Imaginary Exploits of a Hairpiece Gone Mad
by Kris Weberg on August 31, 2006
I stop blogging for a week to read up on political theology, and the world goes awry: planets vanish from the heavens, fantasy football gains a stereotypically "feminine" counterpart, and America's children become catastrophically dumber.
And the worst of it is, I haven't really got much to post about in my life, unless someone here is up for a discussion of Walter Benjamin's metaphor of the automaton and the dwarf, which is nowhere near as funny as the dirty joke you probably just made up while reading that phrase. (See, there's this chess-playing automaton, and it represents historical materialism, but the machine is animated by a hidden dwarf who represents theology....oh, forget it, you had to be there.)
Sitting in a room all day, reading, occasionally braving the sunlight for a hot cup of coffee or a cold bottle of green tea, has strange effects on me. Astute observers will note that I've changed the blog description in the direction of absurdity, which may be taken as a symptom. Likewise, there seems to be simultaneously infinite time and absolutely no time in a day, every day. Having been too much of a slacker to get a real job, I have to wonder if this is what things feel like in private enterprise when there's a huge deadline looming; that is, when the work needs to be taken home, or the office stays open later. I'm also a little dazed when I run into friends on the street or at the coffeeshop, feeling like I've been on a desert island for years.
None of the above is really meant as a complaint, of course. I enjoy what I do, even the scary or anxiety-producing bits of it, and there's not a single thing on my lists that I didn't choose. That doesn't mean the occasional flight of mind isn't going to happen. But what I find odd is an increasing -- for lack of a better term -- nostalgia, not for days past, but for idle fantasies past. Days past would surely be nebulous, reconstructed images of things as I'd like them to have been, so much debris masquerading as the real and solid thing. But I can be surer of my past imaginings and bizarre persistences of velleity.
And some of them are bizarre. Ignoring the typical TV-show projections, I can recall some really odd stuff I thought I wanted as a child. There was a while when I was, say, seven or eight that I had the idea I'd one day become very rich, buy and empty out a local mall, and turn it into some kind of giant hotel/playground for me and my friends. The shops would become our personal rooms, the atria would be filled with video games and theme-park rides, and soda would flow freely in cloying rivulets and our parents were all banished to, I dunno, our real, boring homes, I guess.
There's the time I was so bored in summer that I wrote an entire overarching plot tying together the video games Contra, Double Dragon, Ninja Gaiden, and probably two or three more I can't remember, making me a fanfic producer before the Internet or even puberty. (No, there was no slashfic involved.) Of course, for kids growing up in the late 1980s, Nintendo was our insane folklore, filled with whispered rumors, secrets, and psychotic speculation. Maybe that's why we now see real adults devoting themselves to tool-assisted speedruns or the geek-chic confection that is Scott Pilgrim.
The odd thing is that the real world seems increasingly like the whims and idel fantasies of my childhood, with both the naive fun and the underdone conceptualization that entails. In a world where there really are great empty shopping centers, massive indoor theme parks, and hundreds of thousands of prose stories about Mario Mario fighting Dr. Wily while Captain N defuses a Bob-Omb, even the dumbest half-second notions floating through my sugared-up pre-teen brain now have massive and devoted numbers of grownups indulging in them repeatedly.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm an insane prophet who predicted the dead mall phenomenon and the increasing prevalence of horribly amateurish Harry Potter erotica. And that all of the above is pretty incoherent and mind-numbing.
N.B.: To avoid this sort of "dial 911, and load the rifle with tranq darts" entry in the future, poetry will begin appearing within a week for your mockery and/or befuddlement, Whatever the response, rest assured that I will desperately forestall meaningful blogging until my actual life resumes sometime in mid-November.
Three Replies to Imaginary Exploits of a Hairpiece Gone Mad
Scott Hardie | September 2, 2006
Sounds a great deal like my own childhood, Kris. My eventual academic major can be traced back to the reams of Nintendo fanfic I wrote back in sixth grade. You and I wouldn't have someday met without it.
I'm sure you're not the only one who thought of something like that for a mall. Kelly's brother suggested something very similar way way back in the early days of TC. (link)
Jackie Mason | September 13, 2006
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Berserk Wig
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Lori Lancaster | August 31, 2006
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