loop, infinite

According to WordPress, this is my 208th update. You’d think writing would come easier to me after that many posts. I mean, that was my original intent here: these posts were an attempt to reclaim the volubility the past few years have sapped away.

That attempt’s been successful in some ways, but I’m not satisfied. I won’t be until I find some way to quell the absolute nerve-shattering fear that bolts through me when I look at a blank page. (Or a blank WordPress form, or a blank Google document, whatever.)

The blank page has scary questions. It says, “When you write on me, what the hell are you going to say? How are you going to say it? Are you even capable of saying what you want to say?  Is it even worth trying?”

And each bare word I put down has questions of its own. “Why did you drop me down here? Shouldn’t you have used another word instead? Shouldn’t you move me somewhere else?”

After a while I look at what I’ve got, and it’s a terrible thing: an angry page with sad words on it that writhe and twitch, that embody my insecurities. A sick thing, like a growing fetus with some horrible congenital defect that only gets worse as time goes on. The kind of fetus you’re better off aborting, if it doesn’t abort itself first.

What they never taught me in English class is that the “writing process” is one of small, methodical mercy killings. You highlight and delete many, many nascent chunks of text, because they were too wretched to ever have a chance.

You pick through a flow of your dried-out logorrhea, looking for good stuff and bad stuff. You leave the good stuff where it is and you kill the bad stuff. I’m not too sure how to tell the difference yet, but that’s what you do.

Before it dried into the crusty curio it is today, The X Files was part of the cultural landscape of my nineties childhood. Though I was too young to care about (or indeed ever watch) the show, I had a bleary awareness that it existed. I have fuzzy memories of Time magazine’s X Files articles, just as I have fuzzy memories of its Whitewater exclusives and its Leonardo DiCaprio profiles. The X Files: part of the background noise of an era.

When I got older, I often thought about going back and watching the show to see what all the fuss was about, but I never did. The prospect seemed too discouraging, too daunting. The absurd number of episodes I’d have to sit through (202 in all) was one component of that.

Another was the (to me) uncomfortable idea that only about sixty of those 202 episodes tell the series’ overarching story, the convoluted narrative about aliens and government conspiracies that fans call “the mytharc.”

The remaining episodes are self-contained standalone adventures. They begin and end right where they started. Fuck that shit, I thought. I didn’t have time for that.

But then I came across The X Files Mythology: a fat-free repackaging of the series that’s been pared down to mytharc episodes and nothing else. (Its four volumes came out in 2005, I assume as Fox’s attempt to capitalize on the then-rising popularity of arc-heavy stuff like Lost.)

Not only did the concept appeal to me, but four volumes of X Files Mythology is one fuck of a lot less pricey than nine season sets of X Files proper. With that in mind, I ordered volume one, Abduction. That was almost a year ago.

When it came in the mail, I put Abduction on a shelf, still shrinkwrapped. I didn’t remember to take that shrinkwrap off and watch the damn DVDs until yesterday. I know that’s a little insane.

The show is compelling enough that I do keep watching it, but I wouldn’t say it’s aged that well. The fabled mytharc is – at least at this early stage – more hollow and straightforward than intricate and exciting.

The plotting is forced and murky: instead of resolving themselves, story lines twist in illogical ways and then vanish. The conspiracy theory angle is the writers’ hand-wavy excuse for never explaining anything, ever. Much like this post, episodes don’t come to an end; they stop.

Thirst like a physical presence is lodged in my throat. It can’t be swallowed or dislodged. It’s a sticky piece of rope: one end stuck to the roof of my mouth, the other end left to dangle.

I need to get up and drink some water. I don’t do that enough.

Rick Steel was chief executive officer of SoulConnect Corporation, a small-but-profitable outfit based in Dog, Missouri. SoulConnect was unusual in that it didn’t produce or sell anything tangible. As Rick was fond of saying, his company had been built with “the new economy” in mind, but apart from Rick, nobody knew what “the new economy” was. Nobody knew how SoulConnect made its money.

In February 2009, the Dog Gazette tried to find out. Reporters sought out SoulConnect employees and tried to flatter, wheedle and otherwise cajole them into letting slip with the truth. That didn’t work.

“I’m sorry,” the employees would say, “but it’d be more than my job’s worth to tell you what we do. We have a code of secrecy. Mr. Steel has been very clear on that.”

The week after the Gazette ran its SoulConnect feature, Rick’s son Gary wrote a letter to the editor. Gary was 24 years old. He was SoulConnect’s vice president of marketing.

“SoulConnect has brought many jobs and much prosperity to Dog,” Gary wrote, “but for some, that apparently isn’t enough. For some, satisfaction will not be had until every last one of SoulConnect’s private affairs is dragged out into the open. Personally, I find that attitude appalling. Before she died, my mother always told me that ‘a woman must have her secrets.’ Why can’t the same be said of SoulConnect?”

Gary’s letter inspired an outpouring of sympathetic replies. They burbled through the Gazette’s letters page for days afterward.

Peggy May, a nurse at Dog Hospital, wrote, “The young Mr. Steel’s heartfelt plea brought tears to my eyes. His words were so eloquent. We must leave his family and their wonderful corporation alone. We must trust and respect them, because they’ve brought so much good to Dog.”

In May 2009, Dog High School invited Rick Steel to give the commencement address to its graduating class. It felt like the right thing to do. Rick appreciated the gesture.

The graduation ceremony was held at dusk in Dog Field. The fifty-two graduating seniors sat on lawn chairs arranged in neat rows before Rick’s podium.

Rick gave the commencement with aplomb. His audience was rapt. In another life, he might have made a fine motivational speaker. He had it in him. He had charisma.

Soon he would come to the end. He had just a few concluding remarks to make. Then he’d be done.

“. . . So l guess what I’ve been trying to get across here,” Rick said, “is that life has taught me a lot. It’s taught me what’s important, and there’s a lot that’s important. But there’s one idea that’s more important than anything else I’ve said this evening. It’s what I hope you all remember: you have to do what makes you happy. No matter what.”

Rick took a deep breath. He felt warm. He could feel his collar dampen.

“Seriously,” he said. “Your happiness is all that matters. If, in making yourself happy, you make another person sad, that’s really okay. If, in making yourself happy, you injure or kill another person, that’s really okay too. Really. Because you did the right thing. You made yourself happy.”

Rick was starting to slur, to stammer.

“It is okay to kill people,” Rick said. “Sometimes it’s the right thing to do. It’s okay to kill people and harvest their souls and sell them to North Korea. If you make money doing it, if you make yourself happy, that’s all that matters. It’s okay. Really. It’s okay. It’s the right thing. You’re doing the right thing.”

Rick was shaking.

“And . . . that’s all. Thank you.”

He walked off the stage. He shot himself later that night.

October 19th, 2007 fell on a Friday. I remember that night well. My friend Rock (not his real name) and I had driven to the Plaza with the idea that we’d take a walk and discuss our lives. We did (and still do) that every so often.

We were overdue for that walk. Our last meeting had been on a cloudy night the previous June. We had driven to the roof of the med school parking garage, where we chatted while staring down at highway 71′s mesmerizing curves.

Because it so happened that it was 3am, and because we looked suspicious, it wasn’t long before a police car came to us. Two officers disembarked. They wanted to know who we were, what we were doing.

Rock said, “Well, we’re just a couple dudes. Sometimes we get together and catch up on our lives. That’s pretty much it.”

The cops remained suspicious, but fair enough. They were cops. Suspicion was their job. After a few more questions, they let us go.

So that was the last time Rock and I had hung out. Four months later and there we were at the Plaza.

The Plaza’s an upscale place. Kansas City’s swankest shopping district. Its official name is long and repulsive: “the Country Club Plaza.”

The Country Club Plaza is supposed to be “Kansas City’s premier shopping, dining and entertainment destination.” For a certain type of yuppie I’m sure it’s heaven. It’s got a Starbucks, an American Apparel and an Apple Store all within a block of each other. The three basic necessities: coffee, clothing and Macs.

When I lived in the dorms, the Plaza was within walking distance. I went there often. There used to be a Sharper Image on 47th Street. I’d go in and browse without buying, marveling at the insane goods on display. The electronic tie-sorters. The steel lightsaber replicas. I’d wonder: do people spend money on this shit?

(Last year the Sharper Image parent company filed for Chapter 11 and closed its retail stores, Kansas City one included. I guess that answered my question.)

The Plaza is a good place for people-watching. Contrasts are everywhere. Yuppies and panhandlers. Hipsters and businessmen. Occasional clusters of students. Some college, some high-school; some foreign-exchange, some not.

There are buskers, too. Some are good at what they do. Some are terrible. The one Rock and I met on October 19th, 2007 was terrible. His name was Tad (not his real name), he had an acoustic guitar, and he sat on the concrete in front of the movie theater. He played “You Are My Sunshine” again and again.

This is how Rock and I met Tad: we had parked in the Valencia Place garage next to the Barnes & Noble. We’d crossed 47th and ended up on Nichols Road in front of the Cinemark Palace. We weren’t planning on seeing a movie. We had just ended up there.

Tad had, I gathered, been sitting where he was long before we’d arrived. He was not a real busker. Street music was not a way of life for him; it was something he did on weekends.

Tad was a normal college kid looking to impress people with his musical skills and make some money as an added bonus. He had a blank face, either indicating that he was bored or that he was a boring person. He wore fucking immaculate Converse. There wasn’t a speck of dust on his shoes.

Tad’s singing voice was halting and clipped. It came out funny: “You are. My sunshine. My only sunshine. You. Make me happy. When skies are gray. You’ll never know. Dear. How much I love you. Please. Don’t take my sunshine away.”

When he reached the end of this verse, Tad sang it again. I think that was the only part of the song he knew.

As he sang, Tad strummed chords. I don’t think they were the right chords.

Rock was impressed with Tad’s performance. Rock was an aspiring musician himself. He had, for the past six months, been trying to teach himself to play the Irish flute. He carried his flute around everywhere. When Rock wanted to annoy me, all he had to do was take his flute out and start playing it.

Now he was taking his flute out and showing it to Tad. They were going to play music together.

“Just think,” Rock said. “A flute and guitar jam session!”

He started playing. Tad didn’t join in.

Rock said, “What’s wrong?”

Tad said, “I can’t play in that key.”

Rock: “What key can you play in, then?”

Tad: “Do you know ‘You Are My Sunshine?’”

Rock: “No. Do you know any other songs?”

Tad: “. . . Well, yeah. Yeah, of course. But, uh, I know ‘You Are My Sunshine’ best.”

Rock: “I’ll bet.”

We walked back down Nichols Road the way we’d come. Rock: “Someday. Someday that flute/guitar jam session’s gonna happen. I just have to find someone worthy. This guy’s just not good enough.”

We left the Plaza and drove down Ward Parkway. We ate at Quizno’s. On the wall next to our table was an illustration: a happy, smiling chef, holding a long, thin piece of bread at one end. Nobody was holding the other end. The bread was parallel to the ground.

“How is that shit even possible?” I said.

Rock: “I don’t know, man. That guy’s gotta have some wonderful fucking leverage.”

We went into Target, gravitated toward the videogames in the back. PlayStation 2 stuff was all on clearance. On impulse, I bought Guitar Hero II. Maybe it was because of Tad. Maybe I had guitar on the brain.

Rock looked at me. “Hold it. Do you even have the guitar controller?”

“No,” I said.

“Then why are you even buying this?”

“The guitar controllers here are too expensive. Thinking we could go to that GameStop on the Plaza, get it there. They close at ten, right? We’ve got time.”

Rock shrugged. “Whatever you want to do, man.”

On the way back down Ward we listened to loud music and navigated by dim headlights in the blackness. Most of Ward runs through dark suburbs, though there does come a point where the street curves, and the Plaza comes into view: an explosion of orange light. For a second it’s beautiful. Then it’s just garish.

On October 19th, 2007, the one CD getting play in my car was In Rainbows. In retrospect it’s Radiohead’s worst album (maybe even counting Pablo Honey; “You” alone has more vitality than everything on In Rainbows put together), but it was also an album I’d waited years for and I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

It was all I listened to that autumn. Even now, soporific as In Rainbows is, when I put it on, it moves me, if only because it takes me back to those months.

For reasons I could not understand, Rock loved track nine, “Jigsaw Falling Into Place.” Every time the song came to an end, he’d hit the back button and listen to it again.

After Rock had done that twice, I told him I’d give serious consideration to the notion of killing him, should he do that again. He didn’t do it again. The stereo moved ahead to track ten, “Videotape.”

“Videotape” is a pretty (here a euphemistic way to say “maudlin”) piano ballad. It contains the lyric: “Mephistopheles is just beneath / and he’s reaching up to grab me.”

Rock said, “What the fuck is Mephistopheles?”

Like the douchey cockfarmer I am, I rambled for a while about the story of Faust. (Goethe’s version, at least. I’ve never read the Marlowe shit.) I said that Mephistopheles is either some kind of messenger for Lucifer or a manifestation of Lucifer himself, I was never clear on which.

Whatever he is, Mephistopheles makes a proposal to some dude Faust. He offers to serve Faust until he dies. He’ll give him whatever he wants. In exchange, when Faust does die, Faust will return the favor and serve Mephistopheles forever in hell.

When Mephistopheles lays out these terms and conditions, Faust is like, god damn that sounds like an awesome deal. He signs a contract (in his own blood, to make it official.)

The one complication: if, as Mephistopheles serves him, there ever comes a moment that Faust thinks to himself, “man, this is the greatest fucking moment of my life and it’d be fucking cool if this moment could last forever,” he will, in that instant, die and go straight to hell. Mephistopheles will just reach up to grab the motherfucker.

“‘Videotape,’” I told Rock, “is about that moment. Or something.”

Rock said, “But what the hell was the point of that story?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s an allegory.”

“But for what?”

“Christian shit,” I said.

“How does it end? Does he go to hell?”

“I don’t remember,” I said. “I know it gets complicated.”

When we got to the GameStop on the Plaza, we were told it didn’t have a single PlayStation 2 guitar controller. It had plenty for the Xbox 360, but none for the PS2.

“I guess we have to go back to Target,” I said. “Get a guitar controller there.”

“Are you crazy?” Rock said. “Target’s closed, man.”

“Oh. Yeah. You’re right. It is.”

“But hey, man, I think I’m done for the night. Drop me off back home?”

“Yeah, of course.”

I dropped Rock off back home.

“It was good,” he said. “We’ll do this again sometime.”

“You know it,” I said.

Weird the way friendships work. You turn them on and you turn them off. When you turn them on, when you go hang out with someone, then you have a good time. When you turn them off, when you’re sitting alone in your apartment again, well . . . well, then you’re alone in your apartment again.

How do you cope with that? Not by playing Guitar Hero II. I can tell you that much. To play Guitar Hero II without the guitar controller, by yourself, at midnight and in front of a fourteen-inch television, is to gaze through a fog of futility into the face of loneliness.

If you don’t have the guitar controller, you have no choice but to use the DualShock’s triggers. It doesn’t work well. It doesn’t make sense. It breaks the careful illusion. Guitar Hero II is about pressing buttons on command. Without that plastic guitar controller, there’s no context for pressing those buttons.

So the game doesn’t work anymore and “fun” gives itself over to a perverse existential horror. Guitar Hero II without the guitar controller is “the videogame” stripped down to something ugly and sick. Every game, when you take enough meaning away, comes down to pressing buttons for no reason.

2am: I turned the console off. Enough of that fucking game.

I stretched out on the floor, face down. I could feel a faint tremble through the carpet. What was that? Maybe the sound of the garage door opening in the basement.

I called someone; a girl named Hazel (not her real name). Hazel picked up on the fourth ring. Her voice was faint. My phone had dragged her voice against its will from a singularity of fun and merriment. I could hear a party around her. The clinking of glasses and the shouting of frat boys.

“Hey!” Hazel said. “How’d you know I was awake?”

“I . . . guessed,” I said.

Hazel laughed. I’m sure the laugh was clear and resonant and glamorous on her end, but when her phone ripped her laugh into bits and sent those bits through the air for my phone to reassemble them, the laugh changed. It came to me soaked in static.

“We went out to a club,” said Hazel.

“Oh.” I could feel something in my chest tear. Hell if I knew what that meant or even what it was. “Well, I won’t keep you.”

“I’ll talk to you later,” said Hazel.

I hung up and stretched out on the floor again.

It got colder in the weeks that followed.

In late November, Rock and I decided to hang out again. The general vibe was the same; the details had changed. Radiohead had long since passed out of rotation in my car and Joy Division had taken its place. “She’s Lost Control” was Rock’s favorite song.

We didn’t hang out on the Plaza; we went to the Blockbuster/GameRush on 63rd street. We picked through ratty, grimy games. I remember Gun and Red Dead Revolver. Unlimited Saga and The Getaway. Beyond Good and Evil and Devil May Cry 3.

Maybe some of those games were decent, but not one of them was special. Given how many hours of your life a game can suck away, is “decent” good enough?

When you’re just outside the Plaza, Ward Parkway sends out a branch that hooks into Shawnee Mission Parkway. I got onto that branch yesterday. Shawnee Mission doesn’t take long to cross the state line. You see the big sign: “Welcome to Kansas.”

Shawnee Mission Parkway runs through two separate towns: Mission, Kansas and Shawnee, Kansas.

In Mission, there’s a Vintage Stock. They sell comics and videogames. The store is okay. It’s staffed by three nerds. Two are okay. One is loud and obnoxious. From what I gather, he’s the boss.

Going into that store is like stepping into 1996. I mean, yesterday they were blasting Soundgarden. It took me a moment to place the song, but then it came to me: “Pretty Noose.” I could recognize the chorus – Chris Cornell’s repeated assertions that he “[doesn't] like what [I've] got [him] hanging from.”

I didn’t buy anything there. There was nothing I wanted. Sure, there is a hole in me, but games don’t fill it. I know that. I don’t need games.

But I look at the shelves and racks and think about those long, languorous days when I was a kid and this shit was still exciting to me. It’s depressing. When I was there yesterday it occurred to me that what I was feeling was the reversed negative image of Faust’s moment of bliss.

I left Vintage Stock and kept following the road. I left Mission and I saw a sign that told me I was entering Shawnee’s city limits.

I’d never driven that far before. I decided to keep going. I wanted to see what would happen. I left the strip malls behind and Shawnee Mission Parkway got thicker and wider and the speed limit climbed higher. The parkway had turned into a faux-freeway.

And you know, I’ll be the first to say Missouri sucks, but at least it has its hills. That isn’t so much the case in Kansas. Kansas is flat and huge. The further into Kansas I got, the smaller and lower the landscape got. The sky became enormous. I didn’t know they made clouds that big.

Here’s what’s at the end of Shawnee Mission Parkway: a small gated community. That rushing faux-freeway thins into a quaint, quiet cul-de-sac.

And here’s the biggest mistake I made yesterday: at the end of that long, pointless drive, I went home and installed Diablo II on this laptop. I don’t even like Diablo II. Not that much. I love the first game, but Diablo II takes what made Diablo good – the atmosphere – and dilutes it.

But Diablo II refines the number-juggling. It hones and fine-tunes the twitchy impulse-response dimension of the first game.

It’s so easy, so, so easy, to sit down in front of Diablo II, to start clicking on shit, and to then not get up until four or five hours have gone by. The game’s suction is powerful and difficult to resist. It will absorb as much of your life as you’re willing to give it.

You could say it wasn’t responsible or ethical for Diablo II‘s developers to publish this game that exploits these base human instincts for monetary gain, to publish this game that turns the people who play it into brain-dead lab rats.

But let’s be honest here. If you choose to play this game entitled Diablo II, you know what you’re getting into. You can get that just from looking at the box. There’s a fucking picture of the devil right there. The Lord of Terror. Lucifer himself.

It’s not Blizzard Entertainment’s fault that people don’t realize the obvious truth: that Diablo is now, and always was, some diabolical shit. It’s right there in the fucking title.

I know it’s a bad idea in the long term, but for now I say to Diablo II: I hate my life. If you can give me some temporary peace, then hey, you can take something from me. Feel free. Suck away.

Take whatever you want. Until I find some real happiness, bullshit like Diablo II may be good enough.