The Dark Acre

When I was younger, about the time I turned 12, I began to have periods where I would throw out most of the things I had accumulated.

Clothes, letters, and toys; anything that I felt was cluttering up my life.

But for the past 10 years or so I've been keeping things. Part of me says it's just sentimentalist bullshit. I ignore that part, because I know it's out of sheer laziness that I haven't done as I have in the past.

The old site, if you'd ever seen it, had been built in 1998. Nearly nine years I updated and renewed it, like a creaking old seafaring vessel. Well, it finally sank.

Of course there were no backups.

The images are all safe: what you saw on the old site were nothing more than placeholders for higher-resolution versions, but all the text is gone.

Years of angsty poetry and vented frustration.

Gone.

And I say: good riddance.

I think a lot of our problems would be solved if only we could let go of the excess baggage we tend to gather on our journeys through life. If only we could hit our "reset" buttons.

One of mine has been hit. Let's see where it goes from here.

You want to know what I think?

I think we are born free, and sold into slavery.
I believe we have the right to choose, but no right to dictate the choices.
I want to love everything and everyone, if only to balance all the hate in my heart.
I understand I am a prisoner of my own devices, and some of your devices too.
I feel like I’m drowning in sand, and this sand is spilling quickly through the needle-prick hole in an hourglass.
I fear that there is no where near enough time to do all the things I need to, but there is too much time for the things I want.
I yearn for peace and quiet, all the while running riot and screaming my head off.
I know nothing about everything, but a little about some things, and this bothers the hell out of me.
I accept it all, and this is what sets me apart.

I think we are born free, and sold into slavery.
I guess it’s just the drudge in me.

There are many kinds of people on this Earth, and we are, all of us, limited in some way.
Limits come from our environment; from our programming; how we've learned to live our lives.
Life is a system of trials. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.
There is punishment, and there is reward.
Who decides what is right and what is wrong? For most of us, we don't make that decision.
We look to someone else, some authority figures, to tell us what is good and what is bad.
People like myself, however, make our own rules.
We often ignore the "popular common sense" and try to live in ways that are completely different from the mainstream.
Are we right, or are we wrong? It doesn't matter. The point is that the decision is ours. No one else decides, no one else controls, no one else tells us what to do.

I’ve been physically training since I turned 19.

Despite still being a regular marijuana user, a smoker, and an alcoholic, I managed to make it to the gym three or four times a week. My father had graciously bought me a membership at “Club Phoenix”, a private gym next a brewery on the edge of Victoria’s industrial district. It had been a nice enough gym: new equipment, friendly staff, and nice music.

I began with their introductory training session, where a private trainer assessed my health level and gave me a generic workout program. It consisted of running on a treadmill and then going through a circuit of muscle-training machines.

At that time I knew nothing about physicality. Up to that point I’d been nothing more than an overweight nerd. Even with all the abuse I’d been putting my body through with the drugs and hard living, I’d still managed to keep a few extra kilograms of fat on my frame.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t obsessed about it at all. I didn’t depress myself thinking about the condition of my body. I had developed a very strong “who-gives-a-fuck attitude” from all my experiences in high school. That particular attitude extended deeply into my self-awareness, and of course this included whatever I knew or thought about my health.

So I went through the motions.

The first thing I noticed was that heavy cardiovascular exercise and the inhaling of smoke were incompatible. I naturally started reducing the amount of cigarettes I smoked, and noticed an appreciable increase in my stamina and heart-health almost immediately. Buoyed by these results, I kept at the running and cycling, all the while reducing my smoking habit, until I found I’d quit smoking.

This was not an overnight process; it happened over the course of some six months of hard training. But it happened, and that’s the important thing. At the age of 20 I’d managed to kick the most addictive habit on Earth, and I felt I’d owed it all to exercise.

It wouldn’t be until ten years later, when I experienced my first real lapse in training, that I would consider and subsequently take up smoking again.

The summer of 2005 was a shitty one for me, but as with most shitty experiences a lot of good came from it. I’d been working out at Gold’s Gym Japan for a number of years, and had never really been satisfied with the situation. The staff at the one I went to were xenophobic, and none of them spoke English. It pissed me off, you know, since Gold’s Gym is advertised as “the American gym” in Japan, and yet none of the staff could speak American English. But I got by on “konnichiwas” and “otsukaresamas”. I also had to put up with the occasional meat-head Japanese member approaching me, mid-set, and trying to steal a free English lesson. But I got by.

And then there was an incident.

I’d been training on an abdominals machine, doing three sets of ten repetitions, and had been using a little extra weight-plate that attached to the machine’s stack. I’d decided to drop the extra plate for the last set, and had walked the one meter distance to the weight rack. I’d basically just turned my back on the machine for a second, and a woman who had been hovering and chattering with a friend had leapt onto the machine’s seat like she was fast-mounting a stallion. I shit you not, she practically vaulted over the back of the machine and fucking bounced off the foam and vinyl support chair from the force of her jump.

She then proceeded to lay her towel on the seat’s back, very casually and slowly, and take a long drink of water. I was standing there with my jaw on the floor. To any observer, it was obvious I was in mid-use of the machine: my gear and water were under the seat, and I hadn’t reset the weight stack.

Now, in the normal world, people politely come up and ask if they can work in a set while you rest. This is considered polite. I suppose the woman, who was very much Japanese, could be excused for not speaking English. But to assume that I wouldn’t understand a “sumimasen” or even a simple gesture of excuse was intolerable.

So, I got pissed off. I tried really, really hard to contain my rage, but I simply couldn’t do it.

I didn’t get violent. I got passive-aggressive. I stood close to her. She didn’t look up. I sighed, loudly. No response. I checked my watch, in her face. I’d now missed my rest interval by two minutes. And she still had yet to do a single repetition on the machine.

Finally, she began, and she tried to twist the weight I’d been doing, nearly giving herself a hernia. Flustered, she’d then set the stack at the lowest weight and proceeded to violently slam the stack against the top of the machine. Back and forth she thrashed, without care for form.

So, was she pissed now? Probably. Through cosmic karmic osmosis I’d managed to transfer my rage to her. This was progress. We were communicating.

She continued to do her wild repetitions. 10, 20, 30. Who the fuck does thirty repetitions? An angry bitch who’s made herself look like a total fool, that’s who.

I tapped my foot. I sighed again. I had been considering summoning the staff and trying to play charades to explain my situation, when who should appear but a male staff member! Had he been observing the situation, and seen my plight?

No!

He bent down and conferred with the woman, who was now resting in the machine. Another rule of gym etiquette broken. I was wondering when she was going to spit on the floor, or start jabbering on her mobile phone, just to top her behavior off.

Was the staff telling her about allowing other members to work in? Was he admonishing her for her earlier behavior? Of course not! He was telling her how to use proper form!

Thus, before my now-bloodshot eyes, a mini-training course in the abdominal machine began.

I was five minutes past my rest interval, my abs were stone cold.

Sure, I could have gone and used another machine. I could have gone home. Would you have? I’d been rudely slighted, and woman or no, I wasn’t going to take it lying down.

I tapped the staff on the back and began to explain, in broken Japanese and urgent English, what the woman had done, and was continuing to do. He seemed to understand, and began to explain the situation to the woman.

Suddenly, she came to life. She began to screech and wail. She grew claws and fangs. Her hair spun out and away from her hair in wild seething knots. The room got darker.

Did I fear? Did I run?

Hell no.

I put her out, like pissing on a lit match. I shouted her down. I made a scene. I corrupted the wa.

It worked.

She got up from the machine, without wiping it down, and stormed over to the staff counter.

I finished my set, and then headed over there myself to see what she was doing to the staff.

The day manager was there, intently listening to the wild complaints of the now witch-woman, and she saw me. I had an amused smile on my face, and she returned it. Then began a pained discussion of what to do.

I couldn’t understand a god-damned thing anyone was saying, so after listening for a few minutes I simply waved good-bye and went home.

That night I got my wife to call them up and threaten them. She cited their xenophobic attitudes, and poor conflict resolutions skills. She shot the hell out of their policies, and demanded a refund.

I got the money back, but I was out a gym membership.

For two months I didn’t train, and at the end of July I began to smoke again.

In August I ordered my own gym equipment for the basement of my atelier. It arrived in September, and I was working out with even more vigor than before, and it wasn’t too long before I’d quit smoking again.

Is there a moral to this story? There are probably several. I just see it as crisis producing results, as it usually does when we’re forced to adapt to a given situation.

I like negativity. Black voids excite me.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of nothingness. I spent a great deal of my late adolescence trying to plunge myself into it. I wasn’t necessarily emo; I never put on mascara or eye shadow, never cut myself, never wrote depressing poetry for the sake of pouring out my heart’s contents, never pretended androgyny.

I did wear a lot of black, shapeless clothing, though. I did have a pair of custom-fitted fangs that seamlessly clipped onto my canines, but I never indulged in any live-action role-playing, unless you consider acting like a mindless drug-zombie role-playing.

When I first began to understand how computers and data storage worked, I quickly learned that the best way to make things operate smoothly was formatting and deleting the hard disks.
There was even a command in MS-DOS called “kill”, which totally obliterated your data from the drive.

There are people out there who believe that to truly find themselves, they must first lose themselves. Allow me to explain this:

You’ve spent your life collecting experience. This experience has fundamentally altered your behavior in ways that now shape and dictate the way you act. This is an ongoing process that happens as long as there is activity in that brain of yours.

Therefore, if you could somehow reset these experiences, somehow delete or reformat the data in your brain, would you then have a clean slate from which to work?

There are more than a few experiences I could do without. It is quite possible that these select memories of actions I took and things that happened as a result thereof are responsible for me being the person I am today.

If I could excise these blocks of information from my mind, would that somehow make me better. I say no.

Consider the idea of a time paradox, you know, that shit that always happens in those sci-fi stories involving time-travel: you go back in time and alter a single moment, and the whole rest of reality has to adjust itself to compensate.

The butterfly effect: the air currents made by a butterfly flapping its wings in the Himalayas somehow becomes a hurricane on the other side of the world. Ripples in the pond becoming tsunami. Any other number of bullshit philosophy.

I believe we must consider all the data in our brains to be cross-linked in a massive wafer, where each subsequent layer of this wafer depends on the data on and below it. Remove any part of this cat’s cradle of synapses and mental rays and the yo-yo drops.

If you catch my meaning.

So what the hell does this have to do with the darkness I perceive in myself, and my emptiness fetish?

The absolute Zen. Being both everything and nothing at once. Achieving nirvana through the union of the one and the zero.

I used to believe that nothingness depended on the erasure of time. No longer is this so.

Nothingness is a balance. It is the sum of the positive and the negative. It is understanding that something cannot exist without a sense of nothing to compare it to.

I like negativity. I like it exactly as much as I do positivism, and with this attitude I hope to reach my spiritual balance.

I am indisposed for about 50 hours a week.

12 of these hours are spent on a train, in commute.

3 of them are spent in 5-minute breaks between actual work.

This leaves 35 hours of raw work time, of which an average of 10% is unfilled by customer cancellation or scheduling fuck-up.

Therefore, I can expect to work 32 hours out of every week.

A seven-day week contains 168 hours.

I sleep, on average, 45 of those hours.

I have a rather strict training regimen that consumes about 7 hours.

What does all of this mean?

I have 84 free, waking hours a week to do whatever the hell I please.

If you’re any good with your math, you’ll notice this is precisely 50% of the time available in a week.

1 out of every 2 hours I have been given is mine.

How many do you have?

Consider the implications of the previous post.

Do you ever complain about not having enough time to do the things you’d like?

Chances are, you have the time, but are unaware of it.

Most people seek to fill their free hours with distraction. This may be conscious or not. I tend to believe that we are driven to distraction by our environments and our programming.

After all, if you spend the majority of your waking hours serving the needs of others, it should come as no surprise that you’d spend the hours you’ve been given servicing your own needs.

What exactly do we have to do, you know, in life?

If you live like I do, then you believe that there is absolutely nothing that has to be done.

Free will must override any other desires, and we are supposed to be steering our ships where we please, regardless of ability to chart a course.

Despite this utopian mind-set, there are a great many obstacles to total freedom. While there may be nothing we have to do, there are a great many things we should do, and even a few we need to do.

The “should do’s” are wholly of your own design. They’re the little nagging feelings that come to you when you lie alone at night.

Quit smoking.

Drink less alcohol.

Stop stuffing your face with food and exercise.

Write a novel.

See the world.

Make love.

Be kind to animals.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

And what of the needs? You need to feed. You need to secure shelter. You need to go to the toilet. And so on.

Taking all of this into consideration, where does the self-serving time-wasting that so many of us engage in fit?

It doesn’t. It is outside of this argument. It exists as an extension of your free will, and is totally the purview of what you define as your own reality.

Ultimately, it tells the world who you are and what you believe.

So, if you spend your free waking hours in wasteful pursuits, it is fair to judge you as a wastrel. This is pure and objective reasoning, free from the fetters of emotion and social constriction.

Ah, but how does one define a wasteful pursuit? To use to no purpose.

So, if you could give yourself purpose, you’d no longer be considered a wastrel.

Can a purpose be as simple as “learning to quirks of my favorite television program’s characters” or “gathering knowledge from the Internet”? Certainly. But there must be application for that purpose.

You don’t owe anyone a god-damned thing.

Honor is an illusion, no more real than the ethereal words that spill from your lips.

Tangible activity is all that matters, and you can bet your last penny that the actions of others will be self-serving to the very end.

We are a species lost and afraid, and everything we do is designed to protect our selfish interests.

Expect betrayal.

A few people make entirely too much money, while the majority of people feel they don’t make enough.

What does this economic disparity mean, really?

It depends on whether or not an individual subscribes to the idea of reward and punishment for effort.

If you grasp the concept of receiving an appropriate reward for the things you do in your life, gauging your accrual of filthy lucre is one way of determining how rewarded you’re being for whatever it is you’re doing.

I like this particular measurement, because it is wholly objective and assumes no ethical standpoint.

After all, you could be killing people for a living and doing quite well financially. One may argue that you could be more well off than people doing a lot of good things. You know, those things that supposed to contribute to the development of an advancing society.

Although, the removal of certain individuals from the food chain could be a very good thing for our collective future.

Not going to name any names, but I’m sure we all have our lists.

Money as measure of success is an excellent thing. It is tangible, and therefore beats the shit out of spiritual bonus points. How do you measure your mana levels? With how good you feel? A professional killer probably feels damn good waking up in a secure home. Sleeping on a bed of cash helps a lot, I think.

Popular fiction often rails on the dangers of extreme financial gain, but most of these tragedies have to do with greed. What if people make their money incidentally? Without active pursuit, certain people come into windfalls all the time. Are they destined to end their days like Ebenezer Scrooge?

After much consideration, and the evaluation of my free-time activities and financial situation, I have decided to make a real blog.

Starting August 20th, 2007, the Healthy Gamer will go live with all of my physical training programs, diet studies, anti-stress techniques, and thoughts on the gaming industry. I will also be including periodic reviews of games I've actually taken the time to complete.

In addition to standard journaling posts there will be articles, audio, and video.

As of this writing I am hard at work crafting premium content for general consumption, and with the intent on making gamer's lives and their lifestyles just a little better.

I've chosen the title "Healthy Gamer" but I really feel a better headline would be "How I Stay Lean and Mean and Still Play 6+ Hours of Games a Day" because, well, that's really what it will be about.

If you're feeling helpful, or generous, please link to my new site using http://healthy-gamer.com and spread the word.

It's going to be interesting.

Diligence. Yeah, right.

What a strange year it's been. I've made the final decision to leave my job, I've gone back on a lot of personal promises, I've backslid into a level of health that makes me a complete hypocrite, and I've nearly spiritually bankrupted myself.

I keep telling myself it's all part of the plan.

As of this post I'm 38 days left in Japan. The fuses have been lit, people. Time to bug the hell out.

My XBOX isn't working, and this is depressing me. To balance this, the yoga is working wonderful magic.

It is through clenched and gnashing teeth that I must admit a loss of nearly eight whole months to the World of Warcraft. I did manage to progress very far, focussing the time spent on completing the game. This time around I hit some form of invisible ceiling that prevented me from clearing the content I wanted to.

Even now, I keep telling myself that I did all in the name of research. I have to keep saying this over and over, like a brainsick monk's mantra, in order to prevent the facade from cracking and crumbling all over the place.

Done is done, as it's said. The thing with constant backsliding is I'm never quite certain when I'm moving forward.

A month and a bit left in the land of the rising son. Let me spill the beans here, allow me to make a permanent record (one with time-stamp and public admission) to point people to when they ask me what I'm doing with myself:

I'm on my way to school at a private university that I'm quite sure is nothing more than a glorified recruitment facility for the video game industry, which will be fine if I prove myself right because that's exactly where I want to go and what I want to spend my resources on.

I'm doing this because I feel it rather foolish to jump into a new career without some background in the new industry. I also like having a bunch of guarantees to future success, it helps with risk management and peace of mind.

Upon successful completion of the two-year program I'll jump feet first into the video game business. I want to place myself somewhere I can get a good feel for what running a game company is all about. I need this knowledge for the subsequent step: opening my own video game studio.

This is where certainty ends and fate takes over.

If my current dreams are to be realized I'll have to produce a mega-hit, top-selling, blockbuster video game (or whatever they're to be called into those misty future years, I'm putting money down on "virtual interactive experiences"). I also need to keep all the rights to whatever intellectual properties such a hit would produce, and thus keep all the income.

So the oceans of money start flowing towards me. Then what?

Then I build the world.

I'd like to go into more detail about this "final" step, but I rather enjoy keeping it at an enigmatic distance. I could call it "saving" the world, or "fixing" the world, but I prefer "build" because I only want to provide the means and the tools and let others deal with the improvements.

If someone has to ask why I think the world needs saving, they haven't lived enough. /end that particular discussion.

There are sundry other details that I could go into regarding the current transformation I'm undergoing, such as costs and allocations, but these are inconsequential and boring.

It's enough to say that I'm still doing what I've always done, only doing it harder and longer than ever before.

Watch this space.

It was raining. This was the Vancouver morning I’d been waiting for for nearly 5 years, wet and dark and cold.

It was perfect.

I sat in a small café near my new apartment, surfing the internet and plugging away at minor creative endeavors. I could feel the engine of my creativity re-igniting, cycling up as it usually did around this time of year. It was fall, October 20, 2008. It was Monday, the day of my orientation into Vancouver Film School for a year of Foundation Arts. I was ready.

I’d gotten up at five, two hours earlier, and done my routine. Those days it consisted of an hour’s worth of Ashtanga, or power, yoga. I’d have put on a couple of cups of brown rice and lit a candle, and immersed myself in the golden and nutty scent of the boiling rice as it mingled with the tart apple of the burning candle, and the stench of my own sweat.

Each morning I was taking the time I needed to feel alive. This particular morning I’d taken it nice and slow, allowing my body the space and freedom it needed to release all the stress and tension I’d been carrying up to that point.

After the yoga I’d taken a leisurely towel-bath, massaging Doctor Bronner’s Magic Peppermint Soap into every pore of my body. This not only conserved water but gave me an extra fifteen minutes of relaxation, and more time to get in touch with where I was at at that point in time.

I’d then swallowed half a serving of protein, powder mixed with cool water, and brushed my teeth with aniseed paste.

I’d dressed, choosing from the limited selection of clothing I’d managed to bring over from Japan. Cargo pants, a loose t-shirt, a heavy hooded pullover, the winter hooded jacket, and a pair of heavy boots, all blacks and deep navy blues.

I’d put a tension ball into my pocket, along with my keys and wallet, armed the portable music player, and stepped out the door.

It had been raining, and I’d turned my face up into the dark pre-dawn sky and let the drops fall on me. Taking a deep breath, I’d turned and headed up the dim rain-slicked street to the café.

And there I sat, at a table near the window, watching the traffic, the weather, the people, and the screen. Feeling my anxiety ebb and flow through my nervous system, and not buying into it. Letting those emotions run their course.

I was ready.

Excitement wears me out.

Carrying 300+ kilograms of my old life into my new apartment tires me out.

I wake up with strange pains in hard-to-reach places, and wonder if I'm getting old or just out of shape? It shouldn't be the latter, as I've been so diligent with the yoga as of late that I'm starting to look like a true yogini. Maybe rolling up and down on the floor doesn't do as much strength maintenance as I'd led myself to believe.

Class has been good. I'm "learning through experience" in an educational environment unlike any I've ever been in. Wait, that's not entirely true; this is the kind of space I'd tried to create, often unsuccessfully, in the previous 10 years of my work-life.

It's nice to see it actually working. I think the key ingredient is passion, with a dash of drive, two things a lot of my own students lacked. Oh sure, there'd been the occasional spark, but they were the rare oasis in the middle of vast dry deserts of boredom and monotony.

One could say the lessons were what I made them, but I'm starting to think that in a classroom the onus of the environment is on the student rather than the teacher. The teacher, the ideal teacher, should be a facilitator and a director, and give the students the opportunity to stretch their wings. I've been stretching my wings a lot, and it's only been two days.

I wake late, surprised at how exhausting the exercise has been. But if it is true exercise, then I should be waking up slightly stronger than the day before, albeit more fatigued.

This is why they built weekends.

I carried half a short ton of crap up a flight of stairs and down a long hallway, most of it contained within cardboard boxes that were nothing more than tattered sheets held together by the remnants of glue. This could be the main reason my back feels like a flamenco dancer in stiletto heels has been giving the performance of her life on it. I just hope the constant stretching I've been doing has kept the various muscle groups I pounded limber enough to recover quickly from the damage I've inflicted on myself.

But here it is, the old life, all the things I haven't really needed for the past 29 days, sitting in broken-down cardboard crates and totally blocking my yoga space.

This is the irony of moving, the great reveal of travel. I really don't need most of the things I've accumulated. This stuff could all have been washed overboard in its three-week transit across the Pacific Ocean and I wouldn't have blinked and probably wouldn't even have cared all that much.

Now that it's here, however, I am glad to have more than two shirts and pair of jeans to wear.