loop, infinite

I have a strange, understated rapport with one of the guys who works at the Subway in Westport. We have a certain routine. When I walk into the store, he gives me a look of recognition.

“What’s been going on, man?” he asks.

“Not much,” I say.

He nods a few times. Huge, exaggerated nods. “Cool, cool.”

Then he reaches for a loaf of bread. Saws it in half. ”What you been up to?”

“Nothing.”

When he slides my sandwich across the counter and hands me my receipt, he says, “You have a good one.”

“You too, man,” I say. Then I leave.

The PSP has fluid, attractive menus, and to flip through them without purpose is to experience a bizarre satisfaction. To turn inconsequential system options on and off for no reason is to experience an inexplicable frisson that my inner nerd/asshole considers at least as good as sex. And the lame web browser and half-assed RSS reader are, if not particularly cool or functional, at least interesting.

These good vibes largely evaporate when I begin to play a game. That says something right there: the PSP is a flashy toy first and a game system second, and this quality is inherent. Sony’s R&D guys designed this thing as a digital-lifestyle-portable-media whatever-the-hell from the start. Consequently, where, say, the DS is a nice device that does one thing well, the PSP is a nice device that does a whole bunch of stuff poorly.

This is frustrating with respect to stuff like Space Invaders Extreme, which is very nearly better on the PSP than on the DS, but in the final analysis it isn’t.

What I like about the PSP Space Invaders is that it looks and sounds fantastic: the visuals and sound effects both have a high-resolution crispness that the DS’s dimmer screens and scratchy audio just can’t fuck with. I know that sounds a little shallow, but I’m saying this because an important part of Space Invaders Extreme‘s modus operandi is to overload the player’s senses; the PSP version is more all-encompassing.

Yeah, the DS has that second screen, but in Space Invaders it’s so under-used – perhaps an intentional move on Taito’s part to enforce some parity between the two versions – that I don’t miss it on the PSP. (Space Invaders Extreme 2, on the other hand, looks like it’ll be a lot more vertical, and I figure that’s because it’s also a DS exclusive.)

(There are also several multiplayer features on the DS that simply weren’t coded into the PSP Invaders, but fuck, man, it’s not like I have friends; I don’t care about that.)

What does, in fact, end up giving the DS Space Invaders the edge is something stupidly simple: on the DS, the controls actually work. On the PSP, pressing one of the face buttons does not seem to guarantee that the button press will register. . . and this problem is not unique to Space Invaders.

Attempting to play a game on the PSP is strikingly similar to attempting to play a game using the keypad on my cell phone. I can forgive my phone for lacking the aptitude for games, because I didn’t buy it to play games; I bought it because it was a cell phone. My PSP isn’t that great at playing games either, but it’s also not a cell phone.

A whole network of curling, spiralling highways sprout from and wrap around Kansas City. Collectively, these roads operate as the opposite of an anchor. Instead of supporting Kansas City by holding it down, they pull it up. They are the scaffolding that keeps this city above ground; if they were to crumble away, this place would sink and disappear.

A key part of highway driving is getting over how inherently insane it is. When I’m on the road, my thoughts detach. I see all the cars around me and start wondering, why did we do this? Why did this race of monkeys decide to build these long, sinuous strips of asphalt and the death machines that travel along them? When I’m thinking this way, I tend to miss my exit.

When that happens, I just take the next one. Sometimes that leads to a second, parallel highway, maybe one that’s going in another direction. Another exit might take me back to the same highway I came from, or maybe it’ll connect to a third one entirely. If I can’t get away from the on-ramp in time, I’ll find myself on a fourth highway. Or maybe I’ll be back where I started.

Eventually I forget where I am. The green signs and the green hills and the black road blend into dizzy homogeneity. I don’t know where I am anymore or what I’m doing. Each exit is its own long, luxurious curve. I feel a little like I’m on a theme park ride, though not quite, because here there’s a bizarre, submerged element of danger. After all, if I jerk the steering wheel or depress the accelerator a little too hard, I’ll probably die. Getting over the ever-present possibility of sudden and painful death is another key part of highway driving.

If I drive fast enough, then it doesn’t seem like I’m driving at all. If I’m moving at the same speed as the cars in front of me and behind me, then I feel like I’m stationary. The other cars seem frozen in place. Only the changing signs and shifting greenery give away what’s really going on.

I found a spider; it was tiny, dead and clinging to the inner plastic shell of an empty travel-pack of Kleenex that had been on the floor next to my bed for over a week. Its appearance was a warning shot; I need to clean this place.

But I wonder why it was dead. Maybe it had always lived under my bed and had seen that Kleenex package as a distant paradise. When it knew it had reached the end of its life (let’s assume a spider doctor had diagnosed it with spider cancer), it became determined to make a pilgrimage: before it drew its dying breath, this spider would crawl to that far-off translucent wonderland; see it in all its glory.

And then when it got there and realized heaven was just a fucking Kleenex package, maybe it died of disillusionment before the cancer could even metastasize.

To write anything, I have to forcibly overcome a certain built-in inhibition. I have to deliberately ignore the savage, self-aware voice in my head that tells me everything I have ever written and will ever write is total shit.

And it’s hard. I keep reading over sentences after I’ve typed them and cringing. Sometimes I pull out something I wrote two or three years ago, and realize I don’t seem to have changed that much. My style has stood still. I use and overuse the same words and sentence structures. I haven’t changed enough. Hell, I may not have changed at all.

I need a way out. I can’t move. Every time I try, I end up back where I started. I keep collapsing back into the same deadened, dead-end patterns.