Digital Diversion 1
The Trident Plan
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Chapter 1 Surrender
Jim sat alone in the dark, the computer screen the only light in the room. Rows of old game icons glowed back at him, tiny relics from a life he’d abandoned. Each one stirred something different: nostalgia, embarrassment, longing. He hovered over them, touching old self-inflicted scars.
He created three folders: Try Again, Maybe, and Trash. Then he began sorting. It felt mechanical, but not simple. Every drag of an icon was a decision, a promise, a sacrifice.
This wasn’t a sentimental trip down memory lane. Jim was preparing for a return. After years of avoiding anything that smelled like addiction, he was planning to let gaming back in. His counselors, “quasi-therapists,” as he called them, had suggested he find healthy distractions. So he built a three-part plan. Gaming was the first prong, the center pillar. He told himself it was self-care. A way to stay clean. A way to stay busy enough not to fall apart.
As he sorted, his mind trudged through the rest of the plan. The base was no alcohol, his primary weakness, with a side effect of reducing the chances for making other unhealthy choices.
If he could just keep himself occupied, maybe his life would stop fishtailing. The thought made him sweat lightly, a jittery tingling under his skin. The stirrings of his inner beasts.
The second prong was writing. Back in the day, he’d loved the strange alchemy of gaming and blogging. How a good writer could make a mediocre game feel like a revelation. Comment sections had been their own kind of sport. But the landscape had changed. Now it was all videos, all the same formula: forced enthusiasm, pleas for subs and likes, filler, filler, filler. He wasn’t ready to wade into that.
He’d talk to his friend Samuel tomorrow. Samuel had been a real blogger, someone with a following, someone who understood the old world. If anyone could help him figure out where writing fit now, it was him.
And then there was Marge, real name Marjorie, keeper of the third prong: art. Jim hadn’t drawn since middle school. The idea of starting again felt enormous, almost absurd. But maybe that was the point.
He dropped the last icon into its folder and exhaled. The task had been simple, but it drained him. It felt like the first honest step toward sobriety he’d taken in a long time: admitting he had problems he couldn’t control, and trying, however clumsily, to surrender to a plan that might keep him alive.
He leaned back. Headlights from passing cars swept ghostly refractions through his apartment windows across the walls, making giant, translucent icons drift across the room
A wave of dizziness passed over him. Enough for tonight. Tomorrow he’d meet Samuel. He needed perspective. He needed someone to tell him what he wasn’t seeing.
His instincts were right, but incomplete. He didn’t know it yet, but he was already deep in the psychological stage called ‘Idealization’, where one overstates the positive and understates the negatives of an idea.
The plan he’d built to save himself was already choosing the order in which it would break him.
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