Here it is the 14th of November, and I
haven’t finished reading even one book. Part of the problem is the
Burton biography; I’m trying to finish it before going on to anything
else, and while Burton’s life was the stuff of adventure, the bio is
nothing like a novel. I sometimes wonder why I bother reading
biographies; I don’t care for tragedy, and most bios end only with the
death of the principal.

But it wouldn’t be fair to blame the whole thing on poor old Richard
Burton. A lot of blame has to be put squarely on our Nintendo GameCube.
I bought it six months or so ago; I thought the kids would enjoy it, and
I’d get to play it, too. The way it actually worked out is that I play
it and the kids watch.

“GAUNTLET: Dark Legacy” is one of the games I’ve been working my way
through. It’s surprisingly fun considering that the graphics are a
couple of generations behind the GameCube’s best output, and the user
interface is a disaster. As you go along you collect power-ups of
various kinds, and after nearly completing the game I still have no idea
how to figure out reliably what power-ups I have with me at any given
time.

It’s your basic “dungeon crawl”. You’re playing a mean, nasty, violent,
hair-trigger, suspicious sort of person, which is a good thing because
the world is full of nasty monsters trying to kill you. I find this sort
of thing relaxing. It lets my back brain freewheel on whatever problems
it’s working on, while my conscious brain works off stress. Sometimes in
the evening I’ll tell Jane, “Jane, I’m going to go upstairs and kill
things.” She says, “Have fun, dear.”

I’ve doubtless now lost the respect of many of my long-time readers by
making this admission; ah, well. If I get to feeling anxious about it, I
know the cure.