Friday, August 1st, 2008
I should have gone to PAX…
But didn’t. And I suppose, in the scheme of things, I could still go, I would just have to jump ship and haul ass to Seattle. I don’t have the money. I don’t have the time.
But I can recall an age when those considerations were meaningless and stupid; bygone days where I quit my job after a moments pause, in order to continue the 24 hour marathon of Quake and Syndicate Wars. Or driving through a blizzard to take a friend home for christmas, and when the car slides sideways, I don’t fret…I just turn into the slide and wait for traction to return, humming along to the Nazareth playing out of the radio.
Now I have “responsibilities”. This is a watchword that our parents used with great frequency, and it’s often touted by the establishment. I don’t think anybody should be deliquent in them, but sometimes I wonder if we should blast a few of them out of the water. Days like today, days where I realize that a finite chunk of my existence where I could be enjoying intercourse with stalwart gaming peers, vinyl clad punk girls, and technical elite, has been traded with sitting in a dimly lit room, inputting numbers into a machine that is as thanksless as it is a bitch to operate. It makes me long for a stub cigar shoved into my clenched teeth, while I annihilate someone with a thrice-barreled machine gun. Looking after my mother’s plants instead feels somewhat empty by comparison.
Now I could be one of an infinite number of men who’ve reached a point in their lives where they discover that nightly binge drinking in their underwear, while screaming at a television screen showing the explosive adventures of an enviable, well-hung hero has been replaced with a 10pm bed-down, and steamed vegetables with skinless chicken. The result of which is a stronge urge to purchase a frivilous motor-vehicle containing no more then 3 wheels, and to drive said into the brush with an intention of acheiving no less than 25 feet of vertical flight for a period greater than 5 seconds; an attempt to capture the serendipity and care-free joie de vive encapsulated in every Social Distortion lyric ever sung. But I don’t think I am.
I think the image of “growing up” in our society has been concretized by the pop-culture as a picket fence, sub-urban lifestyle, with 2.5 kids and a VW Toureg in the driveway. Whenever somebody comes along and suggests that a grown man could be just as happy, playing the drums till 2am every Friday night, while consuming a six of his favorites, and eschewing the notional validity of starting a family, everybody starts questioning his sanity, or evoking the deadly “Mid-life” analogy that is so popular. You’re either a loser, or a lonely asshole: society possesses no in-between.
I’ve wandered from the path I started on; lamenting my failure to reach PAX this year, but I think my point is that next year I’m going to make it a point or driving there two days early, drinking a quart of Wild Turkey, and attending the Convention with vigor and brazen-rakish-hellfury. Perhaps the most important thing about having responsibilities, is knowing when to stop giving a fuck about them.
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