24 APRIL, 2019 (WEDNESDAY), 4:57 AM: MY LIFE AT THE MOMENT-THOUGHTS ON MARVEL FILMS AND VIDEO GAMES

So I sit here and write. At the moment, I can’t think of anything worth posting.

The words stumble out of me. They do not flow. They are choppy and lumpy.

When I write in the morning, I feel as if I’m writing on a sort of deadline. I want to post something, and I have until about 5:30, when I need to get ready for school.

I look for something to write about.

Still nothing.

I check my email. There is something in there about “Avengers Endgame.” This makes me realize that I have practically fallen off the earth when it comes to pop culture.

Yes, I am aware that “Avengers Endgame” is a big deal. Yesterday I watched a news story about how some people went to a marathon of all the previous Marvel films before watching this one. It amounted to 56 hours of viewing. The movie theater provided showers outside for anyone who needed one, along with yoga instruction, presumably during the Eric Bana version of “The Hulk,” which wasn’t that great.

Okay, so I wasn’t completely in the dark with the Marvel thing.

I do, however, always feel as if I fell behind in the whole comic thing, and never really got a chance to catch up. There are whole swaths of characters in these films I don’t know at all. When I’ve seen a couple of them, people around me have started applauding when characters turn up unexpectedly, especially during the end credits.

At school, I struggle with mixed feeling about the game “Fortnite.” On one hand, some of my students are thrilled that I loaded it onto my phone, and some were talking to me with more enthusiasm than I’d ever seen. On the other hand, it’s a fiercely addictive game with disconcerting violence, and some of the students playing this game are as young as eight years old.

I’m going to check it out this weekend, but I’m already expecting that, surprisingly, I’m going to be bored with it. Okay, I get it...100 players roam around a landscape, finding weapons and supplies so that they can pick each other off. This just doesn’t seem that exciting to me.

It also seems way too complicated for my tastes. Most video games these days require, it seems, more effort to learn them than I expended learning to edit audio and video. So I think to myself: I can spend time creating things, or I can spend time running around in a virtual world, virtually killing people.

Yet I do want to play this game, just to see what all the fuss is about. If there are big issues and concerns with it, I want to be able to discuss those these things as someone who’s familiar with the location of them.

I’ve just checked out the game on my phone. It just seems like a chore to learn how to play it. It is difficult for me to imagine this being any fun.

At the present, I would much rather write blog entries, stories, and songs.

Maybe I’m just not cut out to be all that much into video games. I had an X Box for a while, and loved “Skyrim” and “Resident Evil.” At the same time, I found “Halo” and “Bioshock” kind of boring.

Maybe I’m just not made for these times. I mean, I do love pinball, particularly the newfangled machines that Stern and Jersey Jack are turning out. They, too, are incredibly complicated, with computer chips creating a complex series of tasks in which I find myself occasionally scoring millions of points for unwittingly doing something right.

For now, though, when it comes to video games, I’d just rather learn to play major and minor seventh chords on my guitar.