I sit down to work and feel a sagging chasm open. I can hardly get there, and once I do, labor feels both impossible and useless. Impossible because it feels useless. What am I aiming for? What's the best possible outcome?
I hear songs that have pleased me and feel either nothing, sadness, or envy. Empty envy. I'm jealous of all accomplishments, all art, all bodies, all beauty that isn't and won't be mine, even as I feel the emptiness of what other people recognize as mine. I want not only to have a different voice or to be a different person, but most of all to be able to believe it would be possible to enjoy having, and being.
More than a dozen people close to me have given serious consideration to death in the last couple of months. This is the creeping darkness of policy. This is the environment we've created, one in which lovely people prefer death to dealing. Inhospitable planet.
I hear someone say the problem is that we live in bad times. That your readiness is less useful. That what we learned to want is wrong now.
I'm watching a catalogue of speed run videos, people bending Super Nintendo games into impossible shapes. The music and art has lost its impact, but there's something in rearranging the shapes into new and deliberately-hostile environments that holds my attention, periodically making me open my eyes wide in disbelief.
"Kaizo" means "rearranged," or maybe it means "asshole," but either way now it also means "a game created to frustrate beyond belief." Games are modified by hacking the impenetrable and delicate fabric of the original ROM, writing inscrutable code to produce monstrous mutations of children's toys. Kaizo is a cruel prank, an easy-looking Mario jump with hidden blocks that dump you into a pit if you try to make the jump as usual. You're only ever a moment from death, with lava at your heels or a vast chasm you have to traverse by spin-jumping repeatedly off the blood-hungry head of a repurposed enemy. It takes incredible patience to explore, decode, and then practice a Kaizo-style game. They're a nightmare of bureaucracy. They turn play into endless paperwork, an arcane form you fill out to the best of your understanding only to have it revoked and returned with corrections and fees attached, thousands of times. And they're fascinating.
People play them to laugh and curse at their own suffering, and at the cleverness of the devil who designed it. Then eventually a small number of people will commit them to memory, practice endlessly to execute the impossible, then take pleasure in being recognized for performing in a way that largely obscures the difficulty of the act in the first place.
I roam the streets of Yarnham and feel purposeful, placated, quietly satisfied. Bloodborne is a game of disgusting, horrifying, frustrating brutality; but Lucy said it feels good to fight because as difficult as it is, you're supposed to beat it. I want blood, I want vengeance, I want there to be an end to the nightmare. Every morning a monster wakes up because no one put the stake in. Every night their eyes close with unearned certainty.
I say Bloodborne has taught me to let go. If I die and lose my accumulated echoes? Oh, well. If I die a hundred times on the way to learning a new area or boss? I hiss curses and try to laugh. But while I'm able to apply this patience and detachment to the game, I can't find that feeling for much of anything else. I take myself entirely too seriously, and failures don't feel like missteps on the way to inevitable victory. I can look back over my life and instead of seeing doors that opened, and paths I've connected, instead I see archways that have collapsed, foreclosing past and future. Places I never got to explore, and simpler territory that's now inaccessible.
I wonder about a Kaizo Bloodborne. Whether I would relish being treated even worse, so long as I had my saw cleaver at the ready. The game was already designed in the kaizo spirit; a distorted terror of height and fur and eyes where nothing is where it's supposed to be and pain bursts forth unannounced. What is the kaizo of kaizo? What is the endless rearrangement that feeds a possibility of pleasure? There's a large part of me that never wants this nightmare to end. It's one of the only activities that brings me anything approaching pleasure at the moment, and its finitude disquiets me. Either it will end, or my enjoyment will run out.
Some people play the same game for decades. They find joy in honing their performance, optimizing the route, skimming along the surface of a memory's lake. I remember learning to beat Super Metroid in about 2 and a half hours when I was maybe 10, because you could see a different ending if you finished in less than 3. I did the same thing with Metal Gear Solid a few years later, to get special items for running the game quickly. I can hardly remember doing those things; I mostly only remember because Ryan has reminded me. I don't know where my own memories go. In 1997 I had no sense of a wider purpose to continuing to run a game. Once I beat the game's internal metrics, I was done. What would I have become if I'd been born ten years later, similarly-disposed, driven to repeat useless tasks to prove I could, if I had been conscious of the world of speedrunning? Like so many other things, it's not worth thinking about. But here I am in the middle of the night turning other people's successes into my own shortcomings.
"Wanna feel the knife, come on, make me bleed. Torn apart for glory while the viewers sleep. On a painted highway towards a fever dream, I could hear the static of television teeth. Yeah, I wanna feel it again!"
"Yes, and finally I am nowhere, on the verge of full collapse it seems. It's a matter of perspective who I am and what you see."
"Head full of strangers under pale moonlight makes me turn from the shadows. I can't find your eyes. It comes from all directions. Suddenly, from all sides. You could be my protector in the arms of the night."
My sleep isn't coming easily. I sleep between 5am and 7am, 9am and 11am, noon and two. Can't get there, can't stay. Does a Hunter who can't reach the dream or the nightmare exist? Hunter's Insomnia, ineffective limbo. Stunning myself into submission.
I'm hoping I'm healing. That waiting is a cocoon and not a tomb. That I can take enough small steps forward and not find myself still in a vast indifference.
I heard someone say all the "successful people I know take their work very seriously, and don't take themselves seriously at all." I am in a prolonged moment of precise inversion.
And I can't help feeling we live in a kaizo world. Where recognizable ingredients have been placed in impossible configurations, where missteps are fatal and there are an increasing number of loose stones and unforeseeable obstacles. One where the monsters aren't being defeated, where their eyes are not placed on altars to reveal the doorways to a livable future. Where every goddamn day is a blind run bracing for the first of many kaizo blocks, and I can't gather the courage to get my ass kicked just to do it again when the only payoff is doing it yet again while a cacophony of clocks tick downward with drooping, inaccurate hands.