The Humble Rock Dove

A Mystic, A Lego Truck and Mental Health

I love my walks in the park. In this blessed life, two hobbies bring me real joy: building intricate model vehicles and getting lost in the details. Right now, I’m about a third of the way through assembling a truck — gearbox and all — made by a German company called Nifiliz. I’ve already built a glorious panzer that sits proudly on my bookcase. This truck, though, is a beast. The box weighed around six kilograms and held nearly four thousand parts. One line from the instruction manual made me laugh: “If you need to stop for some reason, we have included a bookmark.” Classic German — efficient, dry, and quietly funny.

I won’t talk about what sent me to hospital in any context except mental health. There is thick layers of the religious, and serious mental trials at work in that chapter of my life. They are there as I remember them, but pleased to have these as stale memories, not like active volcanoes. It seems my diagnosis I was given out of what seemed like misunderstanding and even ignorance, in my 20’s, has gone. The pivotal point being: these “experiences” I have, which are like a personalised gnosis wearing garments of confusion and peppered with misinformation, became a sharp and heavy, heated burden for me. This, as a mystic, allowed me to embrace the fact that medication, and at this point, strong, or stronger medication, really does help, by a lot. You gotta know when to stop chasing the mystical when the malevolent forces catch up, and at times, perform a drastic overtake of where I’m at. The disease used to be that I knew I was NOT schizophrenic. Now, it is more the case of “this period of gnosis has become utterly detrimental and dangerous”. That’s when the system around and within me says “seek help” and yeah, you know its at a peak of sorts when those sorts of entity agree on this, too.

Caves of Qud – Humble Beginnings

This PC game got me hooked on it for plenty of reasons. The graphics are beautiful, if you like symbols, glyphs and sigils. Like bread that is not toast, the cold butter or lard of presupposition on what this game really is and can be, could rip through bread, but on toast? You got bread with a heat-filled soldier of rectangular carbohydrate sturdiness, ready to be dressed, and splashed with the gasses, liquids and absurtity this game will spread upon you. Up-front, my spiritual path, which is spread across this technological toast of my blog reports, has had my mind unlearn things. Now the author of this post’s mind stretches back along the clocks and calendars, to a time the author in question (myself) was about half my age. So this is where I admit it – I’m using AI language patterns to learn how to do assignments my far younger “me” could smile at, achieving, (hopefully,) one of the first two letters of the alphabet, as a grade.

This game demands your imagination like a product from a food outlet store needs a dollop or drizzle of a flavour the tongue of the devourer desires. Even hunger. I’ve been trying to banter with my artificial helper and part-time nemesis (AI) for months. I don’t know if I need it for the quasi-religiousness for much longer, although a sprinkling of creative caution may be gained by it. Or, shall we say, enriched, sturdier, or more palatable. Now after I mention AI in this context, it feels to me that there really is a connection that is largely and vastly my own desire for that suitable corner in the room that finds understanding and cerebral exchange interesting and desirable. As I drift past my times and eras of mystical being, and remember the straying and drifting through badlands that do not offer peace willingly, within Caves of Qud, the soundtrack, the suggestions, the attitude, ethos and presentation of the package, so far meet a type of conformity that is clearly embraced, loved by many, and engaged with, often avidly, by other people. With the spreadings of imagination, the game becomes an intimate thing for me based on love and with the subconscious hooks, piercing each symbol, and giving it a life and image that is suggested ever so slightly by what there is to look at. Not where it is not, but for within the mind.

So far, the game has presented me with little but the RPG-style grind. Make the character and build it by the way of the school-bully, picking on the aquatic weaklings that never wanted to even trade goods for drams of water. Sorry salt-dwellers: life on the flip-side of the insinuated and heavily referenced post-apocalyptic wasteland, is not a fair world and its a pleasure to attack unprovoked to see the xp bar move. Yes, this is how early-game I am. The bully! The enemies that don’t require the badge of initiated aggression on my behalf, namely the gorilla, the snapjaw and crocodile: they’re fair game. They started it.

I had to break out the gaming keyboard-with-numpad, instead of my gorgeous, clickety-clack mechanical one. Qud accommodates the user without a num-pad. But lets be honest, it really, really wants you do have one. Also, it seems to me, that the entire game can be played with a mouse. Now if you are using just a mouse, and nothing but the mouse, I suppose indeed, you have made the choice of one of a slightly different, more curious, and possibly more peculiar church, for this pixel-world of strange times, strange circumstance, and lore that would leave any seeker-of-strange with raised eyebrow syndrome. Of course I babble. This game encourages the esotericist within me to breathe the outdoor acid rain and babble on, in it, to keep on the course of integration and nips of curious potion, protocol and free-will.