Dead Space and other Tales
“That game came out when we were like, 20.” —one helpful husband.
It is both delightful and painful to my senses to note that I have been avoiding beginning again. The ambient horror score of a particularly squelchy soundtrack sails through my headphones like a jellyfish tentacle, I am in a state of shock.
Dead Space is a difficult game and is made that much harder by its atmosphere. A survival game with horrific creatures that pop out of nowhere with scythes for arms and biting jaws. They grapple you from behind, drop from ceilings, or burst from the wall like juggernauts to kill you.
You are aboard a ship. In this instance, it’s in space. But it’s the same existential horror of being lost in space, or lost at sea—if you like—and you are not alone. Regardless of terrain, it is the familiar endless expanse within which something is hunting you at an alarming pace and you are out of your depth.
This is not unfamiliar as a feeling in daily life.
I have many things to balance, and often fail at doing so. Scales is written down, waiting to be transcribed. For whatever reason, I can’t do it yet. All I can do is set up my computer to try again. But, I figured I’d share a story of some sort today that is less grief-stricken and more of the philosophy that supports the usual sad-struck-content…
Because I think some people miss the point of horror. I think there are many horror movies that display this fault. But we don’t have to talk about that. Let’s talk about the other side of horror: joy.
A Spider named Sadie.
Sadie was, by all accounts, entirely too small. Her mandibles waving against too strong winds from the exhales of my chewing. It’s lunch time and the weather hadn’t yet broken its overcast morning with rain. It takes a moment for me to register the tiny movements, but soon I can sense that I am not alone.
I put down my spoonful of grits to find, confidently charging at my right thigh, a small jumping spider. If you’re unfamiliar, they seem to be everywhere and nowhere. They feel friendly because they often move their mandibles like little pistons, prodding and processing the world around them. They wave their little arms in the air as if to say: “hello!,” or “HEY!,” or “AH!,” I imagine.
“I am not a giant to be defeated, little one.” I joked, taking another bite of grits. Wondering out loud, “…can spiders eat grits?”
Sadie, still, carries on with her charge. Darting forward, then back, while I try to make a safe pathway for this new tiny friend to me, but still unfamiliar to them.
It feels like a spoof on Shadow of the Colossus, with the spider as the protagonist and myself as the unwilling-to-be-your-enemy, enemy. Eventually, I offer her a hand.
Nope. Too much, too fast.
“Okay, not that yet. Maybe some reading material instead?” And offer a bridge with a book, a few essential writings that bring levity to my day.
This is accepted.
She scurries around the words like rocks in a river being rushed. She jumps. She waves. She looks at me.
I wave. Gently, so. Like a reed in the water. I don’t aim to disturb the surface completely, but only to make a small ripple emphatically. Empathetically, so, with this too small creature.
“You’re a pretty cool lady, Sadie.” I say quietly. Dancing gingerly with my index finger, mimicking her movements in a duet.
“Ooo!”
She’s on my hand. Quickly, she runs up my forearm and makes a break for my elbow, following the flowering lines in my tattoos like a race track. I alter the track by offering the other hand as to not lose her immediately in the layers of hoodie, oversized tee, and baggy sweats perfumed in coffee oils and chaff. Each layer a sound proofing against the incessant, but necessary and welcome, whirring of a coffee roaster and the ripping of tape-guns across hundreds of cardboard boxes. Packers suctioning crowds of beans to load and seal for transport. And the dreaded drop of the de-stoner.
Endless, fricative, frenetic energies being transferred and suspended in the thick, dusty air we work in every day.
I slowly get up with Sadie in my left hand, hopefully moving her to a safer locale. I’m not interested in having her murder on my mind. I am simply too sensitive for that.
See below:
She refuses the change in venue, waving at me in protest as if this green room was simply not up to par. So, back to the table we went.
My water bottle, a key accessory for any anxious, dehydrated persons catches the eye of its new conqueror. Sadie makes a break to scale this new obstacle in a race to the top.
I cover the part of the nozzle that would surely swallow her whole as she gleefully begins to spin a web.
“Ooo, girl. We can’t do that. You can’t live there.”
She protests. I try and encourage her to go to the more stable umbrella. A lovely alternative.
Absolutely not, apparently.
She repels off of my hand and swings her little butt back to my Dollywood water bottle, adorned in roses and butterflies in a deep navy background. She gets to the top, and she begins again.
“Ma’am, this is a bit silly. You will die if I let you do this.”
My talent with languages does not serve me well, here. I have yet to master interspecies communications with the Arachnids.
I deter the web again and she decides to then yo-yo between my fingers in irritation. At this point, I’m laughing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something so small throw such a clear tantrum.
But one has to respect her instinct to take up space, regardless of what’s in her way.
And what a delight it was for her to be so annoyed with me, but still want to be in the same space as me.
Eventually, our argument ends. I move her to the umbrella to hang under its canopy when the rain finally drops.
Lunch is over.
Wake up, time to die.
Things on Thoughts:
You cannot smash your way through a task list the size of a building without doing significant damage to your own foundations. Talk with the site manager about your structures. That would be you. Your self-sabotaging brain is a guy in a trailer on a project site doing literally fuck-all, if you’re in a state of suffering. Find them, talk to them.
Finish the project.