As I prepare to take off on this new writing arc (or at least claim that I am) one of the things that I am struggling with is direction. I’ve long told myself that I want to get out of the “I told you so” articles that have become my norm over the past four years. I’ve very much returned to my pre-COVID state of mind, where I am content to let people believe what they want to believe. The lifestyle of being persistently and maliciously and intentionally uninformed while concurrently insistent that what you believe is the unassailable truth is a way to be. I’ve never allowed myself to be weighed down by those forces who prescribe to that way of life prior to the isolation and increased digital social immersion of the pandemic and I am very happy that I have found my way out of that darkness.
I’ve been wanting to embody the writing ethos of Peter Egan. Celebrated author of columns in both Cycle Word and Road & Track, Egan became my favorite writer during my peak motorcyclist years and has remained so. But I often struggle to find my own heart, pathway, and philosophy in his style. I can’t hook the same embodiment of the things that I love. And so I’ve been spending much reflection (really wailing and gnashing of teeth), trying to figure out why. Or just to even figure out what “it” is and where “it” comes from.
I won’t recant the stories of how I came to discover tech and gaming. I think those have been recited enough. The chronology of the events is well documented. What my id is struggling with now is the mental pathology of the love. What led to me falling in love with tech. How? And why am I still here trying to write about it?
When I look at Egan’s writings, I don’t have those experiences. I don’t have a childhood friend with a history of us tearing things down and building things in garage. Mainly because neither of our families could afford a house with a garage. I have some stories of weekend road trips to San Jose and times in San Diego going to Fry’s to hunt down prize components to build the next gaming PC. But those few stories are quickly superseded by the age of Amazon, Tiger Direct, and Newegg and stories of shopping online just don’t resonate as well.
So if there are no stories to tell…with an understanding that storytelling is THE primary way humans revisit themselves and their own history…storytelling being a key way that we dive into and embed ourselves in the notion of things that we love and how we came to love them…our way of conveying to others why we enjoy a thing, why we consider it important…I struggle.
But I think I have found the inkling of an answer. In writing a long-form post on BlueSky this weekend. I will repeat some of that here.
I’ve been trying to get back to writing a regular column and I realize that in trying to talk to people this thing is so much the wall. It’s hard to find people to talk to about games or tech because 98% of the discussion is about being judgmental rather than being curious. I didn’t get into games and I didn’t stick with games because I loved Sega, or loved Xbox, or loved PlayStation. I didn’t fall in love with Windows Phone or the Microsoft Band or TabletPC out of some corporate sense of loyalty to Steve Balmer or Gates.
I fell in love with gaming and tech out of a love for curiosity. Exploration. New experiences both in art but also in the discovery of humanity in the immersion of these experiences. In incorporating them into our fabric and pattern of life. In seeking out the questions to be asked, not simply for answers to pre-ordained ones. That curiosity…that discovery is what keeps me in love with gaming and technology. Not punditry. Not people’s judgements. Those things may be let to rot on the vine.
And so there, I think, it is. I fell in love with gaming and tech simply for the curiosity. Because, quite frankly, lacking the ability to go to space at the time, and given the much better mortality rate of being a gamer and a technoratti than space exploration, I am excited by the constant discovery of the new. In art. In the application of technology to life. In discovering new ways to experience a thing. Through the application layer of newly developed technologies. It may not be much. But that’s what I will try to write about. That is my new creative journey.
Drafted on my Mac Mini M1 using Freeform
Rounding Off Infinity 