Medifast Status: Day 243, Down ~72lbs
Just a lazy New Year’s Day around the Grice household. We hung out most of the day not doing too much of anything. I got my car packed and planned to head out this evening to go back up to Carrollton. Dominica and the girls are going to drive up tomorrow to join Oreo and I.
We spent the day mostly with Francesca playing Fable II. She is making good progress on it now and the end of the game is in sight. Like me, she has spent most of her life playing video games without ever having completed one. Having never completed one she really doesn’t know how good they can be when you live through tens of hours of a story and get to see it come to fruition – an adventure in which you have played a pivotal role.
The only games that I finished when I was younger along these lines were some of the King Quest games, Black Cauldron, The Faery Tale Adventure, Pool of Radiance, Deja Vu and Uninvited. Those stick out in my memory as rare games that I played all the way through when I was in my tweens and early teens. During my college years I played through Earthbound and ChronoTrigger on the Super Nintendo but that was about it. Out of all of the tons and tons of games that I have played over the years, most of them story-driven adventure and role playing games, only those few have I completed end to end. There are, most certainly, a few others that I do not remember. But they were few.
Then a few years ago I played through Dragon Quest VIII on the PS2 and got to see what a modern game last nearly one hundred hours can be like when played all of the way through and I’ve been hooked. Games have really improved over the years. Now I complete video games pretty regularly and try very hard never to play a game without intended to complete it.
We also played some board games this afternoon with Madeline and Emily. I actually managed to beat Dominica, the reigning champion, at a game where you basically play twenty questions with a card on your forehead trying to figure out “what you are.” Headbandz or something like that. Madeline got it for Christmas.
It was about nine when I left to drive Oreo and I up to Carrollton. I stopped at Panda Express, just down the street from the Grices’, but it had closed just minutes before – hence why I knew that it was nine o’clock when I had left. So I went to McDonald’s next door and got myself some fillet o’fish sandwiches. Not on diet at all but it was the best that I could do under the circumstances – I was quite hungry and had not had a meal all day. It would be a long drive without any food.
I finished reading “A History of the World in Six Glasses” on the drive up. Then I moved on to listening to “On the Road: The Original Scroll” by Jack Kerouac, considered to be one of the classics of American literature and the seminal work of the beatnik movement and one of the foundations of the hippy movement. I have been meaning to listen to this book for a while. It has been sitting in my library just waiting for me to give it a listen for over a year, most likely.
I listened to a bit of “On the Road” and must say that it is absolute garbage. The writing of the book is poor, at best, and the story itself is boring beyond belief. It is just some ineloquent ramblings of an extremely uninteresting person and his impoverished and unimpressive group of “friends.” Mostly just people too poor and uninteresting to find themselves anyone else to hang out with.
I suppose I can only complain so much, I do have a really boring blog many, many times the length of “On the Road” and I am not hampered by having to write the whole thing on a typewriter as Kerouac did. But in no way would I just take my blog and bind it as a novel and call it literature. That anyone published this book is insane and that anyone bought it just blows my mind. Not the worst thing that I have ever read but it is certainly close to it.
I am reading the original scroll version of the book – in the scroll, which was written as a single paragraph, the original names and edits are left in. The book that most people read is a slightly modified book with all of the names changed to protect the people too embarrassed to be identified as the losers in the book. The scroll is slightly longer and is supposed to read slightly better than the edited novel version. Although I imagine that having paragraphs helps. How anyone can write a twelve hour long book in a single paragraph is beyond me. That’s not impressive at all.