The Playdate is an odd little 1-bit black-and-white video game system that I ordered in the midst of lockdown. It was $179 and I justified it thinking my son would also enjoy it, but sadness-purchases are pretty easy to justify.
My current joy is “Mars After Midnight”, by Lucas Pope, who is probably most notable for “Papers, Please", a game I didn’t play to completion, that’s still stuck with me for 10 years. In this one, you run a community support center on Mars, you set the program to help angry cyclopses or shy smilers or colonists with gigantic spacesuits, let the right ones into the meeting, provide food and garner some donations.
Still five more slices of dune bug pie
Much of the game - a lot of the game - involves cleaning up after these messy freaks. You use your tentacles to pick up all these leftovers, clean the table and reset the station to match the picture in the background. It doesn’t really matter how long it takes. That alone makes “Mars After Midnight” a pretty good simulation of recovery. Today I lost track of time playing “Mars” and had to log on to my noon AA meeting remotely because I no longer had time to drive. I also feel like I should volunteer for some shifts at my recovery club’s coffee bar.
Still, I logged in because I was brutally sad. At 3:30 on Sunday my son, age 6, jumped off a bench at me, shouting “prank attack”, bounced off me and scraped the back of his head on the corner of the bench. He bled a lot, but it was just a shallow, if wide, scrape. He was scared by the blood, but fine afterwards, no signs of concussion, and promised to never launch another prank attack.
5:00 is my drop-off time, and he was still a little down as his mom and I discussed whether he needed stitches or not. He and I hugged, he went in, normal enough goodbyes, but the pain of not being able to be with him through the evening, to put him to bed, to see how it’s feeling in the morning, to tell him not to pick at the scab, to watch him forget it even happened…
Earlier that day we went to an outdoor coffee place where, last time we went, we met a mom and her 6-year-old son and they became immediate friends. I traded numbers with the mom, who was single, and we had a nice text exchange about meeting up, but when I followed up to schedule a playdate, she never responded.
Learning self-respect is a big part of my recovery, so I didn’t send another text.
I told myself her radio silence wasn’t a referendum on me. OK, I googled myself to make sure there wasn’t something awful about me online, but THEN I accepted it wasn’t about me.
I didn’t even mention the two of them to my son, since I hadn’t heard back, but he kept asking about his friend, the other 6-year-old. Was he going to be there? Could he come over to our house so I can show him my room? Maybe they’re only there when the coffee place is hosting a tent sale. You should text his mom. I bet they’ll be here if we sit in the same spot as last time. I want to leave now.
I’m pretty old-fashioned at AA. I don’t signpost it, but when I share, I follow the experience-strength-hope template. But today I want to substitute joy for hope. I want to accept joy without expecting more joy. I want to be comfortable with the fleeting nature of joy. Hope can eat a bee.
Decades ago, one college day, just before lunch, I walked towards the cafeteria. It was just 11, and the common area was pretty empty. A woman, walking at least 5 MPH, zipped past me, chanting under her breath, “Horseshoe sandwich, horseshoe sandwich” in time with her steps. A horseshoe sandwich, for those of you who haven’t spent time in Central Illinois, is open-faced toast topped with fries and ham, covered in liquid cheese. She was filled with hope, and that hope was about to turn to joy.
I retitled this photo “oh no”
I thought of her as I pulled the leftover fries from the weekend with my son out the fridge. I always have queso on hand because I live in Austin. So I made the sandwich, I cleaned up my own mess and now I feel a little sick.
I wonder how she’s doing. I wonder how everyone is doing.
Carsten René Nielsen, from “Forty-One Objects”
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