I like games. I think life is a game. Look at what I’m wearing. I pretty much just stuck with the first pile of crap I found on the ground in the tutorial area. Pair of dickies, some sort of shirt, shaved head. I also eat mostly just whatever I find on the ground or the internet. Like the Buddha, but not as handsome or dead.
I wrote a book that includes how to eat and travel for free if you have to. It is tucked in between the chapter about eating mushrooms and getting arrested at the Warped Tour and the one about monkeys stealing all the fruit out of my hotel room in Delhi. I think. I don’t read my own books. I was there.
It’s fairly obvious I treat life as a game, including video games. I used to think I was good at video games. I’ve been playing them for forty years. All that changed with the arrival of Elden Ring.
For those who have had sex and might not know what that is, it is the latest in a series of games marketed as deeply challenging. Elden Ring is a mostly perfect video game and to many it proves difficult but satisfying to work through. Like raising kids, but you never have to bail Elden Ring out of jail. You never have to drive Elden Ring to the clinic to get some clap cleared up. No one gets hurt but you.
I beat the pants off it, finished everything it had to offer. Delved every dungeon, slew all there was to slew. I collected everything, I talked to every character. I beat most the challenges in the game naked, both in-game and on the couch.
This epic, challenging experience proved mostly relaxing. Deciphering its cryptic storyline and disentangling the Old English influences on the thing made for an interactive puzzle on top of the rock-hard control scheme and feel of movement in the game.
It’s a thrill to play and conquer it.
But I did so with a PlayStation controller. The kind that just fits in your hands and has some buttons on it. The traditional manner of interacting with a video game console. To some maniacs out there, this isn't good enough. So, they beat the bloody thing top to bottom using a Dance Dance Revolution pad. Again, for those with wet dicks, this is a video game controller. But instead of your hands, you use your feet.
It is somehow more challenging than it sounds. Especially for white people. There is no hope whatsoever of someone named Kyle being able to do this, for instance. The best I’ve seen from a honky in that category is a cracker co-worker completing Kabuki Warriors start to finish by slapping the controller on their ass. Not a lot of grace there. Not a lot of game, either. But a whole lot of ass.
I wonder what genetic memory triggers the desire to slap an Xbox controller on your rump, if any. Or what markers ensure I love video games and potatoes. Dave Chappelle once said he thought he loved fried chicken because it was delicious. But I know I love potatoes because of trauma and genetics. At least, I do for this article.
Genetic memory is a remnant of our ancestor’s memories and experiences lingering in us. Think Dune. These landmines lay somewhere in us, just waiting to get stepped on by a soon to be cancelled monster who used the C-word in their book, like, eight times. There is quite a bit of dispute over genetic memory being real or not, but I don't care.
Genetic memory could be a thing, because it’s funny. Some trigger comes along and makes you act like one of your savage, neanderthal ancestors. Whenever I hear a Flogging Molly song I have an intense urge to blow up babies until the English fuck off so I can start a republic. I don’t do that, to be clear. But I feel like I should be doing that for some reason.
Alternatively, I assume most folks of English descent start polishing their muzzles anytime someone seems a splash too Catholic. The Scots see a wall and start painting themselves and their tallywackers blue. I got those too. Happily, I am mostly American, so at least that and the Irish can gang up and smear the monarchists in between getting entirely too drunk and violent.
It’s a weird place to be in to have all these triggers living in my DNA at the same time. None of them offer aid with video games. The only thing my DNAs agree on is the French kind of smell and are silly and belong on the other side of a large body of water. Except Democracy In America guy. Alexis de Tocqueville. Literally, The Token Frenchman.
I took a semester of French in seventh grade and I’m pretty sure that's correct. Anyway, he’s all right.
But I can't act like my ancestors, that’s not allowed anymore. I can't even act like some of my contemporaries. Blowing up babies is how one starts a government and I’m super not into that right now. I just got a kitten, and it makes me realize those babies might have had kittens too. Now those kittens have no babies.
We're supposed to be better than those who came before us. That is the explicit goal. Not in a smug, Seattle progressive way, just better. Whatever that means to you. That’s fine with me. Not blowing up babies is a pretty low bar even for 2022. But I have to do better than that. I must also strive to not eat or otherwise mulch them in other ways, too.
Eating a baby probably qualifies as trauma. I don't know. But I avoid doing that even if I really want to. Even if I found that baby in a dumpster for free. To be better. I’m not trying to pass on misery, I’m trying to allow subsequent generations to live a better life. In the event genetic memory is a thing, I want to pass on the best memories I possibly can.
Think about it. Think about that and the consequences of passing on memories involving conquering video games using only one's buttocks. Or training future generations how to pee in the dark. Good memories, man. Equipping the future to fight the future.
This is why I hang out at strip clubs mostly. World peace. Eventually. Maybe. This is my justification for any hedonistic endeavor, in fact. If trauma can be inherited so can bliss, man.
I’m just breaking the cycle, a dollar bill at a time. Making it rain compassion like manna from Heaven to a Warrant soundtrack. That’s all a man can do.
Hopefully President Biden doesn’t forgive Krystal’s student loan debt. She’s a national treasure and I’d like to preserve her for future generations of Americans to enjoy. Beating video games with her ass is the least of her fundament-related party tricks. Glitter removal is another.
Sic vivitur.