Paddleboat Galactica
In my ever crippling, blistering, soul shearing, mind erasing, crushing, spirit annihilating depression, I’ve taken to playing Tetris. For about 18 hours a day.
It’s fun, Tetris. The blocks move and dance almost hypnotically. The colors are pretty. The noises are nice. It plays that cool little Russian ditty. And if you play long enough, you enter the T-Hole – a place where the world ceases to be, and you become the blocks, falling, falling, falling…
It reminds me of life. For a while, it’s pretty entertaining. You get into a groove. You nail every move. You can do no wrong. You are the conductor of a geometric symphony, and every note is perfection. The first movement is adagio, slow and relaxed. And without even noticing it, you’ve reached the allegro movement.
Then… something goes wrong.
You got overconfident. You started moving too fast. Drunk on confidence, you made a hasty decision. Now there’s a void in the grid that you can’t reach. You fight to repair the damage, but in your panic-stricken state, you’ve only made it worse. Blocks that were once ordered and harmonious are jumbled and filled with even more holes beyond hope of rescue, and your cup is on the verge of running over. That’s normally a good thing. Here it’s not.
There’s a point at which you stop looking ahead, because all you can do is cling to each moment, every shape that appears on the screen, try your best to save yourself, to clamber out of the pit. You were waiting for that four-by-one block, but it never showed up. You just needed one right-facing L block to stop the hemorrhaging, but all you got were the left ones.
And even though you know it’s futile, you resist. Until the bitter end, against all possibility of success, you move blocks left and right without thought or care. There you stand, careworn and alone, in the emptiness of the final moment of the final movement. Prestissimo. All you cling to is the vain hope that something will go right. That you will accidentally complete some line and watch it disappear, get your bearings and get things under control. Maybe the right block will appear.
But it never will.
