So my 46th birthday has come and gone. As per usual, I took the week off and played video games. The primary focus of this time was spent on Armored Core 6, a mech-focused game by FromSoftware of Dark Souls fame. It’s an excellent pastime, and even though I suck at it, I’m having a blast (pun intended) blowing stuff up with mechs.
Unfortunately during my second playthrough in pursuit of the second of three possible endings, I noticed a lot more eye floaters than usual and a weird squiggle of bright light in the periphery of my right eye.
I took a week off of work for my birthday, and as can probably be expected, I spent much of that playing games.
Stray Being in a cat-like mood, I started with Stray.
Meow
It’s a relatively short 7-10 hour game where you control a cat on a quest to rejoin its friends after being separated from them. Like any cat, you can’t talk and must interact with objects using only your mouth and claws.
The man stared weary ‘cross the valley
o’er all that he had wrought,
what he had yet still to do,
and felt a yawning despair overtake him.
– Anonymous Forty-five years, eh? Malformed though I am, I somehow surpassed my expectations to reach this point, and it’s certainly been an interesting life thus far. College, marriage, a few books, and perhaps even the pinnacle of my career, and then what?
Though I don’t quite know the exact day Luna was born, I know it was some time in late August of 1999. This means a cat I adopted shortly after I graduated from college is now 21 years old.
I had just brought Luna home.
When I stop to think about it, that’s a staggeringly long time. Up until now, the oldest cat I’d ever seen was my grandma’s cat Boo-Boo, a beautiful Russian Blue she found playing in one of her wood piles one day.
People are so blind to their own flaws. Through certainly no bastion of saintliness, I try to at least remember to listen. It’s better to be wrong and learn, than remain steadfast in my ignorance. And there is always so much left to learn. May there be so many mistakes yet to come.
On the cusp of my 41st birthday, it’s inevitable that a certain amount of melancholy or nostalgic regret seizes my attention.
