A Day For Songs and Contests

By Brian Oliu

 

C:\> run ludology.exe 

Hello USER! 

Put that spreadsheet away mr man it is a day for songs and contests a day for songs and contests do you like songs and contests?  (Y/N) 

N 

Put that spreadsheet away mr man it is a day for songs and contests a day for songs and contests do you like songs and contests? (Y/N) 

Y 

What is your name stranger or guest?  We don’t know who you are, or whether you come from sunrise lands or the western lands of evening, but you are here, here with us where we will grant you escort and make you play games that will never make you heartsick for places elsewhere or anywhere but right here?  YOUR NAME 

O 

Hello O!  You are the harborer of seabirds and seasalt, colors blue like 1800 hours on a colorchart, wheel, vessel to get you from, nevermind all that it is a day for songs and contests and games, the best of what is best for you to wash away reasons for weapons, the combination required for an overhand smash is of zero consequence here, there is no time to consider the effects of others, for it is a time for contests.   

GAME OVER 

C:\> run narratology.exe 

The ink gave way because of the height, the lack of air and the opposite of drowning, the wedding that we escaped and the one that occurred away from input devices and we sat and watched it much later, cognoscente only after it was all over, our lives and ourselves transported forward to a place that no longer exists, a place that was bulldozed and burned, a place that I talk about to this day, a signal of my state and my state, an easy way to reminisce about childhood bookstores and standing in front of pixilated screens as our mothers tried on dresses and bought us mint chocolate ice cream if we asked nicely or were terrors, a place that was cursed by kitchen fires and awkward glances over to protect someone not worth the blacked out words some days.  Picture a store.  Picture a store inside of a tan bricked building on the side of the highway, before a traffic circle that you were scared to navigate when you were younger, the fear of merging and all things becoming condensed into one, the fear of archiving, the fear of burning, the fear of finalizing.  There is nothing to be seen here but what you wanted to see here; no remembering of what is to the right of the store, the canned goods and cleaners, aisles that you were dragged through by your mother in order to buy things we struggled to afford back then, certainly, your mother working nights at a bank in a room that you can only imagine; you imagine dark grey walls and dark blue, the color of cobalt, the color of modernity and the autonomy of counting numbers forwards and backwards, the flipping over of bills, the waking you up in the morning with a kiss on the forehead and a candy bar from a vending machine, the pressing of a button while the coil spins, the thought of happiness and love here despite the cold drive around circles, headlights spilling white cones down dark roads with nothing on them except abandoned parachute stores and dead deer spray painted with an orange X, their reward from leaving the thick forest.  No remembrance of rakes and hoses, plastic furniture, white buckets of paint with blue labels purchased by your father as he bought supplies to put down carpet in upstairs playrooms of houses that housed children that were not me, the calculating of knot density and the affix of an underlay, the placing of things to keep the placement of things, a company named after the town where his father was born, and when he spilled that paint on that floor after the job was completed and the thoughts of his father and his father’s son’s son soaked the berber with binder, it is something that I could never imagine, the shock of discoloring and the end of things and how do I keep this child happy and how do I and how do I and how do I 

Put that spreadsheet away mr man it is a day for songs and contests a day for songs and contests fortunate are you in as much as you had as much in common as the distance between the gods and the asuras 

O, you resemble a deathless god, a metasyntactic variable, an abstract representation of higher concepts, a placeholder of Hello World, Alice and Bob, a way to playtest whatever it is that needs to be played for hours in dimly lit rooms, flashing hums and the occasional prompt coming from inside the machine snapping you out of a decision making process and into a decision making process, if Y, join us, if N, fight, and we fully expect you to answer Y, to have the trap door swing beneath your feet or the snake swirl from the inside to black like an inverted tornado that brought you to this place and perhaps if you played the right tone, it’d bring you back home, perhaps if you pressed the right combination of X, Y, and Z, you could leave this colossal cave, this maze of twisty little passages, all alike, to pay no attention to clipping, to walk through walls of bedrooms to regard you with kindness, awe, and respect, heroic in your avatar and your representative, alive and large yet shrunk in scale, mortality dynamically rubberbanded to catch up if all goes too well as it has in the past; victorious battles against Rome and nights of writing epic poems with the conceit of death cause more a more difficult fight here, the world moves faster while slowed in the flicker.  O, this is a time for song and contests and there is no time for you to cry as we show you how we excel in the world.  

Put that spreadsheet away mr man it is a day for songs and contests a day for songs and contests now it is time to spin the blocks until they disappear doesn’t that sound like fun if you do this long enough you will be the winner!  Ready…Go! 

It’s hard to believe that this is the same thing that keeps others awake nights in places that I’ve never been, the feeling that you get when you walk into a dark green room with a piece of machinery on, that pressing of radiation against the right side of your head like a Japanese relaxation method practiced by a psychiatric nurse who was later placed under house arrest; something you found ironic, not the correlation between registering phony pain scales in reports and giving out those same numbers, (10 the worst pain imaginable), but the punishment of being unable to leave a foyer out the front door, press a button that begins the lifting by a counterbalance system, chain loop to belt to outside air, and cooking for one’s self, relying on things that keep, things that don’t soak up bacteria and curdle or fuzz over like the soup you gave to me in a plastic container because ceramics were not allowed here.  I imagine we hear the bounce, and a I wonder what it sounds like without it, as if a bottomless pit were really bottomless like they were in my dreams as a child, night terrors they called them, as I scaled bookcases to get away from falling Russian blocks, tetramino and tennis, as the colors fell from the sky and continued falling from the sky as I fell from the sky.  It is true I once held the ability to spin in my hands, to lock into place on car rides or visits to islands not my own, airplanes, even, ignoring requests for hugs or empty cups of ice so that I could suck on the cubes and crunch them with my teeth, swallowing J, L, S, T, Z, O, I.  The game ends when I cannot keep up with the increasing speed, which is highly likely, probable with my chubby fingers and inability to reach maximum lateral velocity.  It has been said that it is possible for me to play forever, that random is not random and all seven of the letters are generated in a permutation and evenly distributed and there will never be a gap left in a corner on nights when I am here and you are presumably elsewhere, packing suitcases and leaving dogs with brothers, though we both know due to the falling of things you aren’t going anywhere, at least not anywhere anytime soon.  It has been said that the random number generator is potentially and theoretically perfect, and I am not, and the build up of Ss, the large sequences of Zs will leave holes in boxes, perfectly sectioned squares like holes in ventricles, not enough Os, and certainly not enough Is to keep things balanced like an easy spin, Korobeiniki singing the song of my death, polnym poina korobushka, please, Lord, let me stay or take me home, my face covered by a turquoise cape soaking up the water so it never hits ground, silent like the alarm that should have blinked rose-red when you left the house to drown in your car in the river, no blocks left floating above gaps, the naïve gravity more grave.  This is what I see on nights when others reportedly sleep soundly, the hypnagogic imagery of highway hypnosis, sea legs lost, mal, mal, mal de debarquement. 

Put that spreadsheet away mr man it is a day for songs and contests a day for songs and contests that was fun do you want to play again?  (Y/N) 

N 

The smell of tomatoes is no longer there, replaced by a store that sells winter coats and a store that sells diamonds.  This is the consequence of getting older and living to see things around you change.  This would never be a place anyone would take a photograph of; perhaps a background light or a fake silk plant can be seen, inconsequential ephemera as boys leave the darkened arcade, their pants falling to the floor as the quarters in their pockets drag the fibers downward.  There are no photographs of your mother writing a check on tea-stained paper, subtracting numbers in blue pen as you ask for a wad of gum, ask for a quarter to play the game where you jump up and down from balconies, using all of your bullets too soon, your man in the white coat powerless to being run into by men in masks, causing you to jump and fall off screen.  Where is the joy in pretending to be a man who can be killed simply by being touched?  Where is the joy in all things adversarial?  This is what you remember, a square near the carts, running through the empty aisle to pay money to pretend you are not you, your mother behind you signing her name in endless loops, peaks and valleys, waiting for the man with the gun to die, waiting for you to die before we leave here and go home. 

The Game Has Ended.  Your score is 22.  You will do better next time.