When I first saw your email—(of which I'm usually notified through my phone, but for some reason, it [your email] did not push a mobile notification, so I only found your email once I manually checked Protonmail on my PC using Firefox on a whim [which, oddly enough, was three minutes after you had sent the email itself])—titled “Morrowind, Social Media, and Long-form Writing,” I honestly expected a long critique and/or attack on my work; something like “you misunderstood the plot of the game,” or “you overuse semicolons,” or “you can't just put hyphens between random words for emphasis like that; compound nouns/adjectives don't work that way—it's confusing,” or “you could have cleaned up this and this and that, and it would have been much more concise,” etc., etc. (These fears likely stemming from some deep-rooted insecurity about my own ability as a writer.) So, as you can now imagine, when I read your email and found it to be quite pleasant, it coaxed a genuine smile out of this pale, blue-light-stained face, especially considering that no one has ever emailed me directly about my writing before. And for that, I thank you.
When I was a real young kid, I watched my neighbor shoot my cat with a rifle; I watched her eyes go dark and felt the warmth of her blood on my hands. On that day, I looked deep into the eyes of death—the hard-coded reality of it all—and it pained me terribly. Now, I only look when I really really have to, and even then, I shield my eyes, peering through the thin gaps of my figurative fingers, playing peek-a-boo with the quote-unquote real world.
The thesis of this essay is that everyone does this—not just me, but you, too. And you’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise.
This one is for Corbel and all the other cats out there who just want to explore the world unfettered by the fear of death.
i drove by your house
at the tally green
saw the garage door open
the sandalwood between
saw the stolen mileage sign
pressed against the brick
and i knew it was you
We are living within the bowels of a veritable ouroboros of commodification—a corporate dragon of the highest order, itself filled with thousands upon thousands of little corporate dragons. And with this essay, I aspire to harness the power of punk rock to inspire both you—the reader—and me to slay these beasts.
“Yesterday's faded. Nothing can change it. Life's what you make it”
I was 15 years old when I first heard The Colour of Spring. I even remember where I was and what I was doing the very moment the first track—“Happiness Is Easy”—started playing after I inserted the CD into the disc drive (remember those?) of my Dell something-or-other with one of those fat, black-chassis monitors displaying some sort of low-resolution Final Fantasy wallpaper, no doubt. The year was 2006, and I was at my mom’s house playing Okami for the PlayStation 2, which had been released that same year. Weird association, I know, especially considering the album’s 1986 release date, as you were probably expecting something more along the lines of “I had just finished watching ABC’s afternoon Benson-MacGyver block before I slipped the cassette purchased direct from the local Sam Goody into my stereo system’s tape player.”
At the core of all things—planets and stars, moons and meteorites, supernovae and comet tails, pulsars and nebulae, flesh and stone, decayed wood and rusted metal, and those once-things long turned to dust; even in always and neverwas, in awareness and sleep, in rainbows and rainclouds too—there is magic; the 183rd element: hecatinium.
