I struggle sometimes with being happy in the minute and the hour. I sometimes take my life for granted. I feel bored, apathetic, and directionless sometimes. I don’t exactly feel depressed; it’s more like a feeling of not knowing what I am doing, what I should be doing, and what I should be aiming to do next.
I can look out my window and see the spire of the majestic stupas of Chiang Mai’s historic temples. I can look next to me to see Queen Nazz sleeping next to me. I can plant a kiss on her lips and then go to the kitchen to see the leftover chicken soup she made for me sitting on the stove for breakfast. In the laundry room, the sexy webbed tights she wore when she went with me to the music bar yesterday are hanging to dry after I washed them by hand last night. The tights that got all sweaty. The ones she stuck in my face and rubbed across my nose after we got back from the bar.
I have a great life. Oh, it’s not perfect. There are some things I am working to improve and other things I dream about. But there’s a lot to love about my life.
But sometimes I wake up in the morning, scroll social apps, aimlessly watch YouTube videos, then open Retro Bowl football. After I throw a pick-six on extreme mode, I get frustrated and quit the game.
It’s not the game I am frustrated with. It’s not my life I’m frustrated with. It’s how I am living my life. Or, rather, not living it.
So I walk down the stairs and outside. My apartment is at the end of a long road with many hostels, restaurants, bodegas, language schools, and small businesses. I walk down the road, watching as maintenance workers pull tools out of their trucks, students walk to class at the Thai and Korean language schools, and tourists drink coffee outside. I look at the view of the Doi Suthep mountain. I can see the mountain relatively clearly. Smoky season is ending.
I walk under the flowers clinging to the powerline across the road. I smile at the street cats playing.
I think, “This is so routine. I walk this road almost everyday.” (Almost? You should walk on it every day if you are living your life.)
“So? What were you doing before you walked out?”
Playing a phone game.
“You play that phone game every day, don’t you?”
Most days.
“It’s the same every time, isn’t it? You are pretending to be a team of 8-bit pixelated football players. You are controlling them as they walk across the football field.”
So what if, as I was walking down the hostel street towards the temple that I could see from my window, I was just playing the P1 character of Ari navigating his way in the world? So what if I was just controlling my character as I walked down a street? If it’s all the same, at least Ari on the road was playing a real-life RPG.
I went to the temple, the temple I’ve been to so often, and I bowed down before the stupa. I prayed to thank Guanyin for giving me this life. I thanked her for placing me inside this game and making me be a main character.
It’s easy to “fall into routines.” It’s essentially part of life. Most of the quests we embark on in this grand video game are about acquiring resources to keep our characters alive.
Sometimes you really need to fundamentally change your life. Sometimes you need a break; take a vacation or moving to a new city. But you don’t have enough resources to always take vacations, and when you move to a new city, you’ll just get bored of it soon enough, too. Even if you vacation all the time, you’ll start to treat that as a routine.
Routines aren’t so bad. You don’t “fall into” a routine unless you treat it as such. Is it so bad that I have a routine of giving Nazz massages before bed and licking her pussy?
But the good things in life only become a boring routine if you make them so. Or if you refrain from even engaging in them because you yourself became cold to life. If I stayed on my couch and kept playing the fake game rather than engaging in the real game.
So, thank you, Guanyin, for making me realize I should cherish my life. Life may be a game, but it’s the best game there is. We must remind ourselves of that everyday, and we must play the game with passion.
I highly recommend the film _Perfect Days_. It speaks to much of this, and how we can find wonder in routine. https://youtu.be/QzZBbX5A1FA?si=mvClVykza9cKhtfF
Yes, this. I think too many men fritter away their lives online, whether gaming or role playing sex with strangers. Especially true of aspiring malesubs, alas.