Addiction; My dad

I had intentions of actually doing something useful with my time today, but as it turns out, Diablo was a lot tougher than I have ever given him credit for. The other thing that is strange about this game is that it is like a time warp. You can sit down one minute, stand up about four minutes later, and find that you have just pissed away six hours on it. I suppose that the mindset that a serious gamer has when he tries to do ‘just one more’ quest is very similar to the way that the alcoholic needs ‘just one more’ drink. They are both addictions, they both must be sated to make the user happy, and they both ruin families and leave shattered homes in their wake. Though I would like to think that your average Diablo player doesn’t abuse his wife or children as the average alcoholic does.

I could certainly never be a mouth-piece for either side in the addiction category, since I seem to be addicted to both video games and alcohol, but it is certainly an issue that someone should try to tackle at some point. Is it really worse to drink your life away in the real world, or spend your life manipulating pixels to your own end? Each action will result in you dying too early, each will also result in the lack of people that you know (I am not counting on-line contacts there), both addictions are extremely unhealthy, but only one has counselors in place to handle it.

Any addiction is a bad thing. Relying on any substance/stimulus to give you pleasure is always going to result in an addiction. Regardless of what that thing may be you will just want more and more. Eventually the addiction will consume you, and you will die wondering where the hell your life went. If there is any sort of an afterlife, you will look at the time that you spent doing this or that, and wish that you had spent it with your friends and family. At some point it will hit you that you were never able to make time to see your Aunt in Cleveland all those years, yet, somehow you were able to clear your schedule to make it to her funeral. She had been asking you to visit for years, but with work, and your time on-line, you just never found a chance to make it up to her place. That is a shitty position to be in, ehh?

My father taught me a lot and most of it was wrong. One thing that he told me, that I will never forget, is that, “It is better to regret something that you haven’t done than to regret something that you have.” I had really believed that all my life, but I don’t think that I do anymore.

Case 1:

I was sixteen, and I was watching my father die. He had been at home for two days after being released from the hospital, and he was in bad shape. The Hospital had released him to the jail because he had a warrant for his arrest (never found out what that was for, but it was probably a ‘DUI’). The jail would not hold him because he was in a condition where he needed medical attention, so the jail released him to go get medical attention. He ended up at home. He had a punctured lung, which happened to make it past the hospital that day, two broken legs, one broken arm and a broken pelvis. He was casted from head to toe.

This man, the man who started my life, the man who would not walk out the door without cologne, he was going poo in a coffee can (that I had to empty) for those last two days. I knew that he was in a bad way, I wanted to call an ambulance, but he forbid it. I pleaded for him to let me call an ambulance. He would not let me.

Just barely sixteen years old, I watched my father die, knowing that I could have prevented it if I had just disobeyed him and called for medical attention even an hour sooner. There was no one else there, I was the only one that could have done it. God damn it, I let him die…

I think about that damn near every day, it was my fault. I basically made the decision to let him die as opposed to having him be mad at me for calling the ambulance that could save his life. When the ambulance did arrive, he was unresponsive and I didn’t even stay in the room to see if they could revive him, I started calling the relatives to let them know that he had died. I did that while they were still working on him, I knew that he was dead. He made a noise three or four minutes before the ambulance got there that I have never heard in my life, it has never been replicated in a film, it was just a noise that I knew was his last breath. I certainly hope that I will never hear that noise again, as that will mean that I am next to yet another person who is dying. My only hope is that if I do hear that noise again, I will be able to help the person.

Possibly, that is why I think that is better to regret something that you have done, at least you didn’t kill your father.

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