Fuckinorrible

...and then I looked at my e-mail address, and saw:

Giant rat, giant ant worker, farmer, cobra, me, giant rat, giant ant worker, farmer, farmer, yellow light (invading from Nethack, perhaps?), cobra, gnoll, Torgall the dwarven innkeeper, hill orc sergeant, cobra, farmer, unoccupied square of dungeon floor, shadow centipede, hill orc sergeant, mimic.*

Add ADOM, subtract sleep--try it yourself. You'll see.

I haven't slept since last I wrote (and a day or two before that, to boot). I wouldn't say I'm precisely awake any more, not in the conventional sense of the word. On the one hand, I'm intensely awake, janglingly awake, all wide eyes and frozen grin, as relaxed as your average twelve-inch 'fro. (Witness the worst simile in the history of the English language, there.) On the other hand, I'm not even vaguely alert. I read a whole book last night, and all I remember about it is that it was spectacularly boring. It was about personal financial planning. Ordinarily, I'd be asleep in minutes, reading something like that.

When I'd finished with the book, the boring, boring book, I stared emptily at the ceiling for half an hour, allowing myself to feel the full extent of my boredom. That was what the little narrator in my head kept telling me I was doing, anyhow, in an owlish sort of voice. Do I say all my arrs as doubleyous in the real world? Because my inner voice does. I think it always has. (Hey, fuck off, you with the butterfly net over there. I'm not confessing to hearing voices, or anything gitchy like that. I just mean that one voice, the one everyone's got, droning on from the cradle to the grave: "...and then I looked at my e-mail address, and

[to my great bamboozlement]

--no--

[to my complete astonishment]

--no--

...and then I looked at my e-mail address, and saw:")

Oh, right. Anyhow. My e-mail address. I stared at the ceiling for half an hour, listening to that one little soundbite, which went something like this: Fuckinowwible.** That was fuckinowwible. Wight. Just stay put for a while, and feel the wuinous depths of the bowedom. Fuckinowwible. That was fuckinowwible. Wight. Just stay put for a while, and feel the wuinous depths of the bowedom. Fuckinowwible. That was... --and then I got up and started playing ADOM, seeing as the sandman was still on the skyve.

ADOM, for the uninitiated, is the ultimate ASCII dungeon crawl. (Or, for the incredibly uninitiated, it's this funny wee game where you go around killing monsters in a character-map based environment. Or...aw, fuck it. ADOM:

That little white @ sign on the left, there, that's me. I am a thirty-third level grey elven priest. The @ sign off to the right is some old barbarian. We're standing in a beautiful clearing. Or that's what all those lines of dots and Ts and equals signs are meant to signify, anyhow. Most of the game is more greyish, though, being as it takes place in vast underground dungeons full of monsters. The monsters are, for the most part, represented by letters of the alphabet. Take the lowercase "r", for example. That's my favourite one. If you're standing next to an r, you're actually face to face with one of the following unsavoury critters:

A rat
A giant rat
A vapor rat
A chaos rat
A wererat
Any of various types of ratling (swordsmen, archers, traders, master thieves, raving loonies, et cetera)
A giant raccoon
A battle bunny (available in mutated or regular)

Worthy of note: eating regular rats induces vomiting in most characters, but giant rats are A-OK. (Stella, beware!)

Returning to the subject at hand, when confronted with a monster, the usual response is to attack it by repeatedly pressing the arrow keys in its general direction. If you're a bit of a wussy, of course, you could also run away and zap it with a wand from a distance, but when you're as tired as I am, you don't bother. There could be an emperor moloch backed by a bristling phalanx of balors coming at you, and you'd just sit there calmly, beating doggedly away at 'em till they turned your dragon scalemail into a dragon sieve (and you right along with it).

So, as I was saying, I finished up with my boring book, put in a bit of quality ceiling-staring time, and then I looked at my e-mail address, and saw:

Giant rat, giant ant worker, farmer, cobra, me, giant rat, giant ant worker, farmer, farmer, yellow light (invading from Nethack, perhaps?), cobra, gnoll, Torgall the dwarven innkeeper, hill orc sergeant, cobra, farmer, unoccupied square of dungeon floor, shadow centipede, hill orc sergeant, mimic.

Yeah, that's right. I saw my e-mail address and freaked out because I thought I was surrounded by monsters. So persistent was the delusion, indeed, that I started banging away on the right arrow key, and kept at it for several seconds.

As I played ADOM, my mind wandered randomly, visiting favourite places and dangerous uncharted territories with equal abandon.

Favourite Places: Wow. This game is, like, the last word in chase scenes, dude! I mean, there you are, this crazy little @ sign--what in heaven's name possessed you to enter the Drakalor Chain in the first place? I mean, there's thugs and criminals everywhere, no decent-sized cities to speak of, and let's not forget the horrendous chaos plague that happens to be sweeping the land. And there you are, picking your way across the Drakalorian equivalent of the Himalayas with nothing but a bit of crappy traveling equipment to your name. What are you thinking? Major wrong turn, man, let me tell ya. And now you're booting arse down a darkened corridor with beeswax in your ears and a dead dragon on your back. Will you kill the Banshee before she kills you? Can you evade the ancient chaos wyrm, or will he follow you all the way to the surface? And how friendly are these living trees, anyhow? Hey, that's not the sky. Where do you think you're pointing with that branch? Aaaaaaiiiieeeee!

You run and run and run, over lichen and bracken and sprawling herb gardens. (Yes. Herb gardens.) You explore underwater caverns and the insides of monumental trees. You fall through cracks in the earth and holes in the ground, and fight in grand colosseums. You hide from giants in the dustiest, most whispery library in all creation. (You have to hide, because fighting could be too loud. Utter one word, and...you can't get the book that doesn't really do anything. You've got to get it anyhow, of course, so you can say you did.)

Dangerous Uncharted Territories: I wonder if I could sleep now. How about now? How about now? Ha, ha. That reminds me of all those nights I spent playing Baldur's Gate with my ex. Aw, man. Where'd he come from, invading my thoughts? I hadn't thought of him in ages. What a pain.

(Think about something else.)

Baldur's Gate wasn't that great, anyhow. Fallout was better, and I played that one without him. I got Fallout just after I moved here the first time, I think. The same day I had my fortune told on Granville Island. Put me right off fortune tellers, that did. I thought they were supposed to be fun, all those carnie types. What was it, again, my fortune? Well, there was the Death card in my immediate future, except it was upside-down. It would've been good, see, if it hadn't been upside down. All Death means is change, she said, but when it's upside down, it's just about the worst sign you can get, especially when you get...when you get...

What was it, the Devil? The Empress? I can't remember. At any rate, the next card didn't look so brilliant, either, and the long and short of it was that everything was about to collapse in a hurry, and stay collapsed for ages.

"That can't be true," I told the fortune teller. "I just got everything I ever dreamed of. Handed to me on a silver platter, it was. Got married last month, got accepted at Emily Carr--the worst's long done with."

"I hope you're right," she said, shrugging noncommittally as she folded her cards back into their velvet pouch.

"I'm right," I said, confidently.

That was September of 1998.

Fortune tellers, fortune tellers--who believes in that rubbish, anyhow? Yikes. That r is about to take my leg off. Pesky r. Take that! And that! I hit the r full force and transform him into a mangled heap. Transform? Sounds like I hit him with a magic wand, there, rather than a great honkin' battle mace. I think "reduce" would be a better word...

...and just like that, my thoughts are back on level ground, away from black holes and fortune tellers and other such hazards.

One final observation before I make another doomed effort to get to sleep: making raspberry sounds at Stella gets her mad.

* A thousand bonus dork points to anyone who can tell me what colour my e-mail address was probably written in at the time, based on monster selections--without having to look it up. And if anyone'd started wondering what I was going to do about the "y" by the time they got to the first farmer, well, you, sir, are an even bigger dork than I am. (It didn't occur to me till the cobra. That I've never seen any monsters represented by lowercase "y"s in ADOM, that is.)

** I've really got to stop saying "fuckinorrible" like that. Even if I don't mix up my arrs and my doubleyous, it sounds dead common. It's two words, that is. Fucking. Horrible.