Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Street Scenes

Yesterday I was sitting in my (parents’) car at a stoplight on University a few blocks south of Broadway. A line of cars was crossing the intersection from my left. Just before the last one entered the intersection, a young black man on a bicycle (poppin’ a wheelie the whole time) crossed in front of the car. (It was an SUV or something like that.) The SUV screeched to a stop and the guy on the bike kept going, laughing like a hyena.

My immediate, vocal reaction was, “Whoa, he shoulda fuckin’ run that guy over.” Not a great thing to say, even to oneself, but that’s how pissed off I was. The SUV driver just saved his life, and he’s laughin’ his damn fool head off. Maybe he enjoys the adrenaline rush, because he clearly saw the SUV coming.

In the evening, I nearly got run over while using a crosswalk in Cedar-Riverside. As the car approached me, I put up my hands, hopped mostly out of the way and said, “Whoa, whoa!” The middle-aged lady at the wheel didn’t react much. I think she was embarrassed and ashamed, but maybe I’m just projecting, because that would be my reaction. I’m just glad I responded as quickly and forcefully as I did. It’s taken a long time to undo the middle school conditioning of pretending like nothing bothers me.

It made me sad to think the guy on the bike apparently places such little value on his own life. But I was still mad at him. That kind of behavior makes those of us who care feel like suckers. It’s like the panhandler conundrum: to give or not to give (a fuck). I googled it and found a The New York Times editorial citing Pope Francis’s advice.


He recommends giving, even if they use the money for alcohol. (Street drugs don’t seem to exist in the Pope’s world.) Whatever they buy, it will make them happy. He also says you must look them in the eye and touch their hands. That sounds good, but the money still presents a dilemma. If they use it to buy drugs and then die of an overdose, what then? Don’t you bear some responsibility for that?

Last week I got panhandled by a black guy outside Calhoun Square. (As Uptown has continued to gentrify, the number of panhandlers seems to have risen.) I looked him in the eye (like I usually do) and said, “Sorry.” He didn’t hear me, so I repeated it, just before opening a door to the mall. He acknowledged it and then added something like, “Ya don’t hafta frown at me just cuz I’m black.”

I turned around and glared at him for a moment as he walked away. “Yeah, thanks for callin’ me a fuckin’ racist,” I thought. “I’m sure black people just love gettin’ panhandled.” I know he was lashing out from despair, but it still sucked. There we were, sniping at each other, while the Fat Cats looked down from their penthouses and laughed.

Monday, November 13, 2017

Detachment

Before I launch into another bitch sesh about my First World Problems, I’d just like to say how shallow and self-absorbed this feels. I should probably be lamenting the plight of the people who made my clothes, or the people we’re killing in Syria and Afghanistan and Somalia, etc., or whatever else is making Baby Jesus cry today. But I need to get this shit outta my system, and for some reason that means sharing it all with you.

I was able to stop for a minute today and relax. That might not sound like much, especially for someone with as much money in the bank as I have. But it was probably the most relaxed I’ve been since I moved in with my parents 8 years ago.

Since then, I’ve only had fleeting moments of real peace and tranquility. The other 99.9% of the time I’ve been suspended on tenterhooks of shame and anxiety. When you’ve been on tenterhooks for that long, you get used to it, but you also forget how it feels to be truly relaxed.

Out of self-preservation, I repressed the pain until it became background noise. I’ve been floating along on a cloud of ambivalence for years now. Because I was blocking the pain, the joy was blocked too. I didn’t take much pleasure or displeasure in anything. It’s getting better, but I’m still keeping the world at arm’s length most of the time.

This has resulted in "The Shadow Realm" effect, feeling like I’m not really a part of the world or that the world isn’t real. I thought I’d found my condition (by accident) online when I was looking up Adam Duritz of Counting Crows on Wikipedia. (I don’t remember why I was looking him up. I’m not a fan of theirs. I assure you my motives were benign.)

He apparently suffers from Depersonalization Disorder, which sounds a lot like “The Shadow Realm.” My last therapist called it “detachment.” It was a relief when she said that. I didn’t wanna have something serious, and I didn’t really wanna have that much in common with Adam Duritz. (Like I said, I’m not a fan, although I do like “Mr. Jones and Me.”)

I’m grateful for my material comfort and security. My parents have been great. But that only gets you so far. I still need friends. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point when I feel worthy of new friends again. So hopefully I can take advantage of that.

Thursday, November 9, 2017

Space Princess

I’ve decided to take a stab at sci-fi. I’ve long had a wish to write a Hitchhiker’s Guide-type satire. I liked the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, but I thought I could do better. It may be a delusion of grandeur, but I think that’s usually what it takes to make great art. So, here goes:

The spires of Havamegnish City spiraled up to the sky. It was a gleaming pin cushion of silver from horizon to horizon, and somewhere amidst all the grandeur was a beautiful princess named Ambrosia Gentilicus. (Don’t ask me why they still have royalty in this galaxy. It’s a pretty backward galaxy. The whole idea of basing your government on heredity is ludicrous. But, hey, not every space-faring civilization follows the same path of political development. So deal. Besides, we all know who to blame for the persistence of this trope.)

So, anyway, this Princess Ambrosia- (Seriously, though, what is it with Star Wars having a princess and a queen in the movies? Why no princes or kings? I mean, maybe there are some in the books and video games and shit, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any in the movies. What are you tryin’ to say, George? That women can only attain positions of authority through heredity? Do better, man. Do better. But I digress.) As I was saying, Princess Ambrosia was meandering through the back alleys of the galactic capital planet of Encendior. Seriously, that’s how big this Galactic Empire is. It takes a whole planet to run the darn thing.

But Princess Ambrosia was roaming around the ghetto, because that’s just the kinda girl she was. She liked slumming with the common folk, the Salt of the Earth. Not that she was a Woman of the People. No, far from it. But she liked getting her hands dirty sometimes just to remind herself she was alive.

She walked up to a door in the deepest, dankest, darkest back alley she could find. A video screen over the door flickered to life. A menacing, male face appeared with a crazy makeup job and no hair. Think Kratos from God of War. In the gruffest, scariest, deepest voice you’ve ever heard, he asked, “What’s the password?”

“The password is open the fucking door before I shove this phaser so far up your ass you’ll be sneezing rainbows.” Her voice had the cool calm and steely nerves of a street-smart hustler. She didn’t take shit offa nobody. She was super-sexy, but still tough enough to appeal to women.

The door slid open and the princess entered, just before the door slid shut again. She walked down the hallway. The walls were dirty, formerly white and bathed in fluorescent green.

That's all I've got so far. The problem is I don’t really care about the plot. I just wanna make jokes and write dialogue. That seems like it could be an impediment to writing fiction.

Friday, November 3, 2017

Video Game Memory Lane

Last year, they opened an arcade bar in Uptown called Up Down. (I think that’s pretty clever, but apparently it’s a chain, so I guess the neighborhood pun is a coincidence?) I’ve gone a few times, always solo. It’s one of the few places where I don’t feel super-self-conscious about being alone in public. (Actually, my self-consciousness about that has declined precipitously in the last few years, no doubt due to extensive, recent experience.)

The walls are covered with a collage of pop culture from the 80’s and 90’s: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Eazy-E of N.W.A., the Ultimate Warrior (wrestler) and Suzanne Somers with the Thighmaster. It’s a delightful trip down Memory Lane for a child of the 90’s like me. The TV’s show pro wrestling and movies from the era, like Demolition Man, Ghostbusters and Independence Day.

I’ve never been very good at video games. Despite my pleas, my parents didn’t get me a video game console until I was a junior in high school. At that point, I was too old to get addicted. (The window of video game addiction is different for everyone, of course.) I just played sports games by myself, not finding anyone to play with until college, and even then it was rare. But my high school and college friends weren’t really into video games, which was just as well.

The game I’ve played the most at Up Down is probably R.B.I. Baseball. My best friend in elementary school had a Nintendo and regularly kicked my ass at that game in the late 80’s. It was hardly fair, of course, since he was a wily veteran and I was a rookie, but I still took it as a sign of my inferiority. He was happy to reinforce that notion, as were many of my peers.

It’s my own damn fault for being friends with the guy. There were nice guys I’d been friends with before him, but they weren’t cool like he was, and I needed cool friends so I wouldn’t feel so vulnerable to getting picked on. One of those nice friends had a well-to-do friend with a Nintendo and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!

I was enthralled just watching them play. I’ve spent far more time watching other people play video games than playing them myself. This is a pastime I’ve indulged more recently on YouTube with Battlefield 1 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I generally prefer the voyeuristic aspect of video games to the participation. That must be why I’ve stuck with my first love: television.

Part of the reason I’d rather watch than play was my fear of failure. But that has faded as I’ve matured, so I’m more interested in having the controls in my hands now. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been anyone to watch me at Up Down. I actually got my name among the high scores on Super Sprint, but I think that was due to a glitch in the game. Even though I wasn’t winning every race, it let me play for like 45 minutes on 1 quarter.

Track & Field offers a surprisingly aerobic workout. You have to hit two buttons in alternation to run in the sprint, the javelin, the long jump and the hurdles. (That’s as far as I’ve gotten.) In order to beat the computer, you have to mash those buttons with seemingly superhuman speed. The javelin and long jump also require you to time your release or jump to the last possible moment before crossing the foul line. I remember playing that back in the day. At least now I can advance in a few events, even though I felt kinda lame pounding on the buttons like a lunatic all by myself.

Another favorite of mine is 1942 or 1943: The Battle of Midway. You’re an American fighter pilot fighting the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II. It’s basically you against the entire Imperial Japanese Navy, so you’ve got some weaponry at your disposal that isn’t historically accurate or, strictly speaking, real. I read up on this video game series on Wikipedia, because that’s what I do with my free time (i.e., make the most of it). In the course of my research, I had a startling realization: The people who made these games were Japanese.

Does it seem strange to anyone else that Japanese people made games in which their own ancestors are the Bad Guys? I mean, sure, I guess they were the Bad Guys of World War II, but they must’ve been tempted to make a game in which the Japanese were the Good Guys and call it something like Kamikaze: The Divine Wind.

Hell, we’ve already got a wildly successful video game franchise based on an alternate history in which the Nazis won World War II (Wolfenstein). Why don’t the Japanese get that treatment? The Nazis have an even worse reputation than the Imperial Japanese military. They’re considered the ultimate historical example of evil in the West.

So why no alternate-history video games for the Empire of Japan? It’s not like there are no apologists for Imperial Japan. They still have shrines to people whom the Chinese consider war criminals, although that seems a predictable response to Japan’s post-war status as an American client state.

Did you know the U.S. military wrote the Japanese constitution? It’s true! How would you feel about having another country set up the structure of your government and laws? I’d be pretty pissed. Sure, they did some really bad shit, but so did we. I think it would’ve been enough just to slip in that part about renouncing war forever (and never making video games in which you’re the Good Guys in World War II) and then let them handle the rest.

While in Hawai’i for my sister’s wedding, we went through an exhibit at Pearl Harbor about the history of U.S.-Japan relations. It started with Admiral Perry showing up in Edo Bay with 4 warships in 1853, one of the signature events of America’s “gunboat diplomacy” of the 19th Century. Japan had been shut off from the world for 250 years by an isolationist regime, but Perry was able to convince them to start trading with us.

The exhibit ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as though it had taken us almost a century to follow through on that initial threat. Upon reaching the end of the exhibit, I thought to myself, “Am I the only one who sees the connection between those two events? Am I only the one who can connect the dots?”

At the time, I thought I was one of the few who had made that connection. But now I think the creators of the exhibit probably had that somewhere in the back of their liberal, peacenik minds. What would’ve happened if we’d just left Japan alone? Would they have become one of the Bad Guys? Are we partly responsible for the atrocities they committed in World War II?

Sorry. That was a pretty long tangent. I usually try not to get too political on this, my personal blog. (For political shit, check out my other blog, Riding the Rubicon.)

Well, in conclusion, Up Down is a pretty cool place to kill some time and, if you’re a child of the 80’s or 90’s, take a jaunt down Memory Lane… if you dare!