just words

Stephen Thomas Erlewine, who reviewed the album Swoon by Silversun Pickups over at Allmusic.com, gave the album four out of five stars but really didn't have anything nice to say about it or the band themselves. Specifically, he wrote:

“Silversun Pickups avoid unpleasantness to such a great extent on Swoon that they rarely shift tempos or dynamics. They merely wallow in washes of sound, deriving equally from guitars and whispered vocals, never pushing forward, never achieving any sense of momentum, just glimmering in the sunlight. It's pleasant enough, particularly when the breathy vocals fade away to leave behind cascades of guitars, but even at its best, it's nothing more than an approximation of Smashing Pumpkins at their peak, with all the interesting parts stripped away.”

I totally disagree with this, and the second track on the album, “The Royal We,” totally proves me correct, for it is transcendental noise of the highest order. It’s got ugliness. It’s got tempo changes. It’s got loud fuzz and shimmering guitars and vocals that sound like sex. It’s got shifting dynamics. It’s got lyrics about drug addiction and overdosing. It’s got forward-pushing. It’s got momentum. It’s got all the stuff Stephen says it does not have. It starts with Silversun’s signature androgynous vocals, goes into a pumping cello-like guitar chug, layers in washes of feedback-laden fuzz, all while asking the listener, “How many times do you want to die?” over and over. But none of this really reaches the level of transcendental noise; that doesn’t happen until the second half. The thing about “The Royal We” is that it’s almost like two different songs. At the two-minute mark, the tempo shifts completely, which is something Stephen claims the band doesn't do, and then the song becomes something else entirely. Supposedly the song is about drug addiction, and the structure of the song is supposed to mirror a withdrawal-to-next-hit cycle, and it does this very well, because the beginning of the song is aggressive, nervous, impatient, “look over your shoulder,” then at 2:11, it’s like you just took a hit of whatever your drug of choice is: the song abruptly slows down, the guitars get dreamy, and it enters a second chorus, ending with the great, almost sing-song line of “That’s when we fell in love, but not the first time,” at which point the music feels like a tunnel of noise or a rush of blood to the head, like you just shot up heroin or something, then it suddenly shifts back to a leitmotif from earlier in the song, weaving the original verses and first chorus into the structure of the second half of the music, which again is like an entirely different song in and of itself. Then it shifts back to the second chorus again, the “That’s when we fell in love, but not the first time” part, but now the singer is literally shouting this at you for some reason, and the distortion is turned up to like a thousand, and then the druggy tunnel noise comes in again on top of it all as if you’re having an overdose or something, and then you die, figuratively. The way it drops sections, then brings them back, then drops them again, and then pulls back even older sections to top it all off is, in my opinion, genius songwriting. And the song isn’t good just because the structure is genius; it’s also catchy, melodic in a weird way, and super energizing. It’s a car song for sure, meaning you should listen to it while you’re driving because it just chugs along at this incredible motor-like pace even when it’s doing all the slow druggy stuff. The song asks, “How many times do you want to die?” And I guess I want to die over and over again because I have listened to it 55 times this week as of writing this, according to my Last.fm profile.

But “The Royal We” wasn't actually what I wanted to talk about with this entry. I actually don’t like describing music with the written word. I end up using the same phrases and adjectives and whatnot for every damn song. Maybe I just need to build up my vocabulary, learn some music theory or something. I’m not sure. I suspect that music and writing, being two of the great human arts, can only be truly captured through themselves. Writing can never be music, music can never be writing, and neither can hope to fully convey the greatness of the other. That’s my theory, or maybe my excuse.

Anyway. I wanted to kind of talk about Silversun Pickups, as I've been listening to this band since at least 2006, and I have some nostalgic memories linked to their music that I'd like to try to capture here, stuff involving Chuck E. Cheese and basically stealing a kid’s GameCube so that I could play The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess the day it came out.

First, it must be noted, I was an incredibly late bloomer. I watched Blue’s Clues and lied about it to other kids until I was like 13. I had a Blue’s Clues game for my Mac back then, with the discs hidden in my closet, and one time during a sleepover a kid found it and ridiculed me harshly; I'm not bitter about this, it's just something that happened, to give you an example. I didn't get my driver's license until I was 18. And I hung on to Chuck E. Cheese until I was 16, making my grandma Susu drive me and my two good friends, Miles and Matt, to the pizza-arcade combo every winter and summer break when I visited her. I guess my thought process at that age was, since I had had some great times at Chuck E. Cheese as a younger kid, I would try to recreate some of that old magic as an older kid. I hung on to childhood for as long as the world would let me. And this is something I still do now: obsessively try to recreate feelings and situations long past, usually through video games and music and mood lighting. This is one of my core traits. I'm a nostalgic idiot, always have been, even during those peak nostalgia-forming years when you don’t really need to be. I just was. I started pining for the old days like ten years early. And Miles and Matt would indulge me; maybe they were nostalgic idiots too, as they always entertained my childish late-bloomer inclinations. But it should also be noted that I was a bit of a weird late bloomer, because between hiding Blue’s Clues discs and trips to Chuck E. Cheese, I was smoking cigarettes and having sex and doing all that dumb shit teenagers do, meaning I was not immune to the typical trappings of rebellious youth. I was very concerned about image and being “cool” on what I thought were my own terms, but there was always this background feeling of shame, hence why I’d do things like hide the Blue’s Clues discs. Despite the fact that I would tell myself and those around me that I didn’t care what people thought of me, I did in fact care about what people thought of me. I cared very, very much, although I tried hard not to, often to my own detriment, as I was very aloof and standoffish back then. Which is not super important here. What is important, however, is the music and the memories.

Back then, in 2006, Silversun Pickups was by no means my favorite band, but I had their album Carnavas on CD, and I loved the hell out of that album. Between the years 2006 and 2008, that album was a staple of car rides and just in-general hanging out. I used to have one of those black zip-up CD cases, like a CD binder thing, that held about a hundred CDs. Mine had a few band stickers on it, and I had painted the Smashing Pumpkins SP-heart logo thing on the front of it. I remember I would take the discs and album art booklets out of the CD jewel cases and slide them both into the CD binder’s sleeves so that if you were paging through the binder itself you’d only see the booklet with the cool cover art, meaning if you wanted to listen to one of the albums you’d have to dig your fingers behind the booklet a little bit to slide the CD out. I think each page had two sleeves, so if you had the binder fully open you’d see four albums at a time. And I had a lot of cool albums in there, or at least I thought so: I had the whole David Bowie discography in there, a lot of The Cure, all of The Smiths’ stuff, several Smashing Pumpkins records, Synchronicity and Zenyatta Mondatta by The Police, some Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless of course, Silversun Pickups’ Carnavas was in there, a few Cursive albums, and a whole bunch of burned CDs toward the back, because back then I pirated music like a career criminal. That CD binder kind of showcased my ever-evolving musical tastes as a teenager because I got the case from an FYE in the mall when I was like 12 years old and kept it well into my twenties at least. On the first few pages, you had The Cure and some shitty emo bands, which was the kind of stuff I was listening to at 12, and then, as you paged through the binder, the albums got progressively more varied and interesting or whatever. I think I had that CD binder for a little over ten years before it got lost in a move, or maybe I tossed it, I don’t exactly remember. But thinking about it now, it’s a damn shame that I lost it, because that binder is like a sacred relic of my youth, now lost in some landfill somewhere probably. It’s funny how, at a certain point, you look at something and say, “Oh, this thing? I don’t care about this anymore. I’m just going to toss it,” only to find out later that you cared a whole hell of a lot, you just didn’t know it at the time. I’m not trying to justify hoarding, by the way. Materialism is bad for the soul, they say, but in this case, screw that, this is a spiritual matter. I would fucking love to have that CD binder again.

Anyway, that CD binder would sit in the front seat of the car of whichever parental unit was responsible for me at the time back then: if I was back home for school, the case would be in my mom’s car; if I was staying with my grandma Susu during summer or winter break or whatever, it would be in her car; and so on. Back then, I demanded full control of the stereo of whatever car I found myself in, and neither my mom nor my grandma seemed to mind this; in fact, they liked most of my music, except for the heavy, grungier stuff, or anything with screaming, or stuff with audible curse words, but the music I listened to rarely had profanity, so that was never really a problem, and I often played the heavier stuff regardless of their protests, which meant some car rides were full of sighs and sullen looks, but I didn’t care because, one, I was a selfish teenaged brat, and two, I fucking loved music. Still do. I’m always searching for new music.

Back in the mid-2000s, finding new music wasn’t so different from how it is today, though honestly, it might have been better back then. Sure, you didn’t have music streaming services, but you did have Google Search, Wikipedia, Apple iTunes, Blogspot, The Pirate Bay, and a handful of encyclopedic sites dedicated solely to music, like Allmusic.com, a website that has been around for a long, long time. I’ve been browsing Allmusic.com since at least high school, but the site is even older than that, with it first going live in 1994. I remember, during computer lab or whatever, instead of doing schoolwork, I would just go to Allmusic.com, pull up my favorite band’s page, then go through each band listed under the “Related Artists” tab, all to find new music. I would pick new bands to listen to based on a few different factors, most of which superficial as hell. Do I like the band name? Do I like the album art? Are the people in the band attractive, unique, or cool-looking in some way? How obscure is this band? And so on. Once I found a band that seemed interesting, I would decide which album to listen to either by cover art or by the Allmusic rating, then I’d do a Google search that looked something like this: “‘Silversun Pickups’ ‘Carnavas’ ‘Download’ ‘Blogspot,’” and nine times out of ten, I would instantly find a zipped version of the entire album. Because back then, in the mid-2000s, Blogspot was a prime source of free music, probably the best source actually, at least for people in the know. I mean, you could use The Pirate Bay too, to download an entire band’s discography all at once, which was something I did quite often, but you couldn’t find some of the more obscure stuff on The Pirate Bay; for that, you needed to browse Blogspots dedicated to niche music scenes run by hardcore fans. Back then I even created my own Blogspot for music downloads, which you can find on the Wayback Machine, but it was eventually removed from the platform for promoting piracy. I guess at some point in the last decade or so Blogspot cracked down. Back then, I didn’t think too much about the morality of pirating and sharing music online; I just did it because I loved music and wanted to listen to as much music as possible. The thought that musicians needed money or whatever never really occurred to me, for I lived a very privileged white-person life, but I did make it a point to buy physical copies of albums I enjoyed, not for ethical reasons though, but because owning a physical copy made me feel less like a poser and more like a true fan; plus, having the original album booklet and CD to slip into my binder was infinitely cooler than an ugly Memorex CD-R with the band and album name poorly scribbled in Sharpie. The whole process of finding new music back then was exciting and fun for me; it felt different from how discovering new music feels today for some reason. I think finding new music back then actually felt more meaningful because today these streaming services just push new stuff to you constantly without you having to put in any real effort; new singles come out, you listen to them once, you move on to the next one, whereas back in the mid-2000s, you had to put in real effort to download a song, and because of that, you also spent more time with that song, giving you more time to appreciate it. I realize I sound like an old man in a rocking chair smoking a pipe going “back in my day” between fits of coughing or whatever. But back in my day, if I found an album that I really liked, I would listen to it for months, to the point that it colored that whole epoch of my life in the hindsight of my mind’s eye. But nowadays, I’m more inclined to just hit “next,” because there’s seemingly infinite music at my fingertips and I might be missing out if I don’t go go go. I think the easier something is to acquire, the less you might appreciate it. As a society, we seem to conflate instant gratification with instant satisfaction, but these two things are actually inversely related: the faster the gratification, the weaker and more fleeting the satisfaction. The music industry today does not understand this; they are only concerned with clicks and profits. They don’t even care if you actually listen to the music or use the product or whatever, as long as you click and maybe view an ad or two. So basically: Reject modernity, return to Blogspot and physical CDs and MP3 players and stuff, for your very soul may be at stake.

Anyway. 

It was during that winter of 2006, when I was staying with Susu, that I was really big into Silversun Pickups’ album Carnavas. That album sort of colored that whole period for me. I must have been around 16 years old, I think. Susu drove this tan BMW that my mom had bought for her, and Carnavas never left that BMW’s CD slot. I had first heard Silversun Pickups on the radio earlier that year. The single “Lazy Eye” got heavy play on Top 100 rock radio throughout the year, which, in hindsight, is kind of surprising because it’s not the sort of song you’d typically hear on popular radio; it sounds sort of like The Smashing Pumpkins circa Siamese Dream mixed with the dreaminess of Slowdive’s Souvlaki or something, both of which, at the time, were albums I really enjoyed, which is probably why the song appealed to me. The song was pretty popular back then, I think they even included it in one of those Rock Band games or whatever. It starts softly with a pretty simple guitar line that has this little twang to it, then the drums kick in, then the vocals, which are androgynous and airy and nasally and weird, and it stays soft for a bit until eventually it gets into all this fuzzy guitar stuff before just exploding with anger for some reason, with the singer just screaming suddenly like you just cut him in line at the DMV or something, and the guitars turn up the distortion and scream right along with him; all this happens while a druggy noise-tunnel effect is going on, which I think is created in true shoegaze fashion using amp feedback fed through weird pedals, and this persists until the very end of the song, which ends almost exactly the same way it started, with that same simple twangy guitar line. The song is actually a lot like “The Royal We,” just more melodic and less structurally interesting. The first time I heard “Lazy Eye,” I wasn’t very impressed with it until it exploded; the contrast between the pretty and the ugly caught my attention, at which point I was like, “Yeah, OK, I get this. I’m down.” And so then I immediately bought the album and slid it into an empty sleeve in my CD binder, which, back in December 2006, was in Susu’s old BMW.

The car wasn’t old for its time, though. It was actually one of those newer BMWs. I think it was actually a 2006 BMW Series 5, and it was this tannish beige color. In my memory, it has a matte finish, but I know that couldn’t have been right. I remember the inside of the car smelled weird, like mustard almost, because despite being a healthy older lady who looked far younger than she actually was to the point where most people thought she was my mom, Susu was always going to KFC and keeping the sealed plastic mustard cups for some reason, stashing them in the car’s glove compartment alongside those plastic silverware packets and piles upon piles of KFC napkins, which she said she kept “just in case I need them some day,” but I’m pretty sure she never needed them some day, because all that stuff just kept piling up. On the dash, there was this pug dog bobblehead; she had put some of that double-sided tape on the bottom of it so it wouldn’t slide off while the car was moving. I think she actually got the dog from KFC, or maybe it was Burger King; it was a Men in Black II Kid’s Meal toy. It had a tan body and a massive wrinkled head with these great big bug eyes, and it was sticking its tongue out at me.

Whenever I rode in Susu’s car, I would imagine that pug bobbing his head to the music I was listening to, and back in 2006, during winter break, I was listening to Carnavas. I remember riding in the passenger seat, Miles and Matt in the back, Susu up front driving us to Chuck E. Cheese. The lines on the interstate blurred together, the trees were streaks of green, and the sun set orange and pink on the horizon like a distant forest fire. The song “Melatonin” was playing, so the inside of the car was like a shimmering sea of adolescent distortion. I remember Matt saying, “Is this The Smashing Pumpkins?” and I said, “No, this is Silversun Pickups,” and Miles said, “Same initials,” and I said, “Yeah, I didn’t realize that, cool,” and Susu said, “Can you please turn it down?” but I didn’t turn it down because we were now arriving at Chuck E. Cheese.

I don’t really remember what we used to do at Chuck E. Cheese when we were all 16 years old and didn’t really belong there. I remember the general stuff, like the pizza, which I actually enjoyed despite its cardboard consistency, and I remember the arcade area, filled with children who stood up at my thighs because at 16 I was 6’1”. The arcades back then had like three types of games: the big mechanical Rube Goldberg-like machines that you insert tokens into at just the right time so that they slide down the rail in such a way that they end up in the hole that rewards the highest amount of tickets; the sit-down shooters with two big plastic guns where you and a friend sit down and blast zombies or dinosaurs or whatever on a big screen in front of you using said plastic guns, which were usually orange for some reason; and then the skee-ball ones that give you like ten brown balls to roll up an incline into numbered holes, but I would just climb up the incline and put the balls in the best holes because why the hell not. I remember one of the Rube Goldberg-like games kept shouting STEP UP AND PLAY SIDEWINDER in a funny western-cowboy accent, and that one had a brown ball that you had to navigate across a bridge using a single handle without letting the ball fall off the side. And I remember this Simpson’s-themed one that you just put tokens into at the right time and they’d slide down a ramp into one of many holes on a revolving prize-wheel-like thing, with each hole giving a different number of tickets, and I remember getting so good at this one that I could time it perfectly to get the token into the best hole each time, and the thing would just spit out strips and strips of those perforated ticket strips, so many that some smaller kids would come up to me and be like, “Hey mister, can I get some of those tickets?” and sometimes I would give them some, sometimes I wouldn’t, depending on how I was feeling that day. I was always getting a bunch of tickets. Miles was too. But I don’t recall us ever exchanging them for anything. I guess that was never really the point.

I remember, after this particular visit to Chuck E. Cheese, we all went to the GameStop in the strip mall nearby. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess had literally just come out for the GameCube. This game was on my radar, but I didn’t have a GameCube anymore, having sold it a few months prior for PlayStation 2 stuff. But I really wanted Twilight Princess, so I bought the game without having a GameCube. Well, Susu bought it for me, with my mom’s credit card. I lived a very white life. I remember Miles was like, “How are you going to play that?” and I was like, “Doesn’t your brother Gavin have a GameCube?” and he was like, “Yeah, but he’s been using it to play Animal Crossing a lot lately,” and I was like, “Yeah, we’ll see about that,” and, about an hour later, there we are, in Gavin’s bedroom, staring at his GameCube. “Can I borrow it?” And Gavin was like, “What for?” And I of course said Twilight Princess. And he’s like, “But you don’t live here.” And I’m like, “I’m here for the next week, I’ll give it back before I leave.” And he’s like, “But I’m playing Animal Crossing.” And I’m like, “You can play Animal Crossing whenever; me, on the other hand, I have a very narrow window in which I can play Twilight Princess, and that window is literally right now and for the next seven days. So why don’t you be a pal and just let me borrow the GameCube?” There was a lot of sighing and eye rolling, but eventually Gavin handed over the GameCube. He was three years younger than Miles and I, and I got the impression that he wanted his brother and his brother’s friends to like him, so he was usually pretty agreeable. But this time he pushed back a bit more than normal, and he was even grumbling as I gathered up his grey GameCube and all the cords and controllers and whatnot and lugged it all out of his room, after which time I immediately went to Susu’s house and started playing.

During that winter break, my hair was messy and my sweaters were too big and I was staying in Susu’s garage and I was on prescription Adderall. Susu had converted the garage into a makeshift bedroom of sorts. I use the word “converted” loosely because the room was not insulated, the garage door could still be opened and closed, a number of bikes and lawn tools were still stored in the corner, all of Susu’s sewing stuff including her sewing machine was in there, and there wasn’t a real bed, just a box spring with a thin mattress on top of it; but I didn’t care about any of that because there was a big gray Magnavox CRT in there, and back then that was all I needed to call a place my home. I had Gavin’s GameCube hooked up to the Magnavox, and my PlayStation 2, too. I also had a CD-player-stereo thing by the fake bed, which I would use to play Carnavas whenever I wasn’t playing Twilight Princess, which I was playing a lot, obsessively in fact. From the moment I got the GameCube hooked up, I was spending upwards of like ten hours per day just playing Twilight Princess, eating only snacks and one big meal a day, usually Spiral Kraft Mac and Cheese that I would make myself in a very specific way because I was, and still am, insanely particular about my food. My hair was messy, my sweaters were too big, and Twilight Princess quickly became one of my favorite games ever; it was like Ocarina of Time, just with more stuff to do. There was this unlockable combat technique called Mortal Draw, with which you could one-shot basically any enemy in the game if you hit the A button right before they attacked you while you had Link standing still with his blade sheathed, and this was like the coolest shit I had ever done in a video game up to that point in my life. By the time the end of winter break came around, I was still playing Twilight Princess, trying to get all the heart pieces. So on the last day, when Susu had to drive me across state back to my mom’s house, I took Gavin’s GameCube with me and never gave it back. I don't know why I did that.

So yeah, that was what I had going on back then: Chuck E. Cheese, CDs, Twilight Princess, Adderall, Kraft Spirals, Messy Hair, Sweaters Too Big, Stealing, and Carnavas by Silversun Pickups.

“Turns out, if you're brave enough, you can make the real world… your Overworld.”

As Jack Black would say, my son yearns for the mines. He’s 2.8 years old and loves A Minecraft Movie. He stands on top of our living-room coffee table shouting CHICKEN JOCKEY and singing the Lava Chicken song. And he asks to watch the movie every day.

And that’s fine. It entertains him, which is a hard thing to do considering he’s inherited all my worst attention-deficit qualities, meaning, for me, the movie is a brief respite from his normal hyperactive madness. But by extension, considering he watches the movie every day, I've watched A Minecraft Movie maybe six hundred times by now, or at least it’s felt that way, because, despite its fairly standard runtime, it’s an excruciatingly torturous experience that feels much longer than it actually is. This is especially true on rewatches, when you start to notice how the plot is totally contrived, how most of the characters exist for no real reason, and how the pacing resembles my son’s own hyperactive thought-process, which is probably why he likes the movie so much. For example, the first forty-five minutes of the film, before they even enter the Minecraft world, are set in the real world, introduce a bunch of characters that do not matter to the plot whatsoever, and play out like a poor recreation of Napoleon Dynamite, cutting from one weird scene to another very quickly, complete with forced-quirky humor that feels like it was focus-grouped in the early 2000s, with lines delivered by middle-aged women like, “You can bag me up and take me to the curb anytime, but you gotta bungee the lid 'cause I got a lot of raccoons in there,” which feels highly inappropriate considering this is a fucking kids’ movie.

I don’t really want to harp on all the problems with the movie because there are way too many to count, and because that’s not really the point of this journal entry, and also because A Minecraft Movie is a kids’ movie first and foremost, so who the fuck actually cares. But I feel it’s important to let you know that this same take-me-to-the-curb woman later becomes romantically involved with a Minecraft villager who has a huge nose and massive block head that look as if human flesh has been stretched way too tightly over them, and he communicates only in creepy, sometimes pained grunts. The whole thing amounts to total nightmare fuel. In fact, most of the CGI in this movie is total nightmare fuel, as all the denizens of the Minecraft world have fleshy, real-world texturing over their clearly video-game-like block bodies, sometimes with nasty little hairs poking out here and there, which makes for some seriously unsettling imagery that could have only come from the mind of one seriously disturbed individual, presumably Jared Hess, the director, who also directed, you guessed it, Napoleon Dynamite.

Of course, much like the first forty-five minutes of A Minecraft Movie and the weird interspecies-romance subplot, everything I’ve typed up so far is pretty much irrelevant to both the plot of the movie and the point I’m trying to make with this journal entry, which is that, despite being a video-game movie made for kids, it tries to shoehorn what I feel is a very anti-kids message, which is what I'm about to get into here. And this message disturbs me because it mirrors something that I think about and wrestle with literally every day. It is something that I think no child should be forced to think about, especially when they just tuned in to watch Jack Black do funny things in a world inspired by their favorite video game, Minecraft.

But before I can analyze the overall message of the film, which is actually very deliberate, not something the script accidentally stumbles into, I have to provide some background for two of the more important characters.

The first important character is, of course, Steve. Steve’s story is one of escapism. The movie opens with a montage of Steve throughout the years. He starts as a young child who, for whatever reason, yearns for the mines, observing them from afar, dreaming of the day when he can get into those caves and do some digging or whatever. But before long, real life kicks in, and suddenly Steve, now a grotesque fat man in his thirties, is a paper pusher at some corporate office, depressed and without purpose. “My name is Steve. And as a child, I yearned for the mines. But it didn't really work out. So, I did a terrible thing. I grew up.” Toward the end of the montage, Steve has a little epiphany, so he quits his job to follow his dream. From that point, he spends all his free time mining in a nearby quarry, eventually unearthing a glowing blue cube, the Earth Crystal, which opens a portal to the Overworld, i.e. the Minecraft world, where he spends the next several years mining, crafting, and building stuff, basically escaping his real-world responsibilities. In the Overworld, he makes a wolf friend named Dennis, and at some point, he discovers an underworld full of pig-like monsters commanded by Malgosha, an evil piglin sorceress. Things happen and Malgosha captures Steve, demanding that he give her the Earth Crystal so that she can take over the universe or whatever, but Steve refuses, sending Dennis off with the Earth Crystal to hide it in the real world beyond the portal. This leads into the start of the movie, where the whole Napoleon Dynamite rip-off kicks in.

The second important character is Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, played by that same guy who did Game of Thrones and Aquaman or whatever, Jason Momoa. Before the events of the film, he was a child video-game prodigy, having won many video game tournaments and corporate sponsorships, which set him up for financial success and inflated his ego to an absurd degree. However, by the start of the film, he’s squandered all his sponsorship money and is now a washed-up, overweight, mullet-wearing middle-aged man who owns a retro video game store aptly named “Game Over World.” Maybe you can see where this is going. His store is filled to the brim with old stuff from his youth: classic video game consoles, arcade cabinets, ancient CRTs, retro boomboxes, that sort of stuff. One gets the impression that Garrett is a nostalgia junkie obsessed with his childhood. He’s much like that one character from Napoleon Dynamite, the ex-football-player uncle who points at the far-off mountains and says, “How much you wanna bet I can throw a football over them mountains?” Both of these characters live in the past, refusing to move on from their glory days. In fact, all Garrett ever talks about is how he was once the greatest video-game player in the world, which is played for laughs, as Garrett does have some self-awareness about his situation, constantly trying to downplay his boasting by pretending that he doesn’t actually care: “Gamer of the Year, 1989. Whatever. I barely think about it.” Yet despite this, he’s started a mentorship program for people who want to “win at the game of life,” using his own life as a model, even though his own life is in shambles because he is stuck, unable to move on from his glory days. Now, his store is being foreclosed on, and his obnoxious arrogance has made him few friends. After a series of incredibly stupid events, he stumbles into the Minecraft world, where he quickly realizes that he can use Minecraft-world diamonds to make a profit and thus save his soon-to-be-foreclosed retro game store, Game Over World.

Watching this movie, as an adult man in his thirties, I am reminded of my own follies. This is what so disturbs me about the film. In Garrett, I see myself. In Steve, I see myself. This may sound ridiculous, considering this is a kids’ movie for kids, but it is true nevertheless. Like Garrett, my office is my Game Over World. I have games in here from my childhood, from the early 2000s, collecting dust on bookshelves and tables, like a shrine to my youth. In a drawer just to the left of me: jewel-case copies of all the PlayStation Final Fantasy games, Chrono Cross, Arc the Lad, and SaGa Frontier; original Xbox games in their cheap plastic cases, like Panzer Dragoon, Halo, Mega Man Anniversary, and Morrowind; even some old issues of Nintendo Power from the days when I wore a bowl cut. Even further left, on a wooden table that holds my Xbox 360 and Nintendo Switch, old 360 games stand upright between bookends: Fable, Skyrim, Orange Box, Blue Dragon, Oblivion, and more. Next to that, favorite DVDs I’ve had since I was a rebellious teenager: the whole Cowboy Bebop collection, Lost in Translation, the entire Boondocks series, the movie Collateral starring Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise, and so on, all stacked atop each other, their spines facing out, creating a border of nostalgia around the one thing that helps me escape reality: the television set.

Like Steve, I find myself inexplicably drawn to the television, becoming sucked into the pixely glow. I try to fight it, tell myself that gaming has run its course, that it doesn’t bring me the same pleasure it once did, that I could be doing anything else with my time, but night after night I still find myself sitting there, in front of the screen, burning my retinas with the colors of escapism. There is no moderation in my hobbies. I play till ungodly hours. I eschew other things I’d like to be doing, like reading and writing, to stare into this nostalgic glow. I have reached an age where the act of playing video games triggers thoughts of wasted time and irresponsibility, yet there I am, night after night, still doing it, still playing the games, surrounded by all the old things I love. I foster times and places redolent of those long past, not to remind me of them, but to hide within them. I do this every night, to forget, or perhaps to run away from, what I have become, what we all eventually become.

They say age is just a number, that you can be young forever, but at a certain age, the shadow of responsibility catches up with you, and before you know it, maturity has slain the child inside. Your thinking changes, becomes more pragmatic and wise, and while this is enlightening in some ways, it is also scary as hell. What am I to do with myself? Who am I to become? Am I contributing to society in a meaningful way? What is a “meaningful way,” actually? Why do I tell myself that it doesn’t matter when I know, deep down, that it does? The nihilistic excuses start slipping away, replaced by some vague feeling of expectations being missed, but these expectations are not the expectations of your parents, or your teachers, or your boss, but of someone else entirely: you. They are your own expectations, dormant for years, coming to greet you. And the greeting is most unwelcome.

In this way, it is not A Minecraft Movie that disturbs me, but this: my own maturity.

But herein lies my problem with A Minecraft Movie. It is not that the movie has poor pacing, or that the writing is frankly abysmal, or all the weird sexual innuendos, or even the fleshy block people, or how everything looks obviously green-screened. It is that the movie, which is targeted toward kids, tries hard to make the very kids watching it grow up.

By the end of the movie, as you might imagine, both Steve’s and Garrett’s shadow catches up with them, they mature, they end up renouncing their old escapist ways, abandoning the Minecraft world, which the movie treats as an obvious metaphor for escapism, and basically they get jobs in the real world, and the movie totes this as some existential win for the characters. And maybe it is. Maybe it is an existential win for Steve and Garrett, who have spent most of their adulthood running away from their own responsibilities. Maybe this is a good lesson for the adults watching the film, maybe a win for them. But this is not a win for whom the movie is targeted.

Natalie: Are you sure you don't want to come back?
Steve: Yeah, I'm staying here. I got a bunch more stuff I want to build.
Natalie: Why don't you bring some of that magic to the real world?
(The humans enter the portal as Steve ponders about it. Finally, he makes a decision.)
Steve: Screw it. I’m coming with.
(Finally, he heads into the portal to return to the real world.)
Steve: (voiceover) Turns out, if you're brave enough, you can make the real world… your Overworld. 

When a child goes to sit down in a movie theater to watch a funny movie about their favorite video game, they should not be force-fed some adult narrative about how escapism is terrible and how they should quickly start growing up. Children do not come into the theater thinking about the Game Over World foreclosure notice they just got in the mail. They do not, and should not, think about these things.

So, Mr. Jared Hess, if you’re reading this, I do not like your movie. In fact, I hate it. Stop fucking trying to make kids grow up. You are an asshole.

These are lessons children’s movies should not teach, as they are inappropriate for children. These lessons are things that cannot and should not be taught by corporate media. A child must find these things out for themselves, and when they do, their shadow will have caught up with them, and they will no longer be a child. At that point, they will be something else. And this is not something to celebrate. This is something to mourn. 

Mr. Jared Hess, by subjecting children to your terrible movie, you are hastening the shadow of maturity, and this, I believe, is flat-out evil. So I can only hope that this was an accident, an oversight, rather than your true intent. Otherwise, you sir are a monster.

Stop trying to put kids in Game Over World. This is the domain of adults, not children.

Lolly lived a long life. 

She was a fluffy white cat, or maybe she was one of those black and tan shorthair cats, or maybe she was an orange cat, or a gray one, I don't actually remember. It was a long time ago. She was the family cat, but mostly she was my sister’s cat, because Lolly didn’t much care for anyone else. She especially didn't care for me, because back then, in my psychopathic toddler youth, I would tug at her tail and chase her around the house and treat her like a toy, and my sister hated me for it. So Lolly spent most of her time in my sister's huge basement room off the garage. We had this massive wood projector TV down there, with a Nintendo Entertainment System hooked up to it, and Lolly would play all the video games with us. She would track the lights and bat the plumber and hunt the ducks better than we ever could. She had a lot of personality. We all thought she was very funny. My sister loved Lolly very much, and as I grew older, I came to love her too.

But one day, when I was about ten years old, something happened to Lolly.

My parents had gotten divorced a year earlier. My mom remarried a rich older man. He moved us into a massive house that was previously owned by famous baseball manager Bobby Cox, which is not a brag, just a fact. And due to my young age, my parents had split custody over me, so I would live with my mom one month and my dad the next, but my sister, being around fifteen at the time, had chosen to live with my mom, and she brought Lolly along with her. My sister and Lolly lived in the upstairs section of the house, which was like a mini house of its own, with its own living room and kitchen area and everything. And when I was living with my mom, I spent a lot of time up there, because my room was up there too.

My stepdad was a self-proclaimed venture capitalist who bred show dogs, Boxers specifically, and he kept two as pets. Their names were Max and Sassy. Sassy was a sweet dog, but Max was a violent animal. Max especially didn’t like cats, so Lolly had to be kept upstairs at all times. We erected one of those safety gates at the top of the stairwell to keep them separated. This gate protected not only Lolly but also myself, because Max didn’t like me very much either. He would often lurch at me and snap at my ankles and chase me up the stairs. I was scared shitless of this dog. It got so bad that my mom hired a dog trainer, but the trainer didn’t so much train Max as he trained me. The idea was that I was just not approaching Max correctly, that if I just adjusted my behavior with Max, then he’d stop trying to basically murder me. So a few days a week, this dog trainer would take Max and I into the backyard to train us. He would show me how to properly walk up to Max, how to appropriately react when Max lurched at me, how to give Max a treat without getting my hand ripped off, how to hug my mom without Max flying into a jealous fit of bestial rage, that sort of thing. But the training sessions didn't help. Max remained a violent animal, and I remained a frightened little boy.

So, every day when I got home from school, to avoid Max, I would quietly slip through the front door, tiptoe through the kitchen where his dog bed was, army crawl behind the big couch in the living room so that he wouldn’t notice me, and then I’d bolt up the stairs for dear life, latch the safety gate behind me, and spend the rest of the day in my room playing Final Fantasy games on my PlayStation and watching Degrassi on The N.

But one day, that all changed. I had just gotten home from school. The house was strangely quiet. My mom was asleep on the couch. Max was nowhere to be found. I walked through the house relieved and unafraid. But when I got about halfway up the stairs, I noticed something. The gate was wide open and there was a trail of mangled fur leading to my sister’s room. Her door was cracked. The carpet around the door was darker than usual, a sort of reddish brown. I walked up to the door and called out my sister’s name, but there was no reply. She wasn't home. I heard a wet, mushy sound coming from inside the room. I started to feel uneasy but pushed the door open anyway. And that’s when I saw it, clumps of bloody fur, little chunks of muscle matter, small trails of intestinal tubing, an entire cat’s anatomy strewn across the room. And there was some sort of smell, some sort of awful smell. I remember staring, dumbfounded, unable to process what I was looking at. I was only ten years old. I had always assumed that those around me were invincible, that they could never die.

That mushy, wet sound got louder. I shifted my eyes toward the source, and that’s when I saw it. Max. He was in the corner of the room. He was hunched over a mound of flesh and blood. He was chewing and slurping. I felt a mixture of fear and anger swirling in my head and stomach. I stepped back, wanting to get out of there, which caused me to bump into the door, which must have alerted Max, because that’s when he turned his box-like head toward me in what felt like slow motion. His muzzle was dripping with blood, and I swear, in that moment, he had the red eyes of a demon. He let out a vicious snarl, and then he launched himself at me.

But in that moment, something happened. The fear was gone. I stepped forward, met Max in the middle, and then I kicked him right in the fucking face. I kicked him so hard that he yelped and twirled and fell to the floor, whimpering like a pathetic fucking animal, and then I kicked him again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

I don’t know how long I was in there, but eventually my mom rushed in and restrained me. Max was still breathing, but Lolly was not. And when my sister came home, she broke down in tears and refused to go in her room, but she started treating me a lot nicer after that day. Max was taken to the vet. They treated him for severe internal bleeding. He barely survived.

But I guess the dog training worked, because Max never fucked with me again.

My cousin is absolutely retarded.

Now that I have your attention, the word “retarded” is pretty interesting, because it's a good example of how language is ever-changing and fluid and societally constructed. Words and their meanings aren't just floating around out there in the ether. We make the words and we assign the meanings, and we change those meanings based on a variety of different factors. Nowadays, “retard” is a pejorative, a slur pretty much, an insult used to basically call someone a super idiot. The word “idiot” is interesting too, because that's another one of those words that highlights just how fickle language can be.

Until the 60s or so, the words “idiot,” “imbecile,” “moron,” and even “cretin,” according to Wikipedia, were widely used in the medical community to refer to someone with serious mental impairments, that is until mean-spirited people started using those words as general insults toward anyone they thought was annoying or stupid or whatever, at which point those words were reclassified as insults, after which the medical community came up with a new word to refer to people with serious mental impairments, that word being “retard,” that is until mean-spirited people started using that word to also refer to anyone they thought was annoying or stupid or whatever, at which point the word “retard” was reclassified as an insult as well, after which the medical community came up with yet new words to refer to people with serious mental impairments, those new words being “handicapped” and “disabled,” which have thus far withstood the pejorative tests of time, but it's really only a matter of time before mean-spirited people start using those words as insults as well, saying stuff like, “what are you fucking handicapped?” and “were you born disabled or what?”, and when that happens, the medical community will yet again have to come up with brand-new words to refer to people with serious mental impairments, and so on and so forth.

I'm of the opinion that any word we come up with for the mentally impaired will eventually be used as an insult, because it's just low-hanging fruit really, there are mean-spirited people out there, and no one wants to be labeled mentally impaired, so of course any officially dedicated medical term that refers to actual mentally impaired people will eventually be used as an easy insult by these aforementioned mean-spirited people, and these mean-spirited people aren't just going away anytime soon, so any mentally impaired classifiers we could possibly come up with are just kind of doomed to become pejoratives. The only solution here would be for people to just be nice to each other or whatever, but we all know that's a fucking pipe dream. But in the meantime, it's probably wise to steer clear of whichever words we societally designate as pejoratives, because, one, that's just the nice thing to do, and two, you wouldn't want someone to call you a “fucking retard,” so why call someone else one? The golden rule and all that.

So that brings us back around to my cousin, and why I'm calling him retarded. Because if I know, logically, that I shouldn't go around calling people retarded, then why am I so blatantly calling my cousin a retard? Like, what the hell’s wrong with me, right? Well, outside of the fact that I wanted an attention-grabbing opening line for this journal entry, the fact is, even if I were to call my cousin a retard to his face, he wouldn't understand what I meant because he is quite literally retarded. He is as retarded as they come. He is the prime specimen of retarded. He does not possess the necessary cognitive ability to know what words mean, much less even recognize that he himself is retarded. By the time he was like three the doctors had probably written something like “completely retarded” on his medical sheet. To this day, the doctors don't actually know what's wrong with him, just that something is seriously medically wrong with him. He walks around limp-wristed and flapping. He communicates by groaning and yelling and hitting and sometimes using one of those machines a really smart dog might use with big buttons that play pre-recorded messages like “Food please” and “I want to go outside.” As of typing this up, my cousin is thirty-five years old and still wears diapers. He often takes his clothes off and walks around the house fondling himself. He exclusively watches Disney films and gets violent when they're turned off. He was recently put on hardcore narcotics to control these violent outbursts, which puts him in a sort of light vegetative state. He is always dirty, with food and poop smeared all over his chest and face. 

So, if anyone fits the bill for retarded, it’s my cousin, because he's absolutely retarded. I mean, his own mother calls him retarded, if that tells you anything. My whole family, and my close friends, call him retarded, and sometimes we even make slightly off-color jokes at his expense.

Back when I was a young kid, I would live with my grandma during the summers, and eventually my aunt moved in and brought along her son, who is about my age and retarded, and I would share space with this retarded young man, who quickly became the focal point around which all things in that house swirled, because he demanded a lot of attention, on account of him being absolutely retarded. And when my aunt would go to work, she would hire a babysitter to watch her son, who she often comically referred to as retarded in the company of friends and family, and these babysitters were paid for by the government, through some disability program, but the babysitters were not always the most upstanding citizens, many came from sketchy backgrounds and had weird quirks and problems, like sneaking marijuana into the house then getting high in the backyard while they had locked my retarded cousin in his room, which is a huge no-no in the babysitting-mentally-impaired-people line of work, because the state government can and will take your mentally impaired children away if they catch you, or anyone else in your household, with illegal substances, so needless to say, many of these babysitters were very quickly canned, and sometimes it took my aunt a few weeks to find a new babysitter, meaning the babysitter would often end up being my grandma and me.

I would help my grandma feed my cousin, clothe him, make sure his diapers were changed, clean his poop off the walls, make sure he didn’t get out of the house and wander into the street and get hit by a car, hold his hand sometimes and take him on walks, ensure his pill regimen was properly digested, usually by mashing it into his food, make sure his Disney VHS tapes were properly rewound and replayed over and over, take him for car rides to calm him down when he got violent, and make sure the refrigerator and cabinets were all properly tied up with slip knots so that he wouldn’t get into everything and make a huge mess. And we did all this stuff until my aunt came home from work, at which point my grandma would go back to watching her old television shows and I would go back to playing my PlayStation and Nintendo 64 games. And we did all this without resentment or complaint, because, although absolutely retarded, my cousin was part of the family and he couldn’t help how he was born and we loved him, even if we sometimes referred to him as retarded and made slightly off-color jokes at his expense.

During those halcyon summers, I grew to enjoy my cousin’s company. Whenever he was gone, the house just felt weird. I remember he was always very receptive to physical greetings, like if I put my hand up in a high-five position, he would smack it really hard with his own hand, and then he would go back to flapping his arms around, groaning, and watching his Disney films. He always had this blank look on his face, like a sort of vacant stare, but whenever we did those high-five greetings together, I felt something shining through the retarded shell he was trapped in, something deeper than the body and the mind, something like his soul coming through whenever we did those little high-five greetings together, so I would do those greetings with him every time I entered a room he was in, to build a soul-bond connection with him. It got to the point where, whenever I came home from hanging out with my friends, if my cousin wasn’t in the living room, I would go to his room, the walls of which were covered top to bottom in Disney pictures, and his bed was covered in plastic so that it was easier to clean for obvious reasons, and I would do the high-five greeting with him there to help build the connection, before going back to playing PlayStation and Nintendo 64 games in my room, which was actually the garage because my old room was now my cousin’s room, which was something that I harbored no resentment or complaints about, because, although absolutely retarded, my cousin was part of the family and he couldn’t help how he was born and I loved him.

Back then, I was never embarrassed about my cousin. I never tried to hide him from anyone. A good friend of mine, Miles, would often come over to play Super Smash Bros. on the Nintendo 64 with me, and I remember the first time he came over, I hadn’t even warned him about my cousin, because I didn’t even think to do so, because my cousin was just such a normal staple of my life or whatever that the thought hadn't even crossed my mind that someone unfamiliar with him might feel a little uncomfortable. I remember when Miles and I got to my house, opened the front door, and there my cousin was, in the living room, flapping his hands and groaning while wearing nothing but a diaper, I said something like, “yeah, that’s my cousin, he lives here,” and Miles just curiously nodded, not saying anything mean at all, so I showed Miles how to do the high-five greeting, then we all exchanged high-five greetings, and then Miles and I went to my garage room and started playing Nintendo 64. This went on for many summers. Miles eventually became so close to my family that, after hearing my aunt refer to my cousin as retarded many times, Miles and I adopted this language and would casually talk about how my cousin was retarded, and sometimes we would even make jokes at his expense, as if we were just young boys teasing each other, and we did this, I like to think, because we both saw my cousin as a friend, a weird retarded friend, who was just born that way and couldn’t help it and it was whatever because we were all friends here and we had each other’s backs like friends do. We had brought my cousin into the fold of adolescent friendship, as one of the boys, so to speak, and although my retarded cousin could not comprehend that he was essentially one of the boys, I liked to think he could.

But one time, I remember, Miles and I were outside playing with this new kid, Jordan, and I had mentioned wanting to go back to my place to play some Super Smash Bros., not even thinking to mention to Jordan that my retarded cousin lived there too. It turned out that Jordan loved Smash Bros., so we all went back to my place to boot up the old N64, and after a long walk from the clubhouse playground, through the many verdant alleys nestled between the pale blue vinyl siding of cookie-cutter homes, we arrived at my place. Everything was going great until I opened the front door.

My cousin was in the living room, stark naked, pacing around in circles, touching himself with one hand and flapping with the other. I remember Jordan looked at my cousin with this frightened, disgusted look on his face, then looked back at me, then looked at my cousin again, then back at me one last time and finally said, “Who’s the retard?”

Miles and I went completely silent. It was as if a dark cloud had suddenly descended right over us. Eventually, I turned to Jordan, my eyes squinted and my eleven-year-old face just one big scowl, and I said, “What did you just say?”

Jordan repeated himself, “I said, who’s the retard? What’s wrong with him?”

I was pissed and shaking and wanted to scream in the kid's face at this point, but before I could do anything, Miles all of a sudden shoved Jordan’s shoulders real hard, knocking him over, and said,

“What’s wrong with YOU?”