I’ve been a little scattered lately. Unfocused. Know the feeling?

These past thirteen weeks have been a bit of sensory deprivation for me – a soothing environment in which to be comfortable while virtually everything I ever thought I knew for sure proved merely a hunch, while I learned that in my life I’ll probably always be more wrong than right.

A tough pair of pills to swallow. The best sugar to help it down?

You guessed it.

Video games.

Video games and old movies. And also socializing, reading, writing, job searching and yours and mine and everyone else’s share of daydreaming and considering. But mostly video games and old movies. Anything to recapture the nostalgia of my childhood, the one I’ve been trying to rearrange in my head such that I can move on to a healthier, happier life.

There are many reasons why Back to the Future is my favorite movie, and Lea Thompson is but four of them.

I must confess my lowest ebb: Implanting new memories alongside those that already exist in my newly defragmented hard drive/brain area.

I never really played the first Legend of Zelda. I was the coolest square on the block when I got its sequel, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. But I never played the first one more often than occasionally at my friend’s house. It was one pop culture phenomenon that passed me by.

So I found it on my computer – I not so long ago downloaded all the Nintendo games, they take up like 1.44 MB of space, it’s really quite horrifying – and I played it. And I cheated my little tush off in beating it by saving my steps after every positive turn.

It wasn’t pretty, and the lack of discipline took, oh, all the fun out of it. But I felt like I belonged. Twenty years ago.

And if the first Zelda and Back to the Future are what it finally took to get me in touch with a broker and thus an apartment in Queens, then so fucking be it, naysayers. So fucking be it.

Zero regrets. Zero.