This button it let ya kick. And I’ll also use this button for a punch hehe. When we mix that you can saw a combo for this attack. Oh! It true you can also perform grabs. For that ya press...
It wouldn’t take a genious to guess what scene we are witnessing here, but for the benefit of the unenlightened, these dulcet tones belong to none other than GameGenie, the XWF’s resident gamer-cum-combatant. And no, that doesn’t mean he competes in cum games, shame on you for not knowing Latin. We’re in GameGenie’s apartment it seems, or at least one he’s inhabiting. Adorning the walls are a myriad of Nintendo and Mortal Kombat posters. Interestingly, on opposing walls stand the characters of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. In between, the kiddy Nintendo characters grin inanely. It makes for an interesting image, almost as if Sub Zero is about to fight Ryu, in a sea of Nintendo mascots.
Less than ironically, it’s a fighting game GameGenie is explaining. We cant really make it out but it looks like one of those ‘one brand against another’ games. GameGenie is postulating with his Wii remote whilst sitting on a beanbag the shape of Kirby. A few feet to his right, Neonero sits in a lotus position with his eyes closed, not meditating, but simply enduring. GameGenie can be overenthusiastic when he gets into his gaming, and Nero just wants to chill and play not be lectured. But GameGenie refuses to hand Nero a control until he has the full grasp of the controller instructions. Button bashing is punishable by VAC banning in GameGenie’s house.
Nero is just imagining Yuri from SNSD, and occasionally nodding. The scene’s ironically reminiscent of the Shrink’s office yesterday. Nero sat there, imagining kpop to distract himself from an irritating situation.
And well, if ya need to pause ya can press this. Well why sleeping?
Huh? No, I wasn’t sleeping. I was just listening intently.
Well me too I’ll listen like that sometime. But it a shame cos ya din’dt see this button instruction. Well, let me start again for ya.
Oh God.
It mon dieu in this language just for ya info.
GameGenie relays this final tidbit with a gleeful face, and begins his instructional routine once more. Nero wants to leave at this point, but holds his nerve in front of his friend, instead reaching for a ham and mushroom pizza slice. It’s a big 16 inch pizza with a turtle logo on the side. A pretty lame and obvious marketing technique. Nero makes no note of it audibly though, for fear GameGenie will bust out his SNES and make him play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles next. Nero has no intention of being put in this situation.
Time seems to stretch on and on. We drift back to Kerrigan’s room. That disconnect between the moment, time and Nero’s conscious. Nero frowns, eyes closed once more. Suddenly he becomes aware of details that were previously forgot; the deprivation of outside thought has opened up his mind a little. Somehow he shuts out the sound of cartoon men hitting each other, GameGenie riffing about combos and the sound of rain outside...that rain. Rain becomes the prevalent image in Nero’s mind. Suddenly the sound of rain pattering on the glass outside becomes reality, all that is. After all, reality is nought but perception, right?
That rain washes over me. A man once sang, in some obscure song, that rain will always fall. There will always be rain. So why don't you just go outside and shampoo? I can’t help but remember those words. This rain, this deluge that falls upon my naked body, is purifying. Not in some airy fairy new age way. Not in the sense that its ‘washing away all my sins’, not in any way you want to cut it with conventional paradigms. But in a literal sense.
I suddenly become aware of clouds rolling above my head, deep, black monstrosities that roar, and that roar is so deafening that I cannot even hear it. A thousand cries shriek past my ears in a millisecond, it’s a barrage. Though I can’t hear the voices amongst the H2o I feel their rage, and the rain forces me to my knees. My knees are jelly. My feet are abuzz with pins and needles. I look down and a puddle now encircles me; ever increasing as the rain pours. The fractal shapes those drops leave on the water fascinate me. Fractals are everywhere; I look up and even the clouds now speak to me in the unspoken languages of geometry and mathematics. A Fibonacci spiral shrieks towards me and I shield my eyes; as I open them, the deluge has stopped.
To describe what I see now, is a hard thing. On one hand, it’s the picture of perfection. On the other, it’s Hell. If I were to sit and describe a physical representation of the yin yang I would likely come up with something like this. All about me a cool cerulean ocean, but rather than a deep expanse, the water is nary a foot high. It’s almost transparent, and beneath it white sand stretches for distances immeasurable. At random distances, women paddle in the water, women with perfect shape. Just a glance at their slender waists, broad hips, large...you get the point here. I start to question why I am subconsciously talking to myself about what I am seeing, instead of just perceiving it.
This inner monologue becomes the Hell, for I suddenly become inescapably linked with my words.
Every word I have ever uttered slowly passes through me; the good, the bad, the inane, the funny, the nasty, and then the worst of it all occurs; I start to relive every emotion. A sense of anxiety first sweeps me, which is then replaced by sorrow, elation, anger, longing, joy...these feelings pass by me in a moment, but I feel as if I am trapped in an eternity. The sea now darkens, and the women fade away. Suddenly the clouds in the sky part and a huge, alabaster moon hangs high in front of me. Upon its face, a human face lies, looking content, and for a while, seconds, maybe hours, I watch it. Serenity.
A shock wave rockets through my body as the moon opens her eyes, and I suddenly feel weightless, insignificant, irrelevant. I feel like I do not belong here, in this position of grandeur, stood before the moon enjoying a personal audience. Satellites are supposed to hang high, to follow the gravitation of the greater body which, only second to the nearest star, owns them.
And yet here I stand, an insignificant ingredient of that greater body, stood like some ambassador to the solar bodies. I wonder if Mars will pop past and start some shit in his warring rage; Pluto will descend upon me and regard his demotion from planet to Satellite with me. He’ll engage me on this as if I were the leading authority. I question him as to why human classification, on a heavenly body several light years away, is really something to be taken so personally. And at this point, as I am imagining this debate with Pluto, she speaks to me.
She, that is, being the moon. I’m back in the present. Her voice is just as you’d expect it to be, a vibration of the most divine genesis. I’m so distracted by how her voice fills me with ecstasy that I fail to even comprehend what she says. As I realise this, I look at her face pleadingly. She smiles, and those vibrations fill me with a sense of conciliation. Her words are suddenly available to my conscious mind, and I drink them in like I was talking to God. Perhaps I am; perhaps she is a demigod in a pantheon, or perhaps she is simply a normal entity on a plane of existence that would normally be impossible to reach. She tells me of things, and my mind expands, and then her words return to Pluto, as if this whole conversation was supposed to arch back to him. I don't know why Pluto has attained male connotation in my mind but she ignores this tangent. Here I am talking to the moon and I still go on these fucking tangents.
In the most sublime way, the moon tells me that Pluto is aggrieved, and human thought is actually the most important thing in the Universe. More to the point, my consciousness is the most important thing. For without my consciousness there would be no reality. If there were no consciousness on my part, the world around me would simply not exist. I plead with her; ‘but mine is not the only consciousness’, and she smiles again, and tells me that every individual is the universe, that conscious thought is just as much fabric in space time as the tick of a clock. But that everything is centric; without my thought my universe would not exist. Of course this is all cyclic, and all must come to pass. But for now, my mind, my imagination, my reality as I perceive it, is the most important thing in existence. Indeed, it is existence.
She nods; and as she does, she rolls forwards like a ball. What would perhaps be termed the dark side of the moon now sits before me in the satin sky, faceless, silent. My mind wont stop whirring, all of the information I just received taking its own sweet time to deposit itself in my memory banks, my perception struggling to adjust to this new universe I now see. The only way to describe this is thusly; imagine every single advertisement, every logo, every commercial on television, simultaneously turned into a creature. That creature expands exponentially depending on the size of the company, and the sky is just filled with a mess of bizarre constructs, somehow now biological entities feeding on consumers beneath. But is it money, energy, numbers, what...what is it that feeds them? Questions like this, to scenarios completely imagined but real in their metaphorical necessity, hang high and confuse my senses.
Then a question simply falls into my mind, and everything makes sense.
‘Why is a castrated animal happy?’
The answer?
‘Because it doesn’t know what it has lost’.
I suddenly open my eyes for real; I’m back in GameGenie’s place. A glance at the clock; maybe a minute has passed. Impossible. But true. I stare at GameGenie’s television; pixels are jostling for life. Two characters are fighting, each with a health bar that lowers each time they are hit. Of course it is not a natural representation of men duelling. In reality, if you hit a man on the chin with a soaring uppercut, he would be on the floor cold for hours. But this is not reality we are witnessing, this is...actually, it’s completely real. I start to realise that these characters are as real as I am. They may not be sentient, but they’re there. And if we can create life in this way, then why not civilizations, why not the cry of the lost. I have long espoused that morals are irrelevant. Good and evil are constructs. Yet I begin debating it with myself internally, then out loud. I look at GameGenie, and ask him flat out.
Neonero: Do you believe in morals, GG?
GameGenie: Well yes. But why changing this subject? I’ll still trying to show ya this button.
Neonero: Never mind that for now – why do you have morals?
I look at him and realise it is not him who I should debate this with, but nonetheless I press him. He really just wants to play his game, but in this moment I need to vent my thoughts. I start to explain the best way I can, aware that he doesn’t care or really follow my train of thought, but of course no one would or could right now. But verbalising my thoughts makes this process so much easier on my cerebral cortex, which emits a dull pang of pain. My pineal gland is dancing and tiring out every synapse.
GameGenie: Well but
Neonero: Morals bring out our strongest emotions in many ways, yet one man’s morals are another man’s folly. Look at the white man whence he descended on - or we may say returned to - Africa, perhaps with Benin as a useful frame of reference. Much as Cortez sacked South America, defiling the expert pastures, slaughtering the natives, and bringing pestilence to the cells of every local. A civilisation of millions reduced to nothing more than memory etched in stone. And for what gain; the morals of one man’s religion belittling another? Greed? Dominance?
GameGenie: It maybe both I’ll guess. But about this combo...
Neonero: Or is it perhaps nothing more than fear of the unknown, tearing away the veils of common sense?
GameGenie: Well
Neonero: In Benin the same occurred. A civilisation with its own hierarchy, the ‘Oba’ as King. Fabulous works of art the trademark. Like the Aztec, the Bini were reduced from civilisation to dirt within a century, between the early Portuguese traders and the British dominion. Their hierarchy toppled like the domino, their bronze works now the thing of exhibit in the museums of foreign lands.
GameGenie has just started ignoring me; I’m clearly ranting and going on one of my trips. But I keep talking, as if there’s an audience there to listen. Maybe I’m talking to the sky. Maybe I am bouncing my thoughts off the moon.
Neonero: I tell you these things not to make a point, but to evoke a reaction. Nay, not even this. I do this to make you look deeply at your own reaction. Are you angered by these plundering invaders of the West, who took all that they could and enslaved, killed and tortured all who they found? Or are you deeply offended by those ‘savage things’ you were taught of, who based their lives around human sacrifice, politics alien to yours and customs that bear no mark of your hand?
GameGenie just won a match, and he’s complaining about some bad manners. The guy he beat is sending him abusive messages. I kind of take this situation in but can’t lose my train of thought.
Neonero: Would your civilisation exist were it not for these exploits? Would their civilisation rule had we not?
And, when you step back, what, then, are your morals? For your moral reactions to these conundrums are what define you, and it is only when you step back that you can analyse these reactions, for the average man is a slave to his opine, his bias and his herd. This is why the soldier shoots when told, this is why the man walks to the polling station. This is why the human is a slave to his salary, why war may exist in the least. And yet, do we not see these qualities in nature? Does the ant not war also? Is the household cat not a cruel thing when it plays with its prey? Are there not creatures who exist solely as parasites?
I press my forefingers against my temple, massaging my scalp as my thoughts, through some miracle, come full circle and I achieve clarity of thought.
Neonero: Given that these fallacies are true, what then the progeny of these ‘morals’ to which you espouse? The hallmark of the unnaturally civilised, destined to regress forever perpetually, or something quite natural, a cosmic order to all things in spite of man’s perceived good and evil?
It all makes sense now. I glance at the pizza again, and notice the shape of the mushrooms. Clearly they’ve taken me on a trip. But instead of remonstrating with GameGenie about possessing hallucinogenic mushrooms, I realise that he is oblivious; for I brought this pizza. I don't remember buying it, but I remember bringing it in the door. I realise that what I have just experienced was more than just a simple hallucination. It was a doorway into clarity; clarity much needed in my world. In the next, I realise that I must regain control over my person. Who am I? That question still hangs over my head, and I debate whether my identity is more important than my reality, or whether its simply a necessary ingredient.
I realise that if I am to be King of my own reality, I must first understand who I am. For without this I will simply be the inconsistent monster that I have been for the last year in perpitude. Nero must rise. Mr. Cyn must rise. And this begins with more than the menial task of removing a golden trinket from a man who defines himself as a cosmic satellite.
I smile to myself as I imagine him as a literal celestial body, pulled towards me via my superior gravitational force, and my sheer mass. He’s a small satellite, a lump of rock, spinning perpetually, unaware of his real role in my universe. To rouse my interest, to keep the waves of my oceans moving towards the shores of my continents. To provide an interesting sight when I look into the distance. And he’s been that indeed; for I have long admired the beauty of his work, the skill with which he moves in the world like an artisan. The way he captured the hearts of the world with his burlap sack and handicap. The way, just like a true moon, he becomes less attractive in some lights. And more interesting in others. Full moon, Satty at full speed with that bouse robot. Crescent moon, removing that burlap sack. Total eclipse; revealing himself as just another guy with a loud mouth. We’re surely in a long eclipse right now, as the robot is gone, the sack is gone, and we’re just left with some guy. It’s perhaps inane to summarise a man by these factors, and in Satty’s case it is. For he is still an artisan, with or without these things. And his battles are not won and lost on the premise of these things being to hand.
Yet mind lingers, now upon Satty’s invisible obsession with the children’s sci fi show Dr. Who, that seems to consume every action. I can’t help but shake my head when this thought crosses my mind, because Dr. Who is abysmal, it could’ve been written by chimps most weeks. The ‘time travelling alien who changes face at random and always has a different female sidekick’. It really borders on copy write infringement when I think deeper on it. But the difference is that Satty is actually compelling to watch, even when he is in total eclipse mode. Even when he’s being just another arrogant alpha male he speaks in such a way that you want to listen instead of changing channel; certainly the opposite of the male hormone fest lying in the Leap of Faith main event.
I start to wonder why I’m still here, and my mind whirs back into a more ‘normal’ state. By thinking about Satty I have kind of ‘grounded’ myself; ironically thinking of the anything but normal Mr Satellite has made me feel more normal. It’s not some clash of the bizarre, its simply contentment. I’m now ready to forget the material world a while and play some brainless video games.
Neonero: Ok man, enough watching, let me kick some virtual ass.
GameGenie: Well it sure then I’ll thought ya never gonna ask...
I grab a controller, then reach for a slice of pizza...
Fade
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