When I came up with a new personal code of conduct this past January, I placed the most value not on what I wanted to accomplish, but how.  As such, the most important rule I set for myself was to not be frustrated when (not if) I failed to immediately live up to all my expectations.  Having been fueled by frustration for most of my life, I have an annoying and highly self-destructive tendency to throw all my hopes and plans into the dumpster at the first setback.  Usually this comes about because I become willingly distracted by some stimulus and forget about all the big things I want to accomplish.  The stupidity comes about when this sloth frustrates me into giving up and engaging in further, more depressed sloth.  The result of this cycle often becomes that I get so spun around that, when the distractions are all conquered, I’m left with no idea of what to do next.  This is where I’m currently at.

I am a junkie, not for alcohol or drugs, but for bullshit.  I’m not being melodramatic or romanticizing the situation at all.  My sense of obsession is titanic, and rather than use that potentially wonderful quality to fulfill all the big goals I want to accomplish, I derail myself at any given distraction.  The title of my stimulus review column, The Designer’s Drugs, is not so much a clever, rebellious name as it is an admission that entertainment can – and often does – become an addiction.

Even now, even as I’ve outgrown a lot of my past stupidity, I’m fantastically addicted to addiction.  If I’m playing a video game, I tend to complete every side quest and every achievement.  I loathe watching television shows because watching every episode in a series takes too much time and effort, and with TV shows, if I’m in for a penny I’m in for a pound.  I spend hours, days, weeks, and months on the internet doing little more than absorbing trivia, yet I find that I don’t know how to turn off the switch.  I’m brilliant, in all the wrong ways.

My current theory is that all of this comes from a feeling that all stimulus is there to be consumed or conquered, which isn’t surprising considering that I was raised by video arcades and Nintendo.  It’s this line of thought that justifies why I stopped buying cigarettes, as I’d go through a pack a day simply because it was there.  It makes much more sense for me to pace myself and steal cigarettes from my friends.

So if I can view every aspect of my life in gaming terms – winning, losing, high scores – is it possible for me to enjoy life as it is?  Whether won or lost, a game is over.  Life isn’t really like that, as I’m coming to realize.

But strangely, awkwardly, and full of failure, I’m getting better.  Sometimes.

My only rationalized consolation for the time I wasted between January and now is that most of the wasting went according to plan.  During that period, a few video games came out that I knew would be awesome, including a remake of one of my favorite games ever, Final Fantasy IV.  I consciously decided to get these games, and didn’t feel bad about it at all.

Perversely, this is a drastic improvement over the days when I would buy crappy entertainment of any kind simply to get new things.  At least I wasn’t wasting my time on consuming something I didn’t even really like.  This is me maturing.

Unfortunately, my taste in games runs toward epic strategy games that take weeks to complete, so even my reasoned decision ended up with me playing these games from waking to sleep, for days at a time.  I wasn’t frustrated by this, but I sure wasn’t being fulfilled, either.

Equally unfortunate was what happened once I emerged victorious and had no more worlds to conquer.  When the last game was finished, I had no desire to get another throwaway game, to watch throwaway television, to drown in the throwaway internet.  I was done being entertained, and I had no idea what to do next.  Victory had crippled me.

I’ve spent the time since reading, in my conquering junkie style, but I’m not reading mindlessly or gluttonously.  Soon the books I’m working on at the moment will run out, and I’ll be in the same position I’m in with all the other forms of entertainment, not knowing how to flip the switch from mindless reception to brilliant transmission.

I’ve spent a month trying to figure out the answer, but in that time I feel like something might be building, if I allow it to.  The temporary breakdown of my brain I’ve been slogging through has sucked, no doubt.  But it may have been necessary.  I’ve always been kind of an idealist nihilist in that I feel that I’m at my best when I have nothing.  Maybe this is the nothing I’ve been waiting for.

June 14, 2011
Categories: Y Marks the Spot . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

Only this man is exempt from what I'm about to say.

Any group of any kind is only as legitimate as its loudest, dumbest, most destructive member.  When this rule is applied to today’s Republican Party, well, shit.  America’s doomed.  Let’s call a spade a spade: the official party of the right wing has become the party for ignorance, the party for imposed desperation, the party for small affluence and widespread poverty, the party for theocracy, the party for serfhood and feudalism, and most importantly the party that cannot exist without an ocean of second-class citizens.  It’s not even that good at enacting its much-professed ideals of fiscal responsibility and anti-bureaucracy anymore.  And somehow, this party tends to get its way.

What pisses me off most about all this is that the Republican Party is now the party of the insane.  The political buzzword used to be the naïve, idealistic Bleeding Heart Liberal, but with the infestation of the Tea Party into Republican politics, today’s political jackasses tend to be Heart Attack Conservatives, people who care less about facts and self-interest than they do about having a platform to screech and hate.

The worst thing about the real life internet trolls of the Tea Party is that they’ve become a black hole in the public discourse.  They’re the loud, disruptive kids in class who derail the teacher and prevent everyone else from learning.  Scratch that; they’re the loud, disruptive kids in class who infect everyone else in class until all that’s left is a classroom full of shrieking idiots drawing dicks on the blackboard.  And like all things zombie-related, there’s a huge audience that hangs on their every act of faux-rebellious douchebaggery.

The obvious victims of this outbreak are gays, Mexicans, Muslims, women, the poor, the compassionate, and the sane.  But I’m wondering if an equally important victim of the unhinging of the right wing is the right wing itself.

I’ve been watching the looming embarrassment that is the 2012 presidential election cycle, in which the few Republicans who are gearing up to run against Obama are doing their best to out-crazy one another.  It’s awful.  Only in a politically retarded landscape as ours could a batshit vampire lady like Michelle Bachmann gain any sort of credence among those who don’t sleep in padded cells.  Worse still, we have one of the richest men in the world, Donald Trump, running on a platform of lowest common denominator and howling about Obama’s birth certificate in a thin attempt to slum with the crazies.  At the moment, these people are the front-runners, which to me speaks ill of America on the whole, not just the Republicans.

It might be satisfying to anticipate the Wagnerian spanking the Republicans will receive in 2012 if these candidates are the best it has to offer, but I can’t shake this sense of something approaching disgusted pity for them.  (The image in my head is of how I’d react to a shit-covered schizophrenic who just punched me in the mouth, if that helps.)  I’ve never, ever liked the Republicans, but when there’s an election, I expect each party to put forth the most competent candidate they have to offer.  I demand real Republican candidates, not crackheads who would have been laughed out of any other race in history.

The problem is ultimately larger than the right wing.  The public doesn’t want competence or ability; they want elected officials whom they can have a beer with, representatives who are just folks, rulers who are just like them.  Let me say, at the top of my text lungs, that the Beer Standard is the most bullshit criteria in politics (and not just because I’m a vodka drinker).  I don’t want elected officials to be just as good as everyone else.  I’d like them to be a damn sight better.

I never believe that a political pundit is as nuts as he or she appears to be.  I guarantee that if the Beer Standard wasn’t the law of the land, most of our Republican candidates for president wouldn’t be locked in this quagmire of Tea Party-calculated psychosis.  Our country might have a good deal more self-respect.

I might be wrong, though.  Maybe it is a good thing that the worst of the right wingers have gained the overconfidence to expose themselves as the repressive cavemen they are.  I know that time gives things that were intolerable in the present a sort of respectability in the past (see: George W. Bush, the Backstreet Boys), but the McCarthy, Goldwater, and Reagan Republicans weren’t any more saintly for not having to appease all the raving lunatics.  It’s not as though most of the Tea Party’s cells, despite their claims to be grassroots movements, aren’t corporate funded screechshows.  The tactics may have changed, but maybe the right wing is running the same plan as ever.

Yet assuming that the madness of the last decade isn’t an insidious Republican conspiracy to keep people angry and distracted, it’s not the liberals who must be the key players in curbing the Tea Party.  In his conflicts with the wild and populist movements during his presidency, Nixon appealed to a “silent majority” of sober, conservative Americans to stand up and be heard.  That’s precisely what is called for in this moment – a real conservative movement, comprised of people more concerned with policy over polarization, which will stand up and put the Tea Party infants (and, ideally, the Republicans they rose up against) back in their cribs.  The liberals can laugh and mock and loathe all they want, but ultimately it is the right wing which is responsible for cleaning up its own mess.

April 18, 2011
Categories: Y Marks the Spot . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment