just words

“Suddenly now and then someone comes awake, comes undone, as it were, from the meaningless glue in which we are stuck—the rigmarole which we call the everyday life and which is not life but a trancelike suspension above the great stream of life—and this person who, because he no longer subscribes to the general pattern, seems to us quite mad finds himself invested with strange and almost terrifying powers…”
—Henry Miller, Sexus (The Rosy Crucifixion, #1) 

There I was, sitting in my faux-leather office chair, playing Final Fantasy VIII via DuckStation emulator on an old transparent SecureView CRT via an HDMI to Coax Modulator set to CH3 running from an Ubuntu Linux desktop PC to said CRT so that I could play the game How It Was Meant To Be Played in the year 2025 of our lord, because I'm insufferable like that. My good and perhaps only true friend, Robert, visiting from Florida, sitting next to me in the slightly less comfortable office chair, reading orange-highlighted passages out of Henry Miller’s Sexus between taking sips of Red Bull and waxing pontifical on all his various interpretations of said passages, because he's also insufferable like that. It's like three in the afternoon, and we had planned to take my napping two-year-old son to the mall after he woke up. And of course I’m barely paying attention to what Robert is saying because I’m hyperfocused on fighting monsters to grind materials to make Doomtrain, a Guardian Force that looks like a train made of stretched human muscle and bone and teeth with a ghastly scream stuck on its face as if it had just seen itself in the mirror, when all of a sudden there's a VOOM and the word ZANTETSUKEN appears at the top of the screen and I start bouncing up and down in my faux-leather office chair like I’m ten years old again shouting LOOK LOOK LOOK right over one of Robert’s long-winded-but-I’m-sure-very-interesting Miller rambles.

Our heroes fade. The phosphor goes dark. The screen pans to a 320x240 sky cloaked in black and gray clouds. Rain falls in thin pixely white lines. A low-res puddle forms on the virtual ground. There’s a clomp, a splash. The polygonal hoof of a white mare is shown. The clomps continue, slow, foreboding, off-time. The beast has six legs. The screen pans to reveal the rider, an entity only vaguely human, full of strange and terrifying powers, clad in black armor. His face is yellow and his eyes are red and his scowl is permanent. It is Odin, the god of death. The camera pauses on his indignant mug. He looks severely displeased and ready to fuck shit up. Lightning splits the sky. Thunder booms. The screen goes white, turning the wrathful God silhouette, but only for a moment, because suddenly, with massive blue-steel blade in hand, Odin tugs the reins. The nightmare beast neighs a wicked neigh, rears up on hind legs, plumes smoke from its flared nostrils, and then violently leaps toward the enemy. Odin swings his massive blade, big kanji flashes, not once 斬, not twice 鉄, but thrice 剣, then he is motionless, posed with sword crossed by his face, blood-red 斬鉄剣 splattered on the screen, enemy in view behind him, and then, in the silent blink of an eye, that same enemy is split in two, destroyed.

“That’s gotta be the coolest summon animation in all of Final Fantasy,” I say so matter-of-factly that Robert really has no choice but to nod his head and agree before turning his attention once again to Sexus and saying something like, “The thing about Miller is that, like, he can go from these raunchy-as-fuck sex scenes, which are like ‘I touched her only once and it made her cum like six times,’ which makes me wonder if he ever actually had sexual intercourse with a woman, to these vast philosophical musings on what it means to be an artist and how to navigate the soul-suckingly fake modern world, in a way that really no other author, at least that I’ve read, could. I mean, you really should read Tropic of Capricorn at least, I think you’d like it.” And of course, at this point, I’m zoned out on my grind shit again, but Robert keeps going. “I mean, Miller himself, whose middle name is Valentine which is kinda cool, was kind of an awful person, I think he had a daughter that he pretty much abandoned for a life of debauchery in France or something, all while bumming money off people because he was broke as fuck or whatever, but his writing is incredibly good, so it’s kind of like an art-before-the-artist thing, if you know what I mean.” And I’m nodding along, doing the whole absent-minded mhm-yeah-I-know-what-you-mean thing, repeatedly pushing X on my DualShock, watching Squall gunblade monsters to death, when all of a sudden there’s a knock on my office door and in walks my son, Arthur, at the absolute height of his terrible twos, so of course he immediately starts going through my bookshelf, grabbing at all sorts of paperbacks that, if given enough time, will surely be ripped to shreds, so now I’m scrambling to grab the books out of his hands all while he’s repeating “Daddy, daddy, mall, mall, wanna go to the mall, wanna go to the mall with The Robert,” which is what he calls Robert, “The Robert.”

So The Robert and I get our stuff together, pack up my son’s bag, and head off to the mall.

The mall sucks. It’s dying. There's not one store in there worth going to, and there's hardly anyone ever there, so it's kind of like this vast liminal space left over from a pre-terminally-online age. I only take my son to the mall to ride the motorcycles. Arthur loves riding the motorcycles. They're not real motorcycles, they're like these motorized electric three-wheelers dressed up as unicorns and Paw Patrol characters and shit, but they're pretty fast for indoor children’s vehicles, like 10mph at least, and they can technically support up to 200lbs, so I sometimes ride them too, often the same one my son rides, because frankly he's not a very good driver, having run into many benches, walls, and glass display windows in his time, which is easy for him to do because the employees at this little motorcycle kiosk let the kids ride these little disaster machines all over the place with basically zero supervision as long as you pay the going rate of like two dollars a minute, which is actually pretty expensive considering you're really only paying for electricity and experiences, but the motorcycles are just sitting there untethered outside the kiosk, so anyone could potentially just climb up on them whenever, but the motorcycles won't actually rev up unless the kiosk employee inserts a little card into the motorcycle’s backside which, considering these things are dressed as colorful beasts, ends up looking a little sodomitic, to tell you the truth, but I guess that's beside the point.

Anyway. When we get to the motorcycle kiosk inside the mall, it’s like four in the afternoon, and not a soul is there, besides us, and there’s no OUT FOR LUNCH or BE RIGHT BACK sign or nothing. So I’m scanning the area, checking if maybe the kiosk employee is nearby somewhere, maybe actually supervising one of the little cyclists for once, but no, nothing, not a single person that looks even remotely close to an underpaid mall kiosk employee that hates their life, and all the motorcycles are there, right in front of the kiosk, and my son is now climbing up on the unicorn one, which, from previous rides, we have discovered is actually the fastest one of the bunch, so little Arthur always wants to ride that one, so he’s now repeating, “go go go go go,” but little does he know, there is no way to make it go, for the underpaid mall kiosk employee is not there to stick the little card up the thing’s butt, so I walk to my son, lift him off the unicorn, and try to explain the situation, “no one’s here, buddy, we’ll come back in 10 minutes,” but of course he doesn’t understand and, at the absolute height of his terrible twos, while I’m holding him skyward, he starts kicking and screaming like a madman, so I put him down, at which point he climbs up on the unicorn again, so I say something like “what the hell why not” then The Robert helps me push the unicorn out of its little spot in front of the kiosk, and then I get behind the thing and start pushing it, Arthur going “weeeeeeeeeeee” while holding the handlebars and revving it like it’s actually working, which it’s not. I push him around for a few minutes, figuring maybe the kiosk employee will show up at some point, but no one ever does, so eventually I get kind of exhausted pushing this unicorn around, especially since there’s like a thirty-pound toddler on top of it, so I push the thing back into its spot right by all the other motorcycles, and Arthur hates that, so he starts moaning and groaning, doing his terrible-twos shit, at which point I’m like, “OK, what the hell, where is this person?” and The Robert is like, “how am I supposed to know? Maybe they skipped out on work.” So, not taking that for an answer, I tell The Robert to push Arthur around for a minute, and, once he starts doing that, I walk off to the nearby shoe store, which is called something generic like Shoe Emporium or something, and I walk right up to the front desk and say, “Where’s the Motorcycle person?” And the woman at the front desk, who has brown hair and is quite round and whose face just sort of sinks into her neck because she’s quite round, not trying to be mean, those are just the facts, the woman says, “They do whatever they want, just leaving all the time, taking breaks whenever, last I saw them was an hour ago.” So I nod, say thanks, then, figuring surely the kiosk employee will be back soon, considering they’ve already been gone for an hour and it’s still like four hours until mall-closing time, I go back to the motorcycle kiosk, where The Robert is still pushing the unicorn around, and Arthur, who now looks quite bored sitting atop the unicorn, is saying, “I wanna do it, I wanna go fast, go fast,” so I trade off with The Robert and start pushing Arthur around again for another minute or so, but Arthur keeps repeating, “wanna go fast, wanna go fast,” and of course, as his father, I too want him to go fast, I want him to have a great time, I want him to be happy always, forever, and that’s when something strikes me, psychically, so I stop and think to myself, “you know what, fuck it,” and then, with a glint in my eye and a confident smile on my face, I tell The Robert, “Push him around for just another minute, I got an idea,” and The Robert, who is now looking at me with an eyebrow raised and a stern look on his face, as if he’s seen this side of me before and knows something’s up, says, “What are you planning to do?” But I do not respond, I say nothing. I simply walk up to the kiosk and start circling it, looking for an opening, an entrance, but the entrance I find, a wooden gate, is locked, so that’s when I get creative.

The kiosk itself is pretty much just a rectangular wall enclosure that goes up to about my chest, and it's got a raised desk in the middle where the little electronic credit card reader is, and there's also a small bench back there, for employee sitting, and there’s also a long broom, and, upon examining the desk closely, I also see the little card that the kiosk employees use to power up the motorcycles, which is exactly what I was hoping to find, and upon seeing that little sodomitic card, I'm overcome by this tingly heady feeling as if I’ve been endowed with strange and terrifying powers, as if I have become unstuck from the fabric of reality, free of all the frankly fucking pointless rules of the world, and of course I want my son to have some fun here at the mall, and these damn motorcycles are pretty much the only way for him to do that, so without a second thought I decide to use this newfound strange, terrifying power to reach my long arm over the kiosk wall, grab the broom, pull it toward me, examine it as if it were my blade, all while big kanji flashes in my mind, 斬鉄剣, which frankly I don’t know the meaning of, then I move the attached detachable dustpan to the end of the broom, near the bristles, and then I start using the broom as like an extension of my arm, holding it out far over the kiosk wall, maneuvering it onto the desk in the middle, all to reach the little power-up card, and then I start nudging the card off the desk, and after a few seconds of this, the card falls right into the little dustpan, at which point I pull the broom back toward me, to like retrieve the card, but while doing this the card slips from the dustpan, falling onto the floor below, so I quickly pull back the broom, lean it upright on the kiosk, and, thinking to myself, “fuck it, I’m going all in,” I start lifting my leg, totally intent on just climbing over the fucking kiosk wall, to get in there and pick up the damn card, but that’s when I hear a loud, “HEY, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?”

So I turn around, and I see the woman from the shoe store, standing about ten feet away, staring at me with this harsh look on her face, then I look back and see both The Robert and Arthur just standing there staring at me too, although they’re staring at me with these big eyes, as if they’re in awe of the strange and terrifying power radiating from my person, but it’s at this point that I think to myself that perhaps I am setting a poor example for my son, so I turn back to the woman from the shoe store and, acting totally oblivious, say, “What?” And she says, “What do you mean ‘what?’ You can’t do that.” So I say, “Do what?” And she says, “Mess with their stuff.” And I’m just sort of blinking at her at this point. And then she repeats, “You can’t mess with their stuff when they’re not there.” So I say, “Well, when are they coming back?” And she says, “How should I know? You just can’t mess with their stuff.” And I’m like thinking to myself like, “What are they going to do, throw me in mall jail? For trying to climb over a kiosk to get a card that powers a child-sized motorcycle so that my son can have a little fun in this run-down dump of a fucking mall? What is this woman trying to prove? Is she like lonely and miserable, so she gets off on ruining kids’ fun? On a Saturday for fuck’s sake? What’s her fucking problem?” And then she says something like, “You have to wait for them to come back or you have to leave, sir.” And now, feeling the strange and terrifying power dissipating from my body and soul, like I’m slowly becoming stuck in the pointless fucking rules again, I blink and say, “OK, but when are they coming back?” And she says, “I told you, sir, I don’t know, please leave.” And now I feel totally stuck, like I’m fully back in reality again, so I say, “Sorry, I just wanted my son to have some fun, is all.” At which point the woman’s expression softens a little bit and she says, “I get it, but you can’t do that.” So I sigh dejectedly and say, “I know.”

And I did know, but, for a moment there, I didn’t, for a moment there, I was unstuck.

So I turn to my son and The Robert and say, “C’mon, let’s go downtown or something.” But my son shakes his head, “No, no, wanna ride the motorcycles, please daddy, please.” So I crouch down eye-level with my boy and say, “I know, son, but we can’t today, I’m sorry, but we can go to the playground, you’ll have fun there.” And, upon hearing the p-word, his rosy little cherubic face lights up, and off we go, leaving the motorcycles and dead mall in our wake.

Later that night, Arthur is asleep, and The Robert and I are back in my office, doing our literary-nerd shit. I’m repeatedly encountering these Blitz monsters to steal a bunch of Betrayal Swords to turn them into Confuse magic so that I can junction that magic onto Quistis so that I can survive Malboro Bad Breath attacks so that I can kill Malboros so that I can get some Malboro Tentacles so that I can create Doomtrain, which is a fucking pain in the ass and gives you an idea of just how grindy and repetitive Final Fantasy VIII can be, when The Robert, index finger on an orange-highlighted passage of Sexus, says, “You know, at the mall today, for a moment there, you were unglued.” And I’m like, “What?” And he’s like, “Unglued, like, here, let me read this passage here,” and then he starts reading the passage, but I wave my hands and interrupt him because, at that moment, ZANTETSUKEN appears on the screen again, and now, instead of being excited and ten years old again, I’m very annoyed, so I say, “You see, this is the problem with Odin sometimes, it’s like, he just does whatever the fuck he wants. I’m trying to steal Betrayal Swords here, which means I have to actually fight the monster, so that I can use steal on them, but I can’t fight the monsters when Odin just on a whim decides to fucking show up and slice them in half. He slows the whole stealing process down. And he’s done this like five times now, as if he knows I’m trying to steal from these monsters specifically. And since he randomly shows up, there’s nothing I can fucking do about it. It’s ridiculous. It’s like he’s outside of the normal rules of the game, almost.” But The Robert, blinking at me a little bit, just says, “Can I read the passage now?” So I pause the game, turn to him, and say, “Whatever, sure, read the passage.” And that’s when he starts reading the passage, “Suddenly now and then someone comes awake, comes undone, as it were, from the meaningless glue in which we are stuck,” and so on, and this passage actually captures me, I am sitting there, rapt, as he keeps going and going, reading the whole page, and then, after a long pause, he goes, “You know, I’ve known you for a while, and sometimes you really can be one unglued motherfucker. I wish I could be like that, sometimes.” And I sort of shrug and say something like, “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, the whole mall thing was kind of embarrassing, in hindsight.” But he shakes his head, “No, it was cool as fuck.” And I sort of smile before turning back to my game, unpausing, then running Squall around in circles in the woods again, to encounter more Blitz monsters, which, after a few seconds, I do, but, lo and behold, there’s a VOOM and the word ZANTETSUKEN appears at the top of the screen again, so I swivel my faux-leather office chair to face The Robert again, incredulous look on my face, and say,

“You know who’s unglued?”

“Who?”

I point at the screen. “This asshole.”

The Robert laughs. “Yeah, well, at least he’s still cool as fuck.”

斬鉄剣

I wanna take a moment to talk about The Grind.

Anyone who's played a role-playing game knows about The Grind. It's basically a rite of passage for any serious quote-unquote “gamer.” From defeating the same monster over and over again for experience points, to working a soul-crushing nine-to-five to pay the rent, to farming items with awful drop rates for some repeatable quest that rewards a pitifully small amount of gold, to mowing every inch of the lawn only to have to do it again in a week, to endlessly playing the same mini-game to unlock some cool ultimate weapon. We all know about The Grind, it’s nearly synonymous with life itself.

I'm very familiar with The Grind. I spent the last few days playing Final Fantasy 8, trying to unlock Squall’s ultimate weapon, Lionheart, as early as possible on disc 1. I even created an account on RetroAchievements.com, which adds achievements to old emulated games, “Unlock Lionheart on Disc 1” being one of those achievements, all so I could have something to show for completing The Grind.

The actual process of unlocking Lionheart wasn't very complicated, more so just incredibly time consuming. It required the collection of 5 dragon fangs, 1 adamantine, and 12 pulse ammunition. The dragon fangs were relatively easy to get, just defeating a bunch of Grendels in the forest near Galbadia Garden. And the adamantine was pretty easy too, just Card Mod the Minotaur card, which refines into 10 adamantine. But the pulse ammunition was a whole nother story, I had to Card Mod 20 Elnoyle cards, which are hard to come by, especially on disc 1, because they're rare level 5 cards only obtainable one at a time from winning Triple Triad matches against a specific kid in Galbadia Garden, and the kid hardly ever uses the card, so I had to challenge this kid like hundreds of times just to win 20 of them, which is to say this whole process was indeed a grind, a boring, mind-numbing grind.

But this grind did afford me a lot of time to think about life and stuff, which, in my view, is a cardinal sin of gaming, because ideally gaming, being the paragon of escapist entertainment, should distract you from the real world, not cause you to further dwell on it, which is to say that, while I was sitting there in my plushy office chair in front of my old CRT, mindlessly challenging this kid to cards, playing each round exactly the same way because there’s really no strategy or thinking required, I started asking myself the age-old dreaded question of why.

Why am I even doing this? Like, what's the fucking point? Don’t I have like a billion better things to be doing? What am I actually trying to achieve here? Is it bragging rights? Who am I bragging to, then? Is this supposed to be entertaining? Am I supposed to be having fun?

So, to combat the dreaded questions, I tried to come up with justifications, started thinking to myself that perhaps, by obtaining Lionheart, it would fill me with some grand sense of accomplishment, and perhaps texting my friend a screenshot of Squall holding Lionheart would confer some momentary joy, and perhaps users on RetroAchievements.com would come across my profile, see my achievement, say something like, “wow, this guy really likes Final Fantasy 8 and is fucking cool as hell,” and so perhaps The Grind was worth it, I thought to myself.

But surprise surprise, I was wrong.

After five hours total playing cards with this kid, then walking Squall up to the nearest weapons shop and pushing the X button twice to craft Lionheart, little RetroAchievement notification bubble popping up, I felt no grand sense of accomplishment, no momentary joy, no gamer pride, no nothing, at least nothing positive. What I did feel, however, was this sort of empty feeling in the pit of my stomach after it dawned on me that I had just spent five hours of my life collecting some digital trophy that, in a few days, I will no longer give two shits about, so, in a weird funk, I saved the game, turned off my PC, and went to bed full of regret without even bothering to take the legendary gunblade out for a quick test run beforehand.

But hey, at least I have the little badge on my RetroAchievement profile, at least that’s something, right?

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an indictment on Final Fantasy 8 by any means. The game itself actually requires very little grinding to complete, which is one of the reasons I like the game so much, that and it reminds me of staying at Grandma’s house during the summer, that and of course the blurry polygonal character models which perfectly complement the beautifully pre-rendered techno beachpunk environments that are both mysterious and cozy as hell, that and of course Nobuo Uematsu's breezy midi compositions that rank as some of his best, most chill work ever, that and also the bizarre existential narrative that barely makes any sense, that and the fact that I deeply relate with Squall as an angry young man full of brooding angst who says “whatever” and “...” a lot, that and of course the simple addition of being able to tap R1 to trigger an explosive critical hit when attacking which somehow elevates the series’ traditionally boring turn-based battle system into something far more exciting than it has any right to be, which all coalesces into a gaming experience like no other.

All this is to say that Final Fantasy 8 is not really the problem here, the grinding is optional, so this is not an indictment of the game itself, more an indictment of myself for being almost powerlessly compelled to grind for dumb little achievements like this, even when I know deep down they will confer no sense of grand accomplishment whatsoever, but more importantly, my rant here is also an indictment of the games industry itself, and those in it, for their tendency for time-waste and tedium, for their creation of systems that facilitate The Grind, as if they can think of no better way to keep players engaged than by implementing a bunch of boring repetitive bullshit that insidiously extends playtime.

Take Pokemon for example. Everyone knows about Pokemon. In Pokemon, there’s this thing called “shiny” Pokemon, basically just a recolored version of an existing Pokemon, and each Pokemon has a shiny variant, and some of these shinies look very cool indeed, like Ponyta, whose shiny variant has blue flames instead of red, but finding a shiny is The Grind epitomized, probably one of the most egregious examples of The Grind in all of gaming history, to be frank.

Take Pokemon Crystal, for example. In Pokemon Crystal there is a 1 in 8,192 chance of encountering a shiny Pokemon. Yes, you read that correctly, every 8,192 encounters you might find a shiny Pokemon. And legendary Pokemon can be shiny too, but since there’s only 1 legendary Pokemon per game, to find that shiny legendary, you have to save before the battle, trigger the battle, then, if the legendary Pokemon is not shiny, you have to soft reset your game and try again, which you may or may not have to do over eight thousand times, all to perhaps encounter a cooler-looking version of said legendary Pokemon, so that you can perhaps show your buddies and be all like, “I bet you don’t have this, dumbass,” before subsequently letting that same shiny Pokemon waste away in your in-game PC, never to be touched again.

Now you might be thinking something like, “OK, but isn’t that optional? You don’t have to grind shiny Pokemon if you don’t want.” And yes, that’s true. But let me ask you, once one puts their mind to something, is it really “optional” at that point? Once someone has said to themselves, “I must have this,” have they not decided on their path, sealed their fate in a way? Sure, they could change their mind, but “optional” is a bit misleading, I think. After all, isn’t everything optional, including playing the game itself? Isn’t life optional, considering one could just hang themselves? If everything is “optional,” perhaps the word actually has no meaning at all.

Basically, once some kid says, “I want the Ponyta with blue flames,” they have already started down the empty, time-sucking path known as The Grind, which Game Freak, as the developer of said shiny-Pokemon grinding system, has unleashed onto this blue-flame-loving child’s highly impressionable and very fragile undeveloped brain. For a kid, experiencing The Grind in video games is basically just preparation for adulthood, which is incredibly sad when you think about it, criminal almost, especially when you consider how The Grind impacts neurodivergent people, some of whom are very monomaniacal, never letting go of an idea until the idea is fully realized, and in this way The Grind, at least in relation to gaming, could also be considered predatory, in a way.

And it’s not just kids doing this shit. For some godforsaken reason, I follow the Pokemon Crystal subreddit, and the majority of posts on there are seemingly full-grown adults sharing screenshots of shiny legendary Pokemon they spent hundreds of hours grinding for, as if staring into a small Game Boy screen for an ungodly amount of time while barefisting Cheetos and repeatedly performing tasks that require no skill whatsoever is anything other than just plain fucking depressing. I mean, seriously, what do they have to show for all that grinding, other than a slightly different colored Pokemon, which is really just a series of ones and zeroes saved to a small chip with a very short lifespan, and this is supposed to be some sort of impressive feat, some grand accomplishment?

It really makes you wonder, what sort of society do we live in, where Lionhearts and shiny Pokemon are used in lieu of meaningful real-world accomplishments? What sort of society do we live in, where The Grind is not only promoted but celebrated? What sort of society do we live in, where we’re driven to chase little bits of code as if they’re precious treasures? What’s missing in our daily lives that compels us to fill the void with such stupid useless crap?

And is a society that produces such hollow values even worth participating in?