Why do we play some games and not others? My grandma and I used to play a lot of card games. According to her, I was really good at either Rummy or Canasta, but until she told me this was the case, I didn't remember ever playing either. Keep in mind, I might've been 7 or so at the time. Apparently, she taught me how to play, I wiped the floor with her, and then we paused playing for long enough for me to not even remember doing so. With cards, I played because my grandma was a boss and fun to be around given that she genuinely wanted the company of her family. Her including me in card games carried over into when I got older and would proceed to clean up in playing Rummikub with her and her friends.
The familiarity of a game is what I find most potent. It's one thing to have fun, another to consider the competitive angles. But once you know a game, unless you're me as a child, you know it. A thousand protests I can hear in the distance play familiar games with their own versions of the rules or recall memories fighting with family members as someone stumbles through a read from the rule book. You don't need to know hidden banker rules to know how to play Monopoly, and you never have to learn about bluffing or blinds to play poker. You know how they basically operate, and you can carry on in a safe and smart-enough way.
The amount of times I've referred to life as a game is high. The rules are chosen by each individual, and it's played across levels of familiarity and competence. If you choose to pull out of the game, different rules are enforced, and any remote fun or competition is subsumed by all-too-real consequences. The more unfamiliar you are with those consequences, the less the game feels like it can be played with confidence or competence. I think, whether you consider it an over-arching theme in how to approach your life or not, you'd be foolish to not believe there are an endless array of people who don't want you to win.
Win what? Their game or yours? Win how? Monetarily? In notoriety? Winning and losing are ideas before they're meted out as disappointment or punishments. First, you have to lose your mind. You have to lose the conception of yourself as someone who can win, regardless of what, and well before you have the words or vision for what that win looks like. You have to be plunged into the depths of failure and still listen for what's said next. You have to see the inhumanity in so many ideas and land on the side of struggling to push through a conception worthy of life.
My game has remained the same in a lot of ways. I still want to enable people. I still want all of my time to do whatever with. I still want to retain my voice, especially in spite. I want my world to be filled with my people, and I want to see what we create.
My game has changed in a few key ways. I'm not willing to hate and exhaust myself along the road. I'm not willing to work for those who won't work for themselves. I'm not going to look for more reasons than I naturally conceive of to doubt what I'm doing. Do you know who cares? No one. Pretend you're Chang hearing about your problem. Who's Chang? Exactly, and he doesn't know you either. There is no secret drama or meaning behind your struggle. Pick it, or don't, but leave the excess energy and Chang alone.
I like playing games that make examples. I've played the “build a house” game for a while now. School when I was younger was a “smart kid” game. Just like cards, there's familiar patterns of behavior you can play safe and intelligently enough to get to the desired outcome. College was the “party game.” Drug studies were considered an “efficiency game.” I'm calling my time at DCS a “pragmatic punishing perspective game.” I like to prove a point, an almost always petty one, that yes, I can. I can switch and play your game, or amp back up mine, or do any number of things because I'm able and/or going to win.
This can get you into trouble. This indirect, yet somehow exacting sensibility is to be embodied. If you've ever had a body, you know it doesn't always do what you point and click on it to do. Or, it does, but by electing to play on a different level than you were planning. This sounds abstract and weird because it is. Maybe you adopt habits that help you maintain a relationship. Maybe you blackout trauma and unduly worship to keep your head straight. Maybe it's not an affirmation to conceive of yourself as the only one playing or capable of winning on the kind of board you've build for yourself.
Win? Win your own game? Big deal! Who gives a shit about your game with all of the xyz and blah-diddly-blah in the world? Also, sucker, I've got a game too, and you're not even Chang to me.
It can be easy to forget the wins. The struggle, once overcome, is the romance and nostalgia. Pick a battle too big, you may give up or die trying. Pick an opponent not in your league, you won't even be able to understand the directions of their playbook. I make a lot of predictions and comments about who I think people are or where they're at in life. Usually they pretty much tell me how it's going to be. They don't recognize the game they're playing, I don't actually have super powers.
I don't know who I am if I don't exist in service to the larger and longer game, the people I consider mine, and the ideas I've never let go of. It's not that I need some desperate out-of-reach thing to always exist relative to. It's that I feel empowered when I entertain the implication of running those new games. What happens with the right soup of people? Where does my better organized and engaging website take politics? What springs forth from my stabs at paycheck-affordable business ideas? I say things like this often because they are the things that need to win. They need to beat cynicism and comfort. They need to beat dejected c'est le vie. They need to beat you.
I remember never believing, until it happened, being able to get this far. I'm again, typing from my electrified, air conditioned, outright-owned home on my big screens, under a blanket in a recliner. Each piece of this puzzle a little side-quest adventure. I'm doing a solid run this round, on this level, against my worse conceptions of myself. I'm even finding new people to play with and join their games. And, as always, I'm 2 or 4 months away from the kind of tepid “security” that everyone trying to play for 100+ years dreams of; a playground to shape per the directive of the imagination. I mean, even more, that is, as it's so easy to forget the struggle once it's overcome.
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