It’s time to shave. I don’t want to, but I’ve got no choice. The clumps of hair on my face have become too thick, too ragged to ignore. I look like I’m homeless.
I have to go to clinic tomorrow, and if I show up in this condition, they’ll cite me for “unprofessionalism.”
I’d give no shit about that under normal circumstances, but I’ve already been cited once. Even I know better than to push my luck.
I don’t want to shave because I’ve got the kind of acne that turns shaving into a harrowing, real-life version of Minesweeper. You know, where the cursor’s the razor and the minefield’s my face.
Shaving a face like mine requires a degree of fine motor coordination possessed only by neurosurgeons, professional bomb-defusers, and people who can one-credit Ikaruga in hard mode. It goes without saying that I’m none of those things (but I went ahead and said it anyway).
When I shave, I have to wield the blade with a delicate, almost Zenlike touch. I have to avoid every bump, every crag, every irregularity. One snag, one too-steep angle, and I’m lunging for the toilet paper.
Even if I pull off a flawless shave, my face still resembles a nuclear blast zone. Since the hair’s all been shorn away, the acne itself is easier to see. It’s accentuated, even, by the mild inflammation brought on by the trauma that all skin experiences when you scrape a sharp piece of metal across it.
Acne is caused by actual bacteria, a species called propionibacterium acnes. This actual organism, at some point in my teenage years, found its way onto my face and decided to stay there and replicate across the surface of my skin: an entire colony began clogging pores wherever it went.
For years, I’ve slathered all manner of harsh chemicals onto my face in a vain effort to do something about this fucking colony. I wouldn’t be surprised if I develop fucking skin cancer forty years from now because of this.
This past December I decided I’d had enough of over-the-counter shit. I saw a dude who gave me an actual antibiotic that worked for a few months but now does nothing. That’s how it works. Bacteria grow. They change. They evolve. Antibiotics might kill off ninety-nine percent of the bacteria, but there’s always a handful of mutants that resist, and survive, and proliferate.
So I went back to the chemicals, which don’t seem to work anymore either. At least, they don’t work the way they should. They damage my face – parts of it now seem to be drying up and peeling off – but don’t do shit to the actual acne.
To make the situation worse, in these past few months I’ve seen a serious uptick in the sheer amount of shit growing on my face. I guess it’s a stress thing. Whatever it is, it’s obscene and disgusting and maybe even disfiguring. I mean, even if the acne dies down, the scars will remain – this sort of permanent taint. Because of this shit, I’ll be actually, literally scarred for life.
I sometimes look in the mirror and wonder if it’s even possible to extract this stuff from my skin, to pull it away, to remove the taint. But by now, the acne and my skin are one and the same thing: each is integrated into the other now. They can’t be separated.
I’m not supposed to still have acne. I’m twenty-one goddamn years old. But my mirror shows me the face of a teenager. I’m not a teenager now but I used to be one and I guess I can’t escape that.
I’d do it if I could. I’d disconnect myself from the guy I was at age fifteen. I’d find a way to transcend him. That guy was a loser. But I’m still him. I’m never going to stop being him, no matter how often I try to pretend otherwise.
If I’m twenty-one now and it’s the summer of 2010, then when I was fifteen it was six years ago – the summer of 2004. That was the summer before my senior year of high school. It was the summer of the router.
Until that summer, my family only had dial-up Internet, so that was what I used. I had no idea that our neighbors had a wireless router.
On so many occasions, I sat at the computer in my bedroom waiting twenty minutes for a Super Nintendo ROM to download. I didn’t realize that I could have pulled that ROM out of the electromagnetic ether around me in a fraction of the time, if only I had the means.
That summer I had the means. My dad’s employer had issued him a laptop which he had no particular need for, so he let me use it.
“Just don’t break it,” he said.
“I won’t,” I said. And so, right there, one day in May 2004, I put this new machine on our kitchen table and powered it on. Its wireless card found an unprotected network called “linksys.”
You don’t see this kind of thing anymore. In 2010, people know enough to lock their routers down, and to not name them “linksys.” Why, the wireless card in the laptop I’m using right now is picking up upwards of fifteen networks, all locked down. They have names like “brittneyjessica,” “Flower,” and “teef.”
And . . . oh shit. There actually is an unlocked network called “linksys” in range. I guess you do still see this after all. There’s always somebody.
That first day of wireless Internet, I couldn’t believe my luck. I got paranoid and wondered if maybe this was the only time it would work. Maybe this was some kind of fluke. I was afraid to move the laptop even an inch, because I was afraid the signal would cut out. So I stayed in one place late into the night.
What was I doing, you ask? How was I taking advantage of this sudden boon of high-speed Internet? Well, I was browsing OCRemix.org and downloading mp3s of videogame music. I was fifteen, okay. I didn’t know any better.
But do I know better now? It’s true that I haven’t been to OCRemix.org in years, but fuck, it is a real, actual fact that I have the entire Final Fantasy VII soundtrack in my iTunes library, and that I sometimes even listen to it.
Is there any defense for that? Maybe there is, if you’re fifteen. But I stopped being fifteen a long time ago. I mean, that’s what I want to think.
I soon discovered that I could pick up the wireless signal wherever I went in our house. In fact, it was strongest in my bedroom. So I put the laptop there and I screwed around on the Internet. I wrote a lot of shit and posted that shit on my Livejournal. I have an archive of that shit on my laptop here.
Today I looked through some of those entries of summer 2004, and they trouble me for two reasons: not only are they terrible, they’re not that much more terrible than what I’m writing now. No matter how much I try to hone my writing, I’ve got the same stylistic problems I had six years ago. I will always, to some degree, write the way I did six years ago. I can’t get away.
I had taken a P.E. class in summer 2003 and so I had to take another one in summer 2004. I had to get up at eight and go to class for four hours a day, Monday through Thursday. The class was “team sports” and it was a pain in the ass.
It was even more of a pain in the ass than it might have been, because back then I still thought there was something noble and intelligent about not being into sports – out of principle or something. Sports were for Neanderthals. I thought that was kind of an inherent, universal truth.
Now, I’m still not into sports, but at least I’m not as much of a dick about it. I guess that’s one way that I have changed, though it’s not much of a change.
There was this girl in my P.E. class; her name was (not actually) Jade. She was totally pretty. Every day, she sat at a table across from me in the cafeteria, which was where we met before every class. She was always sitting by herself, and always at that same table – against the far wall, underneath the clock.
I always sat by myself too, and every day I’d kind of glance in Jade’s direction, but in what I hoped was a nonchalant way – as though I really just wanted to know what time it was.
I kept thinking, “Man, I should walk over there and be like, ‘What’s up.’” I never did. I just kept glancing in her direction. I don’t think she ever glanced in mine.
Not that I can blame her for that. Even then, my acne was pretty awful. I’ve been a repulsive-looking guy for about as long as I can remember.
After several days of angst, I said fuck it and started sitting at a different table, with some dudes I became tentative friends with. They were nerds and they talked about nerdy shit. It was from them that I learned the difference between AGP and PCI Express, and it was from them that I learned about SuprNova.org.
“It’s a torrent site,” one of the dudes said. “You know how to use torrents, right?”
“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t know. I had seen the word “BitTorrent” in various Slashdot headlines, but I didn’t know what the word referred to, what the technology was, or how it worked.
That summer, I learned all these things. I used my stolen wi-fi connection to download so many games it wasn’t even funny. I got all kinds of shit – PC games, console games to play on emulators, whatever. I didn’t care. I can’t even remember all of what I downloaded.
I remember a lot of first-person shooters: Quake II and Deus Ex and Tron 2.0. Thief, if that counts as a shooter – it kind of doesn’t. Halo for PC. I almost downloaded Far Cry but those dudes assured me my graphics card wouldn’t be able to handle the game, and I trusted them. They were all into Unreal Tournament 2004 and suggested I get that, but I declined.
Sometimes I wonder – what if I’d accepted? What if I’d been less standoffish and pretentious? They would have invited me to their LAN parties and I would have gone. I would have become a more well-adjusted, sociable kid, instead of the slightly-odd and very-ugly dude who rambled to those guys about Deus Ex in condescending fashion.
“You really need to play it,” I kept telling them, “because it’s intelligent. It’s about making choices.”
What an asshole. I was acting like I’d been playing Deus Ex all my life, when in reality I’d played it for the first time that summer. I hadn’t even heard of Deus Ex until sometime in early 2001, when one of my friends told me about it.
“So what’d you do this weekend?” I said.
“I played a lot of Deus Ex.”
“Wait,” I said, “day of what?”
“Never mind.”
What an asshole. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t an asshole.
A lot of those guys were talking about Doom 3, a game which had not come out yet but was slated to do so in August, a month or so after the class we had together was slated to end. They were all going to buy Doom 3, because they were sure it was going to be awesome. I didn’t plan on buying Doom 3, but I did plan on torrenting the hell out of it.
But meanwhile there was this team sports class. We played a lot of dodgeball. There was this kid who played in a kind of unfriendly way.
He was a good player, but he was ruthless. He’d shove people out of the way and shit, even people on his own team. He shoved me out of the way more than a few times.
He talked to Jade a lot, and by the end of the class I guess they were dating or something. They’d make out in the hallways between games.
I’d sort of watch this, then go home and play some kind of videogame to cope. In the years to come, I found myself embroiled, time and time again, in situations very much like the one with Jade and this asshole. And I always cope the same way.
That’s how I’ve always retreated, and it has fucked me over. Now it seems like I’m incapable of processing anything that’s happened to me unless I somehow think about it through the filter of videogames. Maybe there’s no other way for me to make sense of my life.
Most of these past two weeks I’ve just been posting about videogames here. StarCraft II and Dragon Quest IX. It’s easier to talk about that kind of stuff than it is to talk about myself. It’s easier to think about that kind of stuff than it is to think about the stuff that needs to be thought about.
A month after that class ended I did go ahead and pirate Doom 3. My computer had a hard time handling it, but if I turned the graphics settings down to “low” and dropped the resolution down to 640 x 480, then I got about thirty frames per second, which was good enough.
I played Doom 3 for several hours over two days and then wrote a kind of longwinded Livejournal post about it. This post was both godawful and the best thing I wrote in 2004.
I didn’t play Doom 3 again for six years. Not until today. Because of this year’s QuakeCon, Steam had a sale – Doom 3 was 66% off. I went ahead and bought it, because why not. I didn’t remember it as being that good, but maybe I remembered wrong. After all, I was pretty young at the time. I was only fifteen. I thought Doom 3 might be worth revisiting.
Well, I was right and I was wrong. I was right in thinking that Doom 3 was worth revisiting, but I was wrong in thinking that it might be better than I remembered.
No, if anything, Doom 3 is worse than I remembered. It’s a wretched excuse for a game on just about every level. It’s slow and tedious and bland and not a lot of fun to play.
Next year, id is going to release Rage, the first title they’ve developed since Doom 3, and as of today some of my tentative enthusiasm for it has been dampened. Doom 3 reminds me that, as of six years ago, nobody at id had any idea how to design a game.
And it’s possible that they’ve changed, because a lot can happen in six years, but sometimes a lot doesn’t happen in six years. I think I’m proof of that. If I haven’t changed, how do I know that id has?
Playing Doom 3 now is kind of strange because I remember how modern this game used to seem – how advanced. My old computer had to really stretch to accommodate it.
But my laptop – which, given that it’s manufactured by Apple, isn’t a “gaming machine” by any means at all – doesn’t have any kind of issue with Doom 3. Thing loads in just a few seconds.
I can play at 1024 x 768 (the highest resolution my screen can deal with), at “ultra” graphics settings, and I get something like eighty frames per second. On my hardware, Doom 3 is as pretty as it is possible for Doom 3 to look. It can get no prettier.
And yet it’s so boring. It was always boring. It’s the same goddamn Doom 3 it was six years ago. It may look a little better now, but it didn’t grow. It didn’t change. It didn’t evolve. Then again, neither did I.