just words

The other day, I got the urge to play The Sims, not The Sims 4 or 3 or even 2, but the original Sims, released back on February 4, 2000. So I booted up my desktop computer, which runs Ubuntu, and went through the whole tedious trying-to-install-an-ancient-game-on-Linux process, which involves several hours of looking for a cracked, zipped copy of the original game files on sketchy pirating sites, running those files through some supposedly user-friendly program called Lutris, and then failing miserably multiple times in a row until I just gave up, at which point I purchased the new Legacy Collection rerelease on Steam for like $15, which, to my surprise, runs perfectly on Linux. And thus far, after a few hours of play under my belt, I still don't know what the point of this game actually is, but for some reason, I'm enjoying it.

But seriously, what's the point? Is it to build the most lavish home you can possibly dream up? Is it to live vicariously through some digital representation of yourself? Is it some sort of therapy for clinical control freaks? Or is it a dark wish-fulfillment simulator that allows you to create virtual voodoo dolls of all your most hated enemies so that you can systematically ruin their lives and/or just outright kill them by deleting the doors in the kitchen and putting a bunch of microwaves and toasters and stuff in there, thus triggering an inescapable electrical fire? Or maybe it’s some sort of weird digital voyeurism, like I’m supposed to be getting off to these 2D-sprite people, who are serious levels of uncanny valley, while they go to the bathroom and make “woo hoo,” which is what they call “fucking” in their native language, which is called Simlish? Or maybe it’s all of the above? Maybe The Sims is whatever you want it to be, maybe that’s the beauty of The Sims, I don’t know.

Regardless of all that, there’s something about The Sims’ janky isometric blockiness and nightmarish character models that evokes a sort of compulsive yearning for the very early 2000s, back when I was like 10 and living in an apartment complex every other month with my mom and stepdad, and there was this one kid who lived nearby named Chris, who was blonde and kind of chubby and had a lot of freckles and also had a Dell something-or-other in his living room, right by the entrance of the cramped rectangular kitchen, which was the same kitchen in my apartment, because every apartment had the same floor plan. He, Chris, would sit there and play The Sims for hours, even when I came over, and I would pull up an uncomfortable wooden chair behind him and crane my neck to watch him play, but only for a few minutes at a time, because The Sims is very much not a multiplayer game, meaning it is quite boring to watch someone else play, because it’s pretty much just watching someone watch someone else go about their very boring and mundane lives, virtually. So, of course, I would lose interest pretty fast and get the hell out of there, primarily because of Chris’ refusal to let me play, because he was actually a pretty unpleasant kid, for a variety of reasons that I won't get into here, but one of those reasons was because he didn't bathe, and another was the fact that he would often just throw shit at you, and one time he went to my birthday party at the local game store and hogged all the games I wanted to play, which, considering it was my birthday party, seemed pretty assholish, even for a ten-year-old kid. So, yeah, that was the extent of my experience with The Sims back then, even though I did have SimCity and SimPark and SimAnt and a bunch of other Sims games loaded up on my Mac at home, which was one of those translucent blue ones that everyone pines over these days, I just didn’t have The Sims on it, because, to be honest, back then I didn’t really understand the point of The Sims, and obviously I still don’t understand the point even now, yet here I am, twenty-five years later, playing The Sims.

And considering a Sim is like a little story, almost like a little diary of code in a way, I figured I would write about the little Sim guy I created, which I very creatively modeled after myself and named Forrest Unknown, or FU for short. And I tried my best to make him look like me, but the Sim-face selection, while being quite vast, is actually incredibly goofy and limiting, so I picked the dark-haired male with the mullet and the bags under his eyes, because I’m sure that I looked like that at one point in my life, especially when I was drinking and smoking all the time, and I made him wear a baggy dark sweater and cargo pants, because that’s kind of my thing, especially in the colder months. Then I created FU’s personality, which is through a point-based selection system wherein you get a limited number of points to assign to five different core personality traits. Neat, outgoing, active, playful, and nice. So of course I maxed out “neat,” because I’m actually a very neat person, in fact I think the only thing ever to give me a panic attack in life was this one time when I was rooming with some friends and one of their dogs tore through the trash and got soggy wrappers, half-eaten food, and garbage juice all over the apartment. I also maxed out “active,” because I work out like five times a day, not because of health or anything like that but because my diet sucks and I want to be thin and attractive despite that. And I also put a few points into “playful” because, when I'm in the right mood, I really know how to have a good time. I really do. And probably needless to say, but I left “nice” and “outgoing” totally devoid of points because, well, I’m not very nice most of the time, especially in my thoughts, which is just a constant stream of name-calling, judgement, and faux superiority, and I’m not very outgoing either, seeing as I have like a total of two actual friends, both of whom I’ve known since childhood, both of whom also think I’m not very nice or outgoing. And, tangentially related, I just can’t seem to make new friends, no matter how hard I try, and believe me, I’ve tried. There was this one guy at the playground I tried to make friends with one time, we talked about writing and our kids and I even gave him my phone number, but afterwards he totally ghosted me, because I think his wife, who was also there at the playground, got a weird vibe off me or something and decided I was bad news, like maybe she thought I was a low-key psychopath or whatever, which is the only thing I can think of that makes any sense, because the guy and I actually got along quite well, and we were actually in the same line of work, too, so we had a decent amount of stuff in common, although he was quite outgoing, whereas I’m quite reserved and full of glares and scowls, so I probably come off as somewhat mysterious because of that, which, when you’re in your thirties, more so comes off as just plain creepy, especially to those of the opposite sex, which is something FU and I need to work on, I guess.

Needless to say, FU started his life with $30,000 and a bad attitude, which is only a small leg-up from how I started my life, I guess, although I did have loving parents, and FU, as far as I can tell, has none. Zero parents. He just sort of popped into existence somehow. He also doesn’t have a wife, kids, or any pets, because I figured I’d just start with FU and go from there, let him live his life, give him a few happy bachelor years, allow him to build up some nostalgic alone time wherein he can actually focus on the stuff he enjoys, which I think, based on the few things he’s shown interest in thus far, are watching television for hours and playing computer games and subsisting entirely on bags of chips that he keeps in the refrigerator for some reason. Maybe down the road he’ll come across someone who loves him for who he truly is, despite all his flaws, of which he has many, as I’ve made sure of that just by basing him on myself, which, in hindsight, was probably a poor decision, because I’m realizing now that I’ve probably doomed poor Forrest Unknown to a miserable, loveless life, one in which he will likely end up in a shotgun-esque relationship devoid of any emotion besides boredom, frustration, and sexual angst, and he’ll probably work a soulless nine-to-five until he’s seventy, at which point he’ll retire with barely anything to show for it except a high-interest mortgage, some serious wrinkles, and broken dreams by the truckloads, and perhaps he’ll be divorced, too, with like two kids, and those kids might just be the only reason he doesn’t delete all the doors in his kitchen and place a bunch of microwaves and toasters and stuff in there to “accidentally” trigger an inescapable electrical fire which conforms to all the cause-of-death clauses outlined in his last will and testament which legally affords his entire estate to his beloved children in very plainly written no-nonsense English.

And before we go any further, I realize that the lines between myself and FU are starting to blur here, but, unless otherwise stated, I am specifically talking about FU here, not myself, unless stated otherwise. That is the god’s honest truth. I am fine, really, don’t worry about me, worry about FU, and maybe send him your thoughts and prayers or whatever, too, because he needs them, he really does.

Anyway, Forrest Unknown, at the immaculate conception of his birth, immediately put a down payment of $15,000 on a small, two-bedroom house, then proceeded to spend most of the remainder of his cash on the important stuff, like a nice Y2K-era boob-tube television set, a big wooden desk, and a personal computer to place upon that desk, all of which he set up in his living room, partitioned off by an oriental screen and a blue two-seater couch, then, after purchasing those vital necessities, he bought himself a king-size bed for his bedroom, some posters and paintings for decoration, a bookshelf, and a few toasters and microwaves for the kitchen. Then some pencil-mustached guy in a suit named Mortimer showed up at the door, so FU went out to meet him, which resulted in the two men hurling insults at each other in what sounded like salvia-divinorum-induced babbling or those religious nuts you see on late night television. Then a black cat named Callie showed up and somehow pushed open the front door and now just stays in the house like she owns the place. Then FU spent a good two hours vegged out on the couch watching television, then he spent another two hours playing computer games, at which point he was very hungry, so he went into the kitchen and pulled out a bag of chips from the refrigerator, which cost him $5 for some reason, because I guess refrigerators in The Sims also double as check-out kiosks or something. Then he went outside to grab the newspaper, which had been thrown in the street for some reason, then, while standing in the middle of the road, he checked the classifieds and, by doing that, somehow immediately got hired as a journalist at the local paper, and now a car will be picking him up at 3 AM tomorrow morning to take him to his first day of work, so I guess FU was eager to get into the job market as soon as possible, which, to be frank, isn’t like me at all, but at least he decided to become a writer instead of some hypocritical self-hating salesman, so in a way I’m actually kind of proud of him.

Perhaps there’s a bright future ahead for little FU after all? 

I guess only time will tell.

I've been playing Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamer Edition recently, and I'm convinced Square-Enix hates this game, and I'm prepared to prove it.

Yes, I know that Square-Enix isn't a singular person, it's a collective of individuals structured into a corporate hierarchy, but if we look at that collective’s aggregate decisions regarding not only Chrono Cross but all of its classic JRPGs, a trend emerges, and that trend points to only one thing, that they hate all their classic games, especially the ones they've remastered or rereleased in the past ten years, including Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX, SaGa Frontier 1 and 2, Chrono Cross, and many others. And if Square-Enix doesn’t hate these games, then, at the very least, they think these games are ugly, mechanically bad, and that they’re only good for quick cash-grab nostalgia baiting.

For the purposes of proving my point, I’ll be focusing mostly on Chrono Cross here, specifically the Radical Dreamers Edition, which they should have called The Radical Garbage Edition, because it's a dumpster fire full of all the trends that lead me to believe that Square-Enix does indeed hate their classic games.

Let's start with the graphics, and before you get all “butttt graphics don't matter,” let me just start by saying that, yes, I agree, graphics don't matter, but aesthetics matter a whole helluva lot, and the remastered aesthetics of Chrono Cross are an affront to the original game, bordering on total abomination. The only thing quote-unquote “wrong” with Chrono Cross’ original graphics is that they’re presented in 240p and the pre-rendered hand-drawn backgrounds were created with CRT televisions in mind, so they don’t translate well to modern monitors, but the seaside town of Arni Village, with its raised platforms, reed-woven huts, thatch roofs, racks of fish, flapping burgundy fabrics, and that endless blue just off in the distance with those big pillowy clouds just above it, is just as beautiful now as it was in 1999, yet, for some ungodly reason, Square-Enix decided to run it, and every other pre-rendered background, through an AI model, to “upscale” the visuals, which resulted in some seriously uncanny eldritch version of Arni Village wherein if you focus on anything for more than a few seconds, you start to notice how everything seems to meld together in this weird squirrely way, as if the painter never lifted his brush from the canvas, and then you start to notice how the designs on those flapping fabrics seem less like designs and more like strange squiggly lines that twist and turn in these nonsensical patterns that give you a headache if you stare at them too long, as if a robot on LSD were handed a paintbrush and told to just go fucking wild, in fact that's exactly what happened, some low-paid intern at Square-Enix was tasked to just drag-drop .pngs into ChatGPT or whatever using a really basic prompt like, “please upscale this image and make sure it looks as if it were hand-painted to fit with the original aesthetic of Chrono Cross, also make it seem as not-AI-generated as possible,” and they didn’t even bother to touch up any of the obvious jank after the fact, which is especially apparent in the city of Termina, where gigantic posters of pop stars with mangled AI faces are all over the place. It’s a fucking mess. It’s also lazy and greedy and obvious as hell, to the point that I’m convinced that only a company that hates beauty itself would do this to Chrono Cross. It’s just flat-out disrespectful.

Thankfully, Square-Enix didn’t fuck with the music though, which is not only some of the most beautiful video game music ever written, it’s quite possibly up there as some of the most beautiful music ever written period, just listen to "Guldove (Another World)" if you don’t believe me, it somehow captures wistful nostalgia even hearing it for the first time. Yasunori Mitsuda was really on a whole ‘nother level when he composed the soundtrack for Chrono Cross, as if there were a muse held prisoner in his basement circa 1998. The music is also part of the reason I love the game so much, and why I'm so offended that Square-Enix basically butchered my boy.

Now I want to tell you about the "enhanced combat features that make battles easier,” as is how it’s described on the back of the Radical Dreamers Edition case, which comes with nothing but the game cartridge, no manual or insert of any kind, and these “enhancements” are really nothing more than glorified emulator features, like four-times speed, and cheat codes, like auto-battle and making your characters invincible and turning off the battles entirely, which are less "enhanced combat features” and more tacit admittances on Square-Enix’s part that they think the original game’s combat is so shit that, instead of improving it in any way, they just opted to remove it entirely. It’s also telling of what Square-Enix executives must think of the modern gamer. I can only imagine the words uttered in that boardroom meeting or Zoom call, “Today’s gamer demographic exhibits significantly reduced tolerance for the traditional pacing of turn-based combat as presented in Chrono Cross, and the element-grid system presents a level of cognitive load that may be perceived as overly complex for broad-market audiences to fully engage with. Flagship franchises such as God of War and Call of Duty have fundamentally reshaped user expectations, cultivating a preference for high-intensity, immediate-feedback gameplay loops, and in alignment with these evolving market trends, I propose we implement a four-times speed toggle to accommodate those seeking accelerated excitement levels, and considering the element system requires a degree of critical thinking and tactical planning, behaviors that data suggest contemporary players are less inclined to engage with, we should also introduce an invincibility mode, as this will mitigate frustration and reduce the likelihood of negative emotional outbursts, including, for example, hardware damage incidents stemming from thrown controllers, because of course we don’t want any lawsuits on our hands, and I also propose that we offer the option to bypass encounters entirely, supplemented by an automated battle feature, which aligns with the up-to-date consumer behavioral data we have collected, which tells us that modern gamers overwhelmingly prioritize streamlined experiences and instant gratification, and in short, today’s gamers don’t want to work for the win, they simply want the win, so we will give them the win, and they will like it, and Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition will make us millions.” And there was probably one old-guard guy in that meeting that was like, “But isn’t the unique combat part of what makes Chrono Cross so special? And if we removed the combat, or trivialized it, wouldn’t the game end up just being walking from screen to screen talking to people? Wouldn’t that be a little boring?” And that person was probably fired.

Granted, all these “enhanced combat features that make battles easier” are optional, which is good, but the fact they exist at all just goes to show that the modern corporate entity known as Square-Enix hates the original game’s design philosophy. And they didn’t just do this to Chrono Cross, they did this to every single remastered classic game released thus far. Take the latest rerelease of Final Fantasy VII, for example, which includes a button that simply makes all your characters max level. At that point, what’s the point of combat to begin with? Isn’t leveling up and that progressively-becoming-stronger feeling part of the draw of these classic JRPGs to begin with? And Final Fantasy VII now includes a four-times speed option as well, so you can just zip right through every screen, without ever stopping to smell the roses, or whatever it is they say. At that point, what’s the point of the whole adventure to begin with? Aren’t the beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds meant to be experienced, absorbed, and appreciated? And does not trudging these beautiful pre-rendered depths assist in this whole experienced-absorbed-appreciated process? And does not allowing the player to zoom through every screen disrespect both the effort and artistic merit of the game?

What really annoys me is that, when you talk about all this stuff online, on forums or whatever, people defend it, and sometimes they get pretty heated. They say stuff like, quote, “As an adult with a job and responsibilities I appreciate the inclusion of these features. Anyone who thinks it's cheating has too much time on their hands,” and “Personally speaking 3x speed made playing the game way less tedious than it would have been otherwise. Just cause random encounters are soooooo slow,” and “I'm out here to have fun playing games. If it feels like a chore, I'm not going to bother. I don't have time for it anymore. If other people prefer to play it that way, all the power to them. I'm just glad there's options.” But all of these people are missing the point, too focused on speeding through life. It’s a video game, for god’s sake, it’s not a race to the finish, part of the whole experience is sitting there taking it all in, and if they’re focused on just completing the game for the sake of being able to say they completed it or whatever, I truly wonder how much they appreciate anything in their lives, since it seems like they just want to get stuff done as quickly as possible. And if the game is “tedious,” as one of these users claims, maybe they just don’t like JRPGs to begin with, and if so, why not just go do something they actually enjoy? Does speeding up the tediousness really make the game less tedious, or does it just make the tedium faster? Are we tricking ourselves here? And if they have very little time because of adult responsibilities and kids and whatnot, then perhaps their priorities are fucked up to begin with? Perhaps they should consider a different hobby? Because, once they complete Final Fantasy or Chrono Cross or whatever, at four-times speed with max level and the battles turned off, they’re just going to start playing another game that takes up their time, so the whole thing seems less about appreciating the individual game for what it is and more so about getting as many completed games under their belt as possible, which really just highlights how sick and twisted our modern sensibilities are, how everything is egotistical, feel-good bullshit, like, “yeah, I’ve beaten that game, and that game, and that game,” just to say they did it, in their insular little online bubbles, like this is some sort of grand accomplishment or something, when really it’s just fucking video games. The whole thing highlights the “gotta go fast” ethos of our modern society, as if we have this serious cosmic FOMO that, if we don’t complete every game ever in the shortest amount of time possible, then we’re not keeping up with the Joneses and somehow we’re less cultured, worse people because of it, and it makes me sad, it really does, because, when we’re moving so fast, we never stop to appreciate the beauty of things, thus we end up trivializing the world around us, turning it into some sick speedrun where glitching through life’s walls is not only encouraged but celebrated with upvotes and vacuous pats on the back.

Anyway. That’s my rant. That’s why Square-Enix hates their classic games, because their classic games, like Chrono Cross, demand to be taken seriously as an art form, they demand the player’s time and attention, they force the player to appreciate their beauty, and that’s why Square-Enix hates them, because, to them, time is money, and if you’re spending time on Chrono Cross, that’s money you’re not spending on their other stuff, and that makes line go down, which demands serious questions from their executive board, and they can’t have that, they can’t have that at all.

And frankly, we’re enabling it.

Arcades are like children, you just hate to see them die.

I live in this little crime-ridden port town that once had a prosperous, populated mall, back in the early 2000s, before online shopping really took off. Back then, you’d go to the mall on the weekends or whatever, and there’d be at least a hundred people there at any given time, snot-nosed kids running around all wild with ice cream cones, escaping from the little play area with the jungle gym above the massive skylights, parents off shopping at Belk or Bath & Body Works or American Eagle or whatever, and teenagers, some dressed in all black with fishnets and Converse and those baggy Tripp pants with all the belts, others in name-brand polos and designer jeans and the newest Jordans or whatever, both groups rebelling in their own ways, all congregating in their little corners of the food court, snickering and scowling at each other, like some sort of prelude to a teenage suburban war or something.

And there I was, sixteen, clumsy, and shy, at the FYE with my mom, buying CDs. I remember I bought some of my favorite CDs from that place, like The Smiths’ Louder Than Bombs, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge by My Chemical Romance, all sorts of Prince records, Bowie, The Cure, Radiohead’s OK Computer. That stuff saved my life. And when I was done, my mom would go shopping by herself, over at the Belk or the Bath & Body Works or the American Eagle or whatever, and I would wander off to the arcade, which was right next to the food court, and I’d spend the next hour, with my mom’s spare credit card, just playing all sorts of arcade games. I was a huge Tekken fan, even competed in a tournament for Tekken 4 one time, Jin and Lee were my favorite characters of course, and I’d even play Dance Dance Revolution a good bit, with some anime-obsessed girls who seemed to just be there all the fucking time, no matter what time of day you showed up, and I liked DDR so much that I bought the PlayStation 2 version and the pad accessory, and I would play it upstairs in my room, and sometimes my mom would play it when I was at school, for exercise I guess, and I knew this because of the in-game records and whatnot, but she would never bring it up, and I figured there was a reason for that, so I never brought it up either, so I guess it was something we shared in silence, which was cool, and I thank the arcade for that, not only for introducing me to Dance Dance Revolution, but also for enabling me to spend time with other kids with similar interests who just knew how to have fun.

But when I go to the mall now, as an adult, there are like ten people in there at any given moment, tops, that’s including myself, a single security guard, and like eight cashiers, and the most exciting thing going on is the black mold growing on the cheap ceiling paneling, which I swear you can watch grow in real time if you’re paying close enough attention, and the old play area is now just an enclosed pen with that weird soft pebbly flooring because all the kid gymnasium stuff broke and they obviously didn't have enough money to replace it, so whenever there are kids in there, which is almost never, they're miserably trying to climb over the walls, begging to be let out, and the skylight now shines this sickly green hue over everything because of all the algae growing on it, like nature is trying to reclaim the whole godforsaken building, and there’s only like two restaurants in the food court now, and all the name-brand stores are gone, replaced by places like “Asian Body Rub” and “Touch of Wireless,” although Belk is still there, attracting approximately one demographic, sixty-to-eighty-year-old grandmas, which, at this point, are probably the only people keeping the mall alive, and by “alive,” I mean like oxygen, feeding tube, urinary catheter, you know, the works, serious life support, because I’ve literally never seen anyone buy anything from anywhere other than Belk, and even the other business owners seem to know this, the old Indian guy with the beard who owns Touch of Wireless just sits in his kiosk all day looking at his phone, he doesn’t even try to wave me down like he used to, because he sees the writing on the wall, he knows the mall is dying, that it’s on serious life support. And honestly, someone just needs to put the place out of its misery at this point, because it’s just sad now, it's just a reminder that everything fades and nothing lasts forever.

And we all know why this is happening. It’s simple, really. It's the internet. Nobody wants to purchase stuff from malls anymore, nobody wants to exert the energy, they’d rather just buy everything online, get it shipped directly to their homes with Prime shipping or whatever, and I’m not above this, I do this too, so I’m not like casting judgment here, this is just what’s happening, these are the facts, we’ve exchanged a community experience for convenience, anyone would do it, if given the opportunity, as evidenced by the mall itself, and it wouldn’t really bother me so much, normally, but today, when I went to the mall, with my son, to let him run around the wide corridors, get some energy out, because we can’t really go outside, on account of it being like six million degrees out, I walked by a certain empty retail space, all locked away behind a security grille, and I was overcome with this certain feeling of loss that I can’t quite put into words, so instead I’ll just describe what I saw.

There, behind the security grille, in the darkness of the unused retail space, there were about twenty arcade cabinets, randomly spread across the room, their once-colorful screens now pitch black, their power cords all twisted like rat kings on the floor, some of the cabinets were turned on their sides, face down, others stood with their guts ripped out, wiring harnesses and coin mechanisms spilling out all over the floor, and in the back of the room, there was a single flickering bulb, casting a light just bright enough for me to make out two distinct machines in the very back, so I narrowed my eyes, and that’s when I saw them, that’s when I saw Tekken 4 and Dance Dance Revolution, and I swear, for a moment there, I saw those anime girls, dancing on the pad, having the time of their lives, and I wanted to go join them, I really did.

But then my son pulled on my pant leg and said, “I wanna go home,” so we went home.

A couple of months ago, I visited my grandma up in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. Beautiful place. It was her birthday, she was turning eighty-five, or eighty-six, or ninety, it’s hard to tell with her, considering she changes the number up on you every time you ask, and at first I thought it was because she was hiding her age, which I’m sure was the case originally, but that’s not the case now, because she’s not hiding anything anymore, she just doesn't remember.

She doesn’t remember much, actually. 

I mean, her general long-term memory is pretty good, she remembers who I am, how I used to play with the kids in her neighborhood during the summers, and how we used to go swimming every night in the neighborhood pool, and how she’d take me to the playground sometimes, and how I got in trouble that one time for throwing stuff at cars from behind the big hill, and how, between the ages of like seven to ten, I used to fall asleep in her bed, watching television, until eventually she said I tossed and turned too much in my sleep, so she bought me a little mattress and put it on the floor by the bed, and when I got real sleepy, she’d nudge me onto that little floor mattress and tuck me in with a blanket she had sewn herself, and I’d wake up every morning to a cup of chocolate milk, which she always said was too fattening, but she made it for me anyway because I was her favorite grandkid, and she let me know it all the time.

She remembers all this stuff, but she doesn’t remember the specifics. She doesn’t remember the names of those neighborhood friends I used to play with, and she doesn’t remember that it was MacGyver that we used to fall asleep to, and she doesn’t remember how the blanket was actually a Superman blanket, and she doesn’t remember that the cup she always poured my chocolate milk into was a Power Rangers cup, and that it had pictures of the White Ranger all over it, because he was my favorite Power Ranger. She knew that back then, but now she doesn’t, now she doesn’t know who my favorite Power Ranger is, because she just doesn't remember.

During the birthday party, when we were all out there on the back porch, everyone drinking and smoking and laughing and having a merry time, she was just sitting in her little chair, quiet as a mouse. She doesn’t talk much anymore, and when she does, my aunt, who lives with her, as her caretaker pretty much, usually makes some comment about how Grandma’s memory isn't what it used to be, and how she’s taking all sorts of brain pills, doing all sorts of experimental treatments to improve her memory, and when I look at her, my grandma, I see confusion in her eyes, or maybe fear. I see a woman who is losing her self-awareness but has just enough left to know that she is losing her self-awareness, and I think it must be terrifying for her, probably worse than simply losing it altogether, because at least then she wouldn’t feel it happening in real time. It frightens me, it really does. I see her sitting there, blank almost, laughing when she thinks she needs to laugh and smiling when she thinks she needs to smile, but never saying a word because, I think, she doesn't want to make a fool of herself, because she knows, she knows what’s going on inside, she knows that stuff is seeping out of her head and never coming back. She knows that, despite decades of pill regimens and exercise, her body is turning against her, slowly erasing her personality, her loves and hates, all her little quirks, all of it seeping out, never coming back.

I start to wonder, if you forget everything, and then everyone forgets about you, does that mean you just stop existing? Does the physical body even matter at that point? Do you just pop out of existence? In hundreds of years, when all is said and done, and your kids and grandkids and great-grandkids have all forgotten you, or they remember some mythological version of you that’s nothing like the person you actually were, does your existence then simply boil down to a tree falling in the woods when no one is around?

So, back there on that porch, solemn and saturnine, I started asking her a bunch of stuff, “Do you remember this, do you remember that,” but she couldn’t answer any of my questions, and I started to feel a little bad, like I was just highlighting to her how she’s fading away, and then I started to feel like an insensitive asshole, almost, like I was making things worse, so, while everyone was back there, partying for my grandma’s eighty-ninth birthday, but basically partying without her, because she was just sitting there, blank, I took her by the hand and I said, “C’mon, let’s go.” And she said, “Where are we going?” And I said, “To where we used to go.”

Then, hand in hand, we walked to the clubhouse, just behind her house, with the old pool we used to swim in, and instead of asking her, “Do you remember this?” I told her. I told her, “We used to swim here at night, even though the gate was locked, and the neighbors would complain.” And then I pointed out my friend’s house, just beyond the clubhouse, “That’s Miles’ house right there, we used to go there all the time, they had two boxers, but you never liked them much because they barked at night.” And then I took her to the playground just behind the clubhouse, and I said, “This is where you would watch me swing and go down the slide, and sometimes you would even go down with me.” And then I led her up the playground steps and we both slid down the biggest slide, one after another. And then we swung on the swingset, side by side, until the sky was all purple and orange. Then we went back to her house, but instead of going to the back porch, where the party was going on, I took her into her bedroom, the same one she’s had for years, with the same bed I used to sleep in, only now with a big Roku smart TV mounted on the wall, and we lay down on the bed together, side by side, then I put on MacGyver, and that incredible theme song went off, and we just lay there for a while, heads on our big pillows, watching MacGyver weld a nail to a broken spark plug using jumper cables and a battery.

Then, after a few minutes of just lying there, watching MacGyver, my grandma said three words, she said, 

“I remember this.”

A few weeks ago, I read J.D. Salinger’s short story collection, Nine Stories, and it got me thinking, to say the least.

The collection itself is alright, there are a few standouts, like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” both touching on the psychological and interpersonal impacts of war, but there was one story, in particular, that stood out to me as truly special, a story I would recommend to anyone, called “Teddy.”

I won't get into all the details of the story, you can read it yourself, but it's essentially a beginner’s primer to Zen, a Buddhist concept, centering around this idea that, through meditation, you can come to realize your true nature, how everything is connected, and, eventually, tap into your own Buddha-nature, which is this idea that everyone is the Buddha, or has the potential to become like the Buddha, through self-control and meditation. Ultimately, the goal of Zen is to become Enlightened, and one of the core ideas of Zen is that human logic often gets in the way of this goal.

In the story, the titular character, Teddy, is like this ten-year-old Zen prodigy or something, possibly reincarnated from some long-dead Zen master, and he's chock-full of all this incredible Zen wisdom, which he attempts to share with his family and friends while on a cruise to the Bahamas, or something like that, and, of course, no one really takes him seriously, except one guy who tries to use logic to challenge some of Teddy’s wisdom, but, of course, Teddy, being a Zen master or whatever, has a wise counter to every objection, and some of the stuff he says is really out there and cool, like the long excerpt I'm about to copy-paste just below this paragraph.

( Excerpt from Teddy... )

On the surface, Teddy’s philosophy might seem like that of a stoned high-schooler, but he has a good point, that being, humans make up the definitions for stuff, an arm is an arm because we say it is, collectively, and an arm “stops off” where it stops off because, well, we say it does, collectively. We all share in this sort of collective dream world in which we construct the meaning of everything based on usefulness or whatever, but, ultimately, we are constructing the meaning, the meaning does not construct itself, which calls into question exactly where the arm stops, actually.

To illustrate further, the atoms in my fingertips surely touch the atoms in the air around me, and at a microscopic level, if one were to look, those atoms probably look nearly identical, so, at that microscopic level, it would be impossible to tell when the arm truly stops and where the air begins, which begs the question, is everything, in fact, connected? Is everything one and the same? I don’t have an answer to that question, it’s just something interesting to think about.

The point of all this, however, is that “Teddy” got me really interested in Zen, to the point where I even purchased a book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, which I have yet to read, but I have thumbed through it, and I came across this idea that, to achieve Enlightenment, you must practice Zen with “no gaining idea,” and that got me really curious, so I looked it up online, and I found this quote from an ancient Zen master, or whatever, which I will now copy-paste below.


“As soon as you produce any opinion or interpretation, and want to attain Zen and be a master, you have already fallen into psychological and material realms. You have become trapped by ordinary senses and perceptions, by ideas of gain and loss, by ideas of right and wrong. Half drunk and half sober, you cannot manage effectively.”
-Yuanwu Keqin


This quote, to me, is the most interesting Zen-thing that I have read thus far. It actually sent my mind swirling, to tell you the truth, because the quote seems to be suggesting that, if your goal is to reach Enlightenment, you will never reach Enlightenment, like, ever. This is the concept of “no gaining idea,” which essentially means that, in order to become Enlightened, you must sit there and meditate with "no gaining idea” of actually becoming Enlightened, or else you are doomed to never reach Enlightenment. And this idea struck me as not only incredibly wise, but also incredibly paradoxical.

To work through the paradox, we must first understand the paradox, which I barely even understand myself, but I am going to try to explain it in the clearest way possible.

The aforementioned copy-pasted quote above, which encapsulates the “no gaining idea” concept, essentially makes two strong points. One, the desire to attain Enlightenment is itself a barrier to Enlightenment, because Zen philosophy itself seeks to remove desire, as desire leads to suffering and discomfort and other bad stuff. And two, the very idea of Enlightenment itself comes baked-in with the dualistic implication that there are those who are Enlightened and those who are not Enlightened, which is categorical, dualistic thinking, which ends up placing people into camps of “have attained Enlightenment” and “have not attained Enlightenment,” which naturally leads to hierarchical thinking, which leads to seeing some people as lesser than others, which leads to concentration camps, war, segregation, caste systems, death, and all sorts of other bad stuff, all of which Zen aims to eliminate, because, as Teddy so succinctly tells us above, we are all connected, we are all one, things don’t “stop off,” we just pretend like they do.

So herein lies the Zen paradox, or paradoxes, because there’s more than one, actually.

The first paradox is, if you want to become Enlightened, you are already trapped in the cycle of desire that Zen itself seeks to eliminate. Yet, if that’s the case, why are there so many books and schools and masters of Zen Buddhism, all of which aim to provide guidance in the attainment of Enlightenment, if the very idea of trying to “gain” that Enlightenment is itself a barrier to said Enlightenment? Essentially, what this is implying is that, in order to eliminate desire and thus reach Enlightenment, you must first desire to reach Enlightenment, but Zen teaches that you can’t reach Enlightenment through desire, yet, to even attempt to reach Enlightenment, you must first desire Enlightenment, yet you can’t attain Enlightenment if you desire it, and so on and so forth. I could keep going, but I think you get the point. Wanting to be Enlightened is the very thing preventing Enlightenment. This is the first Zen paradox.

The second paradox is, by even engaging with the idea of Enlightenment, you are dealing in dualistic thinking. Yet, these various schools of Zen all teach of Enlightenment and how to reach it, so the implication seems to be that, in order to abolish dualistic thinking, you must first engage in dualistic thinking by thinking about Enlightenment. But by engaging in dualistic thinking, you are actually further from Enlightenment, because Zen aims to abolish dualistic thinking, yet you need dualistic thinking to even think about Enlightenment, yet you can’t be Enlightened if you engage in dualistic thinking, and so on and so forth. I could keep going, but I think you get the point. In trying to reach a state where such dualistic thinking is abolished, you must first engage in dualistic thinking. This is the second Zen paradox.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to do with these Zen paradoxes. My first thought was that they undermine the teachings of Zen, because how could a philosophy be built on the back of two pretty strong paradoxes without collapsing in on itself like two supermassive black holes trying to suck each other up?

But then, I started thinking about Teddy and what he said about the forbidden fruit. I started thinking that, perhaps, in twisting my mind around these paradoxes, I am simply being too logical. After all, the very concept of a paradox is, indeed, just a human-made concept, a concept that doesn't actually exist out there in the ether, just in our minds.

So, after some meditation, I started thinking that maybe I’ve just taken one too many bites of the apple, and then I got this crazy idea, maybe I should just vomit it all up.

Now I just have to figure out how the hell I’m going to do that.

We live in a digital, on-demand world in which literally all media is available at our fingertips, whenever and wherever we want. We’re always online, all the time. We click the links and swipe the phones and talk into our little WiFi-connected devices, “Hey Google, play ‘Lo Boob Oscillator’ by Stereolab,” and the machine obliges us, providing whatever the hell we want, as long as we pay our monthly tributes, which are increasing month to month at crazy, exponential rates.

But the question is, with so much access to all this stuff, do we really appreciate any of it?

I don't mean, like, “oh, this new single on Spotify is pretty good, on to the next one,” or “I can't wait to binge this new show on Netflix, then totally forget about it in a week,” or “I downloaded every Super Nintendo game ever made from CoolRom.com, and now I play them for a few minutes on my phone before switching to the next one.” I mean, instead, like, becoming so obsessed with The Strokes’ Is This It that you memorize the lyrics of each song because it’s one of the few albums you actually own, or watching Cowboy Bebop on DVD so much that it becomes like a core part of your essence, or spending months playing Final Fantasy VIII that, sometimes, when no one is around, you pretend that you're Squall Leonhart casting Meltdown or something.

All this might seem oddly specific, but it has a point. What I'm trying to get at is, I haven't been absorbed in a piece of media in, like, forever. And I think that, maybe, it's because there's just way too much media available now, so much so that all of it has become like junk food, momentarily pleasing but lacking any real, long-term value whatsoever. I used to become emotionally invested in the things I like, now it’s as if I’m constantly on the prowl for something to become emotionally invested in, but never quite getting there. It feels as if I’ve bartered my soul for convenience, and now the media overload, combined with my inherent attention deficit, wreaks havoc on my brain, and I just can’t focus on anything at all anymore.

That's why, a few months ago, I went analog. I bought a Walkman, an old Sony stereo, and I started collecting cassettes.

Well, that’s not the only reason I started collecting cassettes, if I’m being honest. Initially, it started like all these things do, to be cool, because I’m low-key kind of an insufferable hipster, contrarian to the core. I wanted to buck modern trends. I wanted to be different. I thought it would be cool to listen to music on cassette, like I was back in the ‘80s or something. But, lo and behold, through my insufferable contrarianism, I quickly found that, with cassettes, I’m pretty much forced to pay attention to the music I listen to now. So I guess being contrary all the time has its benefits, sometimes.

Before cassettes, I had been listening to a minute or two of my favorite songs on Spotify before being almost demonically compelled to swipe to something else, and I would do that constantly, hardly ever listening to music in full, let alone entire albums. It’s crazy how an artist can spend weeks, months, writing and recording a song, only for it to be consumed then forgotten about in minutes. It’s almost disrespectful, in a way. But now, with cassettes, I’m forced to pay attention. I have to put real effort into picking out music, and when I want to find new music, I have to actively research artists similar to the ones I already like, usually on allmusic.com, then I have to purchase the tape from a record store or order it online and wait for it to be delivered, and then, to actually listen to the tape, I have to go into my drawer with all my tapes, take out the one I want to play, put it into a mechanical device that uses literal belts, rewind the thing, and then hit play, and if I want to go back to a certain song, I have to put in real, physical effort to get up, go to the tape player, rewind the tape to just the right spot, which takes some trial and error, and then hit play again, and because I have a limited collection of cassettes, and acquiring new ones takes time, I’m forced to spend a week or two with each new cassette I purchase, which has, in turn, forced me to appreciate the music far more than I used to.

This whole cassette-tape ritual requires serious deliberation and real effort, whereas online music services require none of that stuff. In fact, online music services seem designed in such a way as to deliberately encourage users to shuffle around as much as possible, to facilitate clicks, which in turn generates revenue, and the end user gets nothing out of it except barely remembered songs and this uncanny feeling that something is missing, like if you just click around a little bit more, you might find something that hits immediately and consumes you, like it used to back in the day, but that never happens, and all the while, Spotify is making bank, paying the musicians barely anything. It’s diabolical, almost, it really is.

And yes, there is an element of materialism to collecting a bunch of plastic tapes and hoarding them in a case or drawer or whatever, but that’s kind of unavoidable, and not really the point. In this instance, it’s not actually materialism at all, it’s humanism and borderline asceticism. It’s about depriving yourself of everything-all-at-once and, instead, focusing only on the things you truly care about, and cassettes pretty much force this on you, which is why they’re such a powerful medium.

This wasn’t intended to be a rant against the online music industry, it was actually intended to be more of a public service announcement. A shout into the digital void, if you will, to let you know that, if you ever feel like something is missing, like you’re just clicking around aimlessly, totally lacking focus, emotionally detached from the things you once cared about, then maybe it’s time to disconnect, maybe it’s time you thought about getting into cassettes.

Maybe it's time to become an analog boy, or girl, or whatever, in a digital world.

( Anyway, here's a list of all the cassettes I've collected thus far, in order of being acquired... )

I’m writing this from Gate B6, CLT, sitting in one of those uncomfortable faux-leather airport chairs that feels more like sitting on a flat rock than sitting on anything even remotely chair-like, although I suppose rocks could be considered chair-like, since it’s all a matter of semantics when you start to think about it. Actually, I wrote most of this long, rambling journal entry on my phone, in real time, as the stuff was happening around me. I’m just now writing this first paragraph, and doing all the editing, here in B6. You see, I’m traveling for a work thing, a big meeting tomorrow, the details of which I won’t be covering here, because I don’t want to be responsible for manslaughter in the event that whoever reading this dies of boredom. The important bit, however, is that my flight from JAX to CLT was delayed by like 45 minutes, which resulted in me missing my flight from CLT to MSP, so I had to book a new flight to MSP, which takes off in approximately 2 hours. It’s all very mundane, first-world airport stuff. I don’t want to bore you with the details. Plus, the company I work for pays for all of it, so it’s not like I’m in serious debt now or something. I actually like hanging out in airports sometimes, when the mood is right, especially the Atlanta airport, as I kind of grew up flying in and out of that place, from my mom’s to my dad’s every month, and it’s nice and big with plenty of places to hide, and it has this cool underground train that takes you from terminal to terminal, and it really hasn’t changed much in like twenty years, so it’s kind of like a monument to my vagrant youth or something.

I quit smoking back in November 2023.

I had been smoking since I was like seventeen or something. I remember I would sneak out of the house and go into the garage to smoke, and one time my mom caught me, and she actually cried. It was the first time I had seen her cry. She was always a stoic, almost emotionless woman, so seeing her cry was actually a profound moment, but I guess it wasn’t profound enough for me to quit smoking. Go figure. I remember, back then, wondering why, why she cried, why was smoking such a big deal, but now, as a parent of two kids myself, I think I know why. If I had caught my son smoking, maybe I would cry too, not because of the smoking, per se, but because of the symbolic nature of the whole thing, like a stark image of my son growing up in real time, innocence lost in the here and now, or whatever. Growing up is such a tragedy that, when you see it happening before your eyes like that, it’s hard not to want to bawl your brains out, but of course, when you’re young, you don’t think about that stuff, that’s the paradox of youth, right there.

Anyway, like I was saying, I quit smoking back in November 2024. By that time, I had gone up to like a pack a day. My brand was Marlboro Lights. I loved smoking, especially the first cigarette of the day, or after a long day of work or societal obligation or whatever, that sort of body-melting feeling after the first drag, that heady pressure like the brain is being enveloped in the best kind of storm cloud, the kind just off in the distance with heat lightning and low rumbling and all that stuff, and especially that sensation of smoke traveling its way down the trachea, subsumed by the lungs, then exhaling the leftover smoke like some sort of high-fantasy dragon. I can’t think of much else like it, to tell you the truth.

So you might be wondering, then, why I quit smoking. You might have already assumed a typical answer to that question, something health-related, like I was running out of breath or my blood pressure was high or I had developed a bad cough or I wanted to ensure that I lived long enough to see my kids become happy, flourishing adults or something like that. But, honestly, none of those reasons were why I quit smoking. I’m not that farsighted or selfless, I’m really not. I quit smoking because, when I sat down to read or write or play a video game or whatever, there was always this nagging thought in the back of my head to go smoke a cigarette. It was disrupting my focus, especially on things that I enjoyed doing. Back then I was smoking a cigarette every hour or so, and immediately after smoking, the timer for the next cigarette would start running down in my head, and I was very aware of it. I’d be playing like Final Fantasy XI or something, an online MMORPG, and I’d be thinking something like, “I’m going to smoke a cigarette in 32 minutes, which should be after about ten more Goblin Ambushers,” and I’d think like that about every activity I was doing, as if cigarettes were some sort of mythical demon, stalking me at all times, seducing me, beyond my control, like some sort of Nicotinic Lamia or Siren or Succubus or whatever. So, yeah, that’s why I quit, because it was consuming my brain. I was thinking about it all the time. Smoking had become my focal point, more important than all other things, sucking everything else in, like some sort of supermassive black hole around which all thoughts swirled. Oh, and because it was expensive as hell.

So, what’s the point of all this?

Well, I started smoking again, a few weeks ago. Actually, earlier than that. I had been smoking on and off at social events, especially work events, bumming cigarettes from people here and there, telling myself that I was now only a social smoker and that I could moderate it and all that stuff, but after a while, that morphed into wanting a cigarette at home, so now, as of just a few weeks ago, I’m smoking at home.

Well, kind of.

You see, my wife doesn’t know I started smoking again. I bought a pack of Lucky Strikes and I hid them in my office, and now, when I go on my daily bike ride, I take my Luckies out with me, stop at the neighborhood pond, the one with all the turtles and ducks and geese, and I spark up, watching those little turtle heads poke up and drift along the surface of the water, and all the ducks come up to me, expecting bread, because everyone around here feeds them, and all the geese that hiss at me because they’re total assholes, and I inhale and exhale like a modern-day dragon, and the whole hiding-it-from-my-wife thing adds an element of excitement to the whole thing too, as if I’m seventeen again, hiding it from my mother. Maybe this is my version of a mid-life crisis, but I would argue that I have one of those every week, so this isn't really anything new.

For now, smoking out there, on that pond, with those torpid turtles and those demanding ducks and those grouchy geese, is almost a zen-like experience, in a way, with how tranquil and melty and heady it is. I even saw a great blue heron one time. Next time, I'll try to take a picture, and post it.

I know I shouldn’t smoke. It’s stupid. I know I’m burning the child inside, making my mother cry, but I’m thirty-four years old and, if I want to burn a little part of myself sometimes, shouldn’t I have the right to do that? And I enjoy it, so shouldn’t I be allowed to do the stuff I enjoy, sometimes? That might sound a little hedonistic, but is it really so different from any other self-gratifying thing we do, like sit around playing video games instead of doing housework, or lazily watching TV all night? And before you say something like, “you’re just making excuses,” let me assure you that I know damn well that I’m just making excuses. You don’t have to tell me.

Anyway, I’m going to go play some SaGa Frontier II, then I’m going to read a chapter or two of Moby Dick, then I’m going to maybe work on the novel I’ve been stewing on.

But first, before all that, I’m going on a bike ride.