Video Games

 I"ll start here by saying that I really, really loved video games as a kid. Because I was a relatively poor kid I never had an Atari or Intellivision or a Colecovision or any of those early home gamer systems which only made me love them more. I sought them out, no matter how shitty, at the supermarket, the mall, friends houses... whenever I had a chance I would play them.

Now, in my high school years I came to, predictably after all the DARE program propaganda, enjoy certain mind-altering substances. As it turned out a friend of mine had just gotten the program Doom on his folks 386 computer if anyone remembers such things from the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. We played it. A lot. My favorite weapon was the pump shotgun with which I dispatched all manner of ugly, alien hell-beasts. It was great.

Then one time we played it on Acid.

After about 15 minutes of playing it I had a moment that was a very deep and profound moment of "What the FUCK am I doing?!?!"

Here I was shooting horrible, misshapen alien demon things with their guts and blood splattering all over the walls of the strange megalithic dungeons when I was living in a miraculous universe of beauty, patterns and rhythms ever expanding into new and increasingly complex arrangements on a planet that is home to an infinitude of wonders and curiosities: Pyramids, giant squid, Sequoia trees, tardigrades. Not to mention mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, engineering, metaphor, symbolism and music. That was that.

 Funnily enough, I had a very similar moment at the same friend's house with industrial music. "Why am I listening to this mechanical, lifeless death soundtrack when I could go outside and lay in the sun?" Or something like that. Memory editorializes the past.


These are wholly unremarkable stoner thoughts, obviously. However, these realizations changed the path of my life. While I did, now and then, play video games and listen to industrial music but, mostly I didn't. I had gotten a bad taste in my mouth about these things that I just couldn't shake that saved me from wasting countless hours of my youth gunning down fictional bad guys and instead I wasted them hiking, reading books that were over my head and writing shitty poetry. Are those things better than playing video games? Maybe. But that isn't the point.

The point is that, as I tried and failed to point out in my Benign Sedition post, technology is something to be a little skeptical of, especially when it is being marketed at us in a way that makes us seemingly crazy not to just want, but to crave it. Or, for that matter, to feel ostracized from our culture simply by not immediately and mindlessly taking it on board. To state it another way: "Is this technology working for me and my enjoyment of my life or is it keeping me, acting as a layer of abstraction or mediation, from enjoying my life?

As I have said earlier, I'm not going to burn my phone or laptop and I'm not going to throw a brick through my TV. But I am using them much less and doing stuff like cooking, reading books, going to the library and taking baths. This experiment is rather recent but I have been less stressed out, slept better and, generally, enjoyed my life a lot more.