[Loser]

I remember the birds. The birds would always start and I knew I had only one hour, at best, before the sun came up. I used to hate the birds: they were like little tattle-tails, bragging that they'd busted me and soon the accursed daystar would be coming to punish me with the accountability that the morning after bring to any night of fun. Stupid birds.

I don't know when the Last time I stayed up all night with a game was. It might have been in the Last year, but it happened quite commonly in '96 - '00 or so. I remember staying up until I could no longer understand the game; it only took about twenty hours of wakefulness for me to get loopy, and not too much more until I set Math down somewhere and couldn't find it again.

Once I couldn't play the game anymore, be it Civ II, SMAC/X, MoO II or SE IV, the choice left to me was sleep or bad poetry. I could also sit still and listen to the auditory hallucinations that started about eighteen hours into the day, but eventually those would lull me to sleep.

I have found that twenty-four hours without sleep is an excellent catalyst for bad poetry, especially haiku. The really charming part of the experience would be waking up later, finding the poetry (or my Last save game) and trying to puzzle out what the bleep I was thinking at the time.