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The 2013 Toyota Camry is my chariot.

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From the KU Library Digital Archives

I have been taken aback by a recent endeavor to read the work of Seneca the Younger. I find reading from antiquity to be a fascinating endeavor, particularly in the non-fiction personal essay genre. One of my co-workers identified that this reflects a current TikTok trend implying that men think about Ancient Rome with some frequency, though I’ll admit that this is about the first time I’ve thought about Rome and/or the Romans in any non-soccer context in a long while. Reading old letters like those of Seneca’s offers a chance to feel oneself reflected as a part of human history that I don’t get out of other genres of writing – Namely, I can see how my own specific neuroses and eccentricities have roots well before me and can sense that those neuroses and eccentricities will continue to exist among people far past me, which helps me to feel that putting so much of my writing out here may have some benefit to someone a little further down the line.

Phillip Lopate’s collection The History of the Personal Essay, contains a letter of Seneca’s entitled “On Scipio’s Villa,” in which Seneca more or less defends the honor of the unordained bathhouse of a man who existed centuries before him. Seneca complains of the unnecessary ornamentation of then-modern baths. He contrasts the pragmatic approach to bathing of his forefather – arms and legs daily and full body once weekly – to ostentatious daily baths taken by men who toiled far-less. Scipio, he decrees, bathed sparingly to wash off sweat, while Seneca’s contemporaries bathed far more often to wash off what but ointments. He bemoans the unnecessary ornamentation of modern baths: “We have become so luxurious that we will have nothing but precious stones to walk upon.” 

Seneca and I are far different people, two millennia and a hemisphere apart. I can only read him through translation, only with context given by the collection, and the cleanliness and ostentation of the only public shower in which I ever find myself (the one in the locker room at Planet Fitness) would probably leave him in indignant horror. However, I am in consort with him. I feel his exigence in my person as I write this post. I too have a dingy old place of my own that I see succumbing to ostentation and petty luxury and feel the need to defend its honor. Continue reading →

Lawrence, Kansas was shocked to its roots on Monday by rumors that the musician and former Tumblr user Taylor Swift had decided to eat lunch. Crowds gathered en masse around Free State Brewery downtown, where she was rumored to be enjoying the popular mid-day meal. It all makes sense – We know she’s been to Lawrence before, she was caught by TV cameras observing the Chicago Bears in Kansas City on Sunday, we know that she loves a nice cool Copperhead Pale Ale on an early autumn afternoon, and we know that she’s had DVD copies of La Haine, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and Ernest Goes to Jail on hold at the Liberty Hall video store adjacent to Free State Brewery for the past six years. All signs pointed to the rumors of Swift’s meal being a reality, but reporting from the Lawrence Journal-World revealed them to be merely fantasy. Continue reading →

Like anyone else, I have a handful of games that I know better than any others. These are the games whose layouts and core mechanics are moreso imprinted upon me than recalled when I go back to them, whose details are stored in the figurative spinal fluid rather than in the figurative back of the brain, the ones I crawl back to in times of uncertainty and play through in sessions closer to therapy and self-actualization than fun. Each echo sentiments from different ages, be they from the first encounter or from repeat plays – Every subsequent trip to Whomp’s Fortress re-sparks the feelings of Christmas Day 2000, each excursion into the Marble Gallery of Dracula’s Castle has me back in the staff cabins at Camp Naish exploring Symphony of the Night with my friends as a teenager, every jump on the Port Carverton spillway evoking the joy of a new game unwrapped on the first weekend of summer vacation after sophomore year. 

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is the standout among standouts here. There is no game I know like that one. There are few, maybe no, works of any medium that I know so well, to which I’ve returned so often over such a span of time – April 26th, 2002, over 21 years ago, was when I first became acquainted with it, and it’s had a presence in some form ever since, be it the original Gamecube copy or those on other platforms that I’ve picked up from bargain bins and thrift stores along the way. I suspect I’ve put weeks into it in total, grinded the high-wires up to the funnel atop the Cruise Ship to collect the final secret tape thousands of times, and I still tend to watch the credit video to its end. I know it like I knew my childhood home and my 2003 Buick Le Sabre, but unlike both of them, I can still return to THPS3.

Those memories are, however, limited to that original version (for the sake of this piece, we’ll call it, the one released for PC, PlayStation 2, XBOX, and Gamecube, the Prime version). I have built up next-to-no experience with Shaba Games’ prior-generation port in these past 21 years. My friend Billy, who lived on the opposite side of the parking lot of the public pool from me growing up, had that version well before I had mine, so I had my first glimpses of the game’s levels while waiting to take turns on the controller at his house in early 2002. I think I rented the N64 version out of curiosity at a Blockbuster at some point, too. I think of it primarily as the source of an alternative version of Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” chopped-down to fit within the space of a N64 cartridge, one that’s become known as “And Don’t Forget The Joker” for the priority it places on repeating that otherwise fairly insignificant part of the original song. Otherwise, before last week, I had surprisingly limited direct experience with it considering not only that, first, it’s a step-down port of one of my favorite games, second, I’m interested in that era of weird step-down ports from PS2 to PS1, and third, I’d spent significant time with both the Game Boy Color and Advance ports of the game during my youth, so it’s not as if I couldn’t have ever touched a non-Prime port.

Yet, there I was, spurred on at random on a free Sunday evening to try out the PS1 port.

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It’s constant. Especially this time of year. You’ll be watching basketball with your friends. It’s near the end of the game. It’s 66-62. The leading team’s point guard slashes into the lane and kicks out to an open shooter in the corner. He takes the three. It tickles the nylon, doesn’t even touch iron, delivers that perfect ‘swish’ sound effect that you could put in a stock sound effect library for the NBA 2K audio engineers to include in the next game. It’s a dagger shot, nearly puts the game out of reach for the team trailing. Somebody’s going on, somebody’s on the bus home. It’s a turning point in the tournament, the beginning moment that leads to worst moment of the losing players’ careers and potentially the start of the sorts of tournament runs that get in the CBS highlight packages forever.

From somewhere in the corner of the room, you hear the word. “Nice.” The score says 69, which is a sexual position in which two people engage one another orally at the same time. This was, at one point, maybe the early 1990s, genuinely funny to people. Bill and Ted used it. But later on it became played out and not funny. In the mid-2010s, it became ‘ironically’ funny to imitate the people who thought it was funny and go “Nice” whenever you see a 69. I don’t know where we stand now.

I will say that a properly deployed 69 is still funny. For example, when Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson ended up judging the NFL’s “Best Catch” Competition at the Pro Bowl, he masterfully acknowledged the absurdity of his presence before following it up with a well-deployed score of 69, lampshading what we expect out of Pete Davidson nowadays. But it is played out. Comedy is built upon the subversion of expectations, and 69, the number of sex, and its number-of-marijuana cousin, 420, and its number-of-the-beast cousin, 666, surprise nobody anymore.  They have slipped into obligatory comedy status alongside funny commercials and meme formats.  Continue reading →

My parents moved house last summer, leaving the home they’d lived in since shortly after my birth in 1995 for one about forty miles away, nearer to my mother’s family, my sister, and I. The process of moving out of that house involved me sifting through and clearing out a space in which I’d had a bed and a home on-and-off for my entire life. The emotional effects this experience spawned can help define many of my actions over the course of the latter half of 2022. I found old notebooks, journals, collected homework assignments from high school, pens, research materials, toys, video games, books, a surprising number of cassette tapes – every sort of artifact a person could absent-mindedly neglect to get rid of over 27 years of life and find themselves deciding to part with through tear-blurred eyes on a time crunch.  Continue reading →