Intention: to experiment, play, and see what happens.
Element of Surprise
11/1/20
What’s interesting, and I don’t know if this is a thing other writers experience, is that in writing a story, the characters have the ability to surprise me, the writer. In the most recent chapter of my short story, one of the main characters confessed their love. I didn’t see this coming. I didn’t plan it, didn’t expect it to happen, and yet it did. Really, I didn’t even expect this character to become a big part of the story—they were really just a bit part, and more and more I find that what they have to say is important. It’s kind of magical.
freeplay
11/4/20
Insert one coin, begin. Feel the flow of movement running through your fingertips. Look outside, life moves on [Libs angry], shopping, cool weather, and yet here I am, writing, working—nah, not working, dreaming of my own 90’s website to publish someday. One day… I will be… a blogger! (dreams of being a blogger, and yet, I know that won’t be true, Because eventually things will turn into experimental shit.
Doomscrolling
Is fun, and I rather enjoy it. Actually, no, wtf am I saying? I hate doomscrolling. No-one likes it. But here I am, this is basically all I can do.
All things told, it’s not a bad place to be, really. I’m lucky to not have the news droning in my ear, which would probably make my anxiety spike through the roof. Just a little cup of tea. There’s a book out there I want to read, Normal People, I think it’s called.
I’ve been reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. Like it, except for the transphobia. Really, it’s more of an experimental concept in writing, rather than, say, good prose. As a writer, Doctorow’s voice is not someone’s I’d like to imitate.
Recognition
11/20/20
🌙
Vivian (previous date) has started working at the same office as me. She is learning design or whatever, and I’m a teacher. She has a partner, a boy who likes scuba diving. She is being cute and friendly, and I have interest in dating her. Later, I end up hanging out with her partner, who tells me what he likes about scuba diving. We go to his house, a large guest house near his parent’s mansion, and he gives me a tour. Later, I give him the anarchism spiel and we’re pretty much in agreement. An assassin comes to kill me.
Later, I’m back stage from the election with Biden, Buttigeg, and Bernie. Everyone seems to be taking it in stride, though people are worried about Biden’s health. Buttigeg asks me if “That’s your boy,” referring to a cute boy that I talk to. I say no, he’s not gay, but we’re friends, something to that effect. Butti looks at me askance, and I correct: I came out late, so I don’t know all the terminalogy.
Sensuous
11/22/20
Feeling a sense of lack, sense of burnt, sense of I don’t know what, desire for a sensual, sensuous, feeling, mood. I think about Tidus (of Final Fantasy X) and his sandy blonde hair and tanned chest and how he exists in the post-90’s liminal swamp somewhere near the EDX game store that also sold dreamcast games while I played Tony Hawk on a PS2 that did not yet exist for me. Dreamed of No Doubt, commodified punk nostalgia actively being created. Oblong oval style predominates everything: icons, radio station logos, game covers. Wherein, looking at this sea of game titles I will never play, nor do I want to, and see the nostalgia (briefly) for what it is: vain.
[🎵 supermodel, SZA]
But I do feel. I do, I do. Everything in my body wants this thing, this closeness, this connection. I may just be jonesing for a dopamine rush, but it’s probably more than that. Is more than that. [an old memory comes back of Eric (Marinovich), I embarrassed myself]
Love will find it’s own unique way through me.
‘The Prime of Friday’
11/27/20
I was in, I guess 7th grade, and Fridays were the best. There was this routine, I think it was Social Studies in the morning, followed by PE And to get to PE, we had to go downstairs and across campus together. For some reason, I really enjoyed that walk, in the open morning air and sun. There were a lot of trees and shade in the parking lot; it just felt like there was a certain kind of atmosphere there. And then to go into PE, that was the chillest, easiest class. We’d get to change out of our uniforms and then run around and do stupid stuff for a while like play dodgeball. And it was on Friday! Of course, the best day of the week (even then, had that capitalist mentality ingrained in me. I was 12. Or 13, it might have been 8th grade when we had that.
I don’t think I could imagine that this is where I’d end up, some 20 years later. I knew what a laptop was. I didn’t know where Taiwan was. I knew I liked geography, so that served me pretty well.
Mr. Price, the PE and geography teacher, had an RX7 and a receding hairline. We didn’t know much about him, but there was something about an rx7 that we knew you didn’t just get from teaching. There was just something that said he had a chip on his shoulder, even if we didn’t know what that was. That being said, he might have been —correction, was— my first male teacher, along with Mr. Mullen. There was something ‘adult’ about that, the way that we knew male teachers didn’t usually teach the little kids. Made me feel more important, anyway. In a different world, I probably would have looked up to Mr. Price. (Mullen, not so much. We all got the vibe that he was somewhat scary. Later on, the fact that he harassed girls was disturbing.)
Price was more neutral, so given the lack of options, he was the one I glommed on to, and even had the notion of being a geography teacher one day. You could tell that wasn’t his first choice in life. He did try. But there just seemed to be something bothering him. Amazing, the way a kid’s intuition can sense when there’s something off with a teacher. They’re supposed to be these figures of authority, and somehow this highlights their own failures even more.
When I think about the best teachers I ever had (grade school to high school), I think about: Mr. Martin, Sr. Jeanine, Coach Aur, Coach (shit, what was his name? The one with the pepper black hair), Mrs. Kelso, Fred Freres, Mr. Baker. They were all different. Some of them were passionate about education (Jeanine, Freres), some of them were more caring (Aur, Baker), some of them seemed to be side swiped into teaching (Kelso, Martin).
Martin, in particular, was interesting. He moonlit as a bartender. Most of the teachers had side-jobs if they had families, so that wasn’t surprising. But that he was a religion teacher and a bartender, that was new. His teaching style is something I would best describe as cold. He wasn’t the most emotional teacher, but at the same time, he didn’t have near the ‘chip on his shoulder’ feel that other notorious teachers at CBHS had, (or the aforementioned Mr. Price). It felt like he was doing a job, but he wasn’t bitter about it. You could tell that he cared about the material, and his approach was more academic that other teachers I’d had previously. He did not (outwardly) give a fuck if we were religious, but he did want to make sure we understood the material. He was rigorous about testing in that way. He is a major influence on why I’m not religious to this day (which may or may not have happened anyway, but better sooner than later I guess).
I want to pivot to talking about some of the worst teachers I ever had. Kollojay (I can’t spell it) comes to mind.
Now he was a case. I wouldn’t even say he was that bad of a teacher. He taught the subject (European Lit) just fine. But he had this ‘reputation’. Everyone knew it. I don’t even know how we all found out these things and circulated the horrible, disgusting rumors that we did, but there it was.
The joke was that he had a ‘little man’ complex, although we didn’t frame it in those terms, we just said he had a small penis. And maybe some of that was true. (The penis thing, who knows, I’m talking about the complex). A sign hung on the front of his desk that said, “I don’t give good grades, YOU earn them.” As if this would buffer him from the petulance of his students. It was an entrenched antagonism. We knew there was something about him you could get away with, something that could be exploited. How does a collective of teenage boys discover these things? That conflict just felt bigger than the learning that took place.
I’ll list the others: Geometti, Dr. Gossett, Mullen. All three of them are curious. Not bad, in a sense. Geometti was a master at making her classes run efficiently and keeping her students compliant. She was notorious because she had expectations and she stuck to them. And for that, we managed to get through. But I remember very little of what was taught. Gossett had issues. A grown man that puts his hands around children’s necks is not ok. Mullen, as I mentioned earlier, was a creep. It’s not surprising that in some way, shape or form, that all of them were authoritarians. Some, by virtue of tenure, were allowed to realize that authoritarian power more fully (Gossett). For Geometti, it was a means to an end (an orderly classroom). But what sticks out in my mind more than what I learned was their personalities and attitudes, as well as a handful of 4 or 5 things.
With the teachers I liked, it was a more qualitative shift in thinking. Martin sparked this. Sr. Jeanine sparked this. Even Freres sparked this (at least in the political way, as someone who had a different background). With a teacher like Aur, there was a genuine sense of care.
Jaggies
11/30/20
Jaggies (n singular: jaggie) – the phenomenon of a early 3D polygon, usually on the Sony Playstation or Saturn, jutting out unnaturally.
By most standards (as well as mine), the 32 bit games of the late 90’s did not age well. For every fan that espouses a love for Final Fantasy VII, very few will go back and play it as it was. It was not pretty.
But these fugly graphics are still, by a certain small group of us, lovable, like an adopted dog.
Playing some of the late PSX titles, it’s clear that they were on to something. They weren’t the first, but they brought the rise of the disc-based game.
Disc-based games aren’t necessarily confined to their medium, but they generally have some traits such as long load times, cd-quality audio, and FMVs. God, so many fmvs.
At the time of the rise of the psx, I was still an n64 kid. I did not like load times, and I didn’t like jaggies (n64 tended towards smooth and washed), although those things eventually grew on me.
But what’s clear to me now, whether I play legacy of kain or colony wars, these games weren’t just different because of those physical differences, but the actual design of the games themselves were different. Meaning, heavier focus on cinematics, dialogue, exhibition before playing the actual game. Looking at the interfaces, these games (like say colony wars) were meant to be entire audio-visual performances, a display of the power of the hardware and electronic equipment used to display it.
What many of these games lack, or I should say also have, is a very ‘narrow’ definition of what a gamer is, which is to say, abled. It’s expected that you should be able to mash buttons quickly, have lightning fast reflexes, want to shoot the enemy as quickly as possible.
In a game like colony wars (which, I get it, is a war), you are able to control a fighter ship and have complete range of motion. And yet, there’s no time to explore the world. There is immediate conflict, however, it is mitigated by a rousing star wars-esque orchestra, and modern user interfaces. Even all these years later, it is meant to be the peak display of performance. Taken in this light, it feels a bit sad, like so many resources went into this privelaging display that only a few select people will get to experience. Let’s say half a million people in the whole world, generously, [note 10.02.22: it was 120,000 worldwide sales] got to experience this work of art, labor, and distribution. And now further, less will even be able to experience it (or even want to). Such is the way of digital art.
Continuing with Colony Wars, specifically, it is not a particular piece of art that I am attracted to for its aesthetics. I hate its aesthetics. But what interests me more is the whole apparatus set up to create these aesthetics. A disc-based game system. A flash website. Photoshop. And what these things 20 years in the past, are trying to create: a future. What this game is saying to you is, you are in the future. By taking part in this technological experience, you’re the vanguard. Which, in a sense, is true, given that most people wouldn’t even have access to these kinds of tools. It was the cream of the crop in its day. Now, in cell phone gaming, things are more widespread. You don’t need a tv and a this and a that and all of the things totaling hundreds of dollars; you just need a phone that you were using anyway.
In this way, the new systems: ps5 and xbox series are just continuing this ritual of technology privileging. What you are paying for is the right to experience things that other people won’t be able to. That’s the allure of the symphony, the opera. Most people don’t have the resources to experience these things that will devour the resources of the planet, and that’s the point.
Need
12/4/20
Today, tea, not coffee. Takes a different kind of balancing act. I want to read The Book of Tea and feel superior.[^tea] Feels different, more of a wobbling, a dancing (maybe a stereotype, but there’s a looseness of feeling that doesn’t come with coffee; I could and do drink tea all day. It’s more of a drunkard’s feeling. Which is alright, I suppose. Because it’s not a bad life. Having the bills paid enough and moving from month to month, although that’s not my metric. Homeostasis is not the yardstick for a good life.
I’m not advocating the capitalist treadmill. That would follow that paying the bills on time is a virtue, and that it gives liberty to want more of the things.
The things I love have no value. My dearest one, my family (as much as I hate them sometimes), my friends (as much as we’re distant). The place where I live and the ecosystem that supports itself. I do feel a connection to it, in that way. It’s different than how I feel about SF, or Memphis.[^wild] Memphis was, and forever will be the hometown. SF was, for a long time, my spiritual home. You could also say it was my capitalist home. Taichung is more of my ’subsistent home’. I didn’t grow up dreaming of this place; it’s not considered an ideal by most people, and yet I can get by and lead a good life here. It’s alright.
Anyway, my mode of existence here seems to be more of, how can I live well and be supportive of others? And that seems to be centered on taking care of myself first, in a lot of instances. Like now, like spending a morning drinking tea and writing. On the one hand, it’s a bougie pastime, but on the other hand, it’s sort of what keeps me sane, the pursuit of some weirdness beyond the treadmill.
[note 10.02.22: This is an assessment of Taichung that seems to hold up today. But I don’t think it’s that trite to be in a mode of existence where I can live well and be supportive of others, in fact that might be even more than I could ever ask for.]
Maybe it’s like this: My afternoons are filled with electronic music above 80bpm, making class lessons, getting ready to teach classes. It’s efficient and perfunctory. And yet, I thrive on the weirdness. I need that sense of chaos, that sense of, I-don’t-know-what to keep me going. (Near by, a watercolor journal workshop. One older man surrounded by 7 older ladies, all with perfect watercolor notebooks.)
[^tea]: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I would go to the tea shops, curious about trying to figure out how to get into “tea”. I would go to china town, downtown, to a shop called Song. There was a lady there I met who said she’d go through a whole bag of the stuff to determine its flavor; I was determined to do the same. You know, zen aesthetics and whatever. Around that time, I read The Book of Tea and found it to be a little (very) pretentious. Orientalism was the new elitism. Tea was the new coffee. Etc. Etc.
[^wild]: It’s wild, but at this point, Taichung is basically “the third city.” Memphis, SF, now this, having lived here for 3 years.
Cyberpunk influences
12/10/20
It’s been a while since I’ve been influenced at release by a game I’ll most likely never play. I think Cyberpunk for me is more influential not for what it wants to be, but what it is: A throwback to all the wrong parts of 80’s gaming.
If you were an 80’s gamer, it probably would not be that hard to pick up Cyberpunk. The settings would look familiar to anyone who’d watched Bladerunner. The toxic masculinity would likely go unnoticed. The killing might take a little getting used to; a gun in a 3d world and all that (and it’s still surprising to me that ever since Wolfenstein we’re still doing the same thing).
It’s interesting to see though that for all of these beautiful shots, immersion in a world and all that, the game still boils down to the killing engine (although, it does seem like there’s a pretty robust photo mode, it’s not what drives the game).
The penis is what drives the game. The penis is what drives just about every game over the last however many years. In fps games, it’s gun penis. In car games, it’s car penis. In wipeout, it’s futuristic super techno 3d penis. In Shadow of the Colossus, its the penis of light that shows the control of your domain over fridged girl character. Cloud have huge penis. Sephiroth have long elegant penis. In the streetfighter games, the fireball is a symbol of ejaculate energy. Similarly, fully powered up fire mario also gains the power of ejaculation; however he must go from flaccid (small) to erect (big) to functional (fire flower).
In cyberpunk, the penis colonizes the non-male body; everything is domain of penis.
There are attempts to subvert the phallocentric logic, and they are relatively good. Animal Crossing is one such example. Yet to someone (even like me) who plays mostly phallocentric games, AC, Stardew Valley, and the like feel lacking; there’s no ejaculation mechanic. You can hit stuff with a net, you can cut trees with an axe, but there’s no sword, there’s no gun. These are castrated individuals.
[note 10.02.22: Jesus fucking christ I love the influence of psychoanalytic theory and feminism on my video game hot takes]
I used to think that the remedy for this was to avoid playing these games altogether, which I did for a long time, but that doesn’t quite rectify the situation. It’s not through repression that one comes to understand the urges and desires that structure these worlds — and provide the capital to create them.
This sort of analysis can create a little room and depth, exposing the structures, as long as the goal is not supression. In other words, I can still play the wrestling game. I can still play the game that involves gunplay. But what ends up happening is not that it gets addictive, but that it gets boring. Using a game as the mechanic of control over my life has limited satisfaction, depth, and appeal.
I want to tread carefully, but I consider writing and poetry to also be a phallic activity (though a form that is much more liberated from its original intent)
The illiad, the odyssey, gilgamesh, are all gigantic phallic masturbation pieces, relying on (in the first two) bloodshed and hegenemony. That these things are considered beautiful is something strange to me, and I’ve never been able to relate to these poems (although I can appreciate their mechanics—hey! Similar to games.). The difference is that we’ve had about 3,000 years (which sure as heck ain’t a lot, geologically speaking) to figure things out. Poems, in their evolution, have on the one hand become more Sapphic, more inclusive. We still have a handful of epics (Omeros), but they by and large are not the main things written in poetic form – other mediums (such as video games) capture that sort of phallic bloodlust better.
If we are lucky to have another 3,000 years, perhaps the video game will find its sapphic moment, although given the resources required, that’s doubtful. The poetry will survive, and I’m not saying that as a sort of superiority statement. Just the nature of the medium, the accessibility of it.
[note 10.02.22: I’ll bite and say that games are already having their sapphic moment. They don’t come in the form of AAA titles and they don’t need to. Games like We Met in May, Mutatzione, Cats and Soup, show there is plenty of room for creativity outside the usual patriarchal dick splosion]
Wrestlemania III
Loomed large somewhere in the soupy unconscious of my mind, at least it did until I finally watched the famous Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant main event. These two were supposed to be larger than life (and they were), just different than how I expected. Andre was large, but you could tell not someone in an athletic prime. It was the spectacle, the pageantry. The flashing bulbs of the silverdome. The announcers. The american flag colors of the ring. And Hogan sold it. He sold every minute of it. The announcers sold every minute of what would have been an otherwise very boring match.
How many were actually Hulkamaniacs? I don’t know. We had one or two in my class. One. Andy Fleming. He was a wrestling fan. That he’d later go on to become a stand up comedian should not surprise me. But our generation was more Steve Austin, Rock, and DX. So by that point, none of us had actually watched the match, only heard of it, saw it in clips. It loomed larger than anything else, casting a shadow. And of course, we also knew about the steroids, the “fakeness”. Maybe not so much the abuse of women.
The retro-nostalgia engine comes for wrasslin’
It’s amazing, but I feel like wrestling is fertile territory for writing. It’s got surprising adjacency to my life, coming from Memphis, one of the cradles of the modern show—and I do call it a show, not a a sport. Of course there is athleticism, timing, hallmarks of a sport, but it shares its roots more with theater and performance. That wrestling could never fully accept itself as such, always seeking legitimacy as sport through presentation y this one of its great tragedies.
Anyway. Memphis was well suited to wrestling culture. Looked down as low brow entertainment by the high places of entertainment such as broadway and hollywood (another status symbol of the major wrestlers: to make it in the movies is to gain a sort of legitimacy above the wrestling world. Hulk hogan even appended it to his name — “Hollywood Hulk Hogan”), a place like Memphis was far enough from the spotlight that its own forms of entertainment could develop.
Before The pay-per-view days of the WWF in the 80’s, wrestling was more rhizomatic, developing in circuits with a lot of cross pollination. Not just in Memphis of course, but all across the country, and in backwoods places in Canada and Mexico as well. [10.02.22 lol wtf me of all people leaving out Japan](The famous Hart Family hailed from Calgary, Alberta, which is like “the south” of Canada). Likely to be attached to the county fair or festival. No one really questioned the existence of it, it was merely there, a fixture. Quick and easy drama.
“The squared circle” as Randy Savage liked to call it, bares a close resemblance to another popular place from a different time: The Globe Theater of Shakespeare famously had space close to the stage for the public, and the stage itself was surrounded on 3 sides by the crowd— the equivalent of an ECW Elk’s lodge in Elizabethan England.
If there was anything that pulled me in, it was the drama, and that it was continuing. Often called a “soap-opera for men”, the story never stopped because it couldn’t. There would never be a time when all debts were settled; the show must go on.
That wrestling never quite deals with its dark unconscious is one of its main draws. It’s not a matter of its “fakeness,” because everyone knows it’s entertainment. But there’s the drama beneath the drama, the story behind the story, the ‘locker room drama’. Unfortunately, the baggage that wrestling chooses to ignore is tragic in a different way. Suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexism. It can also be wonderfully queer: the story of Pat Patterson (an openly gay retired wrestler who recently passed away) was an eye-opener for the gay subculture of the business. And then of course there’s the actual physical abuse that wrestlers put on their bodies, and this turns out to be one of the most mind-bending aspects for both fans of the sport and not: how, why, would anyone do this to themselves, “fake” or not? And this is where the assertion of “wrestling as sport” usually comes in: because the injuries are real, the damage is real.
Maybe all of this is just a carnival-esqe fun house mirror of the soul. Maybe the mirror that wrestling holds up to us is that under the “perfection” of broadway or hollywood, there is a weirdness that we choose (or don’t choose) to deal with. Trump is a bewildering subject until one considers that what he’s doing is kayfabe, creating a drama, a show that is at once bewildering and impossible to turn away from: a reflection of that interior weirdness of the country; and the horrors of racism that it brings out. His tragedy is that he believes it to be real, can’t escape from it, and then neither can we.
Maybe this glimpse into the mirror is what drives me to stay up late, looking up the unseen and forgotten wrestling matches of the past. Maybe that look into the funhouse mirror, in the end, is just too tempting.
pen paper etc. 