Final Boss
One could look toward the Crusades or the Reconquista for some surge in meaning and beating heart of living. Look toward Bismarck collecting his provinces to the trade flourish and beauty within each city-state from Babylon to Alexandria, gondola heights.
What refuge in our Manifest Destiny! This was only the beginning. Our beginning. Flipping through photos of caravans and now the humble infrastructure slowly desecrated so one can wonder, in our bureaucratic enforced mutual hellish descent, what shall one do?
There is nothing more to build if everything is taken away. There are no lands to protect if financiers will lay waste for resorts to bump profits for the perpetual “next quarter”. Naturally one forages away in the cyber, if you dodge the astroturf.
Of all the wars fought and brutality between, with our drone camera reels showing the soldiers’ praying before demolition to cement each broken family, playing chess with our pulse, what is one to do? One cannot find glory in the automatic indifferent bloodshed.
When I close my eyes and iterate through all my fictitious villains and other abstract horrors, though one may not be cradled in the arms of a wayfaring cosmic demon, often excluded is the more slow-drip breaking of spirit: whittling away any light between the cracks of pressure.
In a way, whoever is the creator of this world, could you think of a more apt final boss? A strange monolith infesting everything and everyone you care about: every institution, every strand of modern thought, every bank account, every language and philosophy pulled back into it. Something so absolute and ambiguously permeating that even beginning to question it and tear apart the laws is akin to suicide.
But that’s why it’s the final boss. Maybe it can get worse, but the heights we’ll climb from here… to be a little more than the spreadsheet pusher.
You were not born to suffer meaninglessly. We were not meant to shuffle til death while we watch everything disintegrate in front of us. The game isn’t ever over while you’re still breathing.
Keep your chin up. Look how far you’ve come. Your spirit is unbreakable.
Be the American the Japanese think you are.