Chapter I: You Can Climb That Mountain

Changing the world is a conceit of children. We enter this world bereft of understanding, vulnerable little things ready at any moment to impale themselves upon their towering hopes. Exhausted and seeking renewal, our parents foster those dangerous hopes even as they nurse their own injuries. Indulging vicariously in our youthful indiscretion, they salve the gashes where once their own aspirations, those iridescent parasites, lurked in their breast—and so we are cursed to make the same mistakes, and to repeat the same cycle.

As foolish an adult as I was a child, I once raged against the injustice which had thrust me, tattered and bleeding, out into the cold. At the time I felt that, hardly having had any say in the circumstances of my arrival, I was at the very least owed a warm, fair world like the one sold to me in my youth. It wasn't until later that I realized the scars on my body perfectly matched the grooves of the machine into which I would either be slotted or thrown away without a second thought—that was my curse; that was the gift which my parents gave to me.

Jettisoning my aspirations among the bloodslick of early adulthood, I fought as hard and as cruelly as was necessary to secure my own lowly position. I had made it. I had become the shape and hardness required of me, and had limited the bounds of my imagination to the realities of my existence—I had become a cohesive part.

And yet. Even with my own hands stained by my initiation, even knowing that I could never again claim to deserve anything more, my mind at times wanders from its padded cage. Wasn't I promised something more than these long days and tearstained nights? Wasn't there supposed to be something else, somewhere?

This, I believe, is referred to as the death drive.

November 11, 2011. Veterans Day. Already tasting vodka-flavored oblivion on my lips, I clutch my meager earnings in my hand as I walk to my local GameStop. As I enter I am immediately assaulted by three screens blasting three different advertisements for video games. It would seem that If I am to return to nothingness, I must first embrace hell.

"J-just this, please," I stammer, holding out the empty box and a worn plastic card as if they were an offering to let me pass through the store unmolested.

In this, as in all things, I am disappointed.

"Oh, you're a fan of Elder Scrolls, huh? You want that for PC? You know, PC is really the best, since you get all the mods…"

I nod along stupidly, a lamb to the slaughter. I can't tell if I'm being lamely hit on or limply sold a useless product, but it ultimately makes little difference. After a thirty-second monologue I am permitted to leave the store with my game, if not my pride. Driving home, I wonder when I stopped liking video games, and why I keep buying them. Well, what else would I waste my money on? I enjoy little, and have time to enjoy even less. Better to run headlong into whatever means of burning through my empty days is most expedient, knowing that to raise my eyes to the horizon would only invite deeper injuries. It's a strange kind of responsibility I practice, but then responsibility is always painful.

The game disc feels light and cheap in my hand as I place it into my computer's CD tray. It would only stand to reason that this action, which would come to amount to throwing away the rest of my life, would be mundane and weightless.

The game installs, and I am plunged into a world bespattered by grime and filth. Searching desperately for the magic I was so sure I found as a child, I am left with nothing but burning eyes and a mouse slick with sweat. My character holds seven iron swords, a mace, three sets of armor and miscellaneous fruits, vegetables and tableware—but my own hands remain empty. A sickness overtakes me, a deeper sickness which lies atop and entwines with the one already provoked by cheap alcohol. I just want to stop playing and—maybe take a walk outside, and see if I can't find something to like about this world. For one brief, excruciatingly bright moment, I am filled with fresh purpose—and then a sword intersects with a table, begins to twist rapidly around, and shoots off with an indescribable thud.

It may be difficult to fully describe the enjoyment I derive from this nonsense. It's as if, having just cleared of clouds, the sky were suddenly set ablaze with a brilliant sunset. I begin to chuckle, a strangled, raspy sound, and soon break into full laughter. This, surely, is why I purchased this game. This is why I spent the money I earned with my long hours of work. This is the fruit of my years of labor, the unforeseen end of the journey on which I embarked as a child: unadulterated, cloying meme.

There is a kind of love so pure that it can only be understood as among the gravest perversions. A love which ignites the body with passion, such that through it even the most meaningless of things toss aside empty human logic, overflowing the cardboard cells of the mind and consuming all reason in a bright conflagration. A love which rewires the mind with no consideration of the demands of the outside world. A transcendent, fatal, repulsive sort of love. This is the love that I, an absolutely miserable human being unworthy even of contempt, hold for meme in its raw, unattenuated form. The only love which a creature like me can muster.

Meme is the unordered cold, limp fry at the bottom of the modern Pandora's box, and it is the accompanying chuckle. A single, clearly inadequate redemptive force amid the chaos and control, hope inverted into itself that some small scrap of its original meaning might be salvaged—capture the effervescent radiation at the borders of the crushing arbitrariness of everyday life, look into those spots where the clamps malfunction and crush into bone, find where the canopy of steel grows so thick that you remember sunlight—that is meme.

To acknowledge one's own profound inadequacy and the profound inadequacy of one's condition in one, to accept that everyone is always writhing in unremarkable, boring agony, to know that such an agony is rooted in the clashing of those universal defects of humanity, a constellation of defects scraping against the unseeing barbs which spring from the poisonous soil inevitably lurking in the foundations of our societies—to find and drink deeply of that poison, a poison rooted in the heart of humanity itself, and thus to become drunk on one's own suffering—that is meme. To condition oneself into hallucinating some thin humor as toxic industrial waste is forced down one's throat, knowing all the while that there is nothing else, nothing outside that forced smirk in which to take refuge; that is meme. Human beings are broken, pathetic things that have invented broken, pathetic systems to navigate a broken, pathetic world, all determined as such by the tyranny of our broken, pathetic minds. Is it not an act of self-love, then, or at least the pale surrogate that remains, to find the most broken and pathetic things, the most insignificant and hateful pieces of garbage, and treasure them?

The following day I discover console commands, and the fire of my passion burns so hot that it chars my ribcage, so hot that it melts the chains which I had fashioned from the iron of my own blood to bind me to survival's sharp edges.

I am not set free. A being like myself is incapable of understanding freedom, even if I were to somehow deserve it. No, I am more of a slave than I ever was—a slave to that neon, excruciating joy which has in a single instant melted me down and shaped me anew.

Less than human, I have become a gamer.