Zombies are still in. As far as ways people want the world to end go, this seems to be in the number one slot (followed by robot aliens and Bible Stories). Some sort of contagion starts to reanimate the dead into walking Ms. and Mr. Pac-Men, forcing society to collapse and a rag-tag group of actors all playing different parts to put aside their good-looking differences and ask the question: “How do we live together in this here land of the dead?”
It’s an intriguing and popular hypothetical situation, mostly because a Zombie Apocalypse Scenario allows us three major fantasies:
1) Since no one is allowed concede immediate death while discussing this end of days situation, we are elevated to the special status of “stock survivor,” in which the mundane parts of our lives become important issues to the rest of human civilization. If you took an auto shop class in high school you are now one of the last engineers on the planet. Have diabetes? Congratulations! You’re now a liability to the survival of your species!
2) Because we are all important survivors, everything we do is just as important. This is attractive because most people suffer from an absurd anxiety that because they are un-famous their lives are meaningless to the world at large. If the world consists of you and five people of different backgrounds then you are at least the sixth most famous person in the world.
3) The ethical and political situation is a deadly sandbox. Suddenly all of those theoretical governments you learned about in grade ten civics class are back on the table, and because education is standardized in Ontario, everyone is a politician (Vote Michone!).
I used to love this fantasy. I’m sure you love this fantasy. Millions of people escape to this fantasy every Saturday night with AMC’s The Walking Dead. there are books and comics and movies detailing every aspect.But we’ve been talking about this situation since long before I was born. A zombie apocalypse can’t happen because we’ve all been educated on the worst case scenarios since childhood. We are too educated on the emergency procedures for an outbreak of T-virus to result in anything more than a few proactive heroes ending up in jail for crushing a few heads in a shopping mall.
This is why I prefer an alternative way the world ends, not with a bite, but a curse.
Mummies Alive!
That’s right, the most exciting end to the world as we know it involves mummies: millennia old preserved corpses of world rulers.
Now, some of you may be thinking, “Mummies? That’s no different at all.” And I understand your point. This is an undead end to the world. However, there are some key differences in play when it’s planet Earth vs a mummy:
1) A mummy is intelligent:
Though it has no brain, a mummy is animated by its ancient spirit. This old soul might not know how to drive, but it can navigate properly, wear fancy golden hats, and draw out a military siege tactic that’ll really make you think.
2) A mummy is motivated:
Unlike zombies which spread like an indifferent blight, a mummy is walking the earth for a reason: something has been taken from its bedroom, and it wants that thing back.
3) Walking corpses are only one part of the problem:
Though I’m sure supernatural powers are going to vary from mummy to mummy I think we can all agree on these:
-raising an army of the undead (NOT ZOMBIES)
-commanding flesh-eating plague bugs (locusts and scarab beetles)
-sand-based magic powers
-promises of riches (to extort/bribe greedy living minions)
Every bad thing that is happening during this cataclysmic event is a direct extension of the mummy’s supernatural will. This is why the army of undead cannot be zombies: they are motivated by their unholy emperor and will cease to walk the earth once he is satisfied. Where mummies are concerned, bugs under peoples’ skin, mass migrations of our most famously violent presidential corpses: these are all to and ends and that ends is re-acquisition of an artifact.
4) A mummy apocalypse is not insidious:
Though it starts of very slowly, a Mummy Apocalypse Scenario (MAS) is not something that will creep up on an unsuspecting populace. As soon as the search for missing gold gets out of the museum, we’re going to hear about it in the news. The MAS has an individual face on the destruction (the Pharaoh) and a single person responsible (a selfish, anonymous thief).
This will lead to two distinct characteristics of a MAS: a worldwide manhunt for the thief and a combined military effort against the armies of the undead (which can include living nations).
5) A MAS is not necessarily unstoppable:
If some how the mummy’s thirst for revenge can be appeased by returning its favourite item in a basket containing the thief’s head in the first week of a MAS, we might only need to clean up a few city blocks
6) The beginning and the end:
As mentioned above, the MAS is triggered when a thief or a tomb raider takes something that the mummy needs to have close by in order to rest in peace. Because of how easily we can travel all over the world, the tomb raider can be anywhere on the planet. This is why a MAS is a relatively new possibility. In the 20’s a Pharaoh only had to level Cairo to get the promise ring from her high school sweetheart back.
The temporal scale of a MAS is also large. A mummy is immortal, cannot be killed, and will not be stopped by time. As the military efforts escalate, the mummy’s army will grow in proportion to the casualties. We will all be consumed eventually, until all that remains is a global desert wasteland with a population of one: the mummy who is walking up and down every single line of latitude searching for his stolen TV remote control.
Intro to Practical Ancient Egyptian Ethics:
The reason this alternative needs to be presented is because the Zombie Apocalypse Scenario has nothing left to offer as far as new conversation goes. We’ve all made our decisions. We’ve all made our “Please, shoot me if I’m bit,” pacts. It used to be that you didn’t really know someone until you heard their thoughts on how to handle a ZAS.
Now that you have a new hypothetical fear, I submit to you the following questions for consideration:
1. You suspect the thief is a close relative and/or your best friend. Do you:
a) Turn her in to the government
b) Hand him over to the undead
c) Team up with her and run from the ancient powers
d) Other (explain)
2. Assuming that the MAS originates from the USA, do you think that your country will side with the international forces of life, or with the skeleton armies of the mummy? Do you agree with your country’s decision? If so do you join the fight? If not where do you go?
3. Do you support the government’s manhunt for the thief? If not, why? If so, do you join in?
4. Which undead president do you think will get the most press, Kennedy or Taft, when Arlington National Cemetery is raised?
5. How do you think the event of a Mummy Apocalypse Scenario will affect the international faith communities? How do you think it will affect your personal faith?
6. You turn on the news to learn more about last week’s golden ankh robbery from the Egypt exhibit at Royal Ontario Museum only to find news that the Toronto subway system is flooded with flesh-eating undead scarabs. Describe your next twenty-four hours.
Some times love looks like something else completely. I had never seen the sun rise with the same eyes that watched it set until I met the first girl that ruined me. It was a child’s infatuation. I was twelve and burdened with a retainer, she was American and visiting, via massive yacht, the small harbour town where I spent my summers with my parents on their power boat.
The sky slowly turned blue and I barely noticed. We had spent the night staring into the same campfire built in a rusted, overturned truck wheel, talking about her favourite book. The last of the adults had long since retired to their boats to drunkenly try to fuck, fail, and finally pass out, so we were alone, and she did most of the talking. I had heard of the book, and I certainly liked the prequel—my old Italian stereotype of a soccer coaching Grade Five teacher read it aloud to my class a couple of years previous, and I still had the friends I’d made at recess by imitating Mr. Mamoliti’s hilariously pervy character voice for the fish-man with the thing for jewelry—but every time I tried to read The Lord of the Rings I ended up holding a Star Wars novel before I even knew what a Brandybuck was.
My lack of knowledge was not an issue. She needed to talk about them. It was almost compulsive, as if it had been building up inside her, reaching a critical mass that, when I touched it, exploded like so many walls of Helm’s Deep. She spoke to me like no one really has since: with the conviction of such an absurdly deep sorrow that it could only be expressed through the retelling of her favourite parts of an obscure half-man’s hike up a volcano. By the time the last star of night was consumed by the waking sun I had come to want what she wanted. She called her dream “a world of adventure,” and that was the ideal that would destroy me in the end.
She went away: south to the land called “just outside of Cleveland,” and I was filled with a profound longing. Immediately the world in which I lived was unsatisfying, and I embarked on an intellectual journey of self denial and fanaticism, convinced now that a world of wizards and tree-people was superior to my own home. When my maiden returned on her father’s ivory vessel we would share in this delusion so fully and completely that in some sense it would manifest physically and make her sad eyes go away. Sometimes love looks like something else completely.
When school started, three weeks after she had gone away, I was somehow one-hundred dollars into creating a playable army of Warhammer: the Game of Fantasy Battles.
Definitely not love.
The Sign of the Hammer
It is common knowledge (or just commonly believed) among the Catholic-schooled that at the turn of the first Millennium the Pope of the time (Urban II) saw a golden cross in the sky. The crazy king of Catholicism took this to be a divine revelation: that the followers of Christ would reclaim the Holy Land of Jerusalem in the name of Jesus. In return for killing all the violence and walking involved, the people of the Roman-Cathollic Church would be allowed to live in paradise for another thousand years before the tribulation prophesied by St. John (or as he’s known colloquially: Johnny Dreamy-eyes). This iconoclastic hallucination could have been a mirage, a comet, wishful thinking, or one of ninety-trillion other common brain ailments left over from the Dark Ages, but the man was the Pope and history needed somebody to start the Crusades. Over the coming decades this same thing would happen thirteen more times, and as a result make the school board mandated religion class in my elementary school practically the only school-thing I cared about.
Pope Urban II with Book of Souls (+5 magic)
My elementary school was known only for its sublimely large output of exceptional runners. I was growing too fast to have any sort of physical dexterity; having too many simultaneous long-term dental operations to confidently say a prayer in public; and too scared of Hell to hang out with the kids who exclude the nose-pickers, cry babies, foreigners and scoliosis sufferers, yet simultaneously to afraid of being labelled a pariah to be seen with them. this being the case, there was simply nothing as appealing as the fully-fledged escapism offered by the brutal histories included exclusively in intermediate and senior grade religion class.
Of course, there is plenty of unconditional God-love and good vibes to be had in a religious studies class aimed at twelve-year-olds. The general lesson I remember being pressed on me most was the World Peace was not only achievable but also inevitable. Peace was impending. The word of Christ would spread like Holy wildfire amongst the many bushes of the world and a new Pentecost would arrive, causing a epidemic of hand-holding. It would compel white, upper-middle class forty-somethings to speak in tongues as they shouted from the window of their super SUV’s: “We did it!”
Peace-mongering of this sort put me on the defensive. I would question the publicly funded semi-priests with the zeal of an Inquisitor armed with verbal thumbscrews and a reversible Adidas windbreaker. World Peace? What about everything else we’d been learning? Didn’t John the Baptist lose his head for saying the same thing? Didn’t all the saints die unthinkable deaths at the hands of the unbelieving orthodoxy of the mass-citizenry and its blaspheming church? People don’t just accept Christ. Good is a reflex of evil. The best happiness can only be achieved by experiencing unimaginable sadness.
Later in my education, a priest would tell me that a true believer in the Kingdom of Heaven is unimaginably sad because life on this earth is to be separated from one’s Lord. If only I had heard that from my religion teacher I might have figured out what this was all about before it grew out of control. As it stood, though, in Grade Seven, I thought that the only thing that would make me happy was the start of a new crusade, the same as the old crusades; the knighting of me to act in the name of Lady, far away in her unspecific American town.
Now, my retainer at the time created all sorts of crevices in which saliva would collect and eventually overflow when it came time for me to publicly speak, so there is a good chance that instead of hearing a little self-righteous bastard tell her she was wrong to hope, my teacher might have thought the red-haired shy kid who sat in the back row, and had no running medals to his name, was drowning out of water in an invisible Marianas Trench of mouth juices. I think she must have understood my snarky nihilism. though, because every time I publicly choked about war, class would turn into a twenty minute conversation about The Crusades, which to my tiny, baseball-capped skull, meant we were actually talking about Warhammer. The denial thickened.
Speaking in Tongues
You know what Warhammer is even if you don’t. Perhaps you’ve seen the little pewter figurines in a display window. Maybe you purchased a novel titled Gotrek and Felix in Trollslayer: a Warhammer Novel by accident while looking for Game of Thrones in paperback. There’s a chance you’ve interrupted it on a Friday night, thinking that “Duelling Grounds” was a badass name for a bar, only to find the smell of Chinese food in place of music, the pimpled gaze of a dozen sober eyes begging not to be judged, and a flickering fluorescent light instead of the alcohol you now very desperately need. You could have dreamt it.
My Grade Seven English class knows that Warhammer is a game played with tiny knights and demons and dice and measuring tapes because I told them. I stood before them for a record-breaking eleven-minutes and seventeen-seconds describing the infamously nerdy hobby game as a part of the annual public speaking assignment my school held every spring for every student.
Peter’s Speech Project: Sixth Edition ($90.00)
The sub-unit was called “Speeches” and it was universally maligned. The project was a lethal combination of essay writing, memorization, and reading aloud while on display, suffocating in an unholy vacuum of anxiety. The students hated it because it didn’t involve running, which in the end was the same reason the teachers didn’t like it. My school knew what it was good at, and public speaking was never going to be on the list of reasons to send a child to Mary Phelan Elementary.
Limitations on the speech assignment mandated that the oratory last a minimum of three minutes and be recited from memory with only the aid of cue cards containing memory-jogging bullet points. The maximum allotted time was a laughably unachievable five minutes so as to allow a class of thirty foot-race enthusiasts to present everything over two extended English periods. The goal was simple: year after year I would try my best to hit exactly three minutes by taking my time and pretending that my dramatic pauses were for emphasis and precision. Everyone did this except for the kids who were literally illiterate and barely made it through their introduction by minute four, after which the teacher would allow them to sit down and dream about galloping around while another child was publicly martyred.
Something happened to me though, in front of my split-class of thirty-five. As I stood before my speedy peers, nervous and arguably holding back a tide of orthodontic anxiety drool, ready to three-minute mile yet another “Super-Speaker!” sticker onto a grading rubric, I was overcome with what I can only describe as Pentecostal fervor. For the first time in the history of “Speeches,” a pre-teenaged boy abandoned his cue-cards as his eyes glazed over, spewing forth from his expensively and extensively retained mouth eleven minutes of constant noise that added up to the entire fictional history and slightly abridged rules of a game they didn’t know about. The whole time, overtaken by images of a rising sun, a burning log inside an overturned truck wheel, and a world of adventure.
When it was done and the visions had stopped, no one knew what to do. They clapped, but forgot why. I took my seat back and stared at my hands while some kid lied about what his favourite TV show was and I ached for a world of adventure. The mark I received for my haunting sermon was unsurprisingly terrible. None of it mattered, it was only of this world.
Escapism
My first piece of Warhammer was a Wood Elf Lord on a steed, armed with a lance and shield. I never gave him a name. His grave would forever remain unmarked when he inevitably died in the name of a god that had forgotten him. He had a blue cape that I eventually painted green, and because I rarely used the proper brand name glue to mount him on his warhorse, he often rode into battle with the courageous zeal of a vertigo patient.
Wood Elves were my team. In Warhammer, identifying whose side you’re on is a decision that carries the weight of a dynasty, especially for the unemployably juvenile, as each individual piece costs at least a very real twelve dollars, and in order to play a game you need at least forty of the little bastards. They also need to be painted. I chose to lead a host of Wood Elves out of a strong feeling of belonging. It was commonly thought by the game’s lonely community that the Woodies (colloquial term) sucked. But I was convinced that the skinny guys with the bows and arrows, much like myself, could defy the expectations of society by hanging out in forests and believing they could control the wind.
Three other people I knew played the game. One was my brother. Despite my heroic proselytizing in front of everyone I knew in the whole world, this number did not grow. Because of this sad fact, games were rare. Even more rare was the one time in my life that both my brother and the new kid in school from Poland joined me in my parent’s then-unfinished basement for the most epic battle my nameless general would see. The battle that would destroy my world.
A disaster unfolded, unseen over the moisture-stained concrete plains of war. It was not a hurricane that could be predicted with a sort of satellite apparatus, or a rogue lion bent on species-wide revenge that could be reported by the news. As I moved my miniature under-dogs into firing position that morning, I was none the wiser of the cataclysm of trans-dimensional proportions threatening to open up underneath the spiritual plains of my collectively imagined world of adventure. Soon an unknown horror would consume my most magically equipped Elven Wardancers, leaving behind nothing but tiny pieces of ridiculous lead.
We’d been planning this all week, and we saw in the foundation of my house the ultimate canvas on which to paint our version of reality red with the imaginary blood of a million allowances. Our reality that day was not one dependent on how fast or long you could run but rather on how well you understood the way that things were set, the rules those things followed, and they ways in which you could interact with them. All of this order presented in a package also containing the ingredients to make a fantastic and sweeping narrative. Scattered about the floor was my world of adventure.
My brother’s legion of Dwarf Slayers supported his cannon-toting gyrocopter; the other guy’s host of High Elven lancers; my sucky tree people with their arrows—these were extensions of what we truly wanted, for one reason or another, life to be.
Hour three had come and there was a commotion above us. The doorbell had been activated just as my skinny guys in capes opened fire on my brother’s bearded squad of shirtless axe-wielding half-men. War marched on. The Polish kid obliterated a walking tree-monster of mine as my brother laughed with revenge. Feet descended the wooden stairs that led to reality and my nameless Wood Elf Lord fell off of his loyal mare. I knew we weren’t alone, but I chose to stay in the world we made.
And there she was. Reality and fantasy had collided in the best way possible. Love meeting war, both born of obsession and hormones, and in their mixing creating a place I wanted because she did.
“What are you boys playing?” said the man who took her away on his boat a year ago.
Her Dad with Throne of Souls (+10 initiative)
I explained it was war. I explained the stakes. If one of the others broke past my battle lines an eternal winter would fall. I said it all as if it were real, trying to meet the gaze of the person that did this to me. When I couldn’t find the fire-lit eyes of the summer before my heart sank. She just stood there, in a basement that was made more of mold and dry wall than anything that could be called adventurous.
“So it’s a dice game.”
It wasn’t. Her dad was wrong. But what could I say? That it was war that depended on probabilities best represented by dice? That maybe his precious football was a dice game? Or all the fucking running everybody liked to fucking do? Maybe that? Dice are never just dice. Until they are, and embarrassed, you elect to hide in the basement throwing them against the floor, wishing you were cool and fast.
I gave her a hug when she left but I don’t remember saying anything. I never saw her again, but dreamed of her twice, the way she was when she told me about a world of adventure. No one cares who won Warhammer.
Life After War
Speeches happen at the end of the school year, around the same time that all of the students make a name for their gazelle-like selves by galloping in circles. Maybe it is on purpose, but even if it’s not: all of the spring-time curriculum is filled to the brim with sweaty peacocking activities.
Fresh off of my disturbing display of obsession, the one that froze my heart and confirmed what I had worried ever since that basement annihilation from above, I was sitting in the newly renovated school library hoping that at least my reputation with the quick-legged would be unscathed. I was simultaneously listening to the senior English teacher explain the rules for the afternoon. My school was small, Catholic, and horrible, so that bright afternoon in the library, we would have our end of year dance.
About eighty kids huddled and circled to J-Lo and The Backstreet Boys in a blindingly bright library at two o’clock in the afternoon. It was clear that, despite the conviction in my earlier fevered plea to roll dice in the dark, no one wanted a crusade. The game had changed, but the rules were the same. It was time to redefine the word “adventure.”
I found the most renowned female distance runner in school. She was a year younger than me and had legs woven of aircraft cable. Perhaps it was ambitious of me, choosing such a fast lady for a dance partner, but the concrete battlefield of my basement was a stiff grey library carpet now and this time I would refuse to waltz it alone. We shuffled our feet to the last song of the early afternoon and then her boyfriend kicked me in the back.
K-Rock Presents: Back From the Dead Weekend
I wake up early this morning, earlier than my parents (always an accomplishment). It is day two of K-Rock (allegedly Kingston’s best rock radio station)’s “Back From the Dead Weekend,” which is apparently different from every other weekend because they are choosing to exclusively play music made by dead people, though the DJ never goes on record to confirm my hypothesis, so it may just be a clever rock’n’roll way to say “Easter.” This is an appropriate radio-themed weekend to be staying with my parents, in the house they purchased for their impending retirements. The place is located twenty minutes off the map of a town that isn’t even on any maps. It is as far away from other living people that I can get, and stay, and eat for free (unless you count payment in pretending to my dad that I still enjoy Dumb and Dumber, in which case it’s actually extremely expensive). The house itself is located on a bay in the Upper-Rideau Lakes area, and is just within range of Kingston radio towers. Nobody knows I am here, and as far as I can tell I have no definite idea where other people are located. The only thing I receive from the outside world is a radio signal carrying the voices of dead people singing about the danger-glory of excess and occasionally the cooler points of being a Hobbit. In other words: this morning was exactly what surviving the end of the world will be like.
I am sleeping in the basement, but despite being under the earth I am still awakened by the bright spring sunlight and boorish mating calls of the local bird population. Wearing flannel pyjama pants–and only flannel pyjama pants–I go in to the kitchen and drink all of the coffee. As I am the prototypical Postman (Costner, 1997), I survey my shelter: all the things my parents love so much gathered into one place. A TV VCR combination; the Farley Brothers DVD box set (when the world ends we don’t get to choose out entertainment); a telescope my father gave me for Christmas 2005 and somehow re-acquired, now holding up one side of a sunlamp that is feeding a tray of seedlings. These all stir up with various magazines opened up to articles with titles like How to Feed an Army, or Grid-less: Life Without Electricity and produce a homogeneous solution of wasteland-ish atmosphere. The radio in the corner isn’t turned on. No one has anything new to say. They can only describe the situation that led to this state of perpetual removal. There is also a gun leaning against the door frame.
It isn’t an actual gun gun. It’s a pellet gun. As far as I can tell, this violent marriage of black heavy-duty plastic and steal uses springs, or, magic, or civil disobedience to launch tiny bits of metal into larger bits of anything. No gun powder is involved, no bullets. According to the little shoe polish container that houses them, the pellets are made of lead and can cause sterility, madness, and severe ear-loss in Dutch painters. The weapon only fires one toxic projectile before needing to be reloaded, but that doesn’t stop it from looking incredibly authentic. This gun would look right at home on TV or the back of a soldier journeying in the desert, or jungle, or wherever wandering soldiers are native to.
In my hands it feels appropriately heavy, which is to say heavier than it looks. I am at first struck with an overwhelming familiarity while simultaneously half-vocalizing a thought: I have never fired a gun. Wearing shirts with guns displayed on them, seeing guns used, talking about guns, loving guns, even holding guns: these are all more regular actions when compared to actually firing the deadly items. Guns are a big part of life, and will be even more so when this planet gets all Book of Eli on us. That being said, in my hand-cannon obsessed life I have complimented more people on their gun-shaped tattoos than I have pulled on authentic triggers.
Today will not be the day I “lock and load,” and/or “light this bitch up.” No bullets will be fired. I don’t actually know how to come to possess a real gun beyond maybe confusing an officer of the law into thinking I am him (or her; equal opportunity). Today will instead be a day of profound realization. It will be a major step towards being ready for when the rest of the world turns into some much larger version or other of my parents obscure lake house.
Still shirtless and flannel-clad I make like a Canadian poem and walk out onto the wooden deck with a coffee in one hand and a rifle in the other. I walk to the obnoxious sound of a loon probably singing about some chick’s “major ass” and wish the birds would just quit it with the breeding attempts. I get to the railing of the porch, set down all the coffee, and hold the gun in both hands. I inspect it again in the sunlight and discover a message written for just this occasion:
“WARNING: Not a toy. Misuse or careless use may cause serious injury or death. Before using read owner’s manual[,] free from Umarex USA Ft Smith AR”
Partially because no one else is awake except for these pussy-hungry birds, and partially because I’m a know it all, but mostly because I am a man without a shirt in the process of drinking all the coffee (I can’t stress enough the roll of caffeine in this) I decide to figure out the intricacies of the gun’s firing mechanism the same way my ancient ancestors would have: by way of hitting other things with it, wanton button pushing, and pointing it comically close to the openings in my head. I shoot the ground first: bull’s-eye (100 pts). Then I shoot a beer bottle: crack-shot (1,000,000 pts). After that I scare the cologne off some looking-to-get-lucky woodpecker: tactial warning shot (mission accomplished: INFINITY PTS!).
Every time I pick up a lead pellet my reproductive cells scream and my ears loosen, but the exhilaration is too much to resist. By now my father has woken up and turned on the radio. John Bonham posthumously knocks out the rhythm to the rest, and all I can think of is: How did I get so good at firing guns?
Teenage Wasteland
We are obsessed with the end of the world. As a species there is nothing we have spent more time worrying about, hoping about, or writing about. We’ve gone to war to prevent it (eat it Hitler), some have gone to war to bring it about (Hitler: “No, you eat it, you guys.”), and others have gone to war because it didn’t happen in the first place (Crusading has always been the most kingly way to celebrate continued life). All of our media reflects this want; from our movies, to our videogames, to our rock’n’roll. And why not? It is flattering to think that you will be the last one. If you don’t survive, then you got to see how it ended; if you do survive you get to pretend you’re a young Mel Gibson or finally recreate those scenes from Girlfriend in a Coma like you’ve been jonesing to do since whenever that came out (97? Great book though). We are more prepared for Armageddon than anyone who lived before us, and we know that it will be violent. Not only have we lived through an End of Days already (Y2K: robocalypse) and are coming up on another one (Mayan Time-Revenge v.2012), but we also recreationally train ourselves to be accurate with firearms of all kinds while suspending our disbelief that the end of the world hasn’t already occurred.
Videogames and violence have become practically synonymous by now. Sure, there are varying degrees of verisimilitude of said violence, from the cartoonish de-spining of a Chinese stereotype, to the karate lessons of a rapping dog, all the way to the hyper-realistic murdering of a prostitute for your money back. Gone are the days of time-travelling dolphins that could get by with a little dinosaur-focused dialogue and an alien space ship. Even the games in which you play the good guy, you are mandated with driving an alien race to extinction if not outright committing human genocide (Nathan Drake, I’m looking at you).
I know you’re about to bring up Tetris, or Katamari, or Journey, or some such arty puzzle-business, and sure, you have a point. But go look up the sales numbers for all of those games, then compare them to just one Call of Duty installment. It’s like they don’t even exist. But this isn’t a conversation about violence or sales figures. This is a conversation about the chapter of existence after end of the world and how we are educating ourselves in preparation for it. Even non-violent videogames are preparing us for a future that has suffered at least a Deep Impact. and I am absolutely sure that being able to create a giant ball out of refuse will be a very useful way of transporting large amounts of whatever is left after the Great Cataclysm or whatever we’re going to call it (my vote is “The Happening”). I don’t need to tell you why Tetris is important. We all just know why Tetris is important. I’m just saying the gun-based games are too.
Videogame violence is beside the point. Yes, in many games you are encouraged to shoot human head representing polygons for virtual rewards of either more story, more content, a badge, or my personal favourite: abstract points. The semantics of this are insignificant, though let’s face it, as much as we will be shooting deer and bears and crab-like monsters in the future, we will also be shooting very human-esque cannibals. The important thing is that it is recreationally reinforcing specific types of practical math. Call of Duty, Halo, Mass Effect, and Metal Gear Solid all turn us into applied mathematicians. What is firing a gun other than the deadliest initiation of a parabolic function you can take part in? I’ll tell you what else: fun.
What’s more, the most recent Metal Gear Solid entry (and I am sure many other, newer, more hardcore, shorter, more tolerable games as well) educate the player on the different types of guns, how they work, and how they can be modified for optimum killing. In Metal Gear 4 (subtitled: Guns of the Patriots) your main weapon is a modifiable M4 Assault Carbine. That sentence shouldn’t make sense to a civilian, but most teenage males can not only tell you what that is, but also tell you how using it instead of their preferred weapon can be applied to your sexual orientation in a negative context. These toys are educating us whether we like it or not. And we do.
Some things simply require practice, and first person shooting videogames give that to us. They train our dexterity. It is because I have spent countless hours scrambling the brains of my virtual friends and family with bullets made out of numbers than I can threaten these morning birds out of indecent proposals by way of sterilizing ammunition. I have made these calculations too many times in my head to get them wrong. But that doesn’t change the fact that I learned this with a toy, and that no matter what the free manual from Arizona might maintain, I am exercising this skill with a toy. A toy that can cause death. But then again, name a toy that couldn’t be used to kill you.
Apocalypse Then
We followed the hunter. He had been leading us for some time. It was late in the Winter, early in the Spring. The forest we were in was once frozen, but the current state of affairs had the whole thing melting with us inside. The sun was at the four O’clock pre-equinox angle that turns everything to gold, transforming the forest into a strange palace composed exclusively of demolished watch and jewelry stores with floor-to-ceiling windows. He had two dogs and a rifle.
We were going to find a moose. The hunter had told us this; my brother, my cousin, and I. Initially, weather reports gave the impression that there would be no thaw that evening, but they were wrong. I was the only one to elect not to wear rubber boots, and until we reached a large flooded area that needed to be crossed, it had certainly been the cooler, more fashionable choice. The other two with their hilarious, over-sized boots that just screamed functionality (not nearly as stylish as my wicked-ass black hiking boots) thought for some reason that hunting wasn’t about looking cool. As the hunter took a direct route through the glowing body of water the other two had no issue following, but I soon found that my incredible sense of adventure-fashion failed me. I took my brother as a human-mount and we moved onward, implicitly trusting that the hunter knew where the moose was.
Piggy-backing me, my brother wondered aloud if there even was a moose. The hunter was our uncle, and was notorious for his sense of humour which comprised mainly in lying about reality. We were sure of it. He could lie, of course, but we had seen the beast’s feces, and that could not be a lie. Later I realized that I have no idea how to differentiate various forms of defecation, so any identity we placed on the creator of the evidence in question (poop) was just as faith-based as the existence of the moose itself.
On the other side of the pond, I dismounted and we came to a large pine tree, on top of which huddled a porcupine “Fucking it up,” as my uncle put it. He handed my brother the rifle and told him to make it count; if you miss a porcupine it’ll come right after you, and they’re fast (again, the truth of this statement is suspect). The terrifying image of that prickly little teddy bear charging at us and flinging quills like balanced throwing knives made me forget about my wet socks. If a porcupine’s defense mechanism loges itself in your body you can’t pull it out, it just works its way further in to you leg , or forearm, or brain stem.
We pressured my younger sibling into pulling the trigger, and with an ear-buzzing crack we held our collective breath as we awaited speedy and spiky retribution. It was a foolish anxiety. My younger brother has experienced life from the operating end of a rifle’s cross hairs since the age of eight. We expected wild and painful vengeance at the hands of nature’s proxy, but the critter had ninety-percent of its brain pushed through its eye-socket before it even realized it wasn’t alone after all. It fell to the floor of the forest, finding awkward rest amongst the melting diamonds and zirconium that were slowly rising the water level and freezing the soles of my fancy boots.
“Headshot,” we said. The hunter didn’t care.
The animal that was eating the tree that belonged to my uncle was at our feet, dead, and it was the first time I had seen a porcupine up close. It is amazing how furry and soft they look for something our culture paints as a walking spike-pit. Then again, the porcupine on the ground, the one with the prominent two-dollar lobotomy scar, seemed to have left all of its quills in the tree it fell from. They stuck out of the pine’s trunk like a natural ladder, too fragile to climb. My testimony in regards to the cuddly nature of these elusive mammals can’t be taken at face value, after all, have seen a live porcupine as many times as I have fired a real gun.
We never found the moose, but as I rode my brother out of the end of the world I wondered if we even deserved to.
Dry Bones & Ginger 