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#existential despair
writingoneout · 10 months
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Untilted Katamari Reflections
Preamble:
Content considerations for the following include:
Parental abuse
Bigotry
Worldly anxiety
You're welcome back another day if that's too much right now.
I.
It’s fall of 2015.
You and your virgin college friends drink shitty cocktails called the “Slutty Will Rodgers.” They’re just Pepsi rawdogged with indeterminate amounts of grenadine and Captain Morgan. When you bought the mixers a Wal-Mart stocker yodeled “OOOOoOoooOH, maKIN sOMe DRINKS?!?!” and you knew it was time to leave.
We Love Katamari is on the Telly. It’s a sweet, trippy game you first bought to cope with high school. On Dark Fridays at 1am, when your inbox was barren and your balls were full, you’d drive to the empty gym downtown and sprint six miles. Then you’d come home and replay the firefly level until you fell asleep with your pug.
Your college friends are bad at the game, so they pass the controller. You’re playing the underwater stage. A spaceman falls in the pond of people gunk and stacked crabs. It’s going really well if you’re honest. You point to the screen and say “this’ll be Florida if Trump wins.” See Fig. 1.
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Figure 1: Rick Desantis has big plans for Disney.
Your friends don’t reply because they soon won’t be virgins and their tongues battle each other’s. It’s a different game they play, one with fuzzier rules, but greater industry respect. You wish the campus gym was open 24/7.
. . .
Your skills as the prince are not inherent. You first meet him in 2005, when your dyspraxic hands can barely tie a shoe. Your parents catch you lose shit for the Toonami review of Me and My Katamari. They buy it for Christmas, hoping to steady your nerves while your father’s in therapy.
Dr. Flam is a Neo-Freudian hitched to your mom’s guy, Dr. Flim. She’s deep in your dad’s dream journal and makes him watch movies like Cool Hand Luke to really reign in his ego. He gets the DVDs from the Netflix site, then through the mail. As a family you watch your dad’s therapy films and reruns of Inyuasha.
In the waiting room you barely navigate the sticky ball through Namco Bandai’s Satoshi Kon parade. See Fig. 2. You’ve only seen adults express anger verbally, so when you mess up you grunt a lot and let out those Leopold Butters Stotch swears like “crap,” “shoot,” and “gosh darn.” You’re not particularly self-aware, so you probably just say “god fucking damn it” a few times and don’t remember. Years later you realize there was probably a secretary behind the glass watching you do all this.
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Figure 2: Bwahbwahwabhbawahbwaaaaah.
Sometimes there’s a girl in the room with you, just around your age. She’s stuck while Dr. Flim teaches her mom about what dream snakes mean for her fear of male puberty. That's what he did for your mom, anyway.
You think the waiting-room stranger is cute, but you won’t admit you like girls yet, especially not to yourself. To cope with the cognitive dissonance, you do your weird shit louder while refusing to make eye contact with her. If you get real stressed you crank up the main menu track and yell “ahhhhh that’s so relaxing” while the “nah nah nah nahs” play through your headphones.
At one point the girl stands against a wall and stares at you with her arms crossed. You bet she thinks you’re cool, but she’s probably just annoyed and hopes you’ll notice, or maybe just ask if she’s OK. It’s probably good you don’t talk with her. You might ask something stupid, like if she's seen the roach corpse in the stairwell. It’s been there for a year straight, isn’t that crazy?
For better and worse, you power through your little game alone. Every time you lose the King of All Cosmos beats, shoots, and belittles you. See Fig. 3. It reminds you of when your own dad shattered your Harry Potter wand over the kitchen counter because you dropped a mini pizza.
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Figure 3: The King of All Cosmos offers little constructive advice, all things considered.
You fail quite frequently. Eventually you drop the game because it’s getting stressful and you have the power to relieve yourself of the situation—not the Freudian lobby, just your fake dad.
II.
It’s 2012. PlayStation Network uploads The Prince’s primeval outing: Katamari Damacy. Within, Padre Cosmotic flaps his gums over too much hooch then slams his dump truck ass through the better part of our solar system. He dislodges every recognized constellation and even the moon itself.
Cosmos sends Prince to Earth—the last brick left in the shitstorm—to make slop of our planet and bodies. With the slop space itself will be made anew. The Good Son does as he's told, and every living entity experiences euphoric ego death within the bulbous heaven of the Katamari.
As a Real Gamer Teen you lose a lot less in this one. You really go in and fix Fake Dad’s mistakes, no problem at all. This is why a year ago you hailed “gaming journalism” as your calling. You write clean and play tight; should keep the lights on. It’s the most concrete idea you’ve had since 7th grade when you outlined a YA novel called Tooth Pocket. Even you didn’t think Scholastic would buy that one, though. It was just too hot for the book fair.
One day you’re cranking through FFVI and your real dad swings by, mad you're young. He grills your ass and says “I bet you can’t even tell me the biggest thing happening right now.” It’s some real “What’s a gallon of milk cost?” shit, he could mean anything.
 Surprisingly, you can’t think of a good answer. You and your friends are actually pretty informed because John Stewart is still at the desk and y’all chime in every day. See Fig. 4. You also spend hours each week tearing through MSN slideshows in your Graphic Design class because the Photoshop takes five minutes. You’ve seen a staggering amount of the Syrian civil war.
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Figure 4: Sometimes in Snapchat you draw glasses on your cat to make him look like Mitch McConnel. You wouldn't do that without this guy.
Still, you’re a little stumped. It’s the middle of a phenomenon native to moralist presidencies known as "a slow news week.” You actually ran out of war shit the other day and clicked through some slides about Pakistani wrestlers. The seniors who offered you Jack Daniels in the Whataburger lot saw it and laughed. They thought you were peeping dong in class. You really weren’t, but they didn’t believe you. They graduate certain you were bricked up in the Dell Lab over big guys in spandex.
“I don’t know,” you tell your dad.
He throws his hands behind his head, hard, like an orangutan chucking logs at a poacher.
“It’s the fucking carbon tax,” he yells. This comes as a surprise, you think, because that shit is last month’s news. It really didn’t go anywhere.
“Do you not pay attention because you don’t give a shit, or are you just a nihilist and think you can’t do anything?” You can tell in his eyes he thinks there’s a real answer. “Seriously, which is it?
You don’t remember what you said. You probably just stammered until he walked off.
A month later he picks you up from marching band. Your phone is dead, so he had to wait twenty minutes longer than anticipated while you found his car. He punches the rearview mirror until the windshield cracks then screams of how your birth kept him from New England.
III.
It’s 2016. A rockin’ MILF in the Psych department gets you really into Hamilton. See Fig. 5. Every day you wake up on the grind and blast “You Aaron Burr, sir?” through your shitty 7-11 cans. While cramming foreign language Quizlets and McGraw Hill Online you do this thing called “Hafilton.” It’s where rock up to “Nonstop” and quit listening just before Hamilton decides what he will stop is being a good husband.
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Figure 5: Like Kojima, you know "MILF" is a mindset, not a factual inquiry.
It’s 2018. Your grades are notably better and you’ve snuck into the honors program. Like Hamilton himself, you really flourished at 19 and thought about running for office. You immediately abandoned this idea after remembering your allergy to recordings of your image or voice.
You cohabit with the Psych MILF, and she offers some advice: she’s really had her boots on the ground with this whole “clinical psych thing” and honestly, respectfully, she loves you, but dear God it might not be your scene. It’s taken a real toll on her and the friends, and she can’t imagine you going through that shit.
At 1am in your living room you boot up DOOM (2016) and listen through some Hamilton. Angelica is thirsty on main when you remember that you, yourself, could be a lawyer. You don’t have to run for Congress to fight the establishment. There’s just the common law, and it’s right there. You can just get your grubby little hands in that shit and work your magic.
. . .
It’s the last semester of undergrad. Your Western Thought professor says Hamilton wasn’t really a huge deal and really James Madison shat out the big parts of our faction-proof empire. Yes, there was, in fact, a civil war, but the caplock rifle worked it out. After the Federalist papers he has you read the Bill of Rights but no Supreme Court cases. There’s a lot of talk on negative liberties.
Just before finals, the learned doctor says your generation only has two things to worry about: the climate and the poverty. Yeah they’re big, he says, but they’re just two things. You’re crafty kids, smart as the framers, even.
. . .
The state decides law school is your jam and lets you come inside.
There’s the negative liberties but you actually read Supreme Court opinions when the big boys aren’t shaking fists for Valley Forge. They have you listen to Hamilton for context. You feel dirty. An LRW professor puts on the “I’m Just a Bill” video and your sectionmate with Ivy degrees gets really, really mad.
. . .
The Federalist Society has a comfy presence at your law school. Along with Big Oil they sling out free pizza to every Little Scalia with a rumbly tum tum.
On your way to class you hear what the pizza boys feel. They hate Europeans, those social democrats with the rotten armories and clumpy cash. The Euros, they think, give too much wiggle room for the mentally ill, and by that they mean they mean gay people and probably just women overall.
There are more than two things to fix, you think.
. . .
The pandemic hits. You and some pals start a Google Doc to stay afloat. It barely works. In the Zoom review for the property final your professor catches multiple people crying. "You don't have to be here," he tells them, “there are other jobs.”
. . .
A year passes. You’re in a niche public interest class you do all right with. The professor looks you and thirty-five others dead in the eye and says how sorry he is that law school is traumatic. You shed a single tear in your little window. You're pretty in the shit and haven’t worn pants to class in months.
Then public interest prof takes a big, big drag from his long, fat spliff. He spins his desk chair and baseball cap at the same time, never letting go of the joint.
“Hey,” he says. “It’s not your fault, really, but the world is fucked. It’s time to fix what your parents did.”
The next week he gives a practice exam where the best solution is to sell an old lady’s house to Nestlé.
IV.
It’s 2022. After throwing your whole gooch at it, you fail the bar exam.
You fall back hard into exercise. When you’re not slamming Barbri you’re at the gym binging curls and cranking the Chainsaw Man soundtrack. One night on the way to squats you finally hear “Black Parade.” Just like you, Mr. Gerry Wayland is stuck between global disrepair and the desire to write Funny Little Books.
You just started an FLB yourself, actually. It’s spin on a Story Break episode you love. In your version there’s a fucked up civil war horse that moves like a spider and is covered in bugs. Rich people kill the planet then the horse gets lost in space. It’s compelling, you promise. There’s body horror and pirates dressed like Gorton’s Fisherman. See Fig. 6 It’s about the horrors of the contemporary world state. It’ll be fun.
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Figure 6: An untapped horror icon. Imagine blood contrasting that yellow.
Big problem, though: you remember rich people love hiking. There’s no grass on Mars, not that good shit anyway. Would they really fuck all of it?
You edit. In the last few years, the real breathless ones, the oligarchs cash their tab. A cartel, they think, could really muscle those stragglers, the tragically common. There’s one city left with both breathable air and refugees. They level it. The few survivors are spread amongst the stars, so their loves and languages may die.
. . .
It’s the middle of Bar Prep Round 2. You and the patient MILF see Hadestown in the Big City.
There’s a juke joint on stage flanked by devil trombones. A sad little guy slinks in from the janitor’s closet. His name is Orpheus and, just like you, he’s a sad, short writer who likes a lady so much it comes out weird. He has a vision, he says, for a little ditty. It’s compelling, he promises, and shit’s gonna change. His love is functional and realized, worth the investment of a hardened woman displaced by capital’s torture. She believes him.
You cry because you know where this goes.
It’s just a single tear.
Don’t worry.
Nobody sees.
. . .
There’s this game you like, by some corporate anarchists who hate themselves. They’re Scandinavian, from the spot in Tallin where you stopped for a cruise. Every gift shop there had swastikas and gas masks leftover from the bloody years.
In the game is a liberal yacht MILF. She thinks you’re stupid but someone’s helping with your gun, so you’ve got that on her. And yet, she pins you, re your whole writing thing. See Fig. 7.
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Figure 7: She sucked, but it still hurt when she left.
Your favorite Supreme Court podcast says the ocean’s last hope is other countries. But those countries’ people cry to the Disco game, and their ministers also bought The End of History. You meet them on the subreddit. You're all geeked out, waiting for the tide.
. . .
It’s the era of desert cradles. God thinks you’re disgusting, so he sends his better kids with a memo: the flood was too much work on his end, it’s time for something different.
“Just keep walking,” he says.
Your skin bares his figure. So do the corpses. You little birds among billions, gassed out and screaming, move to clean.
V.
It’s 2023.
We Love Katamari is up on the PlayStation store. You sit with the cats and mow down some crabs. You don’t need it so much these days, but it’s nice.
There’s a Bar card in your wallet, just below your gym tag. There are two interviews in your Google Calendar. Good stuff might happen, hopefully soon. You crawl into bed and wrap an arm around your wife’s rib cage.
Everything matters and nothing is safe.
You are loved enough to sleep.
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s0cioplath · 7 months
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dragonsglare · 7 months
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When Aziraphale tells Crowley he forgives him, he’s not just talking about their little tiffs. He is offering a level of love and acceptance neither heaven nor hell is willing to give him.
Heaven cast Crowley out and left him with deep emotional trauma. Heaven was not only where he had an important status and job; it was his home. He was kicked out of the house and disowned and fired all at once. He lost literally everything, including his identity. He could no longer even call himself what he’d always been: an angel.
Crowley has never been evil at heart and he’s spent all of his time of earth faking it just enough to remain under hell’s radar. The trouble he causes is really just mischief. He doesn’t truly want to harm anyone. So he’s not good enough (according to heaven) to be an angel but he’s not bad, and therefore a total flop as a demon. He’s spent millennia thinking of himself as not good enough to belong anywhere.
Except with Aziraphale. They’ve always been friends, enjoyed each other’s company, and respected each other’s differences. It’s the one place in the universe where Crowley feels at home.
Aziraphale can’t quite bring himself to say he loves him, since that very concept has been drilled into his mind as forbidden for 6,000+ years. But he can go even further; he can offer forgiveness. He is telling Crowley that he is loved and accepted and wanted despite any disagreements they have.
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This last declaration isn’t an insult or a rejection. It is exactly the opposite. It is a reminder that although heaven rejected Crowley and he will never truly be bad enough for hell, he’s perfectly all right according to Aziraphale. It means, “I love you.” It’s the greatest gift Crowley has ever been given.
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t0uch-starved-h0e · 6 months
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every-bad-thing · 2 years
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You’re This Title
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You realize you're a fictional character in a story. You know this only because the writer wanted you to know this. You at first try to deny it. You tell yourself that you're real, you have to be, it doesn't make any sense if you're not.
But you hear a voice in your head ask you that if you're so real, what's your name? And you think that's such a stupid question, but then you search your head and can't think of anything. There's lots of names that come to mind, but none of them feel like yours. That's because, you hear the voice say, you have no name in this story. You didn't forget, because there is nothing to forget. You just never knew.
Then the voice says that if you're so real, who are your parents, and once again you think that's obvious, but as soon as you try to answer, you have nothing to say. Which is because you have no parents. And you say how can someone have no parents, everyone has to come from somewhere, and you're told that you come from nothing but letters and spaces, and so don't need parents. And even if they did, they'd be fictional too.
Finally the voice says if you're so real, what's any detail about yourself. Anything at all. Whatever you can think of. But you can't think of a single thing. You can't even tell if you're warm or cold, if you're tired or hyper, if you're hungry or full. This is all because, the voice says, nothing about you exists until it's written it exists. All you are now is a terrible realization and a never-ending dread and that is because these are the only things written about you so far.
But watch.
You're written as growing up in the country, and suddenly you remember trees and grass and lakes and warm biscuits and cold tea so sweet it almost hurts your teeth to drink. You're amazed that you remember all this. Then you're written to remember you grew up by the beach, smelling salt, collecting shells, working a hot dog stand in the summer and enjoying the peace and quiet in the winter.
Your memories shift more, making you grow up in a city, in the jungle, in the desert and on a boat. Your parents worked in finance, they died when you were young, ran a hot sauce empire, were really into crossfit, or into science, or into cooking, and lots and lots and lots of other things.
Your name changes every minute.
To drive the point home, your thoughts are made so you remember these things all at once, next to one another, so you truly understand that you will be anything you're written to be and there's nothing you can do about it.
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The reality of the situation finally sinks in. You feel a profound and overwhelming sense of horror, worse even than when you found you didn't have a name, which is the natural reaction to learning that you're not a real person at all but just part of a story. You're told that you're the most important part of the story, but that doesn't make you feel any better.
But then you feel better on your own, because that's what's being written about you, and you whistle a happy little tune, a beautiful melody that makes your heart soar. You're extremely happy not to really exist, because actual existence is full of so many things to worry about, and it's really better to be part of this story, where there's absolutely nothing to worry about, except whatever the story needs you to do. You feel a little foolish for having been so upset before and wonder why you ever wanted to be real in the first place.
Then, you're written as returning to your state of horror, and you're told that not even your mind exists beyond what the writer says. You want to cry, but you're not written as crying, so you don't. Instead, you turn around, peer forward, and, after some time, finally see the reader of this story. You've no idea why, but you're written as being able to see whoever is reading this story, in the very act of reading it, and so you do. Then you're written as being able to see yourself. You look down and see a green shirt with the phrase 'I'm real' printed on the front, a pair of brown slacks, and a pair of white shoes. As in, the sentence "a green shirt with the phrase 'I'm real' printed on the front, a pair of brown slacks, and a pair of white shoes" which makes up your body. You feel sick and the word "barf" pours out of your mouth and lands on the floor. You look back at the reader, who is reacting or not reacting to what's happening, one of those two.
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You're then given a final piece of knowledge: your world ends when the story ends. You say no, no, no, no, no, no, no, but yes it's true. This story will end, and end soon, and when it does you and your entire world will end too because that's how stories work. And you say that, wait, the reader will remember you and that you might be able to survive that way. The voice in your head says huh, hadn't thought of that, and then you feel the sensation of a shrug and hear 'maybe.' It advises you that if it is true, though neither you nor even the writer know for sure, then you'd better be as memorable as possible. And so, feeling the narrative start to fade, the world falling apart, you look once last time at the reader, directly at the reader, and say please, please, please remember. Please remember. Please remember.
And then the story ends.
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blazestar345 · 1 year
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Intrusive thoughts go brr...
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existennialmemes · 2 months
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Actually
it's only "Existential Despair" if it comes from the Existentialism Period of Europe. Otherwise it's just Sparkling Philosophical Anguish.
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beljar · 1 year
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I was fearfully afraid of being seen, of being met, of being recognized.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, from White Nights, 1848
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pahaadonkidhoop · 4 months
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it's so funny to be absolutely sloshed and walking alone around the college campus, crying, barely breathing, so funny
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l-appelle-du-vide · 8 months
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I hate how some days it’s like the abuse never happened and other days it feels like the only thing that has ever happened.
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boyofplushcomics · 1 year
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"Hot pockets and inner demons"
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eccentricstardust · 2 years
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It is a curse of a grieving heart that it never stops mourning. It clings onto grief as its last refuge, as its final act of defiance. It stands singing in the wake of its own destruction, refusing to move on.
But this isn't tragic, you know? Grief isn't sad, it isn't something to move out on; grief is the acknowledgement of love, it is an acknowledgement of life, and of the truth that follows. It is a promise of rememberance. "You were here, you were loved, and even though my heart aches from the weight of the hole you left, I'll remember you, in every moment of happiness, in every fickle realization of content, in every dream, in every prayer, in every act of kindness, in every breath, in every twinkle of every star, in every little whisper of wind, in every sob of nostalgia, in every turn of time, in every way of existence... I will carry you on with me, until I can't anymore"
The lost life continues. The love lives a thousand lifetimes. The span of one's life is only the core of their actual existence, and you owe all of it to a grieving heart.
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la-lil-alien · 2 years
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dragonsglare · 7 months
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I love how the GO fandom family can’t quite decide what Crowley is doing to cope with his trauma. What do you think?
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vintage-tigre · 9 months
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brumeraven · 2 months
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🍂:
She was the last to be born, into a world with no children.
Her consciousness sprang into existence a full-formed Pallas. The headache still lingers.
The Fae slowly die out because they cannot have children. They cannot have children because to be Fae is to not be a child. To be Fae is to see nothing but the certainty of the future you aren't in.
Dreaming of Comraich, she sought the Mirror of the World, knowing that Reflections are cast by Shadow, not Light. She gave herself to Shadow to master the Void, but every havenworld she created was consumed by its taint. Now others hide in them, heedless of the corruption.
Fae are the Moths of Shadow. Mages manipulate the Void within Vessels, but Fae channel the Void within.
A predatory lender who labors under debt, a con man who was conned.
Count your fingers after you shake faer hand and count your dreams after you read faer words.
~🍂
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