everything.

I got a little bit of writing done today, and spent some time in-engine editing old code. It’s not much, but at this point, I feel like I have to take every bit of progress as a minor triumph against the tide of my despair and inertia. Tawanda and I are going away for the weekend to a poetry conference. I hope I’ll be able to convince him to write with me a bit. It looks like it’s going to rain all throughout the weekend, but we’ll be by the sea.

I’ve been really troubled as of late. More so than usual, at least. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. Constantly agitated, both emotionally and physically. Some days I just wake up and crumble into pieces. Despondent. I was struck today by the sudden desire to start writing again. Maybe I’ve just been spending too much time with Tawanda. I seem to be pathologically incapable of self-improvement.