just words

A new year dawns, and so too a bunch of promises inevitably broken.

For the record, I think New Year’s resolutions are stupid. I see people make all sorts of New Year’s resolutions that are never realized. I’m going to write a novel. I’m going to stop smoking. I’m going to lose 50 lbs. I’m going to stop drinking. I’m going to stop being so negative all the time. These are things that never work as New Year’s resolutions. I've seen them fail time and time again, with myself and others. It seems to me that a resolution can be made at any time, so why wait until the new year? Why not exercise some willpower earlier in the year? Is there some sort of cosmic willpower-enhancing magic produced when the Earth completes a full rotation around the sun? How long does that magic last? And does that magic only exist at the exact moment of orbit completion? Perhaps there’s no cosmic magic at all; perhaps it’s all symbolic? New year, new you. After all, there’s no real set “complete orbit” in the grand scheme of things; we humans defined the criteria for when an orbit is complete. I could say that the orbit starts in June and ends next June, or February and February, and so on; it’s all societally constructed anyway.

What really gets me is that people will often put off their resolutions until the new year; they know they should stop drinking, but they don’t want to stop drinking right this second because that would be no fun, so they pick some arbitrary date on the Gregorian calendar to stop drinking instead. “I will for sure stop drinking come January 1st, no doubt about it.” And when January 1st comes around, many will have already broken this promise to themselves. “Just a small glass of wine to celebrate the new year, no big deal.” Or, by the time January 1st comes around, they’ll have rationalized the “no drinking” resolution into something more manageable, like “no drinking on weekdays” or something like that. It seems to me that, if one has the thought to “stop drinking,” or whatever, then they should do that thing right then and there, not wait until some random date on a calendar. Otherwise, how serious are they, really? Do they really want to stop drinking, or do they just want to make themselves feel better? And if it’s to make themselves feel better, isn’t this whole thing kind of counterproductive then, considering they'll most definitely feel bad when they inevitably break the resolution?

This is why, every year, I tell myself that I am not going to make any sort of New Year’s resolution. But I’m now realizing that this New Year’s anti-resolution becomes a sort of New Year’s resolution itself because it fits the core definition of one: a promise corresponding to the Earth’s rotation around the sun. Meaning, by telling myself I am not going to have a New Year’s resolution, I am, in fact, setting a New Year’s resolution, meaning I am unwittingly participating in the very thing I am criticizing. And considering my position on New Year’s resolutions, which asserts that all New Year’s resolutions are weak promises inevitably broken, my own “no New Year’s resolution” resolution is doomed to fail, meaning I am bound to set some sort of different New Year’s resolution for myself, although I kind of already have what with the “no New Year’s resolution” resolution, which we already know is bound to fail, which means I am bound to set some sort of different New Year’s resolution, and so on.

You can quickly see how the “no New Year’s resolution” resolution establishes a sort of paradox in which, when the resolution is broken, you end up fulfilling the resolution by breaking it, and when you try to keep it, you break it by keeping it. It is definitionally self-defeating. Perhaps the only way to break the paradox is to stop overthinking it, or just not care. But even that, I guess, becomes its own sort of resolution, meaning you’re kind of fucked either way.

Ultimately, I think the only choice for me here is to stop being so cynical and just set some non-paradoxical resolution like everyone else does. The problem with that, however, is that whenever I tell myself I’m going to do something, the likelihood of me doing the thing goes down considerably. I don’t know why this happens. When I tell myself I am going to write, I end up playing video games; and when I tell myself I am going to play video games, I end up writing; and when I tell myself I am going to read, I end up outside smoking a cigarette while watching mindless YouTube Shorts on my phone. And yes, I realize this is all a matter of willpower, but unfortunately, willpower is a character stat I sorely lack.

This do-the-exact-opposite-of-what-I-tell-myself-I’m-going-to-do paradigm has gotten so bad that I have taken to telling myself to do the thing I don’t really want to do in hopes that the paradigm will kick in and compel me to do the thing I actually want to do; when I want to write, I will tell myself that I am going to play video games instead, hoping that I will betray myself and thus end up writing. But this sort of reverse psychology undermines itself, because of course, I’m aware of the self-trickery going on and thus end up doing the opposite of the opposite, which means I’m right back where I started. However, I have found that this tell-myself-to-do-the-thing-I-don’t-want-to-do-in-hopes-that-I-do-the-thing-I-actually-want-to-do method of psychological self-trickery does, in fact, produce better outcomes than just telling myself to do the things I want to do.

So, this year, I have come up with a list of New Year’s resolutions that I think are just perfect for producing good outcomes, and I will list them below.


Don’t Read Anything, Ever
This year, I aspire to read absolutely nothing. No books. No magazines. No articles. No blog entries. Nothing. Reading is a waste of time, as it fills my head with a bunch of pointless ideas, pointless because, in the cosmic scheme of things, I'm going to die anyway, so who cares. I could be playing video games or watching YouTube Shorts instead of reading a dumb book or whatever.

Give Up Writing Completely
Writing is a stupid waste of time. No one reads any of my stuff anyway. I only started writing in hopes that people would swoon at how smart I am pretending to be. Writing is a pompous, egotistical endeavor, and I should try not to be so self-absorbed and pretentious; so, writing has to go. Everything I write is some rip-off of David Foster Wallace or J. D. Salinger anyway, so it’s not like I’m even original in any way. And when I die, about three people will have read any of my stuff anyway, so it’ll be like I had never written to begin with, so what’s the point? It’s time to grow up and focus on the important things in life, the stuff that makes me feel good, like watching YouTube Shorts and playing video games.

Spend More Time on My Phone
This year, I aspire to look at my phone way more than ever before. Behind that tempered glass is a wonderland of entertainment and good feels. I will download all the apps, spend hours lying on my bed swiping through YouTube Shorts, and sign up for more social media than ever before so that I can make funny and/or smart posts in hopes that people give me lots of upvotes and retweets because this is a surefire way to get the validation I desperately seek. I will replace my in-person community with the Reddit app and get all my news from echo chambers so that all my smart opinions are constantly validated. This will make me very happy.

Eat Shitloads of Candy
This one’s self-explanatory, but this year I will endeavor to never be without candy. If I run out of candy, I will immediately drive to the nearest gas station or grocery store and buy more. I will dedicate a kitchen cabinet solely to candy. It will be called the Candy Cabinet. I will not share the candy. I will eat whole bags. I will try all sorts of new candies and savor each and every sugary explosion of taste. I will become a candy connoisseur who eats nothing but candy. And I will absolutely not go to the dentist.

Don’t Go Outside and Never Work Out
Going outside is a pain in the ass and working out is hard. These things require a lot of mental and physical effort, all for very little short-term payoff. And, in the cosmic scheme of things, these things don’t matter because nothing matters. Everyone dies, so what’s the point? This year, instead of going outside or working out, I will instead use that time to play video games or watch YouTube Shorts, because life is short so I might as well keep myself entertained at all times.

Drink Every Night and Consider Day Drinking
Historically, I have had problems with drinking; once I start, I cannot stop. But this year, I’m realizing that this is not my problem, it’s society’s problem. It's the people around me who are the problem. If the people around me were more accepting of my drinking, then it wouldn’t be such a big deal. So, this year, I am going to start drinking way more, and I'm going to tell those around me to lighten up and deal with it. “Stop fucking with my vibe.” I'm going to drink a bottle of wine each night and perhaps start day drinking as well, because it makes me more charismatic and sociable and fun, and most importantly it makes me feel really good. Again, life is short, so I might as well spend as much time as possible making myself feel good. I could die tomorrow, after all, so why deprive myself of the things I so enjoy?

And that’s it. Those are my New Year’s resolutions. These are the promises I am making to myself, promises that I sincerely hold and will try my best to fulfill. I am really looking forward to achieving all my goals this year. It would be a terrible shame if I ended up doing the opposite of any of these things.

Happy New Year.

Back in 2016, when I was 25 years old, I was living in one of those single-wide mobile homes perilously held up by stacked cement blocks, one of those ones with the cheap vinyl skirts they wrap around the bottom to hide all the duct-taped plumbing and rotted-out wood and raccoon colonies and maybe a dead body or two, because who knows what was actually going on under there. I may have flirted with the dark abyss, but I sure as hell did not want to crawl into it to find out what was inside. My life philosophy at the time a laissez-faire mixture of red wine and nicotine clouds and pixels, so I didn’t even care about much of anything, to tell you the truth. In fact, the rent was so cheap at $650 a month that when the landlord originally showed me the property, I immediately said “Where do I sign?” and moved my wife and three-year-old daughter into the place without even so much as a basic cursory inspection, driven mostly by the fact that I was destitute both philosophically and financially, answering phones for a coffee company for like $14 an hour and binge drinking every night. I just wanted a stable roof over my family’s head, a place that wasn't in an apartment complex, a place with a yard, with some level of privacy, a place where I could play video games, drink wine, and blast super loud music while chain-smoking cigarettes outside without someone filing a noise complaint, and this super cheap rundown trailer from the 80s checked all those hedonistic boxes. 

But as it turns out, skipping the cursory inspection was a big mistake, because, as I would come to find out years later, the place was a deathtrap, and I learned this the hard way, or, well, my daughter did, when the roof in her bedroom collapsed.

It’s hard to believe that almost a decade has passed since I first moved into that shithole, because I remember it as if it were yesterday. My daily routine started in medias res, do something with my daughter after work, pour my first glass of wine around 8 p.m., finish my seventh by 2 a.m., pop a few Benadryl to fall asleep, drive to the call center six hours later, repeat. I would drink so much the night before that I was pretty much still wasted the morning after. My skin was always clammy and pale and my eyes were raccoon eyes. They say men between the age of 20 to 30 are in their prime, able to muster almost supernatural levels of strength, persevere through any hardship by sheer force of will, but I spent whatever supernatural strength I had just getting out of bed in the morning with the worst hangovers known to man and then somehow driving five miles through busy morning traffic all without getting into a single car accident despite the fact that I was nodding off behind the wheel the whole time. Half the time, I wouldn’t even remember driving to work, I’d just appear at my desk in the call center, as if I had somehow teleported there, taking calls in this autopilot-like daze. “Thank you for calling Keurig, my name is Forrest. May I have your first and last name, please? Thank you. And your email address? And your coffee maker’s serial number? Thank you again. And you say your coffee maker is short-cupping? I understand. I know that must be frustrating. We’ll have to do some troubleshooting, so please be aware that the needles inside the machine are very sharp, but could you please gather a paperclip and small measuring cup, then we can get started.”

And this worked for me somehow. I reached a certain level of homeostasis. I made around $1,800 a month, $650 of that went to rent, $300 went to utilities, food was paid for by SNAP, a couple hundred went to things for my daughter, and whatever money left over went to Marlboro Lights and Liberty Creek Cabernet Sauvignon, which was the cheapest supermarket swill wine money could buy at the time, at like $8 per 2-liter bottle, which, at 30 proof, was also the most bang for your buck in terms of getting absolutely shitfaced as quickly as possible, outside of just drinking straight liquor, which I never had the stomach for. Back then, when I was 25, I was still a child, singularly focused on myself, and whatever seemingly grown-up big-boy shit I did do was only done to maintain my comfortable homeostasis. I knew I had a drinking problem, but the negative consequences were not severe enough for me to take it seriously, especially since the euphoria after a few glasses of wine was so strong that it felt like I could not live without the stuff, like life would be just a boring slog without my Cabernet. And there was an identity aspect to it as well, because I thought drinking was super cool, and I even thought that having a drinking problem was kind of cool too, like it added character in some way, a sort of tortured-soul aesthetic. When I drank red wine, I felt like some sort of vampire sophisticate. I loved the whole ritual, the orbed glass, the twist of the wine key, the pop of the cork, the glug-glug of the pour, the exotic aroma, all of it. I would hold that first sip in my mouth for like a whole minute, just swishing it around in there like a mouthful of blood. And after a few sips, I would go outside and sit on the small uncovered wooden steps that functioned as my porch, to smoke cigarettes and listen to super loud music, bringing my orbed glass along with me, because music just hits different and cigarettes just taste better when you’re wasted, and that’s a fact.

After my daughter went to bed, I would sit myself down at my computer desk with a glass of red and boot up a video game. I would play Final Fantasy XI or The Elder Scrolls Online or some other life-suck type game, just getting totally fucked up and lost in those virtual worlds. Eventually, I started joining a Discord server with my old friends from high school, which only made my drinking worse, as we’d all drink and get fucked up together. A sort of digital drinking culture evolved, to the point that, for a few years there, we would be in that Discord server every night, drinking to the point of blurred vision and slurred speech, playing our preferred game of the week, be it Monster Hunter World, Tekken 7, Risk of Rain, Counter-Strike: Source, Diablo III,  King of Fighters XIII, or whatever, just yelling and laughing and trolling the shit out of each other, sometimes to the point of bitter rivalries, weeks-long feuds, all settled with our preferred choice of alcoholic beverage and controller. There was a real sense of community there, built on old friendships and video games and, most importantly, alcohol, because it was weird when someone wasn’t drinking while everyone else was, like you couldn’t connect on the same existential plane or something if you weren’t basically blackout drunk. It was the same sort of peer pressure you might experience in high school, just carried over unspoken into adulthood.

Between rounds of whatever we were playing at the time, I would step outside and smoke a cigarette or two, making sure to bring my wine glass along with me, because after I got my first taste of blood, I could not stop. The moment I could no longer taste the aftertaste of that bittersweet earthy red, something like anxious dread would creep in, a persistent fear that the night would end, that the euphoria would fade, unless I kept drinking, so I would drink and drink and drink, a crimson tide flowing down my esophagus every minute of the night, even when I was outside smoking. And to make my outside-smoking excursions more entertaining, I would play music from my phone’s speakers, and I would literally dance and sway out there in my front yard, sometimes singing at the top of my lungs. 

This is the night of the expanding man
I take one last drag as I approach the stand
I cried when I wrote this song
Sue me if I play too long
This brother is free
I'll be what I want to be

Back then, my favorite band was Steely Dan. It all started when I heard the song “Peg” on the radio one day. I had heard the song before but never really paid much attention to it until one day, when the stars aligned, when it came on the classic rock station and I happened to be in just the right mood. The song resonated with me. The downtown strut of the electric piano, the intricate bounce of the bassline, the bitter darkness hidden within the joyful melody, that rich baritone background vocal by Michael McDonald, all the crazy guitar shit going on that you don’t even notice without specifically listening for it. It’s just a fantastic song, one of the greatest pop tunes ever written. It got me obsessed with Steely Dan, head over heels for their whole dark-irony-hidden-behind-layers-of-smooth-jazz sound. They had that whole anti-hipster thing going on too, which aligned well with my own anti-hip contrarian attitude. Of course, being an anti-hipster is actually just another flavor of being a hipster, perhaps the worst kind, but that didn’t stop me from going through Steely Dan’s entire discography, repeat listening to each album, falling in love with songs like “Only a Fool Would Say That,” “Bodhisattva,” “Rose Darling,” “Kid Charlemagne,” “Gaucho,” and “Your Gold Teeth II,” which, if you’ve been rolling your eyes at the Steely Dan stuff thus far, is probably the song you should listen to because it’s just straight-up poetic and beautiful, one of their few uplifting songs, musically transcendent almost, so much so that if you don’t like it, then there’s a good chance you just don’t like music, period. But back then, “Your Gold Teeth II” wasn’t my favorite song by them. My favorite song was actually “Deacon Blues,” a song that sounds like the inside of a smoky underworld dive bar, a place where the tragically hip and the perpetually misunderstood come together to drink their lives away.

Learn to work the saxophone
I play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
And die behind the wheel

Back then, Steely Dan was my band, and “Deacon Blues” was my song. I identified with that song. I wanted to live inside that song. I saw myself as the protagonist of that song, the tragic hero, the misunderstood artist, playing exactly what he feels, drinking all night long, maybe one day dying behind the wheel, because who cares, nothing really matters, the universe is all chaos and jazz, no one even asked to be here, we’re all just specks of stardust, a flash in the cosmic scheme of things.

So call me Deacon Blues.

And alcohol was my one true love, my muse. It got to the point where, if alcohol wasn’t in my bloodstream, I wasn’t really there, in the present. During the daylight hours, when I wouldn’t drink, I would spend time with my daughter, take her to the playground, the indoor kids’ places, even play dolls on the floor of her small 10x10 trailer park bedroom, but I was never really there. I mean, my physical body was there, but my soul was not. It was someplace else entirely. I was pretending. I went through the motions because I felt like I had to, out of some persistent feeling of guilt, but my heart was never really in it. Every moment I spent with her, I was counting down the seconds until my first glass of wine. The daylight hours were just an excruciatingly long prelude to getting wasted, hammered, shitfaced, sloshed, just absolutely ossified. These were my priorities. I was a child pretending to be a father, a shell of a parent. I would constantly tell my daughter that I loved her as a way to sort of compensate for my parental absenteeism, as if cheap words could ever make up for shit parenting. But whenever she would have trouble falling asleep, making me late to my first glass of wine, I would suddenly become a harsh disciplinarian, not because I thought it was an effective way to discipline a child, but because I would become frustrated and short-tempered without wine, sometimes shouting orders at the girl like I was an army drill instructor or something. “THAT WAS THE LAST STORY. GET IN BED. PUT YOUR DAMN TOYS AWAY. CLOSE YOUR EYES. IT’S BEDTIME. DON’T MAKE ME TELL YOU AGAIN.” And this was usually followed by some pathetic apology and cheap I-love-you.

When my wife would confront me about the shouting, I would justify my outbursts by espousing some rigid parenting philosophy that I didn’t actually believe in. “Kids need discipline. There’s a certain level of fear that must be maintained. This is the way of the world, just look at countries, states, governments, they all maintain order through fear. This is just reality. Laws exist for a reason. My shouting functions as a deterrent to bad behavior, in the same way that the threat of jail functions as a deterrent to crime. What do you really think the world would be like without laws? Do you really think it would be a better place? Honestly? Don’t be naive.” And then I would pour the first of many glasses of wine and disappear into my office, feeling guilty for a whole ten seconds before my blood alcohol levels spiked, at which point I would ride the crimson tide, waves of drunken euphoria, without a care in the world. And this is how it went, night after night.

And it was on one of these nights that the roof caved in.

It had been raining all throughout the week, so it was a damp Friday night. I read my daughter a short story, cleaned up her Legos and Bratz dolls and stuffed animals, tucked her into her cheap Minnie Mouse toddler bed, kissed her on the head, told her that I loved her, apologized for shouting, turned off the lights, shut the bedroom door behind me, poured my first glass of red, logged into the Discord server, and started my whole hedonistic routine. I drank and smoked and listened to Steely Dan for hours and hours. And by the time I got ready for bed, which was around three in the morning, I had drunk so much that my head felt like it was being repeatedly hit with a hammer underwater, and my stomach was one of those bubbling lava pits you see in video games. I had lost control, failed to pace myself, as I often did. I was hunched over the toilet at three in the morning, vomiting up a crimson tide. The inside of the bowl looked like the scene of some grisly murder. After about an hour of throwing up, through sheer force of will, I picked myself up, stumbled to bed, and fell face first on the mattress, passing out.

When I woke up, my head was pounding something fierce, my chest was burning, and it was still dark outside. My wife was shouting something from the foot of the bed. I didn't want to get up, but it seemed serious, so I used some of that supernatural strength young men supposedly have and rolled myself out of bed. My wife was gesticulating, frantically explaining something that I could not comprehend in the moment, and then she grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the living room. It was dark, and our daughter was sitting there on the couch, hands in her dark hair, sobbing. My wits were slowly coming back, so I walked up to my daughter, put a hand on her shoulder, and tried to comfort her, but she wouldn’t calm down. Then my wife said something like, “It’s her bedroom. The roof. The roof fell through. She was in there for hours.” And I could not believe it. So I rushed to my daughter’s bedroom to see for myself.

It was dark in there, and there was a draft, and there was a heaviness in the air. I started coughing, covering my mouth. Then I turned the light on, saw the pile of rotted wood right by the Minnie Mouse bed, the bed itself covered in a thick layer of gray and brown. There were clouds of dust hovering throughout the room, obscuring the Disney pinups and galaxies of glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars. I looked up, and that’s when I saw it, a huge gaping hole, pieces of ceiling and wood jutting out all around the wound, just dangling there, still in the process of collapse. My wife said something from behind me. “I told you this place was a deathtrap.” So I turned to my wife, asked her when this happened, and she said it must have happened hours ago, according to our daughter, so it must have happened when I was awake in the office. She said our daughter was paralyzed with fear, that she couldn't move, that she had just stayed there in bed, under the covers, for who knows how long, frozen with fear, calling out for help. My wife asked if I had heard anything, if I had heard the crash, if I had heard our daughter calling out. I told her that I hadn't heard a thing. She glared at me with something like disgust in her eyes.

I remember just standing in that broken room, thinking it was a symbol of some kind, of neglect, of carelessness, of dysfunction. I had no words. My eyes were like super moons, and my body had taken on some sort of heinous gravity. I imagined our daughter, under the covers, eyes closed tight, her little body trembling, fearing for her life, believing some monster had crawled out of the ceiling and was about to eat her. I imagined her calling out for mommy, for daddy, for God, for anyone, to come help, how her cries went unanswered solely because I was too drunk to hear them.

My wife said something like, “This place is unlivable. I’m going to file a lawsuit.” And then she pulled out her phone and started fiddling with it. “We’re going to need pictures. Let me take a picture.”

But I stopped her, told her to let me do it, so she gave me her phone. I walked further into the room to get a better look at the hole, but I was too afraid to go directly underneath it, so instead I booted up the phone’s camera app, turned the flash on, stretched my phone-arm, positioning the phone under the hole, and snapped a picture. And that’s when I saw it.

( Photograph #1 )

Apparently, there was a hole in the top roof, and a family of raccoons had been living up there in the attic-like space between the ceiling and the roof itself. The hole must have been pretty old, judging by the water damage and amount of mold shown in the picture. So I figured that, due to the accumulated rain water and who-knows-how-many raccoons, the ceiling just couldn’t hold anymore, finally collapsing under the weight of it all. And I figured that the raccoon in the picture must have been the matriarch of the family, who must have gotten out of there before the ceiling fell through. But, eyes wide and mouth agape at possibly the craziest picture I had ever taken in my life, I wondered why the mother raccoon was looking down into the room, like what could she have possibly been looking for?

That’s when my parenting instincts kicked in. The mother raccoon must have been looking for one of her babies, one of her little kits, who must have fallen through the ceiling. So I scoured the bedroom, looking for raccoons. And it only took me about five minutes to find one, a little baby raccoon, hidden underneath a pile of toys in the corner of the room, curled up in a little pink bowl.

( Photograph #2 )

The kit’s eyes were closed tight, and she was shivering a little bit. There was a pinkish bulge on one of her legs, like an injury of some sort, maybe from the fall. I knew she couldn't have landed in the bowl itself, as the bowl was on the other side of the room, so I figured that she must have crawled across the room after falling through the ceiling, and when she found a place to hide, she just curled up there and waited for mommy and daddy to come rescue her. But mommy and daddy never came, just me. And, luckily for that little kit, I love raccoons. But when I was holding that pink bowl in my hand, looking down at that injured baby raccoon, seeing it all helpless and afraid, I didn’t really see a raccoon at all, I saw my daughter.

My wife wouldn’t let us keep the baby raccoon, even though I wanted to. So, later that day, I put the kit in a box stuffed with towels and put the box outside, at the treeline of the woods near my trailer, hoping that mom would return, take her baby back home, wherever home was for them. But hours passed, and mom never showed up, so I got worried about the little kit, worried that she might starve, that she might succumb to her injuries, so my daughter and I took the baby raccoon to the local animal hospital, but they told us that they couldn’t take wild animals, that they didn’t have the proper permits or something. So we left that animal hospital dejected and confused, having no idea what to do with the little kit. I remember just sitting there in my car, head still pounding from the night before, coming up totally blank on what to do next.

But after about five minutes, a young woman walked up to my car and signaled me to roll down the window. “We’ll take the raccoon, but you’ll need to sneak it into the back. Drive around.”

So I turned the key, revved the engine, and started driving around to the backside of the animal hospital. The car’s stereo connected to my phone automatically via Bluetooth, playing the last song I was listening to the night before, which just happened to be “Deacon Blues.” And when I got to the backside of the animal shelter, I left the car running in park, told my daughter to wait, and carried the box with the baby raccoon in it to the back door, where the same young woman from before smiled at me, took the box from my hands, and said, “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine, we’ll take care of her.” And I was left feeling a little sad, because for some reason I knew that I would never see that baby raccoon again.

“Deacon Blues” was still playing when I got back into the car. It was on the chorus, so before I buckled my seatbelt and put the car in reverse, I paused to savor that dark, jazzy sound.

They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

But this was not the song I knew. It was different. It was an entirely new song, with an entirely new meaning. I started thinking to myself, the protagonist of this song, he’s not some tortured-soul romantic, some hip idealist, some sort of tragic hero rebelling against the tides of a dark, unfair world. He’s not any of those things.

He’s just some fucking alcoholic loser.

So call me Deacon Blues.

What's stopping mechanics from fucking with your car after leaving it in the shop? Aren't they sort of incentivized to do this, for $$$?

“Looks like the fuel injector’s got a buildup, gonna have to get that fixed.”

How are you supposed to know that the mechanic didn't put some sort of mineral compound in the line last time you took the car in? Or that they didn't make microscopic slashes in the tires so that you’d have to get them replaced in a month? Aren't they sort of incentivized to mess with your car in subtle ways so that you’d have to bring it back to the shop for more work to be done? Isn't the entire automotive repair industry kind of contingent on cars breaking down? Aren't they sort of incentivized to do this? Don't mechanics have sales goals or quotas or whatever? Aren't they pretty much just on the honor system? Why are they blindly afforded these high levels of trust? Is it because of the $$$ involved? Is it because we just assume they won't fuck with our cars because, if they get caught, they'll lose business? Is it the capitalistic exchange that protects these mechanics from scrutiny? Is it competition, is competition why we assume they'll do good work, so that we don't go someplace else? What if all the local repair shops are in cahoots? And what's really stopping them from fucking with our cars if they do it in such a way that’s almost impossible to trace back to them? There's pretty much nothing stopping them. We have no idea what they're doing to our cars in those shops. We just assume that the mechanic is having a good day and has already met his monthly quota or whatever and so we trust that he won't fuck with our cars, yet we still take all the valuables out of our cars before dropping them off because, per the sign in the main lobby, WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY LOST OR STOLEN ITEMS LEFT IN THE VEHICLE.

We’ll trust them to fix our cars but we won't trust them with anything else. Go figure.

And what about doctors, are they not sort of incentivized to fuck with our bodies in the same way a mechanic might be incentivized to fuck with our cars, you know for $$$? Like if you have cancer and you're getting chemotherapy or whatever, what's stopping the doctor from sabotaging the treatment? Isn't it true that the longer you're sick, the more the hospital gets paid? And how do insurance companies fit into all of this? Don't they make money from people being sick? And the pharmaceutical industry, isn't that whole industry reliant on people being sick? And don't we already acknowledge that pharmaceutical companies artificially jack up prices with no fucks given toward those sick people? Daraprim? Humira? Insulin? Isn't this like a confirmed thing? Aren't these systems ripe for abuse, because of $$$? And don't these medical industries all kind of work together? Like I remember when I was a kid, I would go to the dentist and they would clean my teeth, and afterwards they would say my teeth were fucked up, so they'd refer my mom to an orthodontist, and that orthodontist would then give their whole spiel about how my teeth were coming in crooked and how I needed braces and all that, and then they'd convince my mom to put all that metal in my mouth, which was very painful, and then they'd charge an arm and a leg for the whole procedure plus regular monthly check-ins, and how if we couldn't pay it upfront they would put us on a generous payment plan of $50 per month, and then after like a year of braces, they'd be like, “oh you actually need more braces,” and this happened like three times, until eventually I just stopped brushing my teeth, which forced the orthodontist to take off the braces, only to find out later that this whole braces thing was for cosmetic reasons, like there was no serious risk of medical complications from my teeth being kind of crooked to begin with, thus revealing that the whole procedure was kind of vain and pointless, and you have to figure that the dentist got some sort of $$$ kickback from the whole referral process. And furthermore, you have to figure that whenever some child psychologist or whatever prescribes some hyperactive kid Adderall, that they, the doctors, get some sort of kickback from that as well, be it through free samples or lucrative speaking engagements at pharmaceutical conferences or special funding to the doctor’s practice, thus incentivizing doctors to prescribe as many drugs to people as possible, with no fucks given toward the long-term, life-changing side effects of prolonged use of psychoactives, which the doctor may then use as an excuse to just prescribe more drugs, thus prescribing drugs to treat the side effects of other drugs, and then maybe they'd prescribe even more drugs for the side effects of the drug they prescribed for the side effects of the first drug they themselves prescribed, and so on, all for $$$.

Am I being paranoid here? Is this like totally crazy? I mean, I don’t want to be cynical about everything, but this $$$ stuff seems like it could maybe possibly drive some seriously bad behaviors. Like, if the goal is to be profitable, you can’t just sell one thing and be done with it, you have to ensure the future selling of things, be it medical procedures, drugs, fuel injectors, tires, and of course consumer goods.

Like, electronics companies, aren’t they sort of already doing this type of thing? Isn’t it pretty much confirmed that smartphone manufacturers design their products to be obsolete within a few years? Doesn’t Apple push software updates to soft-brick their old phones, requiring you to buy newer models? Aren’t slimy dudes in suits on Zoom calls right now discussing their planned obsolescence strategy for fiscal year 2026? Isn’t the whole electronics industry contingent on shit breaking? Hell, isn’t almost every consumer-goods industry reliant on shit breaking? Surely they can’t build products that last forever, where’s the $$$ in that?

The other day, I learned that there’s a lightbulb in Livermore, California that has been shining since 1901. That’s literally over 100 years. And after learning about this, I thought to myself, why do I have to change the lightbulbs in my house like at least once a year? Where are all these centennial lightbulbs? And, looking into this, I found out that, in the 1940s, there was this secret cartel of lightbulb manufacturers, General Electric being part of it, that conspired to ensure that any lightbulb sold would last no longer than 1,000 hours. They literally built a 1,000-hour cap into all their lightbulbs, despite the fact that those same lightbulbs could literally last for decades. And, back then, when this was found out, it was kind of a huge scandal, and a lot of reputations and egos were hurt, but now this practice is commonplace, not only among light bulb manufacturers, but with almost all electronics manufacturers, like Epson printers for example, they have a built-in “page counter” to ensure that, once like 10,000 pages are printed, the printer errors out and will not print anymore until you get the error professionally resolved or just buy a new printer. This is a confirmed thing. Look it up. And no one bats an eye. We have all sort of just accepted this planned obsolescence as the price of living in a world driven by $$$.

And if we’ve accepted this about the electronics industry, why haven’t we accepted this about other industries, like automotive repair, medical, pharmaceutical, insurance, and so on? Are we just hoping that the same $$$ incentive doesn’t apply to these other industries? Are we just deluding ourselves, pretending that the whole automotive repair industry isn’t reliant on cars breaking down, that the entire medical industry isn’t contingent on people getting sick?

And if these things are true, doesn’t this mean that one person’s suffering is another person’s $$$?

Back when I was a kid, when I would ask my dad to buy me some new game that was beyond my monthly allowance, he would always say something like, “Son, you'll appreciate this game more if you work for it, if you save up and buy it with your own hard-earned money.” And back then, when I was like 12, I resented him for being cheap or cruel or whatever, and then, when I was a bit older, I figured he was just trying to force his oppressive conservative worldview down my throat, which made me resent him even more, but now, after playing Final Fantasy XI for over two decades, I now know he was simply trying to teach his stubborn young son a very valuable lesson.

A few weeks ago, I started playing Final Fantasy XI again. I've been playing this game on and off since the early 2000s. On my current character, which I’ve had since 2013 or something, I’ve played the game for something like 103 days, 30 hours, and 15 minutes, according to the in-game playtime tracker, but in actuality, I’ve played the game far longer than that, considering I’ve had many characters. It's one of those formative core games for me. It's a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, meaning people run around in real time battling monsters, crafting furniture, gardening, fishing, and all sorts of other stuff. And while remaining the same core game over these two decades, it has changed a lot over the years, and I wanted to write about these changes because they align well with something I've been thinking about lately, that something being Instant Gratification and how it relates to feelings of accomplishment.

From the game’s debut in 2003 to the release of its fifth expansion, Seekers of Adoulin, in 2013, Final Fantasy XI was an absolutely brutal game, probably the most brutal online game on the market outside of Everquest, the game that actually inspired many of Final Fantasy XI’s mechanics. After creating your character from a list of classes and races, all with their own unexplained strengths and weaknesses, and then selecting your hometown, which provided special unexplained benefits depending on your race selection, the game would just drop you into the world of Vana’diel with no guidance whatsoever. Games were like this back then, they treated players like intelligent adults, able to figure things out on their own, rather than ADHD-diagnosed toddlers who require constant hand holding, but Final Fantasy XI took this design philosophy to an extreme. It didn’t tell you where to go. It didn’t tell you what to do. It didn’t even bother to explain core mechanics like how to navigate menus and control your character, which involved weird hotkeys, a complicated macro system with its own coding language built in pretty much, and an obtuse movement system requiring one hand on the numpad at all times. You only got a few Gil and some starter equipment at the very beginning of the game, and what you did after that was totally up to you. Many players quit within the first few hours, frustrated by all the electronic mystification going on, some demanded refunds, I imagine, and those who stuck with it were rewarded with one of the most time-consuming grinds in video game history.

The grind went something like this, if you started in Bastok, you’d wander out into the Gustaberg region and whack bees with your sword or spells or baghnakhs or whatever, depending on your job class, gaining paltry amounts of experience per kill. I think it required 500 experience points to get from level 1 to level 2, and each bee rewarded about 50 to 100 experience points, and then it required 750 to get to the next level, but with each level the number of experience points rewarded from bees went down, so you’d have to start killing worms until the next level, which required 1,000 experience points, at which point you’d graduate to lizards until the next level, which required 1,250 experience points, at which point you'd graduate to Quadavs, and so on, each level taking progressively longer, until eventually you reached level 13 or so, at which point you could no longer level up by yourself because monsters now did far more damage to you than you did to them. And at that point, many players would switch to a different job class, level that job to 13 or so, then select a new job class and do it all over again. Some would branch off into crafting and fishing, others would just unsubscribe and give up, because what were they supposed to do, just let worms and bees and lizards and Quadavs kill them over and over again? Where’s the fun in that? But the few adventurous masochists who stuck with it would eventually notice someone in town soliciting other players to form a party. They would see something like {Looking for Party} {Red Mage} 13 {Valkurm Dunes}, the brackets being the game’s built-in auto-translate feature. That masochistic player might even join said party, at which point they’d discover that the party required four more players to be efficient, preferably a healer and a debuffer and a couple damage dealers, which required more in-town shouting and private messaging. Eventually, after about an hour of soliciting, a party of six would be formed, at which point this party of six had to trek to where the good experience-yielding monsters were, Valkurm Dunes, which was very far away, and that would take another hour or so, maybe even longer, especially if one of the party members died along the way, which was very easy to do, because there were aggressive monsters all along the path from Bastok to the Dunes, and dying meant you were teleported back to town, meaning you had to start the trek all over again. You could also Level Down upon death, which was a nice added kick in the crotch. But eventually, the party would make it to Valkurm Dunes, at which point a camp had to be established, a little corner of the map where you could pull high-level monsters and defeat them comfortably, but the problem was that multiple parties were already there, at the Dunes, already using all the good camping spots, so you had to compete with other people just to find a good camp, which caused all sorts of drama and would take another hour or so, which is all to say that Final Fantasy XI did not respect your time, like, at all. Then you’d spend the next four to five hours fighting lizards over and over again, gaining paltry amounts of experience with each kill, leveling up slowly over several days, until eventually you unlocked your subjob, itself needing to be leveled sufficiently to match your main job, so you would repeat the whole Bastok-to-Gustaberg-to-Dunes grind once more, maybe several times more, until you reached level 20 with multiple jobs, but by this point you probably had a main job already in mind for your character, so you stuck with that job, say it was Red Mage, and you kept playing Red Mage, partying with other players, gaining experience, to the point where you had invested so much time and energy into Red Mage that you yourself felt like a real-life Red Mage almost, like this job class was now part of your identity, and the players you had partied with would also start thinking of you as a Red Mage, sometimes private messaging you with party invites days later, “Forrest, don’t you play Red Mage, we need a healer, do you want to party in the Dunes?” Meaning you partied in the Dunes as Red Mage a whole bunch, until eventually you reached level 20 or whatever, at which point you could no longer party in the Dunes because the monsters didn’t give good experience to level 20 players and joining a party of lower-level players actually penalized experience point gain for all of those players, so you were forced to move on, leave the Dunes, so you asked around and learned that you now needed to party at Qufim Island, which was also far away and required you to carefully trek across the vast landscape of Vana’diel, avoiding all the dangerous monsters that you yourself could not defeat. And at that point, after the long trek, you joined a party in Qufim, and you partied there for a week or so, until eventually you graduated from Qufim, at which point you needed to go to Yuhtunga Jungle, but this required an airship pass, which required the completion of a quest that involved collecting items with very low drop rates from incredibly dangerous parts of Vana’diel, incredibly dangerous parts of Vana’diel that could not be traveled alone, so you needed a party for this too, so you would solicit and solicit and solicit until eventually you found other players to help, sometimes crossing paths with the very same people you had spent hours partying with in the Dunes before. But you couldn't just level up and expect to get into any old party. At a certain point, you needed good gear, armor, weapons, rings, earrings, capes, et cetera. Gear was very important. Around level 30, if you didn't have the right gear, your battle performance would suffer, so people would scoff and jeer and refuse to let you join their parties. So you had to get the good gear, one, because you had to produce the big damage numbers, and two, because some of the gear was just cool as fuck aesthetically, like Final Fantasy XI has some of the best-looking armor sets in role-playing game history, stuff that looks super dope without being over-designed and tacky like a lot of later Final Fantasy armor designs are, and if you don’t believe me just Google the Magus Attire set and see for yourself. So you had to get the good gear, it was not optional. But the good gear was incredibly grueling to obtain. Some gear required the completion of quests that took you to locations in Vana’diel that were just not hospitable at all, places that no level 50 Red Mage could possibly survive alone, meaning you often had to party up to complete these quests. And some gear required you to defeat rare monsters that only spawned once per day and only dropped the gear like literally 1% of the time, the drop rates in Final Fantasy XI back then being insane and almost hostile to the player, and these rare monsters would be camped by other players who needed the same gear, meaning often you’d have to wait at the rare monster’s spawn location for hours while ten other people also waited at this same spawn location, everyone eagerly watching their screens, just waiting to tag the rare monster when it spawned so that they could get the good gear before anyone else, which caused all sorts of drama, but of course this was all made easier with the help of friends, which, by now, after literal days of playtime, you had made several friends, so you’d hit these friends up, ask them for help obtaining that cool rare sword you needed, Nadrs, which dropped at a 14% rate from Cargo Crab Colin who only spawned once every six real-life hours and was heavily camped by other players. And if that seems like a very specific example, that's because I did that, I farmed that crab, back when I was like sixteen. I remember my mom came into my room one morning, “What’cha doing?” and I told her I was waiting for this damn crab to spawn so I could get my cool sword, and then, like 12 hours later, before she was going to bed, she came up to check on me, and she said, “Are you still waiting for that crab to come out of its hole?” And I said, “Yes mom, I’m still waiting for that crab to come out of its hole.” And eventually I did get Nadrs, but it was only after some other players had stolen the monster from me and after I had messaged my in-game friend to come help me camp the damn thing, which was the point in my Final Fantasy XI career that I figured it out, the whole point of the game, the draw, if you will.

That was the point when I understood what made Final Fantasy XI so special, the true magic of the game, the whole draw of the Final Fantasy XI experience. I figured it out. After camping Cargo Crab Colin, and after literal weeks of partying in the Dunes, and after dying many times on my trek to Qufim, after becoming discouraged, getting frustrated, getting pissed, after all that stuff, I figured it out. I realized that although this game neither held my hand nor respected my time, it was the journey itself, the hardships, the frustrations, and quite literally the friends I made along the way that made Final Fantasy XI a truly magical experience. I realized that by being so difficult and obtuse, Final Fantasy XI basically forced me to work with those around me, forced me to build partnerships, forced me to make connections. The hardships that came along with life in Vana’diel brought us all closer together, fostered a sense of community, made Vana’diel feel like a real, living, breathing place, a second life almost. But this was not all that made Final Fantasy XI so special, there was one other thing. Accomplishment. There was this overwhelming feeling of accomplishment that came with even the simplest of tasks in Final Fantasy XI. Learning how to control your character. Killing your first bee in Gustaberg. Joining your first party. Making it to the Dunes the first time. Obtaining your first cool piece of gear. All of these things, while simple in theory, felt like real accomplishments, and they felt like real accomplishments because there was no instant gratification here. The fact that Final Fantasy XI was an utter timesink, combined with the fact that it was incredibly hostile to the player, made every little thing feel like a grand achievement, because at the end of the day, when I had just finished my long trek to Qufim, or after I had just spent twelve hours getting that cool sword from the rare crab, I could sit back and say, I did it, despite all the bullshit, I did it, and look what I have to show for it.

Now, side note, there is something to be said here about digital achievements that, when viewed from a certain perspective, can make the previous paragraph seem somewhat sad and pathetic, like surely there is some commentary that could be made here about the vacuousness of collecting what essentially amounts to pixels on a screen and how collecting such things might be a poor replacement for real-life accomplishments, and I’m sympathetic to argument, I get it, but that is not the point I’m trying to make here.

The point I’m trying to make here, the thesis if you will, is that feelings of accomplishment seem to be directly related to hardship and suffering, or what my old man would call “hard work.” It seems that the more effort you put into achieving something, the more important that achievement feels. And conversely, when something is just handed to you, that feeling of accomplishment is either diminished or just doesn’t exist at all.

You see, I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XI for a long time, and the game has changed a lot over these past two decades. Around 2013, Square Enix essentially made the game far easier than it once was. At first, they added a level sync feature, which allowed high-level players to party with low-level players, which made partying much easier. And then, around the same time, they added new ways to gain experience points, which made leveling faster overall. And then later, they added a mechanic called “Trusts”, which are summonable NPC party members, meaning you no longer have to party with other players at all, you can just use Trusts instead, and this sort of destroyed the community feeling of the game in a way, making the leveling experience essentially a solo affair. And these Trusts are pretty much broken, being incredibly over-powered, so partying in the Dunes went from being a strategic thing with real people to a mindless thing with fake computer people, and leveling at this point was far faster than before, as experience yield is now super high per monster, meaning you can pretty much level a job from level 1 to 99 in a few days if you put your mind to it. But not only that, in an effort to make the game more accessible to a new generation, Square Enix made it far easier to obtain good gear, making most of it purchasable from merchant NPCs using easy-to-obtain currencies, meaning there is no longer a need to farm Cargo Crab Colin at all, unless you really want to, because you can just get a cool sword from the merchant instead. And, having played in all eras of the game, I can confidently say that that feeling of accomplishment the game once produced is just no longer there. Everything is easy now. There is no hardship. No suffering. No hard work required. Nothing. The game feels like some sort of Instant Gratification Machine or something now.

The other day, I was leveling the Corsair job class, and I wanted to wear this special race-specific set of armor. And from my experience having played the game, I knew that this armor could only be obtained by opening chests in Gusgen Mines, and these chests spawn every few hours, and they only contain the armor on specific days of the in-game week, and I had to open at least four of these chests, and to open these chests, I needed a special key that only drops from specific monsters in the Mines, but I had forgotten which monsters dropped these keys, so I went to Google. I pulled up the wiki page of the armor and saw that, as of like 2020, you can now simply purchase this entire armor set from a merchant in Bastok. This made me both annoyed and curious. So I calculated the time it would take me to farm the chests, which would be several days, and I compared that to the time it would take me to simply buy the armor set, which would take me several minutes, and then I considered the fact that I am a grown adult with children and a job, and I said, you know what fuck it, and I just bought the armor set from the merchant.

And now, I’m almost level 99 on Corsair, which took me like three days, and I’m wearing this cool-looking armor set, but I feel nothing, nothing at all.

“Conditioned place preference (CPP) is a form of Pavlovian conditioning used to measure the motivational effects of objects or experiences. This motivation comes from the pleasurable aspect of the experience, so that the brain can be reminded of the context that surrounded the encounter.”

Nostalgia has dominated my life since as far back as I can remember. I imagine this might be true for everyone to some extent, but my extent feels extreme to the extreme. I have a deep, almost unhealthy fondness for times long past, always have. Carefree childhood summers playing PS1 role-playing games at my grandma’s house. Super Smash Bros. competitions in the basements of suburbia. Staying up all night with a good friend in the same room playing our own separate games on our own separate television sets, having our own separate but shared experiences, just talking and laughing and having a good time. Cozying up in front of my old Dell XPS with a Diet Cherry Cola and some pretzels, playing online games from sunrise to sunset, curtains drawn, enveloped in the glow of warm orange lamplight, losing myself completely in those games, the ego falling away, as if I didn’t really exist in the physical realm but in the digital one. That sort of thing. I long to return to these situations, situations I could never possibly return to, so I chase the feeling, try to recreate it. I foster atmospheres redolent of times and places long gone. I do this through carefully controlled lighting, surrounding myself with certain material things, listening to music I used to listen to during those little epochs, and, most of all, playing the video games I enjoyed as a child and young adult. Video games elicit the strongest sense of nostalgia for me. If I had to analyze it scientifically, I’m guessing the medium’s mixture of aural, visual, and physical stimuli releases the most dopamine or something. I spent so much of my youth in front of a screen that my eyes are like permanently tattooed with a glowing box. I associate epochs of my life with certain video games, and I chase these video games relentlessly, meaning I replay them over and over, pretending I’m back there, pretending I’m feeling the feelings I once felt, as if no time has passed at all. For me, nostalgia is like a cheap time machine, one that has no forward option, only back, and when it takes me back, everything is faded, like I’m sort of phased out, relegated to a background plane, unable to truly interface with what I’m experiencing, but it feels good, so I keep doing it, as if nostalgia is like a CAT-1 controlled substance injected straight into the eyeballs that produces a withdrawal so wicked that I have to keep doing more and more just to feel a slight semblance of whatever it was I felt the first time. I cultivate situations reminiscent of old situations thereby creating new situations based on old situations that are never as good as the original situations but they're better than nothing so I keep doing it. Nostalgia, for me, is like a killer of new joys. I am averse to new things because they do not elicit the same nostalgic dopamine response as old things. There is something biologically harsh about all of this, something having to do with the brain and chemicals and questions of free will that I don’t like to analyze too deeply. I say things like, “I know this is a boomer thing to say, but games are actually much worse than they used to be,” pretending that my self-deprecation backs up the claim, when in reality I lack the knowledge to back up the claim because I have not actually played a new game in like five years. The last five games I’ve played are The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy VIII, Chrono Cross, Pokémon Crystal, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, all of which I associate with the elysian fields of my youth, blissful meadows wherein I popped Adderall recreationally to get euphorically lost in the games. I was prescribed Adderall from age 10 to 20. Adderall made me feel like I was part of the game’s world, like I was actually the hero holding the sword and casting the magicks and saving the world. Nothing else was important when I took Adderall. For most of my childhood, I was a character in a video game. I developed a fondness for digital places and things. My nostalgia is not linked to fields and meadows in the real world, but fields and meadows in the virtual plane. I feel as if this is a big problem but can’t quite place my finger on why. I cannot help but think this is a uniquely twenty-first-century problem, what with so many digital worlds available to get lost in. There’s also something incredibly sad and consumeristic about the whole thing, because it means that so much of my nostalgia is branded with corporate logos. Nintendo, Sony, The Walt Disney Company, Microsoft, Apple, Electronic Arts, SEGA, and most of all, Square Enix.

“Amphetamine has been shown to produce a conditioned place preference in humans taking therapeutic doses, meaning that individuals acquire a preference for spending time in places where they have previously used amphetamine.”

Out of all the games I have ever played, Final Fantasy XI, developed and published by Square Enix, produces the strongest nostalgic response for me. Final Fantasy XI is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game released back in 2003, and I’ve been playing it on and off since then. I must have been 12 years old when I first installed the game on the Dell-whatever PC that my mom bought and so naively placed in my childhood bedroom. My first character’s name was “Butterfly,” a lanky male Elvaan with jagged, chin-length black hair. I remember this vividly. Back then, I was taking Adderall in therapeutic doses as prescribed by the pediatric psychiatrist. It was thought that Adderall would improve my ability to focus in school, but all it did was improve my ability to focus on video games. I remember the game launcher, the PlayOnline Viewer, would boot up to some of the most sublime free jazz I had ever heard. Music so powerful that, even thirty years later, hearing it instantly makes me want to play Final Fantasy XI again, like some sort of Pavlovian response. The massive, bustling world of Vana’diel blew my little adolescent brain with its dense forests and rolling meadows and arid cliffs and windy grasslands full of windmills and monsters and beastmen who lingered just outside the sprawling cities wherein actual people behind their virtual fantasy avatars congregated at the fountains and auction houses, wearing their subligars and lizard jerkins and scorpion harnesses and haubergeons, their scimitars and staves and zaghnals and baghnakhs and halberds all tightened to their backs or clipped to their belts or whatever. Massive airships would fly over the cities, taking players wherever they needed to go, which was an absolutely breathtaking spectacle, and a technical marvel when you consider that people were actually up there on those airships. I remember I would stand in the markets of Bastok and just watch in awe as high-level players walked by, hoping that one day, with enough effort, I would be powerful and cool just like them. The pastoral, grounded soundtrack working its way into my undeveloped brain the whole time, tattooing itself there, ensuring that, in the future, whenever I heard the music, no matter where I was in life, I would be instantly transported back there, mentally. But back then, when I was 12, I had no idea how to actually play the game, spending most of my time fishing in the waterways of Bastok and getting myself killed by the giant turtle-men living in the Gustaberg region, all while, unbeknownst to my young self, the game was altering the fundamental chemistry of my brain, forming bonds with my neurons, landscaping the groundwork for all my future gaming aesthetic preferences.

“... dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens have been found to be elevated when rats are placed in the drug-paired environment, compared to the non-drug-paired environment.”

It wasn't until I was like 15 or so that I understood the basics of Final Fantasy XI. My stepdad had moved my mom and me to a fancy island resort primarily inhabited by old rich guys, meaning there were barely any kids around, meaning I had no friends, meaning I spent a lot of time playing games. It was around this time that I started abusing Adderall, hiding pills that were supposed to be taken before school and taking them after I got home, because I was now old enough to realize that this amphetamine stuff was like psychic gold, so I was using it to induce a sort of euphoric trance when playing Final Fantasy XI. I had created a new character named “Einhander,” who was also an Elvaan but had the spiky orange bowl cut. That epoch of my life must have lasted about a whole year, although the exact timeline is hazy. I remember I was listening to a lot of The Police, The Smiths, and Sting back then, and now those songs are like Pavlovian triggers, tempting reminders of Final Fantasy XI. But despite taking Adderall, which improves focus, I was rather unfocused in my approach to the game, leveling jobs up to 30 or 40 or so but then getting bored and switching to another job, only to repeat the process. And back then, leveling a job to 40 was a big deal, a big time-consuming deal, because not only were experience points divided out in very small amounts and traveling the world took literal hours from point A to point B, but also the early era of the game was all about community, meaning you couldn’t solo your way to level 30, you had to find a party of six other real people who had at least three hours to burn, and this party-finding process was often long in and of itself, involving at least an hour of shouting in town or whatever for a party, and sometimes you would go whole days without finding a party. For me, this process looked like the following, get home from school around 4, make myself some Easy Mac, eat the Easy Mac, stock up on Diet Cherry Cola, boot up my PC, stand around Jeuno looking for a party until around 6, get in a party, kill monsters for like 7 hours, get to bed around 3 in the morning or later, go to school the next day pretty much braindead, fall asleep in most of my classes, get home from school around 4, Easy Mac, Diet Cherry Cola, boot up the PC, and so on. The game’s community-minded ethos lent itself to making the world of Vana’Diel feel like a living, breathing world in which you got to know the residents because you were basically forced to, and this was one of the core draws of the game. Back then, Final Fantasy XI felt like a second life because you had to make it your second life, otherwise you wouldn't make any progress. In hindsight, this game-design philosophy is insidious, because it was clearly built around milking as much money from the player as possible, because the game has a monthly subscription fee, so the longer Square Enix can make you play, whether through entertaining means or grueling means, the more money they stand to make from you. And Final Fantasy XI is not unique in this way, this applies to pretty much all MMORPGs, as they’re all built around artificial roadblocks and harsh time constraints designed specifically to maximize profit. But of course, back then, being 15 years old and addicted to amphetamines, I didn’t analyze it in this way, I only wanted to be the coolest Red Mage on the server, which was something I didn’t achieve until years later after taking a long, long break, mostly because my Dad cracked down on me pretty hard and even sent me to military camp one summer, to correct my unfocused, juvenile behavior.

“Most drugs of abuse elicit a Conditioned Place Preference in rats and mice, and the neural substrates of these effects can often be traced to the mesolimbic DA system.”

At some point shortly after high school, when I was working at the animal shelter, a good friend of mine expressed some interest in getting into MMORPGs and asked me for my recommendation. He initially brought up World of Warcraft, which I had played for a bit back in high school but never really got sucked in, so I told him no, fuck that game, you should play Final Fantasy XI instead, it’s quite possibly the best video game ever made. And just like that, we were playing Final Fantasy XI together. I must have been like 18 or 19 or something, and for all intents and purposes I was pretty much a meth head, speed freak, tweaker, whatever you want to call it, because I was hardcore into Adderall. I also had a semi-serious girlfriend, and my mom was paying for me to go to college. But the moment my friend and I started playing Final Fantasy XI, all that stuff took a backseat, because suddenly my life was all about Vana’Diel. I had forgotten the account details to my old Einhander account, so I made a new account with a new character named “Ashleh,” and I would pretend I was an in-real-life girl in the game for some reason, which was kind of an eye-opening experience because guys truly do treat you completely different when they believe you’re a girl, even online. Anyway, my friend would come over with his laptop, pop one of my Adderalls, and we’d both be up until the wee hours of the morning playing Final Fantasy XI and drinking Diet Cherry Cola. Sometimes we’d take short breaks from the game to smoke cigarettes out on my porch, and during these breaks we’d have some of the best conversations in the world. Philosophical conversations. Gaming conversations. Absurd conversations. Philosophically absurd gaming conversations. So many inside jokes were cultivated during this period, many of which still persist between us to this day. WERMZ. WHERE U GET SWARD? Zerva was always trying to get virtually laid by female players in-game. And when my friend left, I’d play all day and night in my room. I skipped college classes, eventually dropping out. I showed up late for work every day because I could never get up on time, and eventually I just stopped showing up. I hesitate to say this, but I was in love with Final Fantasy XI, as much as a human being could love a video game, at least. My identity was intrinsically tied to the game. If something took time away from me playing the game, I would become irrationally upset in an almost drug-withdrawal-like way, like I would become dejected and fuming and just monstrous to be around. I had thrown everything away for love of the game, and it wasn’t until my girlfriend dumped my ass that I realized I had a serious fucking problem, at which point my life was already in total shambles, with only a level 90 Samurai and a blue-colored chocobo to show for it.

“In the standard conditioned place preference procedure, when the unconditioned stimulus is rewarding, rodents will be more likely to approach the compartment that contains cues associated with it. Alternatively, when the unconditioned stimulus is aversive, rodents will be more likely to escape and avoid the compartment that contains cues associated with it.”

Since then, I’ve stopped taking Adderall. I’ve gotten married. I’ve had two kids. I’ve learned to balance my obsessions with my responsibilities in a semi-manageable way. I’ve grown up. And I’ve also played Final Fantasy XI on and off, here and there, every few years. I’ve played it so much, in fact, that Ashleh is now level 99 in most jobs and I’ve got a bunch of colorful chocobos and my Mog House is full of awesome furniture. I’ve played the game so much that the epochs of my life could probably be categorized into “Was Playing Final Fantasy XI” and “Was Not Playing Final Fantasy XI.” Last time I checked, according to the in-game playtime tracker, I’ve played the game for a total of 103 days, 30 hours, and 15 minutes. That is not like “in-universe time,” that is real-world time. What I’m trying to say is, I’ve played the game a lot. And I’ve learned how to gracefully interweave playing the game with tending to my adult responsibilities quite well. I have compensated, adapted, if you will. Yet whenever I play Final Fantasy XI now, despite having grown up, I am always cognizant of the fact that I am sacrificing something else. My focus shifts ever so slightly. Something is always neglected when playing Final Fantasy XI, be it spending time with my kids or work or writing or other games or reading or whatever. Final Fantasy XI becomes my second life every time. Time must always be made for the game. It is almost like, with Final Fantasy XI, I cannot have more than two things going on in my life at once, Final Fantasy XI being one of those two things. And this scares me. It really does. It scares me so much that I haven’t played the game since March 23, 2023. Yes, I know the exact date. That’s how much it scares me.

So, when my friend from high school texted me on Halloween 2025, expressing interest in getting back into Final Fantasy XI, I was both scared to death and excited as hell, because despite knowing the game’s design philosophy is predatory, despite knowing that it has branded my nostalgia with some gross corporate logo, despite knowing that the main reason I like the game so much is probably due to some conditioned-place-preference response, despite knowing that I’ve fucked up my life by playing the game in the past, I still love the game for some reason. The game has like mutated itself into my DNA somehow. And now, faced with the temptation to play Final Fantasy XI once more, there is this internal conflict playing out in my mind. A shoulder-devil, shoulder-angel situation. I worry that I won’t be able to make time for my writing. I worry that I might skimp on my work. I worry that every second not playing the game will once again feel like some excruciatingly long prelude to playing the game. I worry that I won’t spend as much time with my kids. I worry that I’ll become so focused on playing just this one game that I won’t play anything else. And then I start telling myself stuff like who cares about playing other games, it’s all stupid entertainment anyway, why do I need to collect new memories of new stupid entertainments, why not just make new memories of old stupid entertainments, what’s the difference? And of course, I’ll give myself a strict schedule, I’ll only play Final Fantasy XI every other night on the weekdays, focus on my writing on the nights I’m not playing, and I’ll spend every weekend afternoon writing instead of playing, and I’ll never play the game when my kids are awake to ensure I spend as much time with them as possible, and I will strictly enforce this schedule and stick to the path and not stray, because I am a grown man with adult responsibilities and free will.

And just like that, I am flushed with dopamine, listening to some of the most sublime free jazz you have ever heard in your life.

For a moment there, on October 18th, 2025, I became an enemy of the state, a name on some government list somewhere, a statistic. I was one of the seven million people all across the United States who participated in the No Kings Rally. I was of statistical insignificance, sure, but I was still part of it, part of a vast sea of outraged but very civil people, in what is now being called the largest peaceful protest in American history. I didn't exactly want to be there, my wife pretty much guilt-tripped me into going, but now, upon reflection, I'm glad I went, because now I’m part of history. And I imagine, in like twenty years from now, when telling this story to my grandkids, I will feel similar to how all those baby boomers feel when they talk about Woodstock.

There were a lot of older people and veterans at the No Kings protest, which surprised me. There was also a large turnout of spiky-haired people, fishnet-wearing people, and rainbow-flag-waving people, which was not so surprising. I have a shaved head, so I was worried people might think I’m a skinhead or something, but I wear a silver hoop earring and was holding a sign, MY CATS COULD DO A BETTER JOB, which had pictures of my cats taped to it, and I'm not a skinhead, so it was actually easy for me to blend into the crowd. Many people stopped to take photographs of my sign. I wondered if these photographs would end up on some old liberal’s Facebook feed. My wife held one that read THINGS ARE SO BAD EVEN THE INTROVERTS ARE HERE, which was a slogan she had read somewhere online. It was a cool, breezy day. The sky was clear, and the air was electric with excitement. People were gathered in a huge mass at the waterfront stage pavilion overlooking the great marshes just beyond the East River. A DJ played loud music from an elaborate sound system. I watched as a man holding an RIP USA sign danced to Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” as if he were lost in some sort of trance, which seemed a little foreboding to me, like he was reveling in the oncoming destruction of America or something. Maybe this was his last dance before the silence, who knows. A woman dressed in a full-body frog costume gave a speech. “Dressed as this badass frog, I will leap over structural oppression and ribbit my grievances louder than any frog has before.” People clapped and waved signs fervently. “The current administration already has three strikes against me. First, I'm a woman. Second, I come from a family of immigrants. And third, I’m dressed as a gigantic green frog.” Everyone laughed and cheered. She talked about how the current administration is deporting people without due process and how the military is being used to oppress American citizens and how abortion should be a human right. I thought her last point called for a more nuanced discussion around human rights, where they come from, and at which point in the human maturation cycle they should be applied, but this was neither the time nor place for philosophical discussion, so I just kept my mouth shut and listened closely. She ended her speech with WE DID NOT VOTE FOR THIS and urged everyone to chant along. The voices were cacophonous. I did not participate in the chanting because it made me feel weird, like I was being manipulated in some way. This was my first ever protest. I would normally never go to one of these things. My wife pretty much guilt-tripped me into it. My two-year-old son and twelve-year-old daughter were also there. My son was darting between people's legs like a crazy person, blissfully ignorant of politics and his part in the history being made. I was a little envious of him, to tell the truth. He eventually settled at the nearby playground with all the other children. Before the actual march started, I handed my sign to my daughter and told her to be careful, then she and her mother mingled into the crowd of chanting protesters. “When I say WE WANT, you say NO KINGS.” They all marched down to city hall chanting this and other anti-Trump slogans. Some people in pickup trucks yelled at them. I stayed back at the waterfront to keep an eye on my son because there was no way in hell he was ever going to stay focused long enough to march for an entire mile. The origin of the word “march” comes from the Latin word “Martius,” which comes from the word “Mars,” meaning the Roman god of war, which makes me feel a little uncomfortable. I enjoyed the cool breeze and watched sailors on the dock tend to their fishing boats. No one was pelted with rocks, stabbed, or shot. It was all very peaceful. When the march of protesters returned, they resembled more of a parade than a protest. Afterwards, we ate at the nearby pizza joint downtown. I hadn't eaten all day, so I ate way too many slices and spent the rest of the day feeling like a gluttonous pig. There was also a mini Comic Con going on. An entire city block was sectioned off for the event. There were about eight vendor stalls lined down the street, selling Pokémon cards, video game pins, comic books, anime plushies, and 3D-printed junk. Posters portraying Trump as a king with his face crossed out were plastered all over the old brick walls. Fake cobwebs and rubbery bats and animatronic skeletons dotted every street corner. People dressed as anime characters and superheroes carried protest signs and danced in the streets. It felt like some sort of super nerdy punk rock Halloween party. One guy dressed as Michael Myers walked around real slow, flashing his fake butcher’s knife at people, which frightened my son until he figured out it was just a costume, at which point he started circling the guy, tugging at the fabric of his outfit. All in all, it was a good time, but I was left wondering, do these protests actually accomplish anything?

I confess, even before I attended the No Kings rally, I had my doubts about the effectiveness of peaceful protests against tyrannical governments. It seems to me that if the current administration is not willing to play nice, perhaps we should not be playing nice ourselves. If you believe your human rights are being stripped, would you not want to fight like hell to reclaim them? How is marching peacefully going to reclaim what is being stolen from you? Imagine telling a slave in the 1700s that all they needed to do to gain their freedom was shout real loud and wave signs around, as if they had the education or wherewithal to withstand sustained lashings to even do that. If one is not willing to fight against what they deem as systematic violence, then how serious are they really? Structural oppression is designed to diminish the effectiveness of peaceful opposition. The current administration doesn’t even seem to care about the protests. They didn’t even give a weak sarcastic “no please stop” before the protests even happened, and they knew about these protests way in advance. In fact, the administration sort of just laughed it off. Trump even posted an AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown and dropping literal shit on protesters from a jet plane. The reason the current administration doesn’t seem to care, in my view, is because, despite high turnout, these protests don’t actually pose a threat to them. Nothing is at stake. They control both the House and the Senate. They regularly play fast and loose with the foundational documents on which this country was built. They do not play by the rules, yet we are playing by their rules. They allow us to protest, and that should tell us something right there. We are not blocking roads, cutting off supply chains, refusing to work, or being truly disobedient in any way. Hell, the organizers of the No Kings protest in my area went through days of paperwork and approvals with the local city hall to ensure that, one, they were legally within their rights to protest, and two, that the protesters would be protected when the protest actually happened. If there is not something deeply ironic about getting city hall’s approval to protest at city hall then we seriously need to consider changing our definition of irony.

I also have my doubts about these protests' effectiveness at changing people's minds. When I was at the No Kings rally, I looked around and saw only people who were already bought in. There were no MAGA hats on the sidelines going, “All these great signs are really making me want to vote Democrat.” There were no people taking fence posts out of their asses. There were no enlightened centrists in flame pants going, “Maybe they’re right, maybe Republicans and Democrats aren’t the same, maybe I should vote Democrat.” There were no terminally online Facebook moms breaking down in tears at the realization that their favorite president, who they had thought was just trolling to “own the libs,” is in fact a seriously deranged egomaniac. I mean, I can’t claim to know what was going on with every person in the crowd that day, this is all feels basically, but the people I saw already knew who they were voting for long before they came to the protest.

There is a much deeper problem at play here, I think, and it has to do with the internet and its ability to siphon people into little echo chambers. Those who fancy themselves on the right side of the political spectrum are on Twitter, Truth Social, Facebook, et cetera, sharing their anti-liberal memes, consuming their Joe Rogan misinformation about trans kids and death vaccines and Democrat-funded child sex rings, while those who fancy themselves on the left side of the political spectrum are on Bluesky, Reddit, Tumblr, et cetera, sharing their anti-conservative memes, consuming their Rachel Maddow opinion pieces about how the country is doomed and it’s all because of Trump and anyone who voted for Trump is a monster or whatever. And this has produced a society in which intelligent discourse just cannot happen. Everyone thinks everyone else is evil, and you cannot reason with evil. You hear about families being torn apart by this type of shit every single day. People are in their little camps, and each camp thinks the other camp is the problem, and now everyone thinks everyone else the problem. We have lost the ability to empathize with people. The whole topic really requires its own essay. But what it boils down to is this, when there’s a protest like No Kings, not a single right-leaning person will take it seriously because they have already been conditioned into believing that the liberals within the No Kings camp are dumbass morons who are also possibly full-blown evil. They have already made up their minds. No amount of sign waving and chanting is going to change that.

It seems to me that peaceful protests are not for persuading the other side but for gathering those already persuaded, and that’s fine if your goal is to let voices be heard and foster a sense of community, like a big help group, but the jury of my mind is still out on whether these peaceful protests actually produce meaningful change. They seem to just reinforce the fact that Trump is exceptionally good at making certain types of people hate him, but what good is all that anger if all we’re going to do is dance to Depeche Mode and wave signs around?

My wife says I am very fatalistic about the current state of US politics and that my mindset lends itself to a certain self-defeating path. I can’t say she’s wrong. I have sort of distanced myself from the whole political process at this point. I mean, I still vote, but that’s about it. She says I have diagnosed the problem but have not prescribed a solution. I counter and say that the solution is for people to stop participating in bullshit echo chambers, and then she asks me how they are going to do that, and I say by rejecting labels like Democrat and Republican and instead treating each other like human beings, and she says OK well how are they going to do that, and I say by turning the fucking phone off, and she says that’s unrealistic. She says I deal in idealism instead of realism. I say that if I can convince just a few people to turn the fucking phone off, even for just an hour a day, then the world would be a slightly better place, and she seems to agree with that sentiment, so then she told me to turn my own fucking phone off and go to the protest, so I did, and despite all my doubts, I’m glad to have gone.

For a few autumn months there during the COVID-19 pandemic, I drove a 1998 Volvo V70 GLT.

It reminded me of a boxy silver caterpillar. It was all segmented and rode real close to the ground. It had elongated rear lights composed of several smaller square lights, like a pair of compound eyes. It also had cat-like features. Its front-facing car face was a cat face. It had big feline headlights squinted on either side of an oversized grille reminiscent of the mesh of a wet cat nose. Below the grille was a slightly curved line of black open space, like a neutral but satisfied feline expression, as if it had just filled itself on treats and nip or something. The back hatch opened to a significant amount of storage space. It had that distinct nineties car smell, the kind of smell that, due to the breakdown of dead animal matter, only gets stronger as time passes. You could practically see the warm musty leather smell billowing out in thick golden-brown clouds whenever you opened the doors. The front dash was all analog, with little plastic lines arcing back and forth for fuel usage and miles per hour. The clock had numbers made of those small green rectangles you see on ancient digital alarm clocks. There was no CD player, only radio and cassette, so I bought one of those cassette-to-AUX adapters to play music with my phone, and I'm still mystified as to how that actually works. Pushing down the gas pedal produced acceleration akin to a small fart that got louder the longer you held your foot down. It had no cup holders, so I had to order some cheap plastic inserts that fit between the seats. The brakes were flat-out dangerous. It ate batteries like they were Tic Tacs or something, which ended up costing me a small fortune. And I'm sure it failed all modern-day carbon emission tests. But the car was undeniably cool and retro.

I didn't drive the Volvo for long though, mostly because it seriously broke down only a few months after I got it, but also because it depressed the living hell out of me, because the car wasn't just undeniably cool and retro, it was also haunted.

Every now and then, as far back as I can remember, during the Thanksgiving-Christmas months, my father would take me to my grandma’s house up in Watkinsville, Georgia, to check in on old Rosevelyn. She lived alone in this three-story burgundy brick house on a hill off a side road miles outside of town. The house was photographic. Virginia Creeper crept along the walls, and fuzzy green moss grew between every brick. I imagined the house itself was averse to change, like an inert brick giant standing steadfast and tall against the tides of time, showing faint signs of age but still holding strong. The driveway ran beside a retaining wall that held back a raised lawn, leading to a basement garage that felt almost underground. You had to walk up loose brick steps to even get to her front yard, which looked down on the driveway from the brick wall, the top of which was covered in thick grass. As a child, I would T-pose myself perilously on the top of the wall, descend its elevation all the way to the end and back, and as a teenager, I would sit on the wall, legs dangling, Nokia phone in one hand, texting my girlfriend about how bored I was, and as an adult, I would stand atop the wall, pining nostalgically about how I used to do all those things. But from that high perch, regardless of era, one thing remained constant, Rosevelyn’s 1998 Volvo V70 GLT, parked in the shade of the towering oaks.

Rosevelyn had a driver’s license but hated driving, so from visit to visit, until I was like thirty years old, the Volvo never moved. It was always in that same spot, right up until her death.

The inside of the house was static. It was large but felt somehow small. The front door had a knob right in the middle, and the knob itself was surrounded by ornate gold trim, making it awkward to twist. The door opened to a large room with antique couches and a grand piano. It was more of a parlor, really. The room was sunken somewhat, with steps on either end, and it was long, so as a child I would run back and forth, sometimes stopping to play simple melodies on the piano. The parlor connected to both the living room and the kitchen, themselves connected without walls or doors between them. The living room was cramped, with an antique couch and some musty love seats and a television set all behind a standing screen, and there was a large sliding glass door on the far end that opened to a steep backyard that was unkempt and dotted with oaks. There was only one lamp in the living room, and despite the glass door being uncovered, it was somehow always dark orange and gloomy in there. A number of tables and shelves lined the walls, atop which were family photos and dusty tomes and knickknacks, particularly Hummels, of which she had hundreds, everywhere, some set up in little scenes behind an ornate glass cabinet. Angelic porcelain children laughing, tossing balls, and playing little flutes. There was a desk in the corner, near the entrance to the kitchen, where an old typewriter sat, surrounded by letters, stamps, and fountain pens. She seemed to be an avid writer but produced no notable works and never talked about it. As a young woman, she was a real estate agent, and, when she got much older, started working for my dad’s real estate company, but as far as I could tell, she didn’t do any actual work, although by her desk, there was an old wooden sign with CALL ROSEVELYN HARRISON 760-6231 in bright red font. That number connects to a dead line now. I imagine the sign was probably staked in a plot of land somewhere long ago, but by the time I was like ten, it had become just another relic of her past. There were little historical relics like this all over her house. The kitchen was full of them. The cabinets were filled with ancient tableware. Dishes and plates and bowls with all sorts of ornate trim and images imprinted on them, images in that distinct 50s-style Americana artwork with rosy-cheeked children with big dimples that looked both photorealistic and incredibly uncanny. These things held special sentimental value to her for some reason. The kitchen window stool was decorated with Santas and elves from bygone Christmases. There was no dishwasher, everything was done by hand. The kitchen sink was sunk into the counter and made from vitreous china. The silverware might have been actual silver. Some sort of elaborately patterned red cloth draped every surface. The pantry was full of years-old Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies that she would offer me whenever I visited, regardless of my age, and they tasted great. I grew to love Oatmeal Cream Pies. Beyond the living room was a long hallway that connected to all three bedrooms in the home. There were no televisions in these bedrooms, only antique lamps with ornate shades and big mirrors and nightstands on which King James sat. My father’s old childhood bedroom had been turned into a guest room, but remnants of his youth remained. Baseball cards, sports memorabilia, an ancient radio boombox, loose cassettes from the 70s and 80s, and even some of his old clothing deep in the walk-in closet. I got the impression she kept these things as a reminder. That’s probably why the interior of the home hadn’t changed in decades. Maybe the permanence helped her in some way, made her less lonely. Maybe she thought if she just left things the way they were, she would never forget the past, never forget who she was, never forget what she did. Right outside my dad’s old bedroom was a big wooden door to the basement. As a child, looking down from the top of the long stairwell, it was like staring down into a monster’s den, so I never went down there. As a teenager, it was mysterious and alluring, so I would work up the nerve to creep down the creaky wooden steps, but when I got to the very bottom, I would get spooked due to the lack of light and quickly climb back upstairs, feeling as if a ghost was on my back the whole time. As an adult, I would stare down that dark stairwell and see nothing but an existential void. At least that’s how it felt the last time I was there, at the estate sale.

Sometime in October 2020, I was in my office playing video games, and I received a call from my dad. He usually started every call with some comment about how I hadn’t called him in months, but this time, in a solemn tone, all he said was my name. Forrest.

I thought maybe he was joking around, so I said, “Dad.”

“Your grandma’s in the hospital.”

“Is she OK? What happened?”

“She fell down the basement stairs.”

“Is she OK?”

There was a weird silence. I couldn’t even hear the normal background static, like he had covered the phone’s microphone with his hand or something.

“Is she OK?”

“I hadn’t heard from her in almost a week.”

“What do you mean?”

“She fell down the stairs, Forrest.”

“I know, you said that.”

“She was down there for days.”

Something happened with my stomach, like a phantom had reached through my flesh and twisted at my insides or something. Some horrible revelation reached my body before it had reached my mind, and when my mind caught up, I stared off into the wall, wide-eyed and speechless.

“She was down there for days, Forrest.”

“I… I heard you.”

“I drove down there. To her house. To check on her. The Volvo was still there. All the doors were locked.”

“How did you get in?”

“I went to the basement door, the one by the garage.”

There was another long pause. This time I heard something like a forced cough. When my dad returned, his voice was shaking.

“I looked through the window, the one on the door,” he said, pausing again.

“OK, what did you see? What happened?”

“It was dark, Forrest. I didn’t see anything. But it felt weird. Something was off. I got this feeling in my stomach, you know the one. And I don’t know what I was thinking, but I punched through the glass, cut my hand all up.”

“Are you OK?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“...”

“I punched through, unlocked the door from the inside, let myself in. Then, first thing I did was, I went to the stairwell to go upstairs. It was dark. I had trouble finding the light switch, but I knew it was at the bottom of the stairwell.”

“Dad.”

“When I turned the light on,” he said, pausing.

“It’s OK, Dad. I don’t need to know.”

A long silence followed this leg of the conversation. I didn’t know what to say. I thought about Rosevelyn tumbling down the dark stairwell, alone, landing on the hard concrete floor, not being able to move, just lying there, maybe a broken leg or a broken hip. I didn’t want to know. Why was she going down there to begin with? What was she thinking? I thought about her just lying there, her body twisted and mangled, screaming out for help, no food or water, writhing in pain, for days. The thought of it made me sick. I started feeling terrible for having not spent much time with her. I never called her. I never sent cards. I never wished her a happy birthday. Nothing. When I was a kid, I thought she was boring. When I was a teen, I thought she was boring. When I was an adult, I told myself I was just too busy, too busy to care. And then I started feeling bad for feeling bad, like how selfish am I just thinking about myself here when she was the one down there writhing in pain at the bottom of a dark stairwell for days. And I couldn’t even imagine how my father was feeling. I had never lost a parent before. I didn’t know what it was like. There was no way for me to empathize. I didn’t know what the hell to say to him. There were no words. I started wondering what was going through Rosevelyn’s head when she was down there on the concrete. I wondered if her life had flashed before her eyes, like they say. I wondered if she had thought about me, how I never called, how I never seemed to care. I wondered if she had cursed me in her mind. And then I started feeling bad about making this all about me again, and then I started feeling really bad because I had started thinking about her Volvo. My car was a wreck. I needed a new car. I wondered if I could maybe have her Volvo. I don’t know why I thought this, but I did, and it made me feel really bad. It made me feel so bad that I closed my eyes shut for what felt like ten minutes. I breathed in, breathed out. I tried to stop myself from thinking about myself. Then I started thinking if she had been angry down there, angry that after 84 years it had to end this way, alone at the bottom of a stairwell. She was a Christian woman. I knew that. But I wondered if, maybe, down there on the hard concrete, I wondered if maybe she had been angry with God for doing this to her. Or maybe not. Maybe she was faithful until the very end. Maybe this was all part of God’s plan, maybe that’s what she had thought down there while she was splayed out, unable to move, on the hard concrete, in total darkness. I don’t know. Maybe on the way down, maybe she just hit her head, passed out. Maybe she just dreamed a pleasant dream the whole time. Maybe her mind went into self-preservation mode, flipped off her consciousness, flooded her body with endorphins, put her to sleep, made her dream a pleasant dream. Maybe she dreamed of my father as a young boy. Maybe her death came so swiftly that she didn’t even know it was happening to begin with. I stopped thinking about the Volvo. I started thinking that maybe she hadn’t felt any pain, and this thought made me feel a little better, until I remembered what my dad had said about Rosevelyn being in the hospital.

I’m not sure how much time had passed since we last said a word to each other, but when I broke the silence, I said, “How’s she doing, you know, in the hospital?”

“She’s in a coma.”

“How quickly did it, you know, happen?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, was she conscious the whole time, or did she, you know, did she pass out?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about the doctors? What are they saying?”

“They don’t know either.”

There was another silence, shorter this time.

“I want you to come down in three weeks,” my dad said, his voice lower than before.

“To see her, in the hospital?”

“No, for the funeral.”

“But she’s alive, I thought.”

“She is.”

“...”

“I don’t know, Forrest.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I just don’t know, son.”

“Tell me, Dad.”

“I have to go now.”

“Wait.”

“I’ll send you the date.”

And then the line went dead.

My father gave a speech at the funeral. I recited a poem. I don’t remember the details all that well. It was an open casket. Rosevelyn was on display for everyone to see. But she wasn’t herself. Her face was weird, waxy, made up. Her prominent jowls had been removed somehow. She did not look like the Rosevelyn that I knew. I had to look away. It was perverse, in some way. Disrespectful, almost. But no one else seemed to mind, so I didn’t say anything.

Later that day, my dad drove me to the old house on the hill to pick up the Volvo. The driveway was packed with cars. We walked up the loose brick stairs to the front door, which was wide open. Two large men with tattoos were carrying an antique couch through the door. We slid past them. There was a crude cardboard sign in the parlor. ROSEVELYN HARRISON ESTATE SALE. All sorts of people were going from room to room, picking things up, examining them very closely. My father and I walked through the house. There were price tags on literally everything. Little handmade yellow price tags. Some of the Hummels were going for $50 a pop. The antique Santas in the kitchen were $25. The 50s-era dishware ranged from $2 to $10 apiece. The loveseats were $75. Everything had a price. It was perverse. I remember being personally offended, walking through that house. I felt like they were selling pieces of Rosevelyn’s soul or something, like the estate sale company or whoever had organized this had no regard for human life, like they didn't care who Rosevelyn was as a person. As if the moment she died, they swooped in like vultures, tagged every part of her with some arbitrary number, and then opened her soul up to the public and said, “Feast, my pretties, to your heart’s content,” all to make a profit. It was sickening to me. It was gross, disrespectful, and consumeristic. I couldn’t fucking stand it. And when my father and I made it to his old bedroom, where I saw those yellow price tags tacked onto all my dad’s old stuff, I couldn’t hold it in any longer.

I turned to my dad and said, “Who would fucking do this?”

And he said, “What do you mean, son?”

“What sort of asshole would just sell all of Rosevelyn’s stuff like this? She collected this stuff. It was important to her. It had sentimental value. They’re even selling some of your old stuff, Dad. Don’t you care about that? It’s fucking greedy, and gross, that's what it is.”

“I did this.”

I paused for a moment. I think I even did a double take. I wasn’t sure what I was hearing. “What?”

“I hired the estate sale company.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What? Why? Why would you do that?”

A small family entered the room. A woman started rummaging through the closet. A man was examining the boombox. A young boy was cycling through baseball cards. My father and I were just standing there, watching this unfold. I was shaking. Something like self-righteous fury had consumed my soul. My fists were clenched. I felt like I was about to scream.

Trying to contain myself, I turned to leave the room.

But just as I was about to leave, my dad stepped into the doorway, blocking me, then he placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “None of this is important, son. Rosevelyn’s not here anymore.”

I looked him straight in the face, thinking like duh, obviously she’s not here anymore. What do you think I am, stupid? I’m a grown thirty-year-old man. Don’t patronize me, asshole. Get the fuck out of my way.

Then he placed a hand on his chest and said, “She’s in here.”

Later that night, I drove home in Rosevelyn’s 1998 Volvo V70 GLT.

“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”
—J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

A little over a year ago, I created a community blogging platform called howdoyouspell.cool, powered by Write Freely, an online space wherein anyone could sign up, create a blog, and write about whatever they wanted. Back then, I told myself that I was inspired by this concept of the “open internet,” a sort of return to the wild-west era of the Internet in which I grew up, beyond the reaches of devious corporate overlords and money-making algorithms, where people could express themselves however they wanted, no matter how weird or vile that expression might be. But as of yesterday, October 4, 2025, I have retired the domain name and am now in the process of shutting the platform down for good. And now, on this eve of the platform’s obliteration, I find myself analyzing my true motivations for having created it to begin with. Was it really to provide a place for people to express themselves unfettered, or was it something else?

Well, I've come to the conclusion that it was indeed something else, something performative and superficial. I've come to the conclusion that it was all ego, ego, ego. I just wanted to be cool, pretty much. In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious. I mean, the word “cool” is right there in the damn domain name.

To be honest, before I had even created the blogging platform, I kind of knew it was a bad idea. For one, I had tried creating online communities in the past but had always ended up abandoning them a few months after creation because being an administrator just doesn’t suit me, because people annoy me very easily. And for two, I don’t usually get along with my fellow writers to begin with. 

This is a sweeping generalization, I know, but I think most writers are pretentious, narcissistic know-it-alls who are desperate for validation. They want people to read their stuff and be like, “holy shit, this is the most deep and thoughtful thing I’ve ever read, this author is a genius.” Writers seem to get off on impressing others and cultivating airs more so than the actual act of writing itself. I mean, why even publish anything for public consumption if, one, you didn’t want it to be read by other people, which indicates some level of validation-seeking, and two, you didn’t think your writing had some sort of academic or artistic merit worth someone else’s time, which suggests a certain level of pretentious arrogance that contributes to the whole know-it-all thing. I mean, what do you think this whole journal you’re reading here is, exactly? Some sort of selfless practice of the art of writing? Some sort of altruism? No, it's an effort to put myself out there in some sort of vain attempt at validation and like-minded community building. As they say, it takes one to know one. Do note, however, that my wife says my biggest character flaw is that I project myself onto others and have a hard time relating to the thoughts and feelings of other people because of this, so maybe this should all be taken with a nice, heaping pile of salt.

By the time I had created the howdoyouspell.cool platform, I had written something like twenty essays and two short stories, all of which tried to marry my love of video games with philosophical and societal concepts that I admittedly understood very poorly, and I had electronically published two full-blown magazines also, both of which I had done all the editing and graphical design for. I thought, at the time, that all of my stuff was very well-written and intelligent. I was trying very hard to make a point with my writing, and I wanted very much for someone to read my work and say something like, “holy shit, this is the most deep and thoughtful thing I’ve ever read, this author is a genius.” But of course this praise and validation never materialized, because barely anyone read my stuff, and those who did were more interested in the video game aspects than the philosophical, societal aspects, so I began to resent the audience that I had cultivated, seeing them as shallow and vapid, only seeming to care about playing video games instead of thinking about video games. So I decided, hey, you know what, what if I make a writing platform, position myself as some sort of writing authority figure, and then, by using this facade of “I’m just a passionate writer who wants to provide you the chance of hosting your own blog wherein you can say whatever you want without fear of being banned,” I would maybe attract the sort of high-minded audience that would appreciate my stuff. I’m not sure if I was consciously thinking about it like this at the time, but using the forty-twenty power of hindsight, this was certainly what was going on. Ego, ego, ego. I wanted to be perceived as a cool writer. I thought my writing was incredible, and I believed that if people just read it, I would become this sort of online writing folk hero of sorts. In short, I was desperate for attention.

Probably needless to say, but this whole scheme did not provide the attention I craved, mostly because my writing wasn’t actually very good, but also because, by advertising my new blogging platform as a sort of haven for free-speech absolutists, I had once again attracted an audience that I immediately grew to resent. Because upon advertising my platform on Mastodon, a defederated social media network of which I no longer have a profile, the first person who reached out to me was this one guy who wrote erotic anime-inspired fiction that almost exclusively featured unrealistically well-endowed chubby women who battled and performed sexual acts on each other, because his characters were all like mixed-martial artists or something, and in all of this guy’s stories, the women vocally expressed hatred for one another but always had this sort of repressed sexual attraction bubbling underneath the surface, so they’d be in a fighting arena for whatever reason and they’d start off all like, “Do you think you’re better than me? I hate your fucking guts, you nasty tramp. I’m the best fighter in the world.” But by the end of the story, they’d be rolling around completely nude in the middle of the arena, making out and fondling each other or whatever. This is how all the guy’s stories went. 

This author’s work was inherently offensive to me because he very obviously treated women as mere sexual objects, so I didn’t want this guy to create a blog on my platform, but I had advertised the platform as a sort of free-speech haven where anyone could post anything, so from the very start of this whole attention-seeking endeavor, I was faced with a sort of ethical dilemma. Am I really in support of absolute freedom of expression if I’m unwilling to allow this misogynist objectifier of women to post his nasty smut trash on my blogging platform? I felt sort of ethically committed to the bit, so to speak, in that I had advertised the platform as a free-speech platform, and but what would it look like if I suddenly told this guy that actually no, you can’t post on my platform because your writing is disgusting and offensive to me?

In hindsight, this was an egotistical concern on my part, because I was more worried about how people would perceive my shifting stances on the free-speech thing than I was about actually following my own moral, ethical gut code, which told me that by no means should I allow this guy’s awful smut garbage on my platform. But I ended up caving to my ego and letting this guy create his smut blog, because I didn't want to make an ethical 180 on the free-speech thing I had originally committed to, out of fear of being perceived as some sort of hypocritical phony.

As of today, there are like ten users, not counting myself, on howdoyouspell.cool, nine of whom only posted a few entries before vanishing without a trace, but this guy, this misogynist objectifier of women, has stuck around. In fact, I believe he just posted something last week, another chapter in his Beat, Prey, Love series, the title of which follows the annoying format of all his other titles, that being taking an existing movie title and altering it somewhat to vaguely suggest something erotic going on, which is a play-on-words trend that makes my eyes roll into the back of my head even when not used in a sexualized context, as it's never as clever as the author likes to think it is, and it's frankly low-effort and offensively unoriginal. 

The smut author has been consistently posting his drivel on howdoyouspell.cool for like a year now, and considering I had stopped posting to the platform several months ago, that makes this one nasty guy the sole contributor to the site. So ultimately, at this point, I don’t feel too bad about pulling the plug on the whole platform. In fact, I might even do a villainous little laugh when this guy sends me a very sternly worded email after he attempts to log in only to find his disgusting porn writing completely wiped from the internet because his blog no longer exists.

So yeah, I’m feeling pretty good about the death of howdoyouspell.cool, considering the platform was born primarily out of a desire to satisfy my own ego, and it really only attracted one very nasty guy. For one, I don’t want to provide a platform for smut, and for two, I’m kind of through trying so hard to be cool. I want to be the death of cool. I'm done pursuing projects driven solely by my own ego, because my desire to be perceived as distinguished and interesting and cool has only produced within me feelings of anxiety and phonyism.

But is this truly all that my ego has produced? 

A couple of months ago, I read this novel by J.D. Salinger titled Franny and Zooey, which is sort of like a Socratic dialogue between two siblings. Franny is a young actress attending college who is fed up with the ego-fueled intellectual phoniness of her peers and has become obsessed with shedding her own ego through the practice of a repetitive mental prayer she learned by reading an old religious text. Franny is also the source of the quote at the beginning of this journal entry. Zooey, Franny’s brother, disagrees with Franny that ego is the root of all her problems. At one point, about a hundred and sixty pages in, Zooey says something that kind of opened my eyes to the possibility that maybe ego isn’t such a bad thing. He said,

“What about your beloved Epictetus? Or your beloved Emily Dickinson? You want your Emily, every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away?”

Much like the creation of howdoyouspell.cool, my entire body of writing has been largely the product of my own ego, which on the surface is a fact that seems to taint the writing, but does it really? Looking back at everything I’ve written, even though much of it is hot garbage, I’m proud of some of it and grateful to have written it all. Even the writing I now think is hot garbage, I don’t regret having written it, because it helped me become a better writer and led to work that I feel has real, meaningful value, however hard that is to actually quantify.

So the whole thing has me thinking about ego in a deeper way, like, is ego really all that bad? It seems to me that most human behavior could probably be tied back to ego in some way. I mean, even a super generous person who donates to charities probably gets some sort of personal satisfaction from others perceiving them as a charitable person, which is a sort of ego-stroke, in a way. But is that a bad thing? I mean, even if that’s the case, that the charitable person is driven by ego, does the motive even matter at that point? The charity is still happening, regardless of whether the ego was involved or not. Isn’t the charitable person’s ego producing good outcomes in this hypothetical situation? And if we concede that this egotism does indeed produce good outcomes sometimes, then is ego really all that bad?

Like Franny, maybe I've been looking at ego the wrong way. Perhaps ego is more like this neutral power within us all, this driving force that is neither good nor bad, and what really matters is how we choose to use our egos and the outcomes of those ego-driven choices.

A sort of like Ego-Driven Consequentialism or something.

About a month ago, I purchased a black USB Nintendo 64 controller to use with my PC because I had gotten it in my head that I wanted to wallow in some nostalgia by playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time again, but about a week later, by the time the N64 controller had arrived in the mail, my hyperactive brain was already on a whole other thing entirely, meaning I had sort of lost the urge to play Ocarina, so at that point I had an N64 controller with nothing to use it for, so the controller was placed in a dusty cabinet and just sort of languished there with all the other disused USB controllers, until sunk-cost fallacy caught up with me and I wanted to use the N64 controller again, but this time I wanted to play something different, something I had never played before, and that’s when, after reviewing the admittedly small library of N64 games and sorting out the ones that did not fit my particular gaming fetishes at the time, those being like role-playing elements and a good soundtrack and open-endedness and Japanese and player choice beyond just the ability to turn the game off, I eventually settled on Harvest Moon 64.

I had played Harvest Moon-like games before, particularly Rune Factory and Stardew Valley, but never got very far in them due to their penchant for stressing me the hell out, despite the fact that those games are positioned as like relaxing and chill, which, at least for me personally, is just not the case, so I went into Harvest Moon 64 with something like eager trepidatiousness.

And after a day or so of mental preparation, I started playing Harvest Moon 64 on a CRT television set using an emulator, using my new but somewhat dusty USB N64 controller, which made me realize that the N64 controller actually gets a bad rap within the gaming community, because although nascent and experimental, it’s actually incredibly ergonomic, a complete joy to hold, absolutely no cramping or cricks or wrist pressure of any kind while holding the thing, and that's not nostalgia talking, that's just the facts. And the N64 controller is especially nice when playing a game like Harvest Moon 64, which has the gameplay complexity of like a smooth rock or something, so you don't have to perform painful finger calisthenics or be a freakishly mutated three-handed person to reach all the buttons. Which is all to say that, so far, I'm having a pretty good time, but, let me tell you, playing Harvest Moon 64 is a very weird experience, because the game kind of forces you to come face to face with this strange kind of paradoxical irony that’s not present in many other video games, which is something I’ll dive into here shortly.

All that being said, I don't dislike Harvest Moon 64. I actually find it pleasantly addictive and cozy. The game is very quaint and relaxing and low IQ almost, which may sound like an insult but is actually a high compliment, because one of the things I dislike most about modern Harvest Moon-inspired farming games is the fact that there is just so much stuff to do and not enough time to do all that stuff, even though most of these games are open-ended and don’t penalize you for not doing everything all in one day, yet still when playing these types of games I feel weirdly compelled to cram as much stuff as possible into a single game day, which leads to all sorts of obsessive-compulsive-like stresses and frustrations, as if the tasks just keep piling up and I just don't have the capacity to organize or manage them, whereas Harvest Moon 64, being only the fourth game in the Harvest Moon series, which is technically called Story of Seasons if you want to get all nerdy and purist about it, is incredibly barebones and empty almost, which kind of removes the stress of too-many-options, because when you only have to worry about clearing your farm of debris, tilling soil, planting and watering seeds, harvesting crops, rearing animals, talking to townsfolk, participating in the occasional festival, and eventually getting married and having kids with the digital farm girl of your dreams, and you only have like 7 minutes at a time to do any of this stuff, because that's literally how long an in-game day is in Harvest Moon 64, 7 minutes, you’re sort of forced to pick one or two things to do per day and not really care about the rest because there’s literally no way in hell you’re cramming everything into those 7 minutes, and the stuff you’re doing in those 7 minutes is so braindead simple that it ends up feeling cathartic, in a way, like all the stress of modern life just sort of melts away as you’re sitting there holding the deformed monstrosity known as the N64 controller with two hands and moving your little chibi backwards-hat-wearing farmer guy around by tilting the oddly placed analog control stick with your thumb in satisfying little half circles before repetitively making him, the chibi backwards-hat-wearing farmer guy, crush rocks or water crops or whatever by pushing the fat green B button over and over, which, again, is incredibly low IQ and simple, almost anti-complex, as if the game itself is averse to being complex in any way shape or form, and that lack of gameplay complexity, combined with the game’s low-poly 3D environments and big-headed chibi-style 2D sprites and muted pastel color palette, all evoking this sort of I’ve-been-here-before-even-if-I’ve-never-actually-been-here-before feeling of nostalgia that some Nintendo 64 games just seem to have in spades, makes for a gameplay experience in which hours seem to drift away somehow as if you ingested some sort of digital benzo through your eyeballs.

What I’m trying to say is, Harvest Moon 64 is a very simple, very charming game, and its simplicity is not a drawback, in fact this simplicity is one of the game’s greatest strengths, and, like any great game, its gameplay reinforces the core themes of the game’s narrative, which is something like, “modern life is garbage, embrace the simple life, go touch grass.”

And that's where the paradoxical irony comes into play.

Harvest Moon 64 evokes a sort of wistful longing for a simpler life, a rural life, a life of spending all day outdoors, tilling the soil and planting the seeds and rearing the livestock and milking the cows and fishing the fish, a life in which the morning chirps of birds and the evening songs of crickets and the nighttime hoots of owls are fully appreciated in all their wondrous majestic glory, not just random background noise you hear sometimes when getting in the car for work in the morning or checking the mailbox in the evening or taking the trash out to the side of the road every Wednesday night. And Harvest Moon 64 does not merely replicate this back-to-basics, touch-grass lifestyle, it glorifies it, it implies that this sort of lifestyle is meaningful and fulfilling, it suggests that perhaps this kind of lifestyle is in fact superior to the lifestyle of someone who would, say, sit in front of a CRT television set for hours playing Harvest Moon 64, almost as if the game itself looks down upon the person playing it, which results in an almost surreal paradoxical gameplay experience that leaves me questioning if I should even be playing Harvest Moon 64 to begin with, or if I should be playing any video game for that matter. Like, if I enjoy planting crops and rearing livestock and fishing in ponds and touching grass in a video game, which I obviously do because here I am doing it, wouldn't it logically follow that I would also enjoy doing those things outside, in the real world, and if that's the case, shouldn't I then just be doing those things outside in the real world, instead of vegetatively sitting in front of a television set controlling aesthetically arranged pixels with an incredibly ergonomic controller? Wouldn't I get more enjoyment out of the real thing, like the actual putting-the-controller-down, going-outside, touching-grass thing? 

So, needless to say at this point, but playing Harvest Moon 64 is a very weird and conflicting experience for me, which is odd because the game doesn’t actually shove this touch-grass narrative down your throat at all. In fact, Harvest Moon 64 is more concerned with being a simple video game than making any sort of point whatsoever, because Harvest Moon 64 is not deep, like, at all. It has no intention of getting narratively deep with you. The deepest the game gets is this one line of text on this one gravestone in Flowerbud Village that reads, “Deep thoughts are written here,” implying that, yes, someone somewhere in this fictional world had deep thoughts at some point, enough to write something deep here on this gravestone, but that person is not you, you're only here to plant crops and raise animals and marry a country girl and live a peaceful life in a simulated Japanese countryside. The game doesn’t even bother to tell you what kind of deep thoughts are written on its gravestones, that's how little Harvest Moon 64 cares about getting deep with you. It's as if the game is standing at the edge of a philosophical kiddie pool but refusing to even dip its toe in the water, instead just vaguely gesturing at the pool, saying something like, “Yes, there is something deep here, but who cares? It's not important. Go plant some turnips and pet your horse.” The game is so far away from being pretentious that I bet it doesn't even know what the word “pretentious” means. In fact, the most complicated word I've seen used in the game so far is like “howdy.”

Yet, if Harvest Moon 64 isn't deep or trying making a point or whatever, why does it feel like the game is patronizing me in some way? Why does it feel like the game is telling me to turn it off and go touch grass? 

Could it be that I’m actually projecting my own insecurities onto the game? Could it be that Harvest Moon 64 is actually just a mirror, a mirror reflecting my own bullshit back at me? Could it be that it's not the game that’s patronizing me, but me that's patronizing me?

Maybe, somewhere deep inside, there's an unfulfilled atavistic urge to touch grass trying to break through, a sort of mitochondrial shame produced by staring at screens and being so far removed from the simpler, pastoral lifestyle of my great great ancestors? Maybe somewhere deep down in the ancestral gray matter I instinctively know that I'd be happier if I just turned off all the screens and touched some grass?

Now that I think about it, maybe the only depth Harvest Moon 64 has is the existential baggage I bring with me when I turn the game on.

So, with all that said, I think I’m going to take a walk in the park.

“Violence only leads to more violence. We believe your presence here will attract violence. That's why we want you to leave as soon as possible.”

There’s this one scene in Final Fantasy VIII, after Balamb Garden becomes mobile and crashes into Fisherman’s Horizon, where the mayor of said town tells Squall and company to leave as soon as possible because he believes they will attract the Galbadian Army and thus bring ruin to their quaint little fishing village that just so happens to have some of the best background music of any video game ever made.

The mayor has a legitimate point, and he’s also pretty much totally correct, because Balamb does end up attracting the Galbadian Army, and violence does indeed break out in his quaint little fishing village that just so happens to have the best background music of any role-playing game ever made, but when the violence does break out, instead of fighting, the mayor opts to calmly speak with the Galbadian military official in an attempt to come to some sort of peace through open discourse.

Now, I've played Final Fantasy VIII several times, but the last time I had actually completed the game was over ten years ago, so I had forgotten exactly what happens next, but I was hoping it would defy my expectations, pull some sort of twist wherein the mayor does actually manage to convince the Galbadian bad guys to stand down through peaceful discourse, but of course my naivety was quickly made apparent, because of course this is video games, and of course the player must be entertained, and of course it would be boring if the bad guys just packed up and went home after a couple lines of dialogue, so of course this means cool boss battles with lots of flashy effects and violence.

Because, as you might have already guessed, instead of using this scene to reinforce a message of peace, the game instead basically ridicules the mayor’s philosophy of non-violence. The mayor is immediately laughed at, choked out, and told that his village will be razed to the ground no matter what he does, so of course Squall and company have to jump in to save the day, pounding the Galbadian bad guys into a pulp before blowing up their giant death machine with a massive sword laser called Blasting Zone that somehow extends out into space before landing smack dab on the enemy target all without triggering some sort of apocalyptic extinction-level event, and thus the peaceful village, which has some of the best background music of any video game ever, is saved through violent albeit somewhat nonsensical means, thus reinforcing the bloody, cyclical philosophy of violence.

Afterwards, Squall, somewhat sympathetic to the mayor’s philosophy of peace, talks to the guy, saying the following,

“I wish … everything could be settled without resorting to violence ... and there would be no need for battles. Like you've been preaching, it would be wonderful if things could be settled by discussion. The only problem with that is that it takes too much time. Especially if the others are not willing to listen. So I believe that fighting is inevitable at times. It's really sad. That's all I have to say. I hope you understand someday. I think the world needs both people like you and people like us. Thank you for all your help. Goodbye."

Squall’s use of the word “preaching” comes off a bit condescending, but that's more of a translation issue than anything else, and his “takes too much time” comment strikes me as especially odd, considering this is a world in which time magic like “Stop” and “Slow” exist, and his whole “I hope you understand someday” thing comes off arrogant as hell, as if Squall believes his own personal philosophy to be the only viable one and it's just a matter of time and maturity for everyone else to get on his same page, but otherwise I think his heart is in the right place, as his sentiment here more or less mirrors my own, although I hold this position far more begrudgingly than Squall seems to, so ultimately the whole scene still left a sour taste in my mouth, like is this truly the message we want to spread, that the only way to stop violence is through violence, that some people will just not listen to reason and should therefore be beaten to a pulp and blasted with huge space lasers?

The whole thing got me thinking about Japanese role-playing games in general, and how, at least out of the ones I’ve played, which number in the hundreds, they all use violence as a means to resolution, each and every one of them. Every JRPG I’ve played has a battle system in which the good guys are on one side of the screen and the bad guys are on the other, each side exchanging blows in the most flashy ways possible, all in an effort to stop some sort of end-of-the-world threat, be it some mad god or some evil empire. This is opposed to western role-playing games, like Baldur’s Gate or Neverwinter Nights or even Elder Scrolls, wherein violence is indeed there as an option but many in-game situations can actually be solved through dialogue. Hell, many WRPGs even have a “charisma” stat and some sort of speechcraft skill tree which rewards the player for using non-violent means to resolve problems, which, in my experience, is just not something that exists in many JRPGs, if any.

The east-versus-west thing going on in the previous paragraph also raises some interesting sociohistorical questions, considering the whole Hiroshima-Nagasaki thing, after which Japan became relatively non-violent, what with their adoption of a new constitution that expressly renounces war and forbids maintaining any kind of “war potential,” which is all to say that Japanese developers’ strict adherence to violent conflict resolution in video games confuses me somewhat. I can’t help but wonder if it’s some sort of leftover revenge fantasy lingering within their cultural subconscious from the atrocity that was committed against them, and following this line of thinking, perhaps every evil empire in JRPGs, of which there are many, is actually some sort of symbolic stand-in for America, which would be totally understandable, but it’s still a curious thing nonetheless, because the core sentiment that violence begets more violence seems like a demonstrably true fact of life, one that is both unavoidable and incredibly tragic, although Japan is kind of an exception to the rule in this case, because, after the bombs dropped, they did indeed become a more peaceful nation, just at the expense of countless human souls, which begs the question, does it really have to be this way?

I’m not a historian by any means, but surely, back then, whether culturally or militaristically or whatever, Japan had some sort of rigid viewpoint they believed was righteous and correct, a viewpoint they believed necessitated violence for whatever reason, and clearly this viewpoint was one that could not be changed through peaceful discourse. Unfortunately, however, this rigid viewpoint, whatever it actually was, was their undoing, because, whether right or wrong, it facilitated the need for thermonuclear detonation, twice.

At the end of disc 1, right before the assassination attempt on Sorceress Edea, Squall says something that fits here, he says, 

“Right and wrong are not what separate us and our enemies. It’s our different standpoints, our perspectives that separate us.”

And this is a quote I quite like and agree with. It takes the whole concept of “good” and “evil” out of the equation, making conflict more about personal philosophies and open dialogue. It seems to suggest that, if we could just make our enemies see reason, make them adopt our enlightened viewpoints, then there would be no need for violence at all. Keep in mind, however, this quote was uttered by a mercenary on a mission to assassinate a woman in cold blood, which suggests that, perhaps, even if there’s no such thing as right and wrong, good and evil, some people just can’t be reasoned with and thus need to be taken out for the greater good of humanity, but ultimately it is Squall and Balamb deciding what that “greater good” actually is, which when we get right down to it is just another viewpoint, another perspective, which Squall openly admits is a factor in the whole violent conflict he’s a part of, so perhaps Squall himself is a perpetuator of cyclical violence simply by holding a differing viewpoint?

Perhaps holding a rigid viewpoint on anything at all is part of the problem?

Because, as Squall states later on, “some people just aren’t willing to listen,” and if that’s the case, which it seems to be, just look at the right-left divide in America these days, just what are we to do with these non-listening people? Are we expected to just let those who want to take our human rights take our human rights? Are we expected to just sit around in the lotus position all day hoping we can convince fascists of equality and justice for all? Are we expected to just let Sorceress Edea take over the entire world? 

In a hard-line philosophy of peace, are we expected to just take it?

There seems to be a classic double bind here, a paradox of peace almost, that being, if we rigidly adhere to a peaceful philosophy, we effectively roll over for those who themselves are not very peaceful, opening ourselves up to violence, but if we fight back, violence with violence, we beget more violence. It seems to be a no-win situation almost.

So, thinking back to Squall’s somewhat patronizing speech given to the mayor of Fisherman’s Horizon, which happens to have some of the best background music of any video game ever, maybe he, Squall, actually makes a good point? I don’t know.

I mean, we often say that those who commit atrocities will eventually get what’s coming to them, but how long are we expected to wait for that to happen?

Maybe sometimes we have to take matters into our own hands, maybe that's the only way to save Fisherman's Horizon?