“I've always felt, since I was small... That I was different from the others. Special, in some way.”
Before cigarettes and alcohol, cars and girls, work and bills, marriage and mortgages; betwixt red maple and palm; back when Grandma Susu woke me every morning with a tall glass of chocolate milk; when I still kinda believed that toys came to life when people left the house; back in that prepubescent fog wherein I still enjoyed Blue’s Clues but had developed just enough self-awareness to be embarrassed about it; when music skipped and movies barfed tape; back when Miles, my best friend, lived right by the fishing pond on the border of my backyard; when trampolines were gravity wells around which all children orbited; back when we thought time could be stopped and things would never change; when I could pick up Between the Lions and Dragon Tales on PBS if I moved the antenna just right; back when the internet was confined to large gray cubes and was mainly used for printing out cheat codes; when clouds only existed in the sky and Final Fantasy VII, not everyone’s pocket; back when Game Boys and asthma inhalers were the only devices kids had; when I would leave the house with nothing but my wits because phones were still tethered to walls with curly cords; back when true freedom was just beyond the picket fences, in the overgrown alleys between houses of red brick and cheap vinyl siding; when we all knew the neighborhood cats by name; back when politics were boring and there was just so much else to talk about; when neighborhoods felt like they were owned by people instead of banks and politicians; back when parents kept their doors unlocked and kids swept through like little tornadoes; when we would spend afternoons ringing doorbells and running away; back when I would fall asleep on the floor enveloped in the soft glow of video game cathode; when sleepovers were the best thing in the whole entire world; back when Miles lent me his friend Lauren’s Game Boy Camera, which I traded for store credit to buy the game with the cool spiky-haired blonde guy on the cover.
“Ha, ha, ha... my sadness? What do I have to be sad about? I am the chosen one.”
It was around this time that I heard some sort of commotion coming from outside the office. Matt’s dad, a goblin of a man, who must have come home early, was shouting at his son. My stomach dropped and I was suddenly aware of the blood inside me, burning, for I was obviously trespassing in Matt’s dad’s office, having been told several times by both Matt and his dad never to go into the office—or the house without the parents present, for that matter. My face was all flushed red, full of hell and hemoglobin, which I tried to gulp down. I had only a few more questions to go, so in one smooth motion, I twirled and rolled the chair to the office door, locked the deadbolt, then twirled and rolled once more back to the computer, where I took the mouse in hand like there was no tomorrow and started just clicking away as fast as I could, answering the remainder of the “Which Final Fantasy VII Character Are You?!?!” quiz questions as if I had cast Haste on myself and then jumped into the body of Sephiroth, like it was no longer me answering the questions but Sephiroth himself, in the flesh, clicking mighty fast clicks.
“They say that the golden age is gone, never to return. But I believe that we can somehow bring it back. I must believe... if I am to carry on.”
—Narrator, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
Between the verdant hills of Arcadia and the rainbow falls of Shella, the cleansing fires of Kilanda and the wheat fields of Fum, the tranquil streams of Tipa and the crystal blues of the Jegon, even between the burning sands of the Sahara and the majestic geysers of Yellowstone, there creeps a sick miasma, snuffing out the golden glow, slowly killing us all.
You can try to fight it, hold your heart high like a crystal chalice filled with myrrh, try to banish the miasma with memories of the golden age—but your chalice is running dry and the memories are fading fast and you’re all alone because everyone around you has already dropped dead and you’re starving for myrrh and the miasma is closing in faster than ever before.
How long do you think you can survive by yourself, lost in this monstrous fog?
Eventually, you’re going to need someone on your side, because you can’t banish the miasma alone.
So pack up your caravan and dust off that old magic racket, because we’re heading to the unnamed fantasy world of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles to collect some myrrh, banish the miasma, and maybe—just maybe—bring back the golden age.
(This is a cut chapter from the essay “Lost in the Miasma” that I felt didn't fit with the overarching theme of the essay, but I still wanted to publish it, as it captures some of my thoughts on the modern gaming industry and works by itself as a short contained essay.)
The miasma—or the internet—has made gaming as a whole worse for the consumer on a physical, technical level; it has corrupted the games industry to such an extent that game development is now pretty much only about making as much money as possible as quickly as possible as easily as possible while ignoring all ethical values and disregarding the consumer almost entirely. The miasma has enabled a gross disregard for game preservation, player feedback, and, most importantly, the overall quality of the games themselves, all the while making it easier than ever to forever milk cash out of the player through endless low-effort downloadable content, microtransactions, and by pushing fake money purchased with real money that is then used to purchase dumb mystery boxes that contain dumb prizes chosen basically at random, which amounts to literal gambling.
“And he has, that is exactly what he has done, whatever he wanted. As if attempting to reach the end of his desires, to find out what is there at the end. Discovering instead with horror that his desires even when instantly and gorgeously gratified only make him increasingly unhappy and insane.”
—Intermezzo, Sally Rooney, 2024, p. 411.
As of writing this, I have been married for nearly seven years, and within that time, I have thought about sleeping with an unquantifiable number of people who are not my spouse: men, women, non-binary, otherkin—whatever. I am not picky. Pretty much anyone I see that I find even remotely attractive, I end up thinking: “What do they look like without clothes on? How do they kiss, I wonder? Are they wearing a wedding band? Would they be receptive if I made an advance? Do they have a boyfriend? Would they prefer top or bottom? Do they have a girlfriend? Have they ever thought about having sex with me? Are they thinking about having sex with me right now?” and so on.
I want to watch the President bleed out on stage while surrounded by his goons, who are all hunched over his morbidly obese body, protecting him from further gunfire, totally unaware—in that very chaotic moment—that the president is now just a corpse, having given up the ghost after the first bullet ripped through his skin and shredded through the cartilage around his sternum and slipped right through his spine and then, finally, burst out of his lardaceous back; the bullet—blood, pus, and serous fluid twirling behind it like a little horizontal tornado—lodging itself into the wall right behind where the president once stood all tall and arrogant while giving some elaborate speech about how we’ll soon reach the Promised Land if we just rape the planet a bit more and get rid of all those nasty poor people in the slums eating all the cats and dogs, right before he collapses, simultaneously pisses and shits himself, and then twitches out a little bit in his own bloody-piss-poop juice before going completely still and just ceasing to be a thinking thing at all.
“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.
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.
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.
