Am I perpetually doomed to adopt the symptoms of the worst character traits of the people I serve in whatever job I call my career? When I was in customer service, I found myself behaving like an entitled prick mouthing off to total strangers like they were itinerant servants who needed to be put in their place. Now, working with the mentally ill, I feel like I'm becoming one of them, slowly but surely.
I talked a couple months ago about my circadian rhythms all a-whack and my psychological dependence on Ambien. Well, I seemed to kick that...got into a good sleep pattern and refused to renew my script for that horrible drug. I hadn't related the actual struggles I was dealing with when I stopped the Ambien...the night (or should I say DAY) sweats, the erosion of a sense of reality and my difficult re-learning of the concept of sleep.
That was, so I thought, all behind me. But now it's back. When I do "sleep", it's only for a maximum of 4 hours a day, and most times I feel like I was just lying there, tossing every half hour or so from one side to another like I was on some hellish rotisserie, roasting over the metaphorical flames of my ever-restless mind.
So now I'm also back to experiencing ripples in the fabric of my reality. Like scenes from "Jacob's Ladder", it's quite simmeringly horrific.
People are staring at me. And they're talking about me. Oh I can't "hear" them, of course. But I know they are. They only react when I do some action. If I choose to say nothing, they act like NPCs in some video game, as if they're programmed only to respond if reacted with.
It probably doesn't help that I'm reading "Ready Player One" on my Kindle Fire. It's a novel set in a dystopian near-future where everyone has given up on their dreary, down-trodden life in the "real world" and adapted to a virtual existence in a perpetual online 3-D digital simulation, ala a grand MMORPG.
Not a totally unique plot point. It's somewhat been done before (think "Matrix" meets "Surrogates") but the author hints that this world-embraced lifestyle is somehow the natural evolution from growing up immersed in the video gaming culture, coming of age in the Ultima Online and World of Warcraft era, and allowing the ubiquity of Internet utilization to infiltrate nearly all facets of our daily functions via ever-increasingly mobile devices. Blend all that with the malaise of a real world of never-ending recession, escalating political and personal violence and a stark awakening to the nihilistic existentialism of a Godless universe and you have this book's 2044.
My ears are constantly ringing and my head hurts. I wonder if it's 'cause I finally "got it"...this is just a simulation. There is no reality. Nothing is real. I feel like I'm on the verge of "figuring it all out".
Oh oh. But they say when you do that, you die.
Oh well, game over, brother. Send in the clowns.