Facebook parades the faces of the dead before me. Its algorithms suggest that I connect with them. Sometimes I click the profiles of the dead and see their eternal scrolls being etched upon with Farmville requests. There is a ghost protocol to follow: fill out a form called “Report a deceased person’s profile.” The problem is that Facebook requires some proof of death — an obituary or news article or certificate — and my dead friends are from Micronesia, a place that requires no obituaries or paperwork. Everyone on the island pretty much knows you are dead without a printed notice. Long before the internet was invented, islanders were using the coconut wireless, a kind of communal telepathy that carries news at faster than 4G speeds.

Uncle Semester’s heart burst when he bent over to sweep some leaves away from the outdoor drain under the sink. The sink was a length of PVC pipe that ran from a small river uphill down to a little square of cement where the extended family washed clothes and showered. He was dead by the time he hit the ground and joined the leaves in stopping the drain. An hour later we had him up on a table and were fitting him with his Sunday best. We rolled him around, hiked up his dead man pants, and buttoned his dead man collar. I went to fetch some cotton balls to put in his nose before the flies laid eggs there. Micronesia is a tropical place and they like to get you in the ground before you curdle. When the funeral guests arrived, the women wailed and keened over his body. Uncle Semester was in the ground, in a quickly nailed-together coffin, less than 24 hours from the moment he bent over to sweep away the leaves. He left no last words or messages.

His grave is up the hill near where the PVC pipe begins (I always figured we were washing clothes and dishes in bits of dissolved Semester). The grave does not require a marker. The people who know he is dead know where he is buried. We will know this from now until we too are dead or beyond caring and then that’s pretty much it. There is very little left to remember Uncle Semester by after those who remember him are gone. Uncle Semester required no proof of life or death. Like most of humanity throughout time, he simply existed and then didn’t.

Facebook’s new Timeline design has a gorgeous, intuitive design and sleek presentation that causes users to become wonderfully, existentially nauseous. Timeline allows you to see your whole Facebook life, from “born” to “now,” splayed on the monitor like a dissecting-frog in a high school biology class. Viewing it, I can smell the formaldehyde of my own pickled life.

Timeline is the ghosts of past, present, and future all on one scrolling page. Instead of showing you the naked truth, though, Timeline takes you on a journey through years of Facebook bullshit (not that there’s anything wrong with that). From cradle to grave every bit of fake happiness, every thrilling “event,” every complication or party photo someone shared gets memorialized. Every morning I wake up, brew the coffee, sit at my desk and write on my own memorial wall.

A short while after Uncle Semester died, his young nephew Ezekiel died. The difference: by that time the island was enjoying broadband access. I wasn’t there for Ezekiel’s funeral — didn’t dress or bury him — but I saw the pictures posted on my news feed. He wasn’t yet forty years old and died after a long illness, leaving behind a wife and two young children. Although I have seen the evidence in the stream, it is hard to believe he is dead. His final profile picture occasionally pops up. I imagine him rattling his dead bones in a cyber-cage, asking to be put to rest. It’s a little creepy, but I don’t have the heart to defriend the dead.

To avoid Ezekiel’s Facebook half-life, I signed up with If I Die, a service that will post a short video or written message on your Facebook timeline in the event of your death. Except that it should probably be called When I Die, I like the app — it’s slick and easy to use.

What will be your final status to that strange mass of humanity that you call “Facebook friends”? This is a good exercise. Not because it encourages a healthy reflection upon one’s own mortality but because it causes a healthy reflection upon the meaning of a Facebook Timeline and the various ways in which we are linked to other people.

I have considered this message for a few long hours and can’t decide between “This page intentionally left blank” and “Namaste, bitches!!” Perhaps no message is the best message.

Before I die, I hope to spend my time in a secret spot in central Kentucky where I wander the seldom used trails. The place is a blind spot for satellites. So I roam untethered to my smartphone through the overgrown, prickly underbrush. I like the red berries that last through winter. I like the yellow birds and milkweed. I like the little lick that is sometimes silent and sometimes burbles with life. I like the rare mussels in the water with whimsical names like Pink Heelsplitter. In short, I give the place a hearty thumbs up.

The area is farmland that no one farms anymore. There are foundations for barns and houses, crumbled stone walls, and reed choked cattle-watering holes all given to the elements long ago. There is now the barest evidence that people once lived, married, grew up, fucked, shat, and did the business of life here. When exploring this tract of unoccupied land I have found two family grave sites, halfheartedly fenced off from something — vandals? deer? – and dissolving into the earth untended and unremarked.

Here lies Mary Withers and her timeline, which is a single, fixed point: “Died August 15, 1907.” Beneath the name and date lies this message: “She was ready to die.” As a final message it seems a bit harsh. I learn from the microfiche archive at the local library that Mary Withers was 83 years old, childless and unmarried. Her funeral was at her sister’s house, now a weedy snake-infested depression not far from the family plot.

Mary’s father’s name was interesting: Fountain Withers. Perhaps he is buried beside Mary. It is hard to tell. Many of the names on the stones have eroded beyond recognition. Eventually the dead shed even their names. I feel vaguely sorry to bring his name up after more than a century. How many long years has it been since someone even thought of his name or called it to their lips? And what good does it do dig it up now? Perhaps it is a kindness to the dead to simply close the window and forget them.

A few months ago, I stopped reading books.

At night I crawl into bed and thumb my iPhone to life. I watch Star Trek: Voyager on the Netflix app. It’s not a bad show. But somehow it is difficult to compare the weeks it took to complete the seven-season voyage through the Delta Quadrant with Capt. Janeway and the weeks I spent reading my favorite books — thick books by Eliot, Laxness, Dickens, and Pamuk. I know there is an argument that serialized television drama is as complex and soul-nourishing as a good book, but, unfortunately, I don’t care for the shows that are usually held up as modern classics for non-readers: The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc. I have never seen an episode of these shows. If you want to reach me, say it with alien explosions and busty cyborgs.

Back when I was a reader, it often troubled me when friends claimed that they had no time to read. Was it possible that their lives were so full of wonders that they could not spend five minutes here or there to read? How was it that my life, in comparison, seemed to offer so many chunks of reading time throughout the day? A train ride, a late-night break, and an office wait. Through marriage, babies, graduate schools, and new jobs, I always found time to read for pleasure.

Alas, dear reader, the term “pleasure” doesn’t capture the mental and physical need for books I once had. Without a book nearby I felt bereft, purposeless, barely human. Once upon a time I lived in a far-flung foreign swamp with an extended family of non-readers. I frightened them one night when I stumbled home drunk and ransacked the house for a lost tome. A nice cousin had cleaned the house and of course she, like most people, would never feel a deep compulsion to read all of Dickens. So my book got cast off or put away or tossed to the silent frogs in the swamp. (Yes, they were silent frogs.) I screamed, “Sid, where are my drugs!” in my best, cackling Nancy Spungen voice and I laughed for being woozily hilarious to myself but could find no rest without a page of my book to send me to sleep. Books were a long-time lover whose steady weight I needed to feel in bed before sleep was possible. It turned out that the swamp heathens had used Bleak House to balance a very wobbly chair.

Books can steady a chair and a soul. The former use is not recommended for Kindle.

The last book I read was Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. That was months ago. After one day of non-reading I figured, well, perhaps some nights I can I go to sleep with visions of Neelix the Talaxian annoyer on Voyager, rather than Boethius’ prickly and combative angel of philosophy. What’s the harm? After a week of non-reading, I said to myself that I was busy. So busy. Too busy, really, to start a new book. After three weeks of non-reading, my brain felt a bit numb. I told myself that I was working so hard that I couldn’t engage with a book. I fell, instead, into a steady diet of Netlix, Hulu, Skyrim, and the NFL. Like an addict in the early stages of recovery, I felt a euphoric at being released from the bitter yoke of my addiction. As a non-reader I felt free to happily non-think all day. It was delicious. Almost animal. I craved red meat and raw sex and new episodes of Fringe.

Then I opened Skyrim and saw the following message: “48 hours played. Last played today.”

I must have some free time. Perhaps the “I don’t have time to read” line is just a cover. A way that people excuse themselves from the uncomfortable truth that they do, in fact, have time but that they would rather do something other than read with that time (such as pretending to be a wood-elf). We exalt reading as “good” like exercise and vegetables and so we are always making excuses as to why we avoid it.

After I saw that message I knew that I had taken up residence in the swamp of the non-reader. Here is what life is like in that swamp:

1. The world is flat. Not in the sense of a level economic playing field (an idea I once read about, when I read). No, the world is flat because I see no depth. I make no associations. Life unfolds as a rather dull soap opera with bathroom breaks.
2. I can no longer reason and cannot be trusted to make a decision. My brain is distracted by second-hand sensations. When the slightest complexity arises in my life, I crave the screen world – the simple goal of building a house in Minecraft or the easily dis-entangled one-hour conundrums that beset the Voyager crew.
3. I can no longer relax. My Skyrim character now has a longer to-do list than my red-flagged Outlook task-list at work. My days at work and home consist of quests and side-quests leading to more quests and side-quests. I have lost the main narrative.
4. I am empty, but not in a monkish way. I am just kind of dumb. Also, without the pleasing empathy that comes from engaging with new ideas, places, and characters, I am afraid of foreigners and easily manipulated by politicians and advertisements.
5. I have the attention span of cocaine-addled four-year old. My mind is an ’80s Scorsese montage on fast-forward. It’s all sound and fury signifying – are you kidding me? Star Wars in 3D? WTF?

My iPhone has uploaded my fiery libido into the cloud, where it is currently carousing with a Beyoncé video. I crave that cloud. The endless gamboling streams of deathless entertainment… Heaven 2.0. Oh, to be formless, streamed, and exciting. To float above the earth in multiple formats. To be downloaded occasionally into the pockets of a soma-hazed populace. To walk a moment upon the warming globe and then ride in the aether of entertainment. Finding a thrill. A thrill. A thrill and no thought. And another thrill. And no thought.

An inner voice vibrates in the addled idle of my non-reading life. Somehow the words wormed through centuries to arrive upon a still-firing synapse and spin these lines:

What win I, if I gain the thing I seek?
A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy.
Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week?
Or sells eternity to get a toy?

In conclusion: I started reading books again.

Photo by Kim Mason

My daughter’s Minecraft building style depends on a combination of Howard Hughes-level of paranoia and Brutalist aesthetics: it keeps the mobs out and the player cocooned in a stone-block cell. She gets angry if I knock a window in her fortress or unbarricade the door. For her, the game is little more than sitting in a gray box and listening to the chicken clucks and zombie groans outside her gray walls.

My daughter is engrossed in a game and sitting at the computer. My daughter is in a windowless tower of childhood, unreachable and mysterious, even to herself. I try to ask questions. I try to knock windows in the facade but she is quiet like me. Even “How was school?” causes her panic. I want to know everything, but she’s getting cagey these days and has rote answers that stack like stone blocks in front of her.

“Fine,” she answers. Or “Good.” Or “Stuff.”

My own father used to try to knock down a wall with some uncomfortable early-morning conundrum like: “Jonathan, do you hate yourself?” or “Jonathan, are you hanging around with the homosexual crowd?” I grunted and looked at my feet. To speak is to venture outside of oneself. Some simply do not care to go outside. So I leave my daughter alone in her stone house until she calls to me to vanquish monsters. Someday she will slice her own zombies. For now, I’m always there with a diamond sword to save her. ^[i.]

When she was two years old my daughter and I lived in a swamp house on the island of Pohnpei. The house was a square box made of cinder block and press-board with too many windows and a few half-hearted strokes of yellow paint, from which I couldn’t keep the creepers out.

So we ran away. As we split, I only had time to grab what I thought was important which turned out to be a handful of dirty forks and a machete. I guess I was in a sharp mood.

I left my books, music, and games behind. Everything I had accumulated since college: System Shock, feminist interpretations of fairy tales, a new and interesting translation of the Pentateuch, Half-Life, a series of bootlegged Kinks concerts from the ’80s on audio cassette… when I returned to the swamp house weeks later, my collection of Dickens novels was being used to hold up various pieces of decrepit furniture and to balance wobbly plastic chairs. So that’s one thing an English major is good for.

The loss of my stuff was freeing. I sloughed off my media like a snake sheds its skin. But unlike a snake I had no discernible shape underneath. Who was I now? I defined myself based upon my media purchases, which is a tenuous thing to build a personality upon. Who am I? I am a copy of Alien vs. Predator resting against a copy of Middlemarch. Snatch the books and games away and what is left? ^[ii.]

What was left of me was a strong need to protect and an abundance of love. My daughter and I moved to a solid, concrete house on a hill on the other side of the island. From there, you could see the night crawlers approach and be ready for them. I kept forks and machete at the ready. I was scared someone would snatch her in the night, but the monsters stayed away. We were safe.

Eventually we started to collect things again. I made my daughter a rubber tire out of an old flip-flop and she pushed it around with two sticks. We got ourselves a box of toy bricks and invited the neighbors over to make forts and houses with us.

Now it is years later and my daughter is plugging up holes in her massive, intimidating Minecraft stronghold. Perhaps she is reluctant to punch a hole in the wall because when she was two years old I built walls around her mortared with fear.

In the fairy tale version of this, I am both the evil wizard who locks her away and the knight in white-iron armor who saves her. Or perhaps I’m just the peasant who tends the fields around the castle, grunts to himself, and lets the princess find her own damn way out of her tower.

When I was the age my daughter is now, ten years old, I made forts out of the couch pillows in the basement of my house. I covered the distance from the television to the Intellivision with heavy blankets propped up with the pillows. I sat enraptured, by this new technology, conducting abstract space battles on a monstrous old Zenith that I had to smack every once in a while or the picture would fade. I was happy alone, quiet, and safe in my pillow fort.

In the early ’80s, most game lives were nasty, pixelated, and short. Intellivision’s space games were particularly dire. Star Strike encouraged you to lose so you could see the “awesome destruction of an entire planet.” I enacted the Battle of Thermopylae in my thermal undies in Space Spartans. Space Spartans had “Intellivoice.” A lady who sounded like she was in a cave three blocks away speaking through a Campbell’s soup can on a string counted aliens “three aliens, two aliens, one alien…” This was cool. I spent many hours saving the planet from from the Space Armada (the Intellivision version of Space Invaders). I was so good at Space Armada that I could make it to level 99 where the Armada of Invaders from Space were both invisible and fast. Like many early video games, Space Armada was nihilistic in the extreme. No matter your skill, the armada always landed. The end. Reset.

What I learned from my Intellivision games is best summed up in the Astrosmash instruction booklet: “You’re all alone in a hostile universe of tumbling asteroids and homicidal aliens.”

I occasionally had to leave the pillow fort for Lutheran confirmation class with a reverend whose name I don’t remember. He had two fused fingers on his right hand that I used to contemplate while I was supposed to be learning Luther’s Small Catechism. Rev. Claw explained all of the things that were “most certainly true”: endless extra lives, resurrection, and a poorly realized vision of paradise. I knew better – the game always ends. Defenders can only defend for so long. The missile command cannot stop all of the missiles. If you save the princess from one tower, the bad guy will swoop in and grab her and take her to another and say something like “WAKA WAKA WAKA!” We are all alone in a hostile universe of tumbling asteroids and overly certain clergy and little girls trapped in tall towers and our own crazy synapses struggling to make something of our short lives.

Make your fortress and hide and wait until the end, or spin your Breakout paddle, throw a blip at the blocks and break out. ^[iii.]

I know my daughter is stuck on Minecraft these days because before she goes to sleep she asks me questions like: “Daddy, how do I make paper?”

“I don’t know. Sugar cane? Look it up,” I say.

“I want you to show me. I’m scared of going out of the house,” she says.

I’m not generally one for bedtime stories – I’ve got stuff and things to do! – but I give it a whirl every once in a while, when I feel like imparting some wise lesson.

There once was a scrawny little princess who lived in a windowless tower of childhood. On this tower grew many vines that crawled all over the kingdom and hung from the trees. Adventurers used these vines to swing over snapping crocodiles and avoid falling in pits. There was a duck who wandered the forest believing it was a dragon. Leave the duck alone. Why burst its bubble? There was a little man in a white suit who used to burrow in the ground and inflate the crocodiles until they exploded. In many parts of the forest there was a mailbox and the mailbox was always west of a house, no matter what direction you were looking. It was a strange forest.

Oh, and there were of course many dolphins roaming the forest. (There always has to be dolphins.) Forest dolphins. They chewed gum and danced to music that was annoying to the entire kingdom. This music was sung by an evil witch named Demilovato.

The scrawny little princess was locked in the windowless tower by a yellow-robed wizard, her father.

The princess’s yellow-robed father was a demiurge, a craftsman of the material world. And the princess was young, so she was just a semi-demiurge. One day, her father the demiurge was called away on demi-urgent business. He was on a quest to go tell the evil Demilovato to that darn noise down!

With her father gone, the princess sat alone in her tower and listened to the duck-dragon outside and thought longingly of the dolphins far below in the forest. The princess began to sing and because she was a semi-demiurge her singing created little hemi-blocks of a new reality.

My daughter mumbles, half-asleep. I am getting too abstract.

What I mean is, her singing made the world, made life, made everything – really created it. She was a powerful princess but she didn’t know it yet. She was just learning about that because her father was away on business and she was trying out her voice. She tried to create the perfect note but she couldn’t yet sing a perfect note. She tried just to produce a quaver, one eighth of a perfect note. She couldn’t quite get that note perfect, either. She tried one sixteenth of perfect note, a hemiquaver. Then she tried a demisemiquaver. That wasn’t quite perfect. Finally, she produced the beautiful, small hemidemisemiquaver. And that was enough to create a small, princess-sized diamond pickaxe that the princess used to break out of the tower, dance with the dolphins, swing over the snapping crocodiles on a vine, check the mail west of the house, and generally have a great time outside of her windowless fortress.

The yellow-robed wizard returned, having defeated the evil Demilovato with an acne-causing spell, and found the tower empty. He was happy about this. He sat in the tower all day and listened to the tiny, perfect notes of his daughter’s life rising up above the tall trees of the strange forest.

She is asleep.

Sleeping children are such a relief.

Sartre said that we love to watch other people sleeping because we imagine we can own them completely. But Sartre didn’t have kids. My daughter appears more mysterious asleep than awake. Who knows what’s locked away in there?

I tip-toe down to my study and play Limbo, a new game that looks like a mash-up of Mummenshanz, South Park, and Balinese shadow puppets. It’s relaxing to die horribly in Limbo, start again, and learn from the experience. I’m not sure, but I think this game is telling me something important about letting go.

My daughter will find her own way out of the fortress. Her games will show her how to chip away at the walls.

i. On a Saturday afternoon, a man and his daughter spend equal amounts of time playing Minecraft and wandering alone in a nearby wood. Which activity was more spiritual? Why? Really? Why?

ii. There is a great sequence in Brazil where Robert DeNiro is eaten alive by paperwork. He struggles mightily as the forms-in-triplicate attack him but paperwork always wins. Mine has been a life lived playing, listening, watching, and reading. My torso is a series of whirling hard drive discs. Encoded on those rapidly spinning magnetized metal discs are all the games I ever played from AaAaAA!!! to Zork. Flapping pages of literature are my head. I walk upon legs made of Intellivision cartridges. The entire song catalog of the Kinks forms the spine of my being. La-la-la-la-Lola. If you rummage through this body and soul of digested media, from the hardened arteries of science fiction to the poems on my wrists, you will find nothing essentially me. My essential self was lost between the jewel cases for the essential Leonard Cohen and essential Al Green. I imagine my body like DeNiro’s at the end of the scene in Brazil: dissipating and the pages, discs, records, and cartridges that created my life blowing away, leaving nothing. The essence of who I was populating landfills, second-hand stores, and yard sales.

iii. Suppose some Faustian devil whispered in your ear that he would take away all the video games you have ever played, and the memory of them, and in return would give you back the time and money you spent on them. “Imagine!” says the devil, “What else you might have done if you hadn’t devoted so much time to video games? The people unmet. The novels unwritten. The exercise undone. Just imagine. All that disposable income that wasn’t really disposable; imagine if you could get it back…”

Keep in mind that 1) you have spent a lot of money on video games and 2) you are a poor person whose cat hasn’t peed in two days. The cat probably needs to be taken to the vet (which you can’t afford). Would you do make this deal with the devil? If so, would your life be better or worse?

Image by Kevblog

This FAQ is by Parvulus Clamans.

PLEASE NOTE: Do not post this FAQ without my permission.

PERSONAL UPDATE HISTORY:

Version -0.1

• I was a Hershey bar in my father’s back pocket.
• Being unborn is exactly like death. Remember?

Version 0

• I am born, bloody and screaming. Just like every other asshole.
• I was unconcerned about the billions of years of death that preceded me and the billions that stretch out ahead of me beyond this short gasp of troubling deaf heaven with my bootless cries.

Version 0.1

• I tried to punch Robbie in the gut during gym class. He laughed at me. My punch is ineffectual.
• I thought, maybe, Suzanne would like a poem but it just made her cry because she does not like me in that way.

Version 0.2

• I wrote this FAQ after I played The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, but before I died alone in a snow bank holding a summer dandelion, onto the stem of which I had meticulously etched the secret words.

About This FAQ

This FAQ provides information on troubling existential and snack-food related questions raised in Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (W2:AOK). This FAQ does NOT cover any information that might help you play W2:AOK. I do not know what a mutagen is. I do not know how to make a bridge troll stop drinking vodka.

1.1 Character Creation

Q: I followed a dwarf to the secret hideout of a group of elf-rebels called the Scoi’atael. As the dwarf approaches he yells out “Kierk-e-gaard!” The elves creep out of the forest and give the proper password in return, “Heidegger.” Why did the writers break the fourth wall to name-drop existential philosophers?

A: Someday writers may find a way to break the fifth wall which is when they bust into your bedroom at night and tickle you.

But just think: How do they get potato chips to taste like pizza? And what kind of flavor is “loaded potato”? It sounds either like a weapon or the result of weeks of constipation. Just like these potato chips masquerade as real food, so do the characters in W2:AOK occasionally put on airs. Also you sometimes pretend to be coated in a chemical that makes you a teacher or a husband or a father. Your actual substance hidden behind a salty veneer, a husband-flavored dust… So what’s the difference between you and a gussied up potato chip?

Possible reasons for a dwarf-elf exchange that includes Heidegger and Kierkegaard:

1. The names just sound funny, like Alyosius Snuffleupagus, Mr. Bultitude, and John Darnielle.
2. The writers wish us to believe that off-screen there is an Elf/Dwarf rebel book club where they sit awkwardly on cheap couches, eat chips and salsa, and puzzle over thick Heideggerian pronouncements like The interiority of the world’s inner space unbars the Open for us.
3. W2:AOK was produced in Poland by Poles based on a Polish book series. Heidegger had many good qualities, I’m sure, but not being a Nazi wasn’t one of them. So maybe this is some kind of pay back for the invasion of Poland?
4. If Kierkegaard and Heidegger were alive today, they would be dedicated LARPers.
5. Perhaps the writers are holding a mirror up to our Selves and in that mirror we see the Self in a thousand shards of empty light that misrepresent Us. Dread of death is the only power that can arrange the broken Self-image into a single, coherent whole, sailing the now like a billowy ghost-frigate upon a vast ocean.

As an aside: If you eat a tube of Pringle’s pizza-flavored chips, you will burp a kind of metallic substance that smells of car exhaust and you will shit a thin gelatinous gruel that has no smell.

Q: When I play W2:AOK am I supposed to be Geralt of Rivia? Should my choices reflect who I am or who I think he is? Geralt is nothing like me. For one thing, I am a woman and yet I have more hair on my chest than Geralt of Rivia.

A: Here’s a scene: Geralt of Rivia raises his silver sword coated in semi-toxic sparrow potion and slices a screeching harpy with a kick and a deadly thrust. Those harpies cry like little babies. Their baby screeches fill the headphones. Babies. Babies. Babies. I have been a baby, a pre-baby, a post-baby, a clump of jizzy cells, a decision someone made once for good or ill, and here I am, conscious of the world. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

I am Geralt via mouse and keyboard and I am myself via blood, desire, and cheese-filled pretzel nuggets.

I am distracted.

The cell phone bla-chinks incessantly, reminding me when someone or somebot “mentions” me or “replies” or “retweets” or “responds” and it is a cliché to say that I am distracted from myself by such things, that we are all distracted – maybe not more but differently than we used to be. So what? Every time my phone blurts it is saying to me “you are going to die and here is a little chunk of your corpse, @yournamehere.” And then it’s on to the next distraction, the next mask, the next self.

In other words, you are as much Geralt of Rivia as you are anything else. Also, I don’t believe you are a woman.

Q: Geralt’s fancy mage pants feature a laced up penis-pouch for easy elf-whore access to his 4d4 GP tiger-eye turquoise family jewels. When not mercilessly slicing and spell-casting through monsters and henchmen, he is wooing the ladies and getting them into his preferred “doggie-style” position either with charm or money. I could never do anything like that because I have neither charm nor money nor fancy pants. There is an uncomfortable distance between his actions and those that I could actually take. How do I get over this?

A: I feel your confusion. How can I become some white-haired, horny, double-sword toting fantasy witcher? I can’t, even in a fantasy game, move beyond my essential, maddening niceness and overflow of unnecessary empathy, even for squawking baby harpies. A quick reality check brings me back to who I am: some floppy amalgam of Ralph Nader, Mr. Rogers, and Alan Alda. If there were a role-playing game about changing your sneakers, I could be the hero.

I like multiculturalism, 2% milk, tolerating different viewpoints, medium-spiced pad thai, giving people a fair chance, half-caf coffee, half-fat ice-cream, fat-free half and half, hyphens, the Principality of Liechtenstein, hippogriffs, manticores, and the slower, whinier songs of The Mountain Goats played at medium volume in a temperature controlled room.

My go-to fantasy character is a bisexual half-elf who treats everyone nicely. When I used to spin the icosahedric D&D dice as a young man my character’s name was Dag Hammarskjöld, after the Swedish economist and diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld. My motto was a quote from Dag, “If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer.” Dag (the D&D character) didn’t do much but quietly steal pouches and run away.

As Hemingway once said: “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”

Hemingway also blew his noggin’ off. That’s one way to get away from yourself.

Q: What are the secret words you mentioned above?

A: Whooopeee! I shout randomly and for no reason. Can I get a whoop-whoop? No? Yes? Whatever.

There is a tension in every Frito, every Fun-yun, every Garden Salsa flavored Triscuit. It is a tension between the actual components of the snack and what it presents to the world. Like snack foods, human beings are mainly vessels for carrying salt and presenting false impressions to the outside world while not knowing the mystery of what they really are. In the end we are all, basically, Cool Ranch Doritos growing stale in the cupboard of existence.

Which is a long way of saying there are no fucking secret words.

1.2 My Failed Self

Q: You’re a big harpy-faced cry-baby! Cry-baby! Tell me the secret words, please?

A: I loved Suzanne and poured my heart into her poem: “The sun sets upon the landscape of your body / the moisty gloaming glares upon your pinkening flesh / love me, love me when your body turns to night / and I grope for you with blind fingertips.”

She cried and said, “Parvulus, Parvulus, this is beautiful but I just don’t like you.”

I was frustrated. Crushed.

I saw Robbie the next day and punched him in his big, gooey, fat, fucking dwarf-gut. But I had never punched anyone and didn’t know how. He laughed at me. He thought I was trying to tickle him.

I was never going to be that person. The one who made a dent in the world with wit or muscle. I am no Geralt of Rivia. I am Parvulus Clamans of Riverside, Illinois.

I became quiet. And waited. In February, the winds wooshed into the suburbs from the west, across the flat prairie. The sky was a February blankity-blank. It was hurtful cold. I lay down on a dirty snowdrift in the parking lot of the down-market mall. I pulled a dandelion I had saved from the summer of the possible – possible love, possible violence – from my pocket. I etched the secret words in the stem of the dandelion with the sharp tip of an antique diaper pin.

OK, the secret words were: “I ENVY YOU.”

A gust of wind blew the dandelion into the street where it was crushed by a 1987 Chevy Impala.

1.3 Legal / Contact / Thanks

This guide is Copyright (c) 2011 Parvulus Clamans

The following website has permission to host this guide:

bygonebureau.com

All mistakes are intentional.
All communication with the author must be indirect communication.
Special thanks to CD Projekt Red for creating the world.

The royal blue Class 55 British Railways “Deltic” locomotive pulls out of York with a satisfying metallic chunk-a-chunk. The twin diesel engines whine majestically as they begin a special service, hauling a group of hooligans to a soccer game in Darlington. This is post-war England, an era of industrial brawn ruled by hulking metal behemoths that tear across the countryside and whiz past sheep and ancient stone cottages, a place where a giant diesel locomotive embodied the pinnacle of technological achievement.

Today, these locomotives are rusted, dilapidated, and relegated to museums. Our future is small. It comes to us in pads and pods and apps. Progress is pulled from the clouds. It seeps through screens in our houses. The tons of rolling steel, steam and diesel engines, that once wove the world together are forgotten relics of another era, long gone. The only place where new 55 BR Deltics gleam and flash is Railworks 2, a train-simulator for rail nuts who sit at computers and play choo-choo.

As I play with my train, my ten-year old daughter enters my office dressed in a too-small black tutu that she insists actually fits. No amount of argument will move her from her belief that her tutu still fits. Though as a matter of objective fact, it doesn’t.

She stands on one leg like a ballerina and cranes her neck to see the old locomotive pull out of the station on my computer monitor. For good reason. The trains in RW2 have been rendered with a fetishist’s eye for detail. The Deltic diesel sounds and feels solid and real. Zoom in, and exhaust fumes will obfuscate your view of the air intake grill and spinning radiator fans. Railworks 2 encourages you to aim your gaze at these mighty engines. In fact, most of my game time with RW 2 is spent playing with the many camera angles, both inside and out of the train. For many minutes, even hours, there is little else to do but consider the rain, the metronomic clinking of the track, and the power of these gorgeous, deceased diesels.

Eventually, my daughter gets bored with the idea of watching someone play a train simulator and prances off to listen to Cody Simpson. Cody Simpson is a boy with hair. That’s all I know about Cody Simpson.

It’s raining in RW2‘s England and I switch on the Deltic’s wipers and lights. I turn up the sound of the engine to drown out my daughter’s growth spurt. The train devours the track as I push the engine past 100 MPH. It must have seemed natural back then, in the age of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, that all one need do is create the best train and you would rule the world. If you can hack your way through to chapter eight of Atlas Shrugged you will find pages of orgasmic prose describing the first run of the John Galt Line. On this line rides Dagny Taggart’s wondrously metal-muscled über-train (with six diesel engines!). The train is “moral code cast in steel.” Every man who embraces his own soul has in him the capacity to create a roaring, phallic monster of industry that splits the mountains apart like “two wings… of naked rock.” Humanitarians who stop to consider others are pathetic impediments to progress. Such is the steel-cast moral code of the John Galt Line.

No government or union or consortium of railroad owners impedes my diesel engine at they do Dagny Taggart’s. However, I am told to watch out for something in this scenario that might “throw a spanner in the works” of the special passenger service. Twenty minutes of straight track and mushy, gray English countryside go by and the spanner has yet to be thrown. I check Twitter. I grab some coffee from the kitchen. I listen to the muffled strains of Cody Simpson’s kid-pop through my daughter’s bedroom door. Still no spanner. Ca-thunk, hiss, growl, ca-thunk goes the diesel. Playing Railworks 2 is like one epically long game of pop goes the weasel.

There was no happier place in my childhood than underneath my father’s model train set. I was fascinated by the spaghetti of wires that hung beneath the model town and the train signals. I liked to lay there and listen to the model Amtrak, which would run round and round until the room smelled of electrical sparks. To this day, I love trains with a deep, burning, indigestion-like feeling. Ayn Rand sees power and domination in a train. I see only joy. I intend to pass along this joy to my family. By “pass along” I mean “force them to like.”

On Father’s Day I made my wife and daughter board a retired Norfolk and Western diesel engine and be mercilessly yanked down a portion of little-used and not terribly scenic rail in central Kentucky. The old Erie-Lackawanna line carriage cars (built in the 20s and used until the 80s) were full of families indulging their fathers or, more likely, grandfathers. The windows were cracked and we were warned that they might slip from their runners and guillotine our hands if we weren’t careful. Faded advertisements for Grape Nuts and Ovaltine hung in the curved ceiling of the car.

As we slowly bounced down the track, a retiree provided description via crackling speakers. “On your right you’ll see a field. That’s the Dawkin’s farm. They don’t have horses now. Not sure where the horses went. Last year, they had horses in the field. I guess the Dawkins moved.”

About a half mile into our journey, as we pass more green fields bereft of horses, my daughter asks for the iPhone so she can play with her wedding cake simulator. I refuse. It’s my day, after all, and I can obstinately demand enjoyment of this train ride. What is Father’s Day for if not for that? Gone are the days that she loved trains just because I loved trains. I guess I was about her age when we packed up my father’s train set to make more room for hanging laundry in the basement. Like a circular model train set, my daughter will move away and instantly hate or at best barely tolerate the things I like. Then, many years from now, she will come around the papier mache mountain again and the train obsession will descend upon her. She will drag her family on the Mother’s Day train. She’ll look out of the cracked glass and think of her father. Maybe I’ll be the retired guy providing the play-by-play on the empty fields rolling by outside.

Across the aisle from us is a pair of new parents and their baby. The new father is wearing a “Who is John Galt?” t-shirt and a pair of ineffective birth-control glasses. The baby, obviously agreeing with Ayn Rand that her own happiness is the purpose of her life, refuses to be held by her father. She squirms bitterly for a minute or two before the John Galt follower and presumptive tea-partier returns her to her mother. It strikes me that someone who takes the John Galt oath, “I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine,” would not make the best father.

Who is John Galt? John Galt is the mysterious hero of Atlas Shrugged. Reading Atlas Shrugged to uncover the mystery of John Galt is about as exciting as reading the phone book to find out what happens in the Zs. Spoiler alert: John Galt, when he finally appears, makes a long-winded speech. Altruism is bad. Poor people mooch off the kindness of the rich and grow lazy with their sweet, sweet handouts. (Government cheese! Whee!) “Producers” like John Galt, people that today’s Randian psychotics call “job-creators,” will collectivize, move to Colorado, and begin a general work stoppage of wealthy capitalists. Shrug.

The Father’s Day special ambles to a rousing and clackity 10 MPH. The train doesn’t go over 10 MPH, explains the conductor, for insurance reasons. More moocher regulations keeping us from the free expression of speed…

I turn to Mr. “Who is John Galt?” and say, “Look, Ayn Rand was a crazy person who, in a fit of logorrhea, dropped a thousand page asshole manual called Atlas Shrugged.”

He stares at me through his thick glasses like a stunted mole fascinated by a yo-yo.

“Do you know who worshiped at the feet of Ayn Rand? Alan-fucking-Greenspan! And now we’re all on the Bullshit Express, it’s like the little engine that could but instead of ’I think I can!’ it says ’Hate the poor! Hate the poor! Give to the rich! Steal from the poor!’ I realize that’s much more rhetorical content than the little-engine-that-could expressed, but nevertheless screw you.”

Then I throw his glasses out of the window, fart violently, and sit down. Everyone applauds.

“On your right is a field of what I think is soybeans,” says the conductor. I wake up from my revelry. I can’t bring myself to speak across the aisle to “Who is John Galt?” Let the tea party steep as it will. I am lost in thought amid fields of possible soybeans. The moral code expressed by this slow train is quite different from the John Galt Line. We are on a barely functioning diesel in a cast-off passenger car on a short line restored by affable, retired volunteers. An elderly lady in a home-made Thomas the Tank Engine dress walks up and down the aisle offering to take pictures of the fathers on their special day and making sure that everyone is having a good time. “Of course! Wow! This is incredible!” the fathers say. Their families force a smile, snap a picture, dream of the moment the engines reverse and we inch back towards home. This is a train of families sacrificing their afternoons for their fathers. The moral code of this train is the simple enjoyment of a life together.

In Railworks 2, the spanner is finally thrown in the works. An excited soccer fan accidentally hits the emergency brake. The train squeals to a stop. The huffing, wheezing diesel engine idles on the track like a tired malamute. After waiting a few minutes, I am given the go-ahead to roll on towards Darlington.

My daughter enters still wearing the too-small tutu that she, in a fit of anti-reality thinking worthy of an Ayn Rand character, still believes fits her. She has augmented her outfit with purple eye shadow and a pair of pink sunglasses perched on her head.

“Why don’t we ride our bikes?” I ask.

“Pshaw!” she says. I believe this means “yes.”

Out on our bicycles in the summer heat, I wonder what it must be like to never live for the sake of another human being nor accept the help of another human being. To sneer at those in need. To look at a train and see not childhood, not togetherness, not the quaint choo-choo of yesteryear but rather the dominion of industry over humanity, the average soul crushed by a capitalist machine, the rule of a few rich oligarchs over the sniveling masses. Is such a life even possible? Did Ayn Rand never skin her knee and need a kiss to make things better? Did she never look underneath the trains and the towns and see the little red and blue wires connecting us all?

The wizard reeked of lutefisk and anger.

When I get home I shall weep on Simone’s sweet bosom.

I was told by my therapist to write this. How introspective does he expect a yellow-robed faceless wizard to be? I come to him with a simple issue regarding time travel and infidelity and he tells me that this isn’t really the problem. No, he says, we must find my “original choice.”

To begin: my father was a gelatinous cube creeping around in the lower levels of dungeons and my mother was a level 10 elf-wizard. My father beat me horribly. I mean, he beat me gelatinously, which is horrible in its own way. But my therapist doesn’t care. He says I’m totally free to choose what creates my essence, the face I hold to the world (which is no face!) and that even my father can’t simply beat the freedom out of me.

“So go for me and cast a spell of introspect, or whatever it is you masturbateurs do, and find the choosing that created the essence of you,” he said in his hoity-toity French accent.

Upon his suggestion, I immediately raised a wall between us. I formed an arcane stone wall by combining the elements of stone, shield, and arcane. This is the combination I use when I feel emotionally threatened. He could have sliced through it with a mallet easily enough, but instead he waited until it poofed out of existence. In this very controlled poofing, his dried flower arrangement caught on fire (he placed this arrangement on the glass table between us, as if to bring the specter of death between every word we spoke). What’s the point of dried flowers anyway? I’ll buy him a new arrangement in the idiot section of Wal-Mart next to the scented candles.

Patient caused minor conflagration / magick wall when threatened. Resulting fire consumed Simone’s flower arrangement. She will think I destroyed it just to torture her. She will be right.

Patient’s fundamental choice must be brought to light. Patient must understand this choice is prior to logic.

I think better when I create small thunderstorms by combining steam-steam-lightning-arcane-lightning. I guess I pretty much cleared out the Starbucks and ruined my laptop with this one. So I’m sitting in a Starbucks that is raining on the inside, munching on soggy biscotti and handwriting this in a Moleskine notebook. The ink runs down the page like a tiny trickle of dark blood running down a perfect white buttocks.

Huh?

A new James Taylor song is crackling through what remains of the sound system here. Fuck. I want to kill somebody. He sounds like fucking Mrs. Butterworth singing In the Midnight Hour. Remember when JT was cool? “If I’m feeling edgy there’s a chick who’s paid to be my slave / she’ll hit me with a needle if she thinks I’m trying to misbehave.”

Here it is: in my timeline my lover, the green-robed wizard, made love with Jormungandr the snake-beast of Fornskogur Forest just yesterday. In her time-line it was years ago. It’s driving me crazy. Who can compete with a fucking snake-beast? She says she barely remembers his tingling poison darts, his ability to burrow “deep, deep, deep” and his fun but painful tackling maneuver.

Sounds like she remembers Jormungandr the snake-beast of Fornskogur Forest just fine.

I sprayed her with a torrent of water from my yellow-cloaked hands. Then I sprayed her with cold and froze her solid. Boy am I in for it when she thaws. Why do I always do this to myself? Freeze the ones I love? I understand that I use my control of the elements to keep people at a distance. What am I afraid of?

My therapist says that I have to find the origin of this problem but not in something that was done to me or in a dream. Rather in something that I did. Some choice I made.

Perhaps I crawled out of the womb with a wandering and lonely heart and never made a choice in my life. Perhaps I am a thousand rolls of a thousand dice and nothing more.

The patient believes his libido is a mysterious place he can visit in dreams. He doesn’t understand that his essence is prior to his fixations.

Tonight, I will watch Simone sleep and think of her as my possession, like a clock or a dried flower arrangement. She will love me completely.

I have been many things before I was a yellow-robed, faceless wizard. I am, after all, an elemental. The experiences pile up and must go somewhere. I always supposed those years in Sosaria, Skara Brae, and Llylgamyn disappeared into my dreams and subconscious. I can barely remember them. But my therapist told me that my subconscious mind was a figment of my imagination.

So this morning I made the coffee without a subconscious. The pot was no longer shaped like my lover’s sweet, unfaithful buttocks. I didn’t pour mother’s milk into my coffee cup. The coffee grounds did not remind me of the cold earth where I lay naked and played doctor with little Claudia and the other kids from the subdivision. Claudia was so small that her doctor’s uniform swamped her tiny frame. Her face covered in a surgical mask, she slowly approached my naked buttocks with the sharp pin she had stolen from her mother’s sewing kit. The other kids laughed and laughed as they watched me squeal in anticipation of the needle pressing and breaking into my naked flesh. I was so excited that I cast an area spell of fire and stone that burnt the soles of the children’s tiny feet. They scampered away like little mice. Except for Claudia. She could handle fire. She pricked me with the needle and I was in love. To this day, I always go for the faceless types in oversize clothes.

According to my therapist, that’s not the source of my problems!

Jormungandr. Jormungandr. Jormungandr. Thy very name is like a handful of spiked marbles in my mouth. The green-robed wizard is mine, will always be mine, always has been mine — even before I knew her; from her first breath to her last. I dream of you two together, in flagrente delicto, and I am a malignant beholder — I am nothing but an eye and six impotent tentacles, hovering in the air, watching as she betrays me, sad lightning bolts dripping from my monstrous body to the green grass of Fornskogur Forest.

• Good lord his dreams are boring!

• Sour cream.
• Breading of some sort… Panko?
• Fat-free half and half (for Simone; she will hate me elegantly tonight!)
• His jealousy derives from his inability to own the green-robed wizard. It is not possible to own something that is completely free.
• Green beans?

This is what I have discovered. I have discovered that I am a confused jumble of sentient meat that staggers forward in time at the whim of the world. More acted upon than acting. Like Siddhartha I see the river of time but instead of gaining enlightenment, I jump in the river and disappear. Yellow-robed wizards cannot swim. The river is where my soul resides. Unknown, beneath the surface of the rushing water of time. I am a stranger, an avatar, a block of pixels. When I move, the world moves beneath my feet but I stay still. I am searching for a choice; something I did that signifies the fundamental characteristic of my being. I am playing 52-pick-up with memories, but they won’t fit back in the deck; the narrative won’t hit the proper beats; there is no thread or trail of breadcrumbs to help me out of the maze. If I never made a choice, I never existed.

Patient appears to be spraying a steamy mist from the folds of his yellow robe. It reeks of sweat and fish. We are getting somewhere.

A wizard who cannot control his thunderstorms is not welcome anywhere. I am banned from Starbucks. I guess I’ll just wander around the mall. It seems that wherever I go, I must always go forward. I cannot return to the past. I mean, I literally cannot go back — I get stuck on the bottom of the screen. I guess it has been this way ever since I left my gelatinous father and Elvin mother behind in Sosaria. You should have seen me sail away! That was the most magnificent thing I ever did: take off alone from the city of Yew in Eastern Sosaria, my father slobbering on the shore and my mother sending me a sweet west wind of Elvin magic. Even Claudia was there, dressed in an oversized suit of armor and slumped against a rock. I assume she was crying. I sailed the Sosarian sea alone: to the left-arrow, left-arrow, left-arrow I went sailing across the screen of the world and never looked back.

This was the choice that made me.

Now I sail upon a vast inward sea with a time-traveling green-robed wizard woman. And together we will keep going, further into anger, jealousy, and frustration until one of us just stops and says, “Enough! We will anchor here and begin our lives.”

Here she comes, dripping wet and cold. I wonder what her face is like. Her original face from before she was born. I will find it by loving her as completely as I know how.

She thinks she is being sly, slinking from the food court as if she is not preparing a fireball for me. I will not run. I will stand here by the very flammable wicker furniture and dried flower arrangements of this Pier 1 Imports store. My life is just one spark away from going up in flames. It always has been.

I see she is peppering her fireball with lightning. I will not leave this pier. Jormungandr would hide in the ground. I am not Jormungandr. I will not raise a shield or an arcane wall. This time, I will stop running.

“Please, my green-robed love, see me as I am and put out your angry flames,” I said.

And I put down my yellow hood. There are not enough pixels to generate such a wonder as my actual, human face. I caused the entire world to hiccup and jump. We all went crashing to the desktop. My lover, my therapist, the mall, the seas of Sosaria, the world blinked, turned blue, and disappeared. I write this now from the spare memory of an overtaxed universe. When we re-boot, we shall be wonderful together. We shall disrobe, my love and I.

I made a back-up of the yellow-robed wizard’s notebook by re-writing it in blood, ink, and flower ash upon ancient parchment and then digitizing it. Simone will be proud of me, if she ever wakes up. If she does not, she will be a decaying clock lying beautifully upon my bed.

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of an old, tastefully restored farm house. There is a pretty lake here. There is a college town ten miles away where people think highly of you. Do they envy you? Yes. You have your own office and a hybrid vehicle. You are highly paid to say vaguely important things. You are sexually satisfied. There is a mailbox here.

> Open Mailbox

There is a note in the mailbox. The front of the note has your address and the message: “Warning! Secret of your life inside this note! Do not read!”

> Go East

Doorway of House
As you approach the house a woman’s voice calls out from inside: “Slippery fortune plays random games with us.” The house changes. The house is no longer a farm house. It is not near a lake. The house is not a house; it is a cheaply-constructed townhouse. People do not think of you very much nor do they envy you. You are not paid well to say things of vague importance. You have one year left to live. You have been under the influence of a FANTASIZE spell.

> Enter House

Hallway
This is a dark, narrow hallway that accentuates your recent weight gain. To the east is an office. To the south is a kitchen. You smell Frobozz brand turkey bacon frying on the electric stove.

> Enter Kitchen

Kitchen
Lady Philosophy is here. She is an attractive woman frying turkey bacon for use as a garnish on turkey meatloaf. Her beautiful dress is meticulously woven. The dress was once a glittering wonder but is now gray and worn like the dress of an unvisited cemetery angel. The word “Theory” is embroidered on the top of her dress. On the hem of her dress is the word “Practice.”

To the east is an office, to the south is the dining room.

> Speak Woman

Philosophy says, “You have neglected me for so long, why should I come to you now? For years you have turned your back on rational thought and let yourself be led by chance and desire. When you had no need to confront death, you cast me aside. And now that you are troubled you have need of me again? Go away.”

> Remove Dress

Can be done in theory, but not in practice.

> Go East

Office
You enter the office. There is an Apple ][e computer here. It's the one your father bought you in 1983. Text can be displayed in either 40 columns or 80 columns. Also, this model features lowercase letters.

> Turn on computer

The computer is on.

> Type “C:\> Run 'EFPX'”

Office
You are sitting in an office. You now have less than one year to live.

> Verbose
You are sitting in an office of hand-me-down and Goodwill furniture. Your office features hand-made and hastily spray-painted bookshelves and milk crates full of the type of science-fiction and philosophy books that repel most sane women.

> I

You have:

A note that contains the secret meaning of your life.

> Go West

Kitchen
Philosophy is baking a turkeyloaf. She has finished cooking the turkey bacon.

> Examine Bacon

You track the lines of your life on the turkey bacon’s fake marbling of fake fat. There you see choices you might have made. There were times full of possibility for fame, fortune, and adventure. But now you see yourself stuck in one dark, final meat-like knot of the fakon. “Where there is bacon substitute, there is hope,” says Philosophy. “Also, you should exercise.”

> Examine Loaf

The loaf contains the following ingredients: ground turkey, salt, onion, humility, cayenne, self-awareness, carrot, chili powder, contentedness, kosher salt, egg, flux and permanence.

> Eat Loaf

Philosophy says, “You ignored me when I wasn’t needed. Now you want to eat in the kitchen? Go away.”

> Enter Dining Room

Dining Room
This is a small, brightly lit and oddly-angled dining room that contains a card table and some candles.

> Off light

It is pitch dark. You are unlikely to be eaten by a grue, but you might trip over something.

> Light candle

Instant atmosphere! Philosophy enters and places her turkeyloaf in front of you. She sits down at the card table with you. Philosophy says, “You are anxious because others are more successful than you. Well, why didn’t you become a banker? It’s a good time for bankers, you know. Do you think that bankers are happier than you are? Wealth, power, and fame are the gifts of fortune and they can be taken away at any moment. They will not help you as you approach the end. ”

> Eat Turkeyloaf

Philosophy snatches away the turkeyloaf. She says, “Now that you are dying, you bemoan your choices and search me out for solace. You are in the sway of two delusions. In one you believe yourself to be worse off than others, less happy, disregarded by cruel fortune. In the other you believe yourself more special than others and are crushed to find that you are nothing more than a heap of sagging muscle and thickening blood. You have been chosen for nothing more or less than life and must play by the same rules as all other players.”

> Screw you

Most illogical, Captain.

> Arrrgh!!!

I don’t understand “Arrrgh!!!”

> Attack Philosophy with Turkeyloaf

The gnome of Zurich appears in a puff of smoke, grabs the turkeyloaf before it hits Philosophy, and puts it back on the plate. He checks his watch, whistles a few bars of the “Mission:Impossible” theme and disappears again.

> Speak Philosophy

“The real jewel-encrusted eggs have been in your mind all along. Let me put this in terms you can understand. Remember the Apple ][e that used to sit in your boyhood room? Your forays into tangles of logic on the green screen? If yes, then:

REM * Socrates Considers Planet X *
CLEAR
DIM a (x = Time, y = Will, z =Action)
DIM b (m = Fortune, Mystery, Chance)
a (x * y * z)+ b (m) = everything you will ever do and what it means (number not to exceed 69,105)
IF y > 0 THEN you will find a song.
REM * There can be no action without desire.
IF x * y * z + m = your song THEN another heart will whisper back.
FLASH PRINT “Two moose chewing gum beneath a purple sky.”
NORMAL PRINT “True love. Content.”

> Eat turkeyloaf

“I suppose you expected something earth-shattering from Philosophy’s turkeyloaf?”

> Say Yes

“Well, the humility is the important ingredient. A dash of that and you will become yourself again. Who could ever take you away from yourself but yourself? That’s what I said to Boethius 1,500 years ago and it seemed to help him. Boethius was unjustly thrown prison and had one year of horrible deprivation to endure before being dragged around town by his own entrails. You have blocked arteries from eating too much saturated fat. Who’s got it worse?”

> Read note

Are you sure? This note contains the secret mystery of your life.

> Read note

The note says, “This page intentionally left blank,”

> Quit

Your score is 300 (total of 350 points) in 22 moves.
This gives you the ranking of intermediate dork.
Do you wish to leave the game? Y is affirmative: >

Illustrations by Hallie Bateman

Truck stop hot dogs slowly twirl under a yellow heat-lamp. A curdled mass of pizza sinks into greasy wax paper like a decomposing animal. If you want something krispy, kwik, or krazy, this is the place. I stir flavored kreme into a styrofoam cup of coffee. The coffee has the aroma of singed hair and grease. It tastes vaguely metallic. As soon as the near-scalding liquid touches my tongue I am instantly transported to childhood, the coffee acting like one of Proust’s madeleines. “The taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment…”

I am eleven or so. I am reading Salem’s Lot and sucking on my jacket zipper in the back seat of our blue Chevy Impala. My mother glances back and sees the cover of my book, which features a stone-faced angelic girl with a trickle of bright red blood sliding down her chin. The girl doesn’t care at all about wiping the blood from her chin. She is a soulless undead nightmare creature and doesn’t know the first thing about manners.

Mother’s clip-on earrings read “war is not healthy for children and other living things” (they are big earrings) and they scratch against her light brown windbreaker as she turns to view her hellspawn in the back seat, sinking into the blue velour and happily freaked out by Stephen King’s latest opus.

The dead child in Salem’s Lot is scraping its yellow fingernails on the bedroom window when mother says, “Maybe soon your vampire phase will be over.”

Mother never yells or screams, but pushes those volatile emotions into a dripping contempt that oozes, like rancid Dutch Lady condensed milk, upon all that I hold dear. Mother’s comment makes me afraid of myself — could this fascination be just a phase? Will I cease to enjoy blood, guts, nudity, explosions, aliens, bugs, demons, projectile vomiting (and other fluids), barbarians, werewolves, the undead? Will all my vampires melt to dust in the blood-red dawn of puberty?

Horrified, I begin to consume horror and sci-fi at an ever greater clip from that point on. I fear the day that I might turn, as Donald Sutherland does at the end of the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, into a screeching pod person who no longer has the capacity to enjoy an exploding head or a mutant impaled upon a large cactus.

Many years later I am sliding into Creeps in the first-person shooter Bulletstorm and exploding them with my shaking and engorged Penetrator drill-gun. What joy! In the adrenaline rush, I can taste the zipper of childhood and feel the Chevy shake beneath me. Just as children amuse themselves by steeping gel-encased sponge toys in water until they stretch themselves, bend, and become distinctive shapes like dinosaurs, farm animals, or Miley Cyrus, so in this moment all the gory entrails of my past life spring into being: there are the glorious crimson innards in Day of the Dead; there goes young Sigourney Weaver running through a spaceship in her underwear in Alien; there I am peeking through my fingers, barely able to watch An American Werewolf in London. My older sister has ditched a date and taken me to see it (probably I am too young, but that makes it all the better). The memories are sweetened by the taste of the forbidden.

Standing in the truck stop, I visit these memories with sincere affection and believe in my revelries that this must be the best of all possible worlds.

“The increase in rapes can be attributed in large part to the playing out of [sexual] scenes in video games,” says Dr. Carole Liberman in a Fox News report warning parents of the potential for Bulletstorm to create sexual sociopaths. There are two words in this sentence with which I agree, “can” and “be.” “Can be” is useful to people who don’t know what they are talking about. Drop it in any sentence and it will sit and pretend to be meaningful. For instance:

The increase in rapes — I can’t even write the phrase, honestly, without doing some fact-checking which leads me to wonder where this increase has occurred except in the mind of Dr. Carole Liberman and the Congo, where they play Bulletstorm all the time I’m sure — anyway, let’s go with it: The increase in rapes can be attributed in large part to increased use of the Shake Weight for men, steamed kale, and jeggings.

It’s fun to make shit up.

I don’t believe that I played out any “sexual situations” in Bulletstorm. Perhaps Dr. Liberman and I have differing views on what constitutes sex. I admit that I kicked the assplate off of a mutant miniboss and shot him in his glowing purple anus. I even grinned slightly when I got +100 points and the news that I had performed the “Fire in the Hole” skillshot. This Bulletstorm skillshot is pretty far from anything I’ve ever experienced as a “sexual situation.” The resulting assplosion, however, was rendered with real love.

As poodle-haired philosopher/calculator Gottfried Leibniz originally discovered 10 years after Newton, one can put any two things together and describe the relationship of those two things in terms of the change the input causes upon the output. This is the source of much amusement among people who find amusement in such things. (Please see here and here.) Input “violent” video games and out comes “rape.” Of course there is a long tradition of positing these kinds of false relationships: input Tropic of Cancer, Black Sabbath, Ellen DeGeneres, Rick Santorum and you get excessive masturbation, devil worship, lesbians, and a frothy fecal matter/lube mixture, respectively. Only in the last item of the series does the output have a causal relationship with the input. Further, there isn’t anything necessarily immoral about an evening of masturbation, devil worship, lesbians and santorum. Sounds like a party.

Santorum (the man, not the mixture) has come out against violence in video games. Violence in video games is bad, he claims, because it is “depicted without consequence.” On the contrary, steering a charged head-hunter bullet into the balls of a diving Creeper and then exploding that bullet and taking out three other Creepers has a very serious consequence: at least +300 points which can then be spent upgrading your head-hunter gun for ever larger explosions. I am sorry that Dr. Liberman and former Senator Santorum can’t enjoy such wonders. The light in Bulletstorm is Vemeer-like, the color-palette exquisite, the exploding mutants balletic, the odd single-entendres so nonsensical and un-friggin-believable that they kill your dick (in a good way).

When Santorum and Dr. Liberman turn life into a game they are doing a disservice to both games and life. It seems hardly worth pointing out the difference between games and life to someone who insists on equating the two. The sinister effect of their nattering drains actual horror and violence of its complexity and at the same time scares people away from the comforting, curative qualities of fictional blood spatter.

Tell the boy reading Salem’s Lot in the backseat of the Chevy Impala not to worry. Soon, real horrors will heap upon him as they do everyone and the horrors of games and fiction and movies will be a comfort and release. Some nights I am restless. The scar on my wrist twists and turns into the eyes of a lost child. Old, yellowed bruises re-appear and flourish, blooming like sick marriages before fading. I feel lost. Something is missing — someone I love. I sense the lack of her body in my bed and I fling awake. Am I awake? There is a knocking or a scratching. The police are at the door again. I can just make out a woman’s face through the window of an ambulance. What is she screaming about? I feel nauseous. Tense. Am I a lost child? No, I am the father now. Now the eyes of the dead have me in their sights and they will come crowding into my thoughts. This is the real zombie feast: the memories of the dead shuffling back to eat my rest. The friend resting his head against the door, hanging from a belt wrapped around the doorknob, breathing his last. A sinus cancer growing behind the eyes of another friend. Another friend grown thin with despair since his child was killed. Always that child coming back to scratch at the window. The little tuft of baby hair upon the lifeless skull. Please let me awaken before the eyes turn to me.

My vampire phase is not over and can never be over for as long as I have a memory that can raise the dead.

There will always be pod-people who want to frighten us away from Bulletstorm, from gore and viscera and fun, from imagination and fear and beautiful destruction, from video games that celebrate our humanity by celebrating the splashing, gushing, gory demise of our meatbags when at last our weak sausage casings are punctured.

Let us reject these prudes. Or as Grayson Hunt, the hero of Bulletstorm might say, these “cockfucker rimjob pieces of shit.” Life is one long, hard dick joke. Let us not close our eyes and turn our faces away before the climax. Let us not spit out the horrible, salty essence of life. Let us swallow it instead. Swallow it whole, like the soul swallowers in Evil Dead 2 swallow souls. And when that awkward, zipper-sucking little boy lays down as an awkward old man, sucking on oxygen and force fed through a tube, I hope he will be ready to take his final rest. I hope he will be visited by the demons of a life lived in all its spewing wonder. And as a death rattle descends upon him, I hope he has a chance to eke out these final words: “Yeah! The dance of death, mothas!”

I sometimes carry with me the lack of a house I once lived in. Picture a house on a mountainside in the jungle overlooking the ocean. Picture a little girl peeing off of the second floor balcony every morning; claiming the world for her own. Now take the house away. Change the girl so that she faces the world from inside a room with the door closed and the YouTube Taylor Swift channel blaring. She could be in that room for hours while I retire to my computer, re-creating our old house in Minecraft, placing a waterfall on the balcony, trying to fill the emptiness with an approximation.

I was born in Minecraft alone and without defense. Browse the nerd-ecomiums about this game and you will find that everyone has a narrative about how they survived their first day. It is a powerful experience to be cast into Minecraft‘s blocky paradise without direction or preparation. On my first day, I thought the game was about punching pigs. So I punched pigs. Then night fell and a demon, kind of like a Hong-Kong hopping vampire, crept toward me in my loneliest loneliness and exploded, saying (at least in my narrative): “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more.” In other words: respawn or quit to title.

Another morning in Minecraft and with the help of fan-made survival manuals I am now equipped to survive the nightly night of the demons. Safety ensured, I must climb my pyramid of needs toward Minecraftian self-actualization. But what is that, exactly? What do I do now? In Minecraft, as in Sartre, existence really does precede essence. There is no goal, no point, no reason at all in this godless universe for playing Minecraft. But then, there is no point to playing with blocks either. There are things you can do with blocks. There are things you can do in Minecraft. You can find an elusive saddle in an underground monster lair and use it to ride a pig. But you don’t get anything — no badge or narrative or points to spend at an online store — for riding a pig. Pig riding is an end in itself. When you have accomplished it, that is simply how you chose to live your Minecraft life. Quit to title. You are your life and nothing else, pig rider.

I have completed my monument to concrete nothingness in Minecraft. It is not as spectacular as the Starship Enterprise or as genius as a working 16-bit CPU. It’s a memory in block-form, a simple house built of cobblestone, wood, and wool dyed with lapis lazuli (a difficult ore to mine, only found deep beneath the surface).

Years ago when we lived in this house, my daughter went through a period where she could invest any inanimate object with life. We didn’t have a lot of toys but she was three and didn’t seem to care. She had a handful of change, mostly dimes and nickels, that she thought of as her baby. She took her “baby” to the video store, which was a pile of stones in front of a wooden post in a little hut we had in front of our house. We could create together endlessly in this hut — the rocks and posts were never castles (she wasn’t that kind of girl) but more ordinary buildings like banks and grocery stores. The edge of the hut was the garbage dump. She loved the dump because it was controlled by a pack of cute, feral cats and because on our weekly excursions to the dump we always got ice cream. She would lean over the edge of a little pier across from the dump and let the ice cream drip into the ocean. Purple and yellow fish would dart from the rocks and eat the ice cream drips. Back at home she would re-create the dump trip in our hut and hold her little coin baby up to see the fish .

One day while we played in the hut, she dropped her baby. The look of horror on her face as her baby dripped, coin by coin, into the mud and spread out beneath us as nothing more than, say, 63 cents, still haunts me years later. There was no consoling her for the loss of this baby. Loose change never again became a baby. She learned something horrifying and essential about life in that moment. Sartre needed over 600 pages in Being and Nothingness to communicate what was in my three-year-old daughter’s look. She now held the absence of a baby in her hands.

Legos come in two distinct philosophical stances. Traditional existentialist Legos present you with a box of colored, stacking bricks and no reason for being. For those who feel that life has a set purpose and innate, god-given reasons for being, there are themed Lego sets. No video game before Minecraft has presented the player with a world as simple, beautiful, and engaging as a box of random Legos or wooden blocks or loose change or sticks or shells… toys whose only purpose is to soak up human consciousness and light into being upon a human whim.

Minecraft‘s creator, a Swede named Markus “Notch” Persson, appears genuinely nonplussed by the success of his game — an unfinished product that looks like something that I played in 1984 and only has two short, soporific synthesizer doodles for a “soundtrack.” He has sold about 1.2 million copies of Minecraft and is so internet-popular that he causes bearded men to to jump up and down and make crazed masturbatory mining motions at the very mention of his name. Meanwhile, Notch is the kind of guy who uses his newfound wealth to take his mother on vacation. The popularity of the game makes perfect sense as I ride my pig in front of my cobblestone memory palace. The sun is setting, so I need to get inside before the creepers come. Fear is essential to action, after all. Life would be dull without creepers.

It’s bed time in the real world as well. So I rouse myself from Minecraft and approach my daughter’s closed door — it doesn’t yet actually say “keep out” but the various pop idols taped there seem to strongly suggest that I am not as welcome as I once was. I knock twice and open the door.

She isn’t there.

Of course, she’s at her friend’s house tonight. I had forgotten. The lack of a little girl to tuck in and kiss goodnight fills her room. Taylor Swift, still unravish’d bride of quietness, looks down upon the my daughter’s empty bed from her perch on the wall. Sweet, unheard melodies fill the empty air.

“Why are you stuck on that?” my daughter asks me as I spend my Christmas break becoming slightly less sucky at Battlefield Bad Company 2: Vietnam, a multi-player shooter from gaming behemoth Electronic Arts.

I stare at the screen, concentrating on blowing up an enemy tank. I say in a zombie monotone, “I don’t know.”

But I do know. It feels good to kill in an amoral virtual jungle. It supplies temporary meaning to my life. Like a monk lost in contemplation, I forget the troubles and pressures of Samsara. I dive into the game for the same reason a monk dives into religion: because I dread my own freedom. Kierkegaard wrote, “He whose eye chances to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy.” The abyss is freedom: moral freedom, the freedom of “I could…” as in “I could show my junk on Chatroulette.” The abyss is there in the corner of my eye each day that I strap on my seat belt to head to work (I could drive the car into a ditch) or wait in line at the grocery store (I could jab this plastic spork into that old lady’s neck) or really any time that I am doing what I am supposed to be doing — which is why BFBC2V is such a release. The game is just kill kill kill and no consequence.

Thanks to my genuine Vietnam experience, I look back now with nostalgia to my 0th year of life, 1970. The music was angry, the populace was riled, and I happily farted in public. Meanwhile, Richard Nixon presided over an unpopular, nasty war that featured unprecedented (and never to be repeated) press coverage and forced enlistment of any male unlucky enough to be in their late teens. (In fact, as I learned via early synthesizer and freaky looping in the ‘80s, the average age of the Vietnam soldier was n-n-n-n-nineteen.)

Today’s most jowly villain is no Nixon. He’s glassy-eyed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Sen. McConnell might be a dick, but he isn’t particularly tricky. He’s right out there in public, widening the income gap in America to something approaching Czarist Russia. But the serfs will not riot nor mock; will not protest nor strike; will not sit-in nor die-in. The working poor of McConnell’s state of Kentucky, of which I am a member, are content to patiently suck on cancer sticks and gaze at the apocalyptic death-scape created by removing entire fucking mountains. The occasional toxic mud slide sloughing off of what used to be a hill doesn’t move me from my usual weekday meal of Kentucky hot brown, Ale8, and squirrel cracklins. While I escape into Bad Company’s faux-Vietnam, our sons and daughters sign up to escape into Afghanistan and Iraq. Is the bad economy a kind of de-facto draft of the poor and under-educated? As Sam Harris writes, “Just how much inequality can free people endure?” Indeed.

Is it the lack of a draft that has caused our current wars (I’m sorry, “conflicts”) in Iraq and Afghanistan to seem so abstract and impersonal? No time to dwell on this. I’m deep in the jungle and Charlie is everywhere. Or maybe they are American GIs. Unlike real life, in Battlefield Bad Company 2: Vietnam, I find it hard to understand if I am Vietnamese or not. With the bullets flying, helicopters on the prowl, and tanks rumbling through burnt-out villages, there is little time to stop and look in the mirror. As a nod to multi-culti fairness, there is no functional difference between being Vietnamese or American in BFBC2V. And after each round of the game, you are forced to switch sides so as not to bear a xenophobic grudge for too long. But I signed up for a morally repugnant experience. I want to wallow in it. I want to experience how far off the grid of good taste a game can go and what I get has all the balls of an Elmo tooth-brushing game?

I can torch thatched huts with my flame thrower. This is a pretty sight but is fleetingly glimpsed before — thwonk — a sniper snipes my head clean off and I am dead again. What happens to me in BFBC2V is that I die. Repeatedly. BFBC2V is a massively multiplayer team-based shooter. This means that when you fire up your first game, you may find yourself surrounded by 14-year-old boys who should be doing their homework. Said boys have spent about 1,000 more hours than I have (what with my job and family getting in the way) learning every nuance of the game. I died over twenty times before racking up a single kill. But that kill was sweet. Sweet as a first kiss or a lilting aria. And now, I wanna kill, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL!

Kill is what I mean to do as I crouch in the upper tier of what were once the beautiful cascading steppes of a mountainside rice field. An enemy tank is tearing up a muddy road, grinding gears as it lumbers up the hill in an attempt to capture our flag. I want to concentrate on the game but am haunted by a photograph of the monstrous cavity that is Mitch McConnell’s nostril. There is the abyss again. Up, up, we go, out of the game and inside Mitch McConnell’s head where there is no right or wrong.

It is difficult to accept that a man like Sen. McConnell, a not entirely dumb person, can actually believe saving ga-jillionaires from even modest taxes somehow “helps” the average Kentuckian. Therefore, McConnell must be an “aesthete,” a man of no fixed principle who changes his moral judgments on self-serving whims the way, to use Kierkegaard’s metaphor, a farmer rotates his crops. Nixon, in contrast, had a guiding moral principle in his life: he was racist. It may be a repugnant principle but at least he never had to ask himself, “How should I act?” Jews — immoral bastards. Negroes – live like a bunch of dogs. Indians – if some get shot, that’s too goddam bad. Nixon ate his breakfast as a racist. He masturbated in his nightgown as a racist. He made a choice to live his life according to a moral code and everything else in his life flowed from that choice. He was, in short, a principled asshole as opposed to McConnell who is merely a plain asshole.

In Kierkegaard’s scheme McConnell is like most of us. We are people who grow bored easily with one pleasure, and change to another, from greed to sex to drugs to God to Xbox to typing “First!” in the comment box to wearing rabbit costumes in a sexual way and on and on, our boredom causing “infinite momentum for making discoveries.” At some point we may, like Nixon, choose to have a guiding principle or perhaps we’ll just die, still grasping at the last pleasure, still running from boredom.

“Daddy, I’ve got nothing to do,” my daughter proclaims.

“Life, friends, is boring,” I say.

“Daddy, c’mon! Are you still stuck on that?”

Yes, I will be in BFBC2V for at least a week. While crouched in the virtual bamboo clutching my machine gun, the world has set rules and few choices. My purpose is to point and shoot. My kill-to-death ratio is now up to about .25, meaning that I die four times for each kill I make. This, I think, is important progress in my life. I don’t have time to be bothered by children.

When the game hiccups and dies because of a still unexplained and possibly sabotage-related internet outage, there’s the abyss again. It creeps, if an abyss can be said to creep, like the toxic ooze that sloughs off Kentucky’s mountains. BFBC2V, with its skimpy offering of five playable maps, will not distract me for too long. I must set up the next distraction; must stave off a reckoning with the abyss. I could, perhaps, live my life with the guiding principle that income equality is the most important feature of a stable democracy. More income equality, even a little bit more — like taxing the wealthiest at, say, the same rates as in 1970 — would mean more flourishing for all Americans; better lives. You may not agree but it is at least a guiding principle and one, I think, better than racism. Or I could fire up the next distraction. I could trust that Noah’s ark might save us from our current flood of poverty and despair. If Vietnam is not in poor enough taste to rile me, perhaps I could play as a Taliban in Medal of Honor.

Is it a bad thing to pretend to be in Vietnam as represented by BFBC2V? Does playing it somehow diminish or desecrate or lessen the human toll of the actual war? Is BFBC2V the wrong way to spend an afternoon? I don’t think so. It’s fun. It’s artful. It’s a balanced game that never feels like anything but a game. Yet I can’t get over the feeling that as we scamper through this virtual war my fellow squad members and I are being pwn3d in reality. We are pwn3d by Mitch who is pwn3d by corporations who pwn our democracy and rack up the kills while we flail about like nOObs.

I plug in the internet router that mysteriously and of its own accord became unplugged. I re-boot Vietnam and amidst the whirr of bullets, I press the j key to talk to my fellow players. I type: “Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked?”

“WTF?” they reply.