“To breath, so to speak, without air … To be, in a word, unborable.”
—The Pale King, David Foster Wallace, 2011, p. 440.
Question for you: What do the following three people have in common? 1) a young boy who spends hours a day contorting himself in very painful ways so that he can eventually lick every part of his own body, including “the papery skin around his anus” and the back of his own neck; 2) a GS-13 Revenue Agent at the Peoria, Illinois IRS Technical Auditing Branch who can complete over 100 tax audits per day and levitates a little bit while doing so; and 3) a verbose college kid addicted to Adderall who is able to tap into such heightened states of awareness that he is even aware that he is aware of being aware and can describe everything around him with near-perfect clarity.
Keep that question in mind—we’re going to come back to that later.
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.
I: Vivec as Computer Game – Toonami’s Official Review – Contextualizing Soul Sickness
“I watch. I wonder. I build. I tear down. Am I a god? As surely as any are.”
― Sotha Sil
In the beginning there were four Gods Among Men and Mer: Almalexia, Sotha Sil, Vivec, and Dagoth Ur; five if YOU are considered: the reader, the player, the Nerevarine, the everything, or the fool. For the benefit of the potential Nerevarine, we will cover – in some short detail – the computer game in which they will be participating: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind; a computer game designed to be as hostile to new players as mechanically possible, with role-playing systems that require forty-page manuals to be understood resulting in the first twenty-hours of play being slow crawls across all-brown-landscape and visibly striking rats yet missing-with-whoosh because easily-frangible-character-building and hidden-dice-rolls that do not belong in role-playing-games-that-are-actually-action-games are all working against you and the manual was much too long to hold your smartphone-addled attention span much like every article in this publication.
High above the clouds, a great tree pierces the heavens like the mythological Yggdrasil, with branches resembling legendary dragon-slaying halberds impaling the clouds, and thick dew-encrusted leaves falling from such great heights that they disintegrate before touching the ground. This is a world full of sprawling hollows, teeming with humans and monsters alike; bazaars perched on gigantic leafy bird nests repurposed into bustling plazas, and children running about freely. Fertility and happiness flow in abundance – but only for humans.
