Choose Your Own Adventure

When I was much younger I had no concept of what god was, only that he was some sort of magical figure who was sort of in charge of letting people into heaven. Eventually though, I somehow got the thought in my head that free will was an illusion, that every single aspect of the universe was controlled and dictated by god. I actually remember sitting in the backseat of my parents van, staring intently at my right hand and trying to sense the predetermined path it was meant to take. I wanted to defy god, to break free of his omnipresent control and to, for the first time, act of my own accord.

I must’ve spent a good hour indulging the bizarre staring contest, waiting for that precise moment when I thought god wasn’t watching. And in that instant I’d violently jerk my hand one way or the other. If I thought god was telling me to jerk my hand left, I’d slam it to the right. If I thought he wanted it to go right, then quick as I could I’d force it left. There was no matter of complexity to the equation, no odd angles or bending curves to try and outsmart the lord. Just a simple binary state, off or on, left or right. And every time I made my choice I’d look at where my hand sat, only to shake my head sadly, knowing whatever decision I'd made had been decreed by god. And I’d return my hand to the center and start again.

I miss those days, back when I was just a retarded little kid with no concept of just how terrifying the world was. Not concerned with death itself, but with the hope that heaven would be alright and that I could still watch my favorite movie (Home Alone) if I wanted to. I'm twenty two years old now and still experiencing a mid-life crisis every morning, staring into the cracked wall mirror I've installed on the door, slicking back my thinning hair with a small wad of generic hair gel and wishing that the scale in the corner of my room would reward me with some good news one of these days. I go to bed every night thinking that tomorrow is the first day of my life, and the first day of my life usually consists of dicking around at work for an eight hour period, arriving home prepared to get something done only to become overwhelmed by either the call of another useless social engagement or the internet’s promise of cheap entertainment and lurid pornography. Soon I will have health insurance and I will attempt to drown my inadequacies in a steady torrent of feelgoods of all colors and persuasions. I used to be covered under my mother’s health insurance, which through some bizarre loophole of policy had me referred to a pediatrician’s office. What a scene that was. Sitting in the brightly colored waiting room perusing a copy of Highlights for Children, called into an office where I found myself confessing to a man with a hundred colorful key-chains hanging comically from his fanny-pack just how damaged I am. Telling a man whose expertise normally covers the realm of skinned knees and runny noses that sometimes the crushing realization of my own morality is so great that I grab whatever is closest to me and whip it at the wall in a rage, my mind screaming as I fall to my knees and dry heave for a few minutes.

Last time I did this I received a small bottle of pills for my troubles. One night while delivering pizza in a drugged-up stupor I first drove the wrong way on a one-way street, then later hopped a curve and popped my tire, then while driving a loaner car hopped another curve and ruined the hubcap. After that I stopped taking the pills except recreationally, the last lonely white tablet sitting in its orange container for three months past the yearly expiration date before I finally swallowed the thing and felt nothing.

People say Marijuana is a gateway drug. I’d argue health insurance does a much better job.

Eventually my dad tried to bring god into our lives, and for the first time I got some idea of how this magic sky-being actually worked. I went to bible class and everything, even got confirmed, a time in my life I barely remember except for the part where the little diner in the basement of the church had a Virtua On machine for some unfathomable reason. My first confession was a weird one, for some reason I had paid such little attention in bible class that I had no real idea what the ceremony entailed, until the priest asked me “Is there something you want to confess my child?” and I told him not really, that “I’ve been pretty good I think.” Eventually he got an admission out of me that I could probably treat my sister nicer, and he told me to perform some combination of prayers. I forgot about his assignment until a few days later, at which point I’d forgotten the exact number of prayers he’d dictated and became convinced I was going to hell because I either performed too many Hail Marys or not enough. For some reason I always assumed god had these little loopholes. That being an omnipresent being all the time would get boring, so I figured he made up additional commandments once in awhile without telling anybody, sins you could never confess to because you wouldn’t even know you’d committed them.

Commandment 4,637,192,928 – Thou shalt not have the song “Private Eyes” by Hall and Oates appear on the same playlist as any song from Justin Timberlake’s album “Future Sex // Love Sounds.”
Commandment 8,293,272,283 – Thou shalt not drink a diet Mountain Dew while watching a DVD copy of the movie “They Live” in a full-screen format.

Just something to do, make up this whole list of asinine rules and hand it Saint Peter. I figure there’s enough people in heaven anyhow, might be worth it to weed out a few here and there, cut down on the overhead. Besides, if you read the bible you find that people’ve been turned to pillars of salt for much less.

Unfortunately, my father's attempts came too late for the shortsighted rhetoric to take root, any chance to save my mortal soul ruined by my inability to stop asking questions and just accept the loving embrace of our ever-present sky father. I actually attended bible camp for two years, where I sat in the tiny camp chapel and listening to a woman with no background in science tell us about how the dinosaurs were around some thousand years ago and how radio-carbon dating was a great deal of unreliable nonsense.

I think that camp really set my development as a functioning American kid back a few years. It was so bad that I heard a local band playing "Louie, Louie" on stage at some school carnival and couldn't for the life of me figure out why anyone want to change the lyrics to "Pharaoh, Pharaoh."

Pharaoh, Pharaoh.
Oh baby.
Let my people go.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So though all the young me wanted to do was to buy obscene amounts of candy at the canteen and play capture the flag, I instead found myself assaulted from all sides with Christian rhetoric, everything I loved now viewed through an additional moral lens I never asked for. I loved WCW wrestling, but throwing up the "Wolf Pack" hand signal (Middle and forth finger down, meeting thumb, pointer and pinkie up to make the 'ears') got me an earful from a councilor about how making those "devil horns" gave Satan his power. My childish prank of 'mooning' a fellow camp-member and denying everything, led to him screaming "God know what you did! God knows what's in your heart!"

Simply put, for the first time in my life I had people reinforcing what a horrible sinner I was. To be honest, it'd be kind of useful to have that about today, as my ethics slowly slip down the drain. To my younger self though, I was more annoyed than anything. All of it finally culminated on the last day of camp, where all the boy's cabins gathered to watch a portly balding man toss unrecognizable sports trophies and play money into a fire, demanding we cast off our false idols and embrace the lord. Midway through his impassioned midnight speech the stomach bug I'd been fighting all week got the better of me, promptly ruining whatever theological point this man was making as a legion of my juvenile camp mates eagerly turned from their log seats to watch me hurl.

To this day I still think of that man and his play-money, children eagerly grabbing at the burning embers as the wind took them overhead, me examining the scraps of clearly fake legal tender with disappointment. It took a few more years for me to abandon religion entirely, but I realize now that was maybe the moment it all went downhill. Realizing that Jesus had died on the cross for my sins, yet his followers weren't willing to burn even a couple singles to help save my soul.

All these emotions come to the surface now as I watch my childhood home being prepared for sale, the decaying bathroom features and several decade-old shag carpeting having been ripped out, replaced with a sparkling new interior that makes the place feel entirely alien to me. At times I can hardly fathom I’d ever lived in this structure, my mind still somehow unable to forget the long-gone orange couch cushions and wood-paneled walls I remember from my faint childhood memories. I think my love for our house ended when my dad left. At that point it stopped being a home, then it was just the place where I slept, where I stored my things, the place where I ignored my homework and played Chrono Trigger. I returned home recently and felt these small twinges of regret as I took a tour about the premises. My thoughts were no more complex than “Damn this is a great porch, why did we never get drunk here?” or “Damn this is a great roof, why did we never smoke pot here?” It’s never what we’ve done by which we define ourselves, only by the things we could’ve done. Maybe I could’ve learned to love that house, as broken as it was. Now it’s too late.

Upstairs I find myself rifling through my past, through two giant plastic bins piled high with most every piece of terrible grade-school artwork I ever scrawled. It's a terribly odd experience to sift through the stuff, equal parts strange fascination and mild embarrassment. Some of the things I find I remember in vivid detail. The paper monkey mask I was begrudgingly forced to make, watching as the other Kindergarten groups got to make much cooler monster and robot masks. The character designs I contributed to some grad-students’ thesis project, where me and the other “smart kids” in my forth grade class got to come up with the concept and graphics for a math “video game” which was then horribly programmed in visual basic. We ended up aping Mario Party pretty unabashedly. Not that it mattered since the whole game was a sham, the die rolls were exactly the same every time you ran the program, predestined to always land you on the few spaces this lazy bitch had actually taken the time to program.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum, a great number of the works are pretty much impossible to decipher. Abstract crayon drawings with no apparent theme other than chaos. A complete list of every level in Illusion of Gaia. A inexplicable series of pictures depicting the Elmer’s Glue bottle in almost retarded autistic detail, extreme close-ups of the label, each proudly declaring in every possible childhood medium “BONDS STRONG FOR ALL YOUR NEEDS SAFE NON TOXIC 4 FL OZ (118ML).”
Until finally I arrive at maybe the most terrifying piece in the box, a piece of crumpled paper which makes stops me dead in my tracks. One I look at now with an odd mixture of hopelessness and regret. One which reminds me how simple everything is when you’re young.

As most kids from my generation probably remember, elementary school computer class mostly consisted of us pounding away at antiquated Apple workstations, learning to type on those ancient yellowing keyboards while finding some sort of primal entertainment in the likes of classic edutainment titles such as 'Oregon Trail,' 'Number Muncher,' or my personal favorite 'Land of the Rising Sun' - a choose your own adventure which put you in the role of a young Japanese male, growing older in this strange foreign land and making various life decisions along the way. I remember vividly how disgustingly hard the game was. A sample scenario:

You have entered High School. The club fair is today. What do you do?
A) Join the Tennis Club
B) Join the Calligraphy Club
C) Join the Fencing Club
You have chosen (B) – Join the Calligraphy Club. Your family disowns you.

You could never win. Even if you picked the correct high school club to join or graduated with full marks, your family would always end up despising you for some reason or another. I think if you married the wrong girl your father committed seppuku.

The point is this was a simpler time. A time long before we allowed our barely pubescent kids unsupervised internet privileges, not realizing whatever NetNanny program we installed would fail to block access to some Digimon pornography forum and ruin their sexual development forever. This was a time when something as simple as playing Oregon Trail and finding a tombstone that said “Here lies Boner” would put a smile on my face that would last the whole day through. A time when the older kids in the neighborhood would chastise us for our stupidity, laughing when we begged them to endow us with their knowledge, begged them to tell us what the hell a "dildo" was. And a time when a portly unliked younger version of myself would sit in the computer lab, watching as a soulless computer algorithm took the data points I entered at random and used them to scrawl a beautiful fractured kaleidoscope of pinpoint light. The bright green lines staring back at me as I complete my masterpiece, imprecise fingers hunting and pecking away at raised computer keys. Hearing the angry static scream of the giant printer in the corner of the room. Holding the faded computer printout in my hands and smiling at the horrible work I'd produced.

INSERT PICTURE HERE

I have that piece of paper sitting on my desk now, an image so powerful I can barely look at it for a few seconds before I feel the cold rhythmic beating of my heart slamming about in my chest. Before I start to wonder when it is I lost that sense of stupid contentment. That beautiful knowledge that everything in world could be so easily summed up. I loved Ninja Turtles and Megaman. I loved the Legend of Zelda and Power Rangers. I loved my Mom and Dad, and even though I didn’t really know a whole lot about God, I probably loved him just as much as I loved Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the rest of that mythological greeting card lot.
Thinking back, I don’t know what I expected out of my staring contests with god. I don't know what I expected to happen if I truly accomplished my act of free will, if I thought god would shatter the world upon seeing my defiance, or rather welcome me into his kingdom as the lone soul who'd seen through the illusion of choice. For some reason I just figured I’d know.

More than a decade, and here I am. Attempting to justify free will. Visualizing the endless paths my life could take and wishing everything could just make sense again.

You are twenty two years old. You have a mildly respectable job as an internet marketer, a long unfinished novel sitting on your hard drive, and still entertain useless thoughts of finding a way to justify your mortality. As most of your former schoolmates finish their college degrees, finding success in their chosen fields, you languish in obscurity somewhere north of nowhere, the dreams you had as a child slowly dying.
What do you do?
A) Go left
B) Go right
C) Run off to L.A. with the only friends you've ever had, and hope that somehow, god willing, that everything will work itself out in the end.

You have chosen (C).

Good luck.