just words

“The Citadel Military College of South Carolina (simply known as The Citadel) is a public senior military college in Charleston, South Carolina, United States. Established in 1842, it is the third oldest of the six senior military colleges in the United States.”
—Wikipedia

A few months ago, I was really into Columbo, and one night, while watching the show on Pluto TV, I was hit over the head by some seriously dreadful deja vu.

A cannon had backfired at a military academy ceremony, killing its headmaster, foul play was suspected, so up drives Columbo in his busted-up 1959 Peugeot convertible, shaking and backfiring and billowing smoke like crazy. He parks, gets out, bumbles through an open portcullis into the courtyard of a massive three-story barracks, floor a checkerboard pattern of red and white, walls smooth and white and taller than the eye can see. It’s all very orderly and intimidating and familiar somehow. And I’m sitting on my couch, overcome by this dreadful sense of profound deja vu, as if I had stood there before, right in the middle of that checkerboard courtyard, but I couldn’t place the when, where, or even the why. So up Columbo walks in his wrinkly old trench coat with that signature drunken-penguin gait of his, and there are dozens of young military cadets performing drills in the courtyard, and their drill instructor, a Colonel Lyle C. Rumford, played by Patrick McGoohan, who plays a villain in like every other episode of Columbo for some reason, instructs his cadets to continue their drills before turning to talk to the aloof hobo detective, at which point Columbo asks a few seemingly innocuous questions before going wait wait just one more thing, then asking a few more questions, and then wait wait just one more thing, and yet more questions before the Colonel reveals, in an overly calm and conspicuous way, that the now-deceased headmaster was planning to allow girls to join the academy, which of course makes Columbo instantly suspect the Colonel as the murderer, and so now Columbo is determined to figure out how the Colonel did it, how the Colonel murdered the headmaster while making it look like an accident done by one of the young cadets. And throughout this scene, shots of the barracks from every angle are shown, the three stories of white-cement archways, the rounded castle-like stairwells at each corner of the rectangular courtyard, the countless dark blue doors lining each identical floor, and of course the cadets with buzz cuts and fatigues all looking both stoic and miserable at the same time somehow. And all this is just making my deja vu more dreadful and profound. So I’m sitting there thinking to myself, I have been here before, I know I have, but where, where is this place, and it’s bothering me a little bit, so I whip out my phone and search up the episode, and that’s when it all comes flooding back.

This is the place my dad sent me for summer camp when I was like twelve. This is the Military College of South Carolina. The Citadel. How could I have forgotten?

“The Citadel was initially established as two schools to educate young men from around the state, while simultaneously protecting the South Carolina State Arsenals in both Columbia and Charleston.”
—Wikipedia

Back then, I played a lot of video games and shopped at Hot Topic and listened to 80s music on repeat. My youth was typified by a yin-yang dichotomy of apathy toward anything that didn’t interest me and hyperfocus toward things that did interest me, those things being Zelda, The Cure, Dragon Ball Z, and Gundam Wing, but never school. I was the type of kid who would literally use dog-ate-my-paper type excuses when teachers asked why I didn’t complete my homework. So my grades were terrible and I was put in special-ed classes. I always had the feeling that people thought I was dumb and detached, but looking back, I now realize this is only half true, although for people looking at me from the outside, this was not obvious, understandably so.

My parents divorced when I was like ten, so I would live with my mom one month and my dad the next, as outlined in their court-ordered custody agreement. My dad was a hardass, while my mom basically let me do whatever I wanted. This parental yin-yang colored my entire childhood. My mom’s favorite phrase was “yes, honey.” She indulged my every whim, either because she loved me and wanted to make me happy regardless of the consequences, or because she didn’t want to deal with my tantrums, or maybe a mixture of both. My dad was the opposite. He was all about hard work and personal responsibility, and he didn’t take no shit, and he was the only person who would tell me no. He was also very stubborn, so he could wait out my tantrums no matter how long it took. My dad had an old-school conservative upbringing typified by rulers and staring at walls, and he incorporated a watered-down version of this into his parenting technique. He was never abusive, but I grew to be afraid of my father, and this fear brought about a certain level of obedience. But after my parents got divorced, it was like I lived in two different galaxies, one with a warm bright star and another with a cold dark star. When I was living with my mom, I did whatever I wanted. I would come home from school, tell her I didn’t have any homework, drink soda and play video games all day, spend all night on my Dell PC just chatting away with strangers in the Yahoo! chatrooms while Adult Swim played repeats of Home Movies and Cowboy Bebop in my periphery. There, I lived a life of no responsibility and maximum comfort, courtesy of my new wealthy stepdad. I remember my bedroom only vaguely. It was on the second floor of a mansion, and you had to walk across something like an indoor bridge to get to it, so my mom never bothered to check on me at night as long as I kept quiet. My room was a decent size but felt small because of the king-size bed pushed against the middle wall. My computer desk was on the right side of the bed, with a bookshelf and stereo to the left, and there was a low-standing dresser with my television and Nintendo 64 to the right. A big dresser containing all my band shirts and tripp pants was situated on the left side of the bed, with only a small walking space between the bed and the dresser. I had stuck band stickers all over the dresser itself, which was something my stepdad hated because the dresser was an expensive antique, much like everything else in the lavish house, none of which I appreciated, because back then I never once thought about how privileged I was, because frankly I was a spoiled fucking brat, and my dad knew this better than anyone, because when I came to live with him, I had always gained like ten pounds since the last time he had seen me, and I was tired all the time, and so of course he blamed all my apathy and weight gain and bad grades and inability to focus on my mom.

Living with my dad was like orbiting a whole other star. From the moment I walked through the front door of his square brick house, party time was over. It was all about chores and schoolwork and playing on local church sports teams of which he was the coach. To this day, my old room is decorated with photos of the teams I played on, everyone looking bright and happy except me, wearing a huge scowl in every picture. At my dad’s, there was little time for doing the things I actually wanted to do. The Nintendo 64 was in the basement, and the basement was locked until I completed all my chores and schoolwork or whatever. When I came home from school, the first thing he would have me do was sit at the kitchen table and do my homework until it was perfect, often coming in and checking over my shoulder. But I would sit there in silent protest, in that uncomfortable metal chair, just using my pencil to poke little holes in the apples in the decorative bowl at the center of the table, pretending like I was stuck on a math problem or something. I was stubborn in a very dumb way, because I knew that if I completed my homework, then Dad would let me play video games, but I still didn’t complete my homework for some reason, so I never got to play video games. In this way, my dad’s parenting method didn’t really work to improve my grades, but it did work in preventing me from throwing tantrums like I would with my mom, because I was truly afraid of my dad, not because he was abusive or anything like that, but because he was firm and would take my stuff away and do all the other normal stuff normal parents would do when trying to raise their kids to be fine, upstanding citizens.

At some point, however, my dad got sick of it all, and realizing that my apathy was not fading and that I was not improving, he decided to send me to a summer camp for troubled youth, although he didn’t frame it that way at the time, positioning it as just a normal summer camp that normal kids went to, so it wasn’t until I walked through that open portcullis and onto that red and white checkerboard flooring that I realized that this was not a normal summer camp at all, this was actually a fucking military camp. I remember standing there, frozen, staring up at the castle-like compound, watching kids wearing buzz cuts and fatigues march in the courtyard, realizing that I was a long, long way from home, in a place that might as well have been hell, and that’s the first time I ever felt true dread.

“A lawsuit contends that The Citadel knew one of its counselors was abusing summer campers in the mid-1990s but didn’t fire him and did nothing to stop it, yet another in a string of sexual-abuse accusations that have been made against two men who worked at the military college’s summer camp.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

The next thing I remember is my dad was gone, and I was being shouted at by some older man in full uniform. He directed me to get into marching formation with the other kids, but I was frozen in terror. I remember I was wearing my Cure t-shirt and tripp pants, and I was sweating profusely in the harsh summer sun. So when I didn’t immediately comply, the man shouted something like, “C’MON PIGGY, WE DON’T HAVE ALL DAY,” which kicked my ass into gear, and I immediately fell in line. We marched out of the portcullis, through the sports field, and into another huge white castle-like building. I had no idea what was going on. Some of the other kids were in civilian clothing, some were in fatigues. The ones in civilian clothing were separated from the fatigues-wearing ones and ordered to march down a thin hallway, where we stood silently outside a blue door. Kids entered this door one by one. At first, I didn’t know what was happening, but after the first kid entered with shaggy hair and exited with a buzz cut, my eyes grew wide, and I knew. They were cutting my hair. Back then, I was serious about my hair. I liked it long and messy, like Robert Smith from The Cure. So as the line and average length of hair for the regiment grew shorter, the pit in my stomach grew larger. Until eventually, I entered the barber’s room and was pushed into the chair. The clippers went BRRRRRR and just like that my hair was gone. I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. This was one of many hammers used by The Citadel to pound individuality and ego out of children.

Later that day, they assigned us our quarters. Mine was on the second floor. There’s a scene in that Columbo episode where the titular detective enters one of these rooms to question the cadet accused of accidentally backfiring the cannon. My room looked just like the one shown in the episode, indicating that The Citadel has not changed in a long long time. The walls of the room were white brick. There was a single barred window. It felt like one of those insane asylum rooms. There was a sink in the corner, a single dresser with two cabinets pushed against the right wall, and a bunk bed against the left wall. The mattresses were thin, and the blankets ratty and torn. I was paired with another kid. I forget his name, but he was strange and kind of horrific. I remember he was tall and lanky and acne-ridden and would make a lot of weird sex jokes. I slept on the bottom bunk in a perpetual state of psychic terror. On the first night, in the middle of the night, instead of going out to the bathroom, my bunkmate took a shit in his underwear, wrapped it up in a ball, and then put it in my cabinet dresser for me to find the next morning, like some sort of weird animalistic dominance thing. I was too afraid to report him, thinking he would hurt me or something, so I just cleaned it up and didn’t say a word about it. I remember, night after night, after they would ring the bell and scream “LIGHTS OUT” at 8 p.m., I would just lie in my bunk, frozen, staring up at the wire mesh above me, fantasizing about ways to escape. Occasionally, a camp counselor would creak open the door and peek their head in, checking on us. One time, at night, I remember a counselor entered my quarters, stopped in the middle of the room, and stared at the bunks for what felt like an hour. I was wide awake but holding my breath and keeping my eyes shut real tight, frozen with fear, thinking the guy was going to get me out of bed and beat the shit out of me or something. Nothing happened, but I learned how to play dead that night.

“The suit was filed in federal court in Charleston earlier this week by a now-25-year-old alleged victim who claimed to have been abused on 21 different occasions by Michael Arpaio. The Citadel ultimately closed its summer camp in 2005 after reaching a $3.8 million settlement with five campers who said the former Marine captain had abused them between 1995 and 2001.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

Every day was the same. I would wake up at five in the morning to the sound of a loud whistle, put on my fatigues, hustle down the stairwell, and line up with the rest of the kids. Then we’d march to the mess hall, where they’d serve us the worst-tasting breakfast you have ever tasted, so bad that I hardly ever ate anything, only drinking some milk most mornings. Then we’d march out to the field, do push-ups and jumping jacks and sit-ups and burpees and laps for a few hours. Then we’d play soccer for some reason. Then we’d march back to the mess hall and eat the worst-tasting lunch ever. Then there’d be a thirty-minute block of free time, where we could socialize or whatever, but being so out of shape and practically starving myself, I was pretty much half-dead by this point, so I would just go back to my quarters and sprawl out on the bottom bunk and pretend I was in another place, pretend I was in the world of Hyrule, and this was a brief respite, my little form of escape.

They wouldn’t let us bring anything personal into the camp with us, but we were allowed paper and pencil for writing letters to family, and I remember one time, during the break period, I wrote a short letter to my grandma, Susu, because her address was the only one I could remember, and the letter went something like this: WHAT DID I FUCKING DO TO DESERVE THIS? I AM GOING TO DIE IN HERE. I WANT TO GO HOME. PLEASE. I’M SORRY FOR WHATEVER I DID. TELL MOM TO GET ME OUT EARLY. PLEASE. I CANNOT DO A WHOLE MONTH IN HERE. SAVE ME. PLEASE. This text is almost verbatim because Susu kept the note and still has it to this day, along with the newspaper clipping she found years later outlining why The Citadel summer camp was closed down permanently.

“Arpaio pleaded guilty to multiple charges in 2003 following a military court-martial and served 15 months at the Charleston Naval Brig. According to the lawsuit, Arpaio was indicted in 2009 on federal charges including conspiracy to commit murder and disposing of a cadaver and is in federal prison.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

When it was all over, I had lost about thirty pounds and was mute for an entire week. I remember, when I got home, the first thing I did was fold all my clothes and arrange them neatly in my dresser, then I put all my Gundam models and Nintendo 64 games and Dragon Ball Z VHSs in the closet, hiding all the things I loved, then I straightened out my sports team photos on the dresser, organizing everything real nice, because I thought that if I hadn’t done all this, I’d be sent back there, back to hell. And then I sprawled out on my king-size bed, imagined myself in Hyrule, and passed out.

But it must have been midday or something, because I remember my dad woke me up. He was looking around my room with this astonished look on his face, and he said something like, “Wow, you really cleaned up, I guess your time at The Citadel taught you a thing or two, huh?”

And I remember rolling over in bed, looking up at him with this blank expression on my face, and nodding, then I went back to sleep, dreaming of Hyrule.

Then, the following year, around my thirteenth birthday, when the judge gave me the option to pick which parent I wanted to live with, I picked Mom, and then, just like that, I was back in Hyrule, for real this time.

“All plots tend to move Deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer Death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.” 
―Don DeLillo, White Noise 

Death, perhaps life’s greatest mystery. What is Death? Where does it come from? Why is it a thing? Neither the what, nor the where, nor the when, nor even the why is known to mortals. Why, why do we die? What's the purpose? Where does consciousness go? Are our souls recycled, inserted into new life upon Death? Do we end up in some sort of Mysterious Otherside? Heaven? Hell? Valhalla? The great recycling plant in the sky? Perhaps we are consumed by Earth herself, fated to be nothing more than nutrients for the soil? Worm food, is that it? No one knows the answer. There are all sorts of theories, some scientific, some mystical, but no one really knows, and those who claim otherwise are almost certainly deluding themselves.

The most I know about Death is from the beginning of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, when Alucard, in all his bishonen glory, equipped with his most powerful artifacts, comes sprinting into Dracula’s castle, super cool afterimages trailing in his wake, only to be met by the floating specter of Death himself in all his cloaked skeletal grimness. “I’ve come to put an end to this,” Alucard says, to which Death responds, “You shall regret those words,” before stripping Alucard of all his artifacts, laughing a chilling laugh, and vanishing with an ominous warning, “We shall meet again.” This leaves Alucard effectively newborn and defenseless at the very start of the game until he powers himself up by collecting his stolen artifacts strewn all over the castle, around which point he crosses paths with Death again and stomps him good. But Death is never truly defeated. He returns again and again with each subsequent game, all while some valiant new hero goes dashing Deathward, which I'm sure symbolizes some profound thing that I haven't quite figured out just yet, but maybe I will stumble across it by writing this journal entry? Don't count on it.

This journal entry is not actually about Castlevania, however, it’s mostly about Death, and also White Noise by Don DeLillo, which is a novel that has been marinating in my mind ever since I finished reading it about two weeks ago. The book was first published in 1985 and is considered one of DeLillo’s best works, although this is the first novel I've read by him, so I don't really have much to compare it to. I got interested in DeLillo after seeing his name come up time and time again in reference to authors similar to David Foster Wallace, and I figured the best place to start was with DeLillo’s most popular novel, White Noise. I quickly found that the only similarity between DeLillo and Wallace is the fact that they write about similar subject matter, that being the subtle perils of modern life, ruminations on mindless entertainment and vacuous celebrity worship and the numerous distractions we all willingly engage in, both authors trying to tease out why it all feels so empty and gross. DeLillo, however, is a much more mature writer than Wallace. Reading DeLillo, one gets the impression that he has nothing to prove to anyone, even himself. He uses short, simple sentences. He doesn’t mess around with complex runaway paragraphs. He doesn’t overuse semicolons or em dashes or footnotes or whatever to make some kind of literary point. He has things to say and thoughts to express, and he does these things in a very to-the-point manner. There’s no fluff, no pointless wordplay. Every sentence, every word, every punctuation mark feels like it has a purpose. You never get the impression that DeLillo is doing the whole literary “Look Dad, no hands” thing, and because of this, his writing is very easy to digest, and not in a vacuous, unmemorable way either, because despite all his stylistic simplicity, the writing is still somehow multi-layered, full of double meanings and triple meanings that, considering how simple some of the stuff he writes is, kind of makes your head spin in a sort of “How the fuck is he doing this?” sort of way. Basically, if you can’t tell, I really like Don DeLillo’s style. I think he’s a brilliant writer.

And White Noise is a brilliant book that I would recommend to anyone. It’s a fast read, like 300 pages, and I read it in a few days on account of how engrossing it is. The dialogue in particular is fascinating in this darkly humorous way, and it’s written in the first-person perspective, which is my favorite perspective, so make of that what you will. The story is told from the point of view of a university professor specializing in “Hitler Studies” who is so afraid of Death that he comes up with all sorts of absurd plots and intellectualizations to hand-wave it away, all while being constantly thrown into situations that exacerbate his fear of Death, which results in a constant stream of humorous situations, like in the second act when this toxic-chemical tanker crashes, resulting in a billowing cloud of poisonous gas ominously hanging over the main character’s town, which, if I were to analyze, is a potent metaphor for Death’s looming influence over our lives. The novel also covers themes like rampant consumerism, family dynamics, and academic pretentiousness, all filtered through a sort of dark-comedy lens, which has resulted in many critics hailing the book as a quote-unquote “postmodern masterpiece of our age,” and I use the tag “postmodern” here kind of flippantly because I don't actually know what the fuck that means, and I don’t think Don DeLillo knows what it means either because he basically said something like “Postmodern? I don’t know what the fuck that means” in an old interview from 2010, which he later clarified by saying, “I think of postmodernism in terms of literature as part of a self-referring kind of art, people attach a label to writers or filmmakers or painters to be able some years in the future to declare that the movement is dead,” which illustrates that maybe Don DeLillo himself also has a preoccupation with Death, so perhaps there’s something autobiographical going on here too.

So, basically, White Noise is about Death, among other things. I had originally planned to write about the novel immediately after finishing it, but I kept putting it off because, well, surprise surprise, I guess I don't really like thinking about Death too much. In fact, I rarely ever think about Death, but the same cannot be said for the two main characters of White Noise, Jack and Babette, who are deathly afraid of Death and literally think about it all the time, and they have pretty logically convincing fears, too, considering Death is literally all around us just waiting to swoop in and take us away to the Mysterious Otherside, like you could step on a pebble the wrong way causing you to fall and bonk your head and that’s it you’re dead, or you could be watching your favorite television program while eating grapes and then all of a sudden a grape goes down the wrong tube and cough cough you’re dead, or you could be sleeping and your heater starts malfunctioning thus putting out some sort of invisible odorless gas and you never wake up because you're fucking dead, or you could be on a walk on a nature trail or something and you somehow touch some innocuous-looking plant and you have some ultra-rare allergic reaction to it and suddenly you’re throwing up and then bye bye dead, or you could be walking downtown and some random thing just falls on your head and bam dead, or a plane could just crash into your home for example, or you could be crossing the road and some drunk dude just doesn’t stop at the light and all of a sudden your guts are all over the windshield and just like that you’re dead, or your body could just say NO and trigger a brain aneurysm and that's it see ya you’re dead, and so on. Neither the what, nor where, nor when, nor even the why is known to mortals. No one knows. It's almost so absurd that it's not even worth worrying about, at least that's how I view it, like if I could die at any time, in ways often outside of my own conscious control, why expend time and effort worrying about it? Why get worked up? Why ruin my day? And that’s why I don’t fear Death, because like what’s the point?

But after reading White Noise and upon reflection, it turns out I was wrong, I do fear Death. Maybe I don't consciously fear Death, but I certainly subconsciously fear Death, at least on some sort of deep biological level. After reading White Noise, I started analyzing my habits, my daily routines, things like that, and came to the realization that maybe everything I do is actually motivated by some latent fear of Death, like Death is this terrifying primordial silence just lingering there in the background of things, always influencing literally everything I do, and I hadn’t even realized it until just recently. I started thinking that maybe even the stuff I do that seems so far removed from fear-of-Death, like reading and writing and playing video games, is actually just a subconscious distraction from the ever-present biological fear of Death. Maybe all the bullshit I do to keep myself occupied actually functions as a sort of white noise to drown out the silence of Death. This idea was new to me, and it spooked me a little bit. I didn’t understand it, but I wanted to. So I went on a quest to understand it, which involved the writing of this journal entry, and this quest led me to the soft conclusion that it’s likely very possible that everything we do is actually some sort of Death Avoidance Behavior.

There's obvious Death Avoidance Behaviors, like eating so that we don't starve, drinking so that we don't dehydrate, finding shelter so that we don't die of exposure, avoiding vicious animals so that we don't get mauled, forming communities so that we can help each other survive, establishing rules so that we don't take advantage of or kill each other, and so on, which, in the modern world, manifests as things like working shitty jobs so that we can buy food and afford a place to live, buying cars so that we can travel to all the places that supply various life-sustaining things, wearing clothes or whatever, obeying laws so that we don't end up getting murdered in jail or whatever, brushing our teeth and taking showers and whatnot, getting married and having children so that we can form our own close-knit communities so that we can have life-sustaining support systems, and so on, which is all very obvious stuff. But then there’s the less obvious stuff, like watching television or reading a book or playing a video game or writing a journal entry or painting a sunset or performing in a play or dancing on Saturdays or playing tennis or whatever, all so that we don’t quite literally bore ourselves to Death because, I suspect, if we just sit on our asses all day doing literally nothing, we’ll start thinking a little too much about our own mortality and thus the fear of Death will start creeping in. Maybe boredom is actually a latent fear of Death, our bodies telling us that we better getting moving because one day we will just up and die. Death is always there, in the background. So we distract ourselves. We turn on the white noise. Otherwise, we become depressed, despondent, miserable, all those dark adjectives that only serve to bring us Deathward, be it through suicide or self-neglect or whatever. What I’m trying to say is, it seems like everything we do is some sort of Death Avoidance Behavior, even the stupid behavior that seems counterintuitive to staying alive, like overeating food packed with high-fructose corn syrup or binge drinking alcohol or vegging out in front of a screen for hours or injecting heroin into our veins, these things serve as sort of Misguided Death Avoidance Behaviors, because even though this behavior is harmful, potentially bringing us closer to Death, they make us feel good in the short term by doing a really good job of drowning out the silence of Death, even if only temporarily, which becomes extra complicated when addiction comes into play, creating a sort of paradoxical Death trap wherein by trying to avoid the fear of Death you are actually hastening your own Death, or something like that, which only serves to show how cruel biology can be sometimes, tricking us Deathward. And we do these good and bad things, obviously, because Death just keeps showing up in each subsequent Castlevania game, he just doesn't go away, he is an ever-present force. Death is a hard-coded fact of life, and coming face to face with this is just downright unpleasant.

At first, this all struck me as very grim and depressing, but after finishing White Noise and ruminating on it a little bit, my perspective changed.

In White Noise, there’s this drug that basically eliminates the fear of Death. The main character becomes obsessed with this drug and comes up with all sorts of plots and schemes to get their hands on it, eventually leading them to the creator of the no-fear-of-Death drug. The creator of the drug turns out to be a man living in a cheap motel room. And from the very first scene with this man, we can tell that he’s obviously addicted to the no-fear-of-Death drug. He has eliminated the fear, drowned out the silence, conquered Death. He’s sitting in an uncomfortable metal chair in the middle of the room, no lights on, surrounded by broken bottles and candy bar wrappers and flies and stuff, just staring up into this little television set mounted in the corner of the room, mumbling to himself. He has clearly not bathed or groomed himself in months. He’s just wasting away, dying pretty much. He is no longer living life. He is just there, existing, doing pretty much nothing. The text makes it clear that this man is a sad, pathetic excuse for a man, a hollow shell, a ghost almost, someone who is both alive and dead simultaneously.

But he doesn’t care, why would he? He has no fear of Death.

To hear my dad tell it, I learned to read by playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, or so the legend goes.

I must have been like seven or eight or something. I have a hard time remembering that far back, but things come to me in flashes, like a movie montage of disparate events that all occurred somewhere between 1997 and 2000, playing to the background music of whatever my dad was listening to on 99X in his jellybean-shaped Ford Taurus. Stone Temple Pilots, Matchbox Twenty, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” Spin Doctors, “Even Flow,” that sort of stuff. Climbing on top of the slides at the playground at the park where my sister played softball while a wicked sunset was going on so everything was dragonfruit pink and cobalt blue and on fire. Time felt different, longer, more mysterious, mystical almost. My parents were still married. “Name” by The Goo Goo Dolls played on MTV a lot. Happy Meals cost like $1.50 and came with high-quality Power Rangers action figures with accessories. The food tasted better. I had a frankly embarrassing haircut that involved a bowl and kid-safe scissors. I would play Power Rangers out in the field by the haunted house with the other suburb kids. Space Jam featuring basketball legend Michael Jordan was heavily advertised, I remember. Special Ed classes and frequent parent-teacher conferences. Pokemon cards and fucking Crazy Bones, if you remember those. After-school programs. That one time I drank a whole gel pen and the teacher had to call poison control. I remember seeing a movie in the theater was like a bona fide special event and the next two months were colored by that movie as if everything in your life took on some aspect of that movie. PE teachers played “Cotton Eye Joe” at max volume over the gym loudspeaker while kids pelted each other with hard foam balls. Blue’s Clues in the mornings, Dexter’s Lab and Johnny Bravo and Powerpuff Girls in the evenings. I’d see scary witch faces in the darkness behind my eyelids at night, so I’d climb out of bed and go sleep in my sister’s room, which she hated. I would get like two dollars a week for allowance and thought that was a lot of money and spent that money at the comic book store in the strip mall that I could walk to through the backwoods area of my neighborhood, and my parents were totally fine with that for some reason. I couldn't read the comic books but loved the artwork. My dad made me play every little league sport imaginable even though I had no interest or aptitude in sports, and one time in the outfield when I was playing baseball a pop fly literally crash-landed into my skull and knocked me out for a good whole minute, and when I came to and my dad asked me, “Son, what were you doing out there, didn’t you see the ball, we were all shouting at you,” I simply responded, “I’m sorry, Dad, I was thinking about Zelda.”

I remember the first time I ever laid eyes on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was around this same epoch of my youth, at the Media Play, which was a few miles from my home, located in this giant strip mall near the movie theater. Media Play was this big white stucco warehouse-type building, a little smaller than a Walmart almost, with the words MEDIA PLAY in massive red LED channel letters high above the pneumatic double doors, and between MEDIA and PLAY was an image of the store mascot, a face made from an open green book with eyeballs made from a pair of red musical eighth notes, which looked very cubist and robotic. I must have been seven or eight or nine or something. My dad had taken my sister and me to Media Play to buy a new video game console because we had been bugging him for months to get one. The inside of the store was massive, with rows of ground-level shelf wiring for all sorts of entertainment, electronic or otherwise, like CDs and cassettes and VHS tapes and video games and books and even manga, and I remember the ceiling of the store was like this exposed web of steel beams on which hung fluorescent tubes that bathed the whole store in preternatural white light. My dad gave my sister and me the choice between the Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. My sister was dead set on a PlayStation because this boy she hung out with in the neighborhood had Need for Speed II, and they would play it all the time, and she wanted to like fit in or whatever. But I wasn’t sure which console I wanted. The console we had back at home was the Sega Genesis, and I mostly played Sonic the Hedgehog and the 6-Pak on it, and I wanted something like that, and for some reason I had it in my head that the PlayStation was more akin to the Sega Genesis than the Nintendo 64 was, so I was leaning PlayStation. But at some point in the decision-making process, I had wandered off and ended up in the Nintendo section, which actually had its own section for some reason, and in that section, I came across a display cabinet that changed my life.

The cabinet itself is hazy in my memory, but I remember it was dark, woody almost, with curly gold lettering running along the thick wooden side bezels, and it had a large CRT monitor inlaid in the upper portion, and above that, situated on the very top of the cabinet itself, was this golden triangle thing, and the cabinet was double my prepubescent height, so I had to tilt my head pretty much skyward to see the thing in full. There was a single three-pronged controller poking out of the wood, about chin level with my adolescent self. The monitor was playing a scene of a green-clothed man wearing what looked like an elf’s hat, riding a horse through a twilit field while a huge full moon hung in the background. Back then, I wasn’t very attuned to music, but even then I could tell that the cabinet was emitting some of the most beautiful noises I would ever hear in my life. The soothing sounds of synthesized harp arpeggios over a flute melody that sounded like some sort of majestic owl holding its hoots for as long as possible over the ambient noise of hooves clomping and water flowing in a tranquil stream, all calling out to me. I stood there for a few minutes, totally entranced, just watching the green man ride his horse through that twilit field, until eventually I lifted my arms skyward, gripped the controller with both hands, lifted my head up over the thing so I could see the buttons, and pressed down on the big red start button, at which point a dark harmonious jingle sounded and the monitor switched to demo scenes of the same green-clothed man fighting lizard warriors and ghosts and giant super bosses, and then it showed the kid version of that man doing very similar things, and I was totally enthralled by this and at that moment knew I absolutely needed whatever this game was in my life, so when the Nintendo 64 logo popped up on the screen alongside the name of the game, which I couldn’t actually read because I had been diagnosed with dyslexia and had problems with phonetics and couldn’t actually read, but I knew my console-branding logos very well because I loved video games, I quickly released the controller and ran off through the store to find my dad.

When I found my dad, I grabbed him by the hand and dragged him to the magical cabinet I had found and then said, “I want this, I want this, I want this,” over and over until my dad, who was actually a big Mario fan, having played the original games in college obsessively, nodded and turned to my sister, who was arms-crossed and full of blossoming teenage angst, and then he, my dad, asked her what she thought, and at first she disagreed until both my dad and I wore her down, at which point she sort of threw up her hands and said something like, “Whatever,” so my dad flagged down an employee, asked the employee to “get one of those Nintendos and a copy of whatever that game is in the wooden display kiosk my son keeps going on about and a copy of Mario 64 and that Mario racing one too,” the latter of which my sister had picked out, and about an hour later we were back home in front of the old boob tube hooking up the old yellow, white, and red.

Days turned into weeks, and I was hooked on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I played it obsessively whenever my dad wasn’t playing Mario 64 and my sister wasn’t playing Mario Kart. The game blew my little adolescent mind. I got lost in the world of Hyrule, which to little seven-or-eight-or-nine-year-old me felt like a real place with its realistic graphics and its dynamic world and its day-night system and its massive open areas to explore. I skipped all the text because I couldn’t read, but through sheer perseverance and some luck, I managed to complete the Deku Tree and Dodongo Cavern dungeons. I related to the main character, Link, who was like seven or eight or nine himself, and whenever I couldn’t play the game, I was often pretending to be Link, swinging around whatever long sword-like objects I could find, imitating Link’s horizontal sword slashes and vertical sword slashes and that iconic hi-yah jump-slash attack, making the noises and everything. But I couldn’t read, so at a certain point, I was stuck. Weeks turned into months and now my daily play sessions of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time consisted of wandering around Hyrule Field, defeating skeletons and blowing up stuff, doing the same thing over and over, which kept me entertained for a little while, but eventually I grew confused because I couldn’t figure out where to go next because I couldn’t read, and eventually that confusion turned into boredom, and eventually I slowly lost interest in the game.

Back then, my parents would work with me daily, trying to help me learn how to read better. I could read a little bit, but certainly not at the reading level of the average kid my age. Back then, reading simply didn’t interest me, and if something didn’t interest me, I didn’t care, but if something did interest me, I would hyper-fixate on that thing until I wore it out. I was in special education classes for this very reason. Whenever my parents would sit down to teach me how to read better by practicing phonetics and reading me simple books and sounding things out, I would pretty much immediately zone out, and then my attention would wander to something that did interest me, like my action figures or my Legos or my video games, at which point my parents would give up for the day, letting me do my own thing because I was quite emotional as a child and would literally scream my head off if I was forced to do something I didn’t want to do. Of course, my parents would try to help me with reading the next day, but the same thing would happen, so they’d give up and try again the next day, and so on.

To hear my dad tell it, at a certain point, after so many failed attempts at teaching me how to read better, he became discouraged and was starting to believe that I had a serious incurable mental problem and like “why even try with the boy?”

That was until one day when I was in the living room sitting on the carpet in front of the old boob tube, wide-eyed and transfixed by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, when my dad sat down next to me on the carpet and asked what I was doing. I said I was playing Zelda. He said something like, “I can see that, but what are you doing, you know, in the game?” And I said something like, “I’m fighting skeletons.” And he said, noticing that I would fight skeletons a lot when I played Zelda, “Is that all you do in this game, fight skeletons?” And I said, “No, there’s lots of stuff to do, I just don’t know how.” And he said, “What do you mean, you don’t know how?” And that’s when I told him I was stuck. I told him I beat the big spider in the tree and the giant lizard in the cave and now I was stuck. I told him I didn’t know what to do. He just nodded and watched as I vanquished skeletons until the sun rose over Hyrule and there were no more skeletons to vanquish, at which point I was just wandering Link all over Hyrule Field, not really doing anything, until Navi, Link’s little fairy guide, said HEY LISTEN and pulled me into a dialogue with her. Naturally, I skipped all of Navi’s text and then kept wandering around until a few seconds later when Navi said HEY LISTEN again and pulled me into yet another dialogue, which I also skipped, but this time my dad, who was curiously watching me at this point, said, “What did she say? Maybe she's telling you what to do.”

So I turned to my dad and said rather pathetically, “I don’t know, Dad, I can’t read it.”

He smiled softly and said, “But you want to beat the game, right?”

So I said, “Yeah, I do, I want to get all the stuff and beat the game.”

And just then, Navi said HEY LISTEN again, and the text box was back up on the screen. I went to skip the text with the A button, but my dad placed his hand on mine, which froze me for a second, and then he turned to the screen and, presumably reading the text in his head, said, “Yep, she’s telling you what you need to do.”

So I started getting excited. “Tell me, tell me. What does she say?”

But my dad only shook his head, then he said, with that soft smile on his face, “Try sounding it out.”

And about a month later, I beat The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know who’s unglued?”

“Who?”

I point at the screen. “This asshole.”

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

斬鉄剣

“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?

You ever have one of those days wherein you roll out of bed at three in the morning, bladder levels so in the red that you nearly piss yourself, so you stumble to the bathroom, nod off on the toilet, hygiene bar going down because you get some pee on your hands or whatever, then you compulsively wash your hands and brush your teeth as if some extradimensional being is just clicking away, commanding you to do things for some reason, then you realize your hunger bar is like non-existent, so you make yourself some breakfast in the kitchen, but for some reason the food has no taste at all, yet you force yourself to eat regardless, knowing that otherwise your hunger bar will just keep dropping, and of course you don’t want to starve on your first day at your new job as a Typesetter, which starts in ten minutes, so you speed-walk mindlessly to the bedroom to get dressed and that’s when you hear what sounds like someone just mercilessly holding down a car horn, so you look out the window and see Carpool John in his old busted-up 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air doing exactly that, mercilessly holding down the car horn, so you spin in place super fast like a tornado, which somehow sucks in all your work-appropriate clothes and magically applies them to your body, then you bolt out of the house, force the rusted Chevy door open, disappear into the passenger seat somehow, and say some dumb clichéd shit like, “another day, another dollar,” before holding on for dear life because Carpool John floors it, then the car vanishes down the road as if you just drove through some dark portal straight into Dante’s vision of Hell?

If any of this feels familiar, you might have more in common with a Sim from The Sims than you realize, because this is reality for little Forrest Unknown, or “FU” for short, who does this same routine on every day ending in the letter Y, which is each day of the week, or until I turn the game off.

I’m not sure what FU actually does at work, to be honest, because after the car disappears, time speeds up, hours pass, and suddenly he’s right back where he started, in front of his two-bedroom home, stepping out of that old busted-up 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air, extra $200 to his name, hunger bar totally drained, fun levels absolutely abysmal, so he goes inside, takes a piss, makes some lunch, plays video games on his PC for a few hours until his social bar is in the red, at which point he calls up Mortimer, whom he hates, invites him over, and Mortimer brings a friend, a little girl named Cassandra, and they overstay their welcome, sticking around all night, becoming so tired that they fall asleep in the living room, and Cassandra urinates all over the floor for some reason, so FU has to clean up the soppy piss puddle with a mop, which puts him in a bad mood and drains his energy bar, at which point he goes to bed, sleeps for like five hours before rolling out of bed at three in the morning, bladder levels so in the red that he makes a beeline to the bathroom where he nearly falls asleep on the toilet, thus getting pee on his hands, which makes his hygiene levels go down, so he washes his hands and brushes his teeth, at which point he realizes his hunger bar is like non-existent, so he makes himself some breakfast, scarfs it down even though it tastes like nothing, then he realizes he has to get to work in like ten minutes, so he speed-walks mindlessly to the bedroom, at which point he hears what sounds like someone just mercilessly holding down a car horn, so he looks outside and sees Carpool John in his old busted-up 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air doing exactly that, mercilessly holding down the car horn, so FU spins in place super fast like a tornado, which somehow sucks in all his work-appropriate clothes and magically applies them to his body, then he bolts out of the house, forces the rusted Chevy door open, disappears into the passenger seat somehow, and probably says some dumb clichéd shit like, “another day, another dollar,” before holding on for dear life because Carpool John floors it, vanishing down the road as if he just drove through some dark portal straight into Dante’s vision of Hell, and then time speeds up and FU is right back where he started, in front of his home, stepping out of that old busted-up 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air, extra $200 to his name, hunger bar totally drained, fun levels absolutely abysmal, so he goes inside, makes some lunch, plays some video games, and I think you get the point. It’s a never-ending struggle for little FU, like he’s stuck in some sort of heinous time loop, or a little something I like to call the fucking rat race that is modern first-world life.

It’s depressing, watching FU repeat his boring little mundane routine all in service to the almighty Simoleon dollar, just so he can keep himself alive and buy more electronics and stuff, which he then uses to distract himself from the existentially dreadful fact that, despite how much money he makes, he will always have to repeat boring little mundane routines in order to continue existing, as if the routines themselves only serve to facilitate distracting himself from those very same routines.

I will say, however, that little FU is moving up in the world. After just one week as a Typesetter, he got a promotion, he’s now a “Game Reviewer,” which the blue in-game text box describes as, quote, “the lowliest writing job you can get,” unquote, which I can’t help but agree with, having done the whole game reviewer thing myself for a time, the only job requirements being having passed third-grade English, and being of the smug belief that your subjective tastes are actually objective facts, and also being able to come up with some sort of cute point system wherein stars are replaced with, like, video game controllers or cans of Monster Energy Drink or sticks of extra-strength deodorant, all things hardcore gamers desperately need, which is to say that I hope little FU sees the error of his ways and grows out of this new job quickly, even though I do like to imagine that, on FU’s first day as a Game Reviewer, he maybe wrote a very meta review of the actual game that he himself exists in, which I like to imagine includes the following paragraph,

“Despite The Sims’ retro charm, zany humour, and addicting gameplay loops, there are no words to describe just how depressing it is to watch your little Sim guy repeat the same boring mundane everyday tasks that you yourself were doing right before you sat down at your PC to escape the very same boring mundane everyday tasks you were so desperate to avoid in the first place. Whether intentional on behalf of Maxis or not, The Sims remains one of the greatest Misery Simulators on the gaming market today. 10 out of 10 Lexapros.”

I’m not trying to be funny here. Well, maybe I am, a little bit. But I’m mostly trying to be serious. Because as I played The Sims, watching little Forrest Unknown going about his daily tasks, which were eerily similar to my own, I was overcome by something I can only describe as the nihilistic heebie-jeebies. I was starting to see myself acutely within FU. I was starting to think that my life was not dissimilar to a video game in which some disembodied megalomaniac is just clicking around commanding me to do things. I was starting to question the whole meaning of existence and all that stuff. And before you know it, I was fucking miserable. And I figured, you know what, I bet little Forrest Unknown is miserable too.

So I decided to put him out of his misery. I decided to kill him. I decided this would be symbolic, somehow.

What I did was, I directed little FU to go into the kitchen, then I went into build mode and removed all the doors so he couldn’t escape, then I placed a bunch of toasters and microwaves and stuff in there, then I removed the smoke detector so the fire department wouldn’t catch wind of what I was doing, and the whole time I was doing this there was some upbeat pop music playing from the stereo in the living room, the singer was babbling incoherently in Simlish, and this felt dichotomously significant for some reason, then, knowing that FU was a terrible cook, I commanded him to make lunch, hoping he would accidentally start a fire, so he goes over to the stove and starts making lunch, which, to my surprise, he prepares successfully without managing to start a fire, so I command him to place the food on the floor and try again, so he starts making lunch again, but he prepares it successfully again, so I command him to place the food on the floor again and make lunch again, but he prepares it successfully a third time, so I have him do it like ten more times, each time successful, but now there are like flies and stuff all over the kitchen, and he starts babbling incoherently about the mess, but I just keep going, I keep commanding him to make lunch, which eventually turns into dinner, which eventually turns into breakfast, on account of all the time that has passed, at which point the whole kitchen is like a fly breeding ground, the buzz cacophonous, and FU’s energy bar has become so depleted that he passes out on the floor with his head in a plate of moldy fly-covered food, so I wait for him to wake up, at which point I command him to prepare food again, but he’s successful once more, so I start to suspect that, throughout this whole food-preparing fiasco, he has become so proficient at cooking that he cannot actually start a fire on accident anymore, then he pees himself, because he can’t reach a toilet, so now he’s standing on rotten food and piss, and at this point I’m starting to feel really bad for the guy, so I think to myself, there has to be a better way, so I pause the game and cycle through some of the entertainment items that can be purchased, and that’s when I find the fireworks set, which I quickly discover can be placed indoors, so I buy one of those and command FU to use it, at which point he walks up to it, fiddles with it, and it starts sparking like crazy, so he steps back, near the washing machine, and watches the firework set, which, after a few seconds, launches its first round of fireworks right into the kitchen ceiling, producing a beautiful flash of color, which of course catches the kitchen on fire, and the pop music has changed to some sort of sick metal riff at this point, all while FU is just standing there clapping his hands, which I suspect is part of the game’s code, to have Sims clap after firework launches, but it ends up feeling like FU is clapping for his own demise, which I find poetic in a way, but he doesn’t clap for very long because, upon noticing the fire and the fact that there are literally no doors to escape through, he starts flailing his arms like crazy and babbling incoherently, but he doesn’t move, he just stands there, even as the inferno creeps closer to him from tile to tile, he never moves, he just babbles and flails, even when the blaze catches up with him and he becomes totally engulfed, he’s still babbling and screaming, crazy rock music blaring from the living room stereo, only little FU’s head and arms visible as the fire consumes his entire blocky body, and he babbles and flails right up to the very end when he falls face first into the great blaze, at which point he babbles and flails no more, but the sick metal riff keeps going, as if part of some occult ritual intending to summon some sort of crazy demon, which actually works, because out of nowhere a skeleton wearing a dark gray robe appears, it’s the Grim Reaper, Death himself, and he starts lifting his skeletal arms up and down, up and down, as if performing some dark death ritual, and he does this until the whole kitchen is nothing more than a gray pile of ash, at which point a blue text box pops up and says, 

“Deepest sympathy! Forrest has just died. Though the body is gone, the spirit will always remain.”

And I feel free at last, deciding never to play The Sims ever again.

But before I exit the game, I hear a familiar sound, it’s Carpool John, mercilessly holding down the car horn, beckoning me to return to the boring little mundane routines I so desperately seek to avoid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And frankly, we’re enabling it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I quit smoking back in November 2023.

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

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

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

So, what’s the point of all this?

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

Well, kind of.

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

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

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

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

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