Tonight I would like to detail a somewhat unusual night I spent in the depths of anxiety and mental illness. The year was 2003, and I was living with Christian in an extremely shitty rundown farmhouse in Lexington. The house had been there for a long time, and the neighborhood had grown up around it. The furniture was extremely decrepit and sparse. The wiring was bad. The telephone jacks didn’t work half the time. And I was in the depths of Insanity. All in all, it wasn’t a very good time for me. But I will detail the 2003 house in a later entry.
At that particular time I was convinced that some ne’er-do-well would bust into my house and rob me at gunpoint, seeking to take away my sweet sweet television and original XBOX. I didn’t realize then that such things bring almost nothing on the black market, and the difficulty in lugging them out generally outweighs the profit to be made from stealing them. Thieves generally go for more portable things: cash, jewelry, CDs, games & DVDs, and laptops. In any case, I was certain I was about to be robbed at any moment.
I thought for certain the attack would come in the wee hours of the morning, and I was deathly afraid that I would be asleep when it happened, unable to call the Police or respond in any fashion. So I determined that I was going to start staying awake all night and sleeping during the day. (I wasn’t working anywhere at the time.) I put a fork under the door (I thought this would form a crude doorstop and prevent any hooligans from entering easily) and began playing through Knights of the Old Republic again. However, I couldn’t make it. I became extremely sleepy and knew that I had to lay down. The problem was, even with the lights on, somebody might suspect that nobody was home and attempt to burglarize the house. To this day I am still terrified at the thought of someone shoving a gun in my face and hurling expletives at me.
So, I exited out of my KOTOR game and went back to the menu. KOTOR had what they call an “attract mode,” where the game would automatically begin cycling through introductory cutscenes if the console was left inactive on the main menu for very long. So, I figured the flashing lights from the television viewable from outside via the front windows would convince any thugs that somebody was watching TV inside, so I left the game running… all night long. I slept very fitfully on Christian’s uncomfortable, flea-riddled couch, and every couple of hours I would wake up to the sights and sounds of the KOTOR cutscenes going in the corner. Each time I awoke I was still filled with mortal terror. I made it through the night, though, and nobody robbed me. I’m sure I felt it was because of my precautions.
Unfortunately, the introductory cutscenes of KOTOR required a lot of reading from disc, so when several months later my XBOX completely crapped out, I suspected that the night of continuous KOTOR Intros was to blame. This contributed to my boredom and depression when I eventually moved back in with Granny Bernadette, since I had absolutely no outlet for videogames at that time. I will talk about living with Granny more in a later entry. That’s about all I have to say about “The Night of KOTOR.”