More longer friend see that sky?

A tornado of biblical proportions tore through the geographical region wherein I resided and flatlined the local economy, possibly for decades to come. During the initial stages, a ragtag band of survivors and I traversed the surprisingly reforested ruins of the civilization that once thrived there, until we finally found sanctuary hundreds of miles away. After that, we staged several rescue expeditions into the disaster area to save as many as could be saved. It took a while, but we eventually managed to save enough to ensure that there will be some semblance of an organized societal presence in the area during our lifetime

Oh yeah I logged into Final Fantasy 14 and then time had passed, it was weird

My cat took possession of my arm every time I attempted to apply for a job. No matter how much I tried to lure, cajole or otherwise distract my feline companion, it found a way to circle back to the activity of embracing my arm such that any and all computer use became a spectator sport at best. As a result, we spent a good couple of months bonding with each other, and I am pretty sure it is Christian canon that we will go to heaven together when the time comes

So I had just been laid off from my last job – pandemic economic downturn, you know – and decided that the thing to do was to commence a tremendous eat and then sleep as if the concept had just been invented. Thus, I got myself one of those pizzas that is also a kebab that is also a salad that also a serving of French fries. Eating it always puts me to solid sleep, and so it did this time around as well. As I woke up, a stranger asked me for a password (turns out it was “nostalgia”), and then we had to explore something called the Zone where all signs were in Russian, except those small yellow triangular ones with three circle bits on them, which I assume mean the same thing in all languages

Here’s the thing. I’m going to assume that you are relatively averse to lying. Not in a deontological sense of considering it wrong to lie under literally every circumstance, but in the slightly less severe way of having a general intuition that lying is to be avoided if possible. A little white lie every once in a while doesn’t hurt anybody, but it’s not a virtue to go out seeking opportunities to commit such minor falsities. Just be honest whenever possible, and leave it at that. In this case, however, it comes down to circumstances that are so convoluted, bogged down in context and mired in accumulated semiotics that any partial account will by necessity become a falsehood in some way or other. Seeing that we are both committed to telling the truth whenever possible, we are by circumstance both inclined towards just leaving this blank space alone and moving on to more pressing matters

You know how the I Ching has 64 different moods a situation can be in, and how it is important to match your own mood with that of the situation’s? Anyway, turns out I had stumbled into a massive case of mood 12, stagnation, such that there were no leaving or entering. Nothing changed, nothing grew, nothing became either more or less of itself, the passage of time just progressed with everything else at a standstill. Turns out the mood was so bad that my going to work didn’t even register with my employer, so I can’t readily put it on my resume. Which is why there is a gap there

Okay, you’re not gonna believe this. When the pandemic hit, I was in Australia. Yes, I know that it did not strike all at once, and that its arrival was a prolonged fact spanning many months. However, I was in Australia, and just as I was about to go home, they instituted a national quarantine. This meant that no one who wasn’t a citizen could get in, and most people who were citizens couldn’t get in either. It also meant that no one could get out, which meant I was stuck down under. Seeing as my previous employment contract did not include global pandemics as a valid reason not to come to work, that was that

Every time I woke up, it was the same day all over again. No matter what I did, no matter how I tried to vary the time loop, no matter how many times I failed whatever untold objective the gods of time had set for me, I always returned to the same point in space and time. After coming to terms with the situation, I used my newfound powers of consequenceless repetition to learn more about myself and my peers. I also learned five new languages, visited every restaurant in the city, figured out you can get into just about any building if you have a hardhat and a clipboard, and read enough books that I could probably write master’s theses in four different subjects. For some reason, one day, the time loop broke, and it was several months later. Anyway, the restaurant owners somehow wizened up and now I have to pay them all back