random thoughts – Day 2,124 (Friday) – lost weekend

On this date in 2010, I discovered the video game BioShock. I know this only because Facebook memories showed that my posts for the day had one about there having been three days of snow and only a half inch accumulation, and a second with on word: “BIOSHOCK.” The Tennessee live-in boyfriend had set the game up on the TV in my Tennessee house and told me to check it out. Then he left for the day.

I sat on the couch, completely absorbed in the underwater world of Rapture all day, my brain on some sort of autopilot mode, hypnosis, suspended animation, or something. Maybe it was some form of brain shock. And by “all day,” it was all the daylight hours from morning into the evening, except for the briefest of bathroom breaks for myself and for Moose. I didn’t even eat. It was bizarre, because in real life, I don't like being underwater and underwater scenes in movies make me anxious, yet, for an entire day, I was absorbed and anxious in an underwater scenario and had no desire to turn off the game.

Boyfriend returned from work some eight or nine or ten hours later, saw me still on the couch and BioShock still on the TV and laughed that I had been in an underwater video world all day. I played that game all that weekend and then, thank goodness, it disappeared from the house. I never saw it again, but I still remember the weird, out-of-body sensation of being sucked into the graphics and losing an entire weekend.

Fast forward 14-ish years. I found a cool framed poster in a St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Shop and bought it because I liked the retro style of the artwork. It didn't hurt that it was also half-off a low price and practically free. The poster is for Electro Bolt, and states “Don't be a Dolt Use Electro Bolt – Evolve Today!”

It sat in a storage stack for 18 months, artwork without a wall, until I moved this past summer and found the perfect spot for it. Initially, I wanted to use it to decorate the panel to the electrical box, but the size is wrong. Instead, it hangs on a wall in my laundry room several feet away from the electrical panel box and holds the honor of being the first piece of decor hung in the house. I finally researched the poster and learned it is from BioShock, for which I still remember that very odd lost winter weekend spent on a retreat in a video game, but next to nothing about the specific game elements.