Last night as I was falling asleep, preparing for another rousing night of disaster nightmares I began to reminisce a little bit about how much I enjoyed my time on Siren Isle. And then I sort of, you know, remembered that Siren Isle is a made up place in an online game called EverQuest. But for a minute there I thought “Man, it was really peaceful there on Siren Isle and you could just watch the ships sail by and listen to the waves lapping at the shore. I should go back.”
It’s the little things like this that make me question my sanity on a daily basis.
That said, the years I spent playing EverQuest from about 1999 to 2002 or so made a pretty deep impact. I think if you spend that much time doing anything it’s going to leave a mark, or at least that’s what I tell myself. We’re talking 8+ hours a day for years at a time. Yea, it’s a game and it’s fantasy and all that but it’s still a real amount of time doing some kind of task.
Anyway, there’s lots of things that remind me of the parts of EverQuest I spent a lot of time in. Especially music. I’ve talked on this blog many times about how important music is to me, and I definitely associate parts of my life and different experiences with what music I was listening to at the time. One of the most powerful is Mr. Bungle. If I listen to anything by Mr. Bungle I get serious flashbacks to my first apartment and powerleveling my EverQuest character Dunlain by making and selling Tumpy Tonics.
And the disaster nightmares bit? For some reason for the last three nights I’ve had these nightmares about disasters happening to me. Sunday night I was driving my RX-8 down Main Street in my old home town of Mantua, NJ and the front window started fogging up. It got worse and worse and no matter what I did it kept fogging. And then all the other windows did. So I turned on my hazards and tried to pull over and someone plowed into me doing something like mach 3.
Tuesday night I was in a giant train wreck.
And last night was the best. I was in a huge auditorium to see Nine Inch Nails. It looked like a really large high school auditorium. So Trent comes out and the lights go down. He has these two giant bass drums on the floor and he has these big sticks he starts hitting them with. For some reason I had planned to play along so in the aisle in front of me I had my own bass drums and giant sticks. So a few minutes into the song someone to the right screams “Fire!” and everyone panics. While everyone is running for the fire exits a bunch of people trip over my drums. Aside from the doors being stuck for a minute everyone makes it out okay.
Tonight I’m hoping for something space related. I love space.