Actually being old I can’t speak to. But Getting old is really interesting. I mean, if you’re me. If you aren’t me, maybe the hellscape of degradation that our culture constantly heaps on you for having the temerity to not die can find purchase. There’s a lot of people trying to make me ashamed of various things and then trying to sell me chemicals to manage them, and while I appreciate the hustle I’m simply too far along whatever kind of spectrum it is to yield to this kind of manipulation. It isn’t possible to not age; I never thought I would remain the same. That’s what would be weird, in fact: to endure raw time and the obvious, profound insincerities of existence and be recognizable at the end. It’s psycho shit; I don’t honor it.
I never thought Penny Arcade would remain the same, either. I have entered a kind of fongoid “fruiting phase” where I’m just annihilating myself in the service of the future. A future, maybe – a specific one. It doesn’t make me sad. In “Decide-A-Tron,” MC Paul Barman suggests that adults are a literal waste of energy; I’ve always taken it as a challenge. The best approach to any of this is, in your final writhings, to make possible the work of amazing others who are not you. Some of these others are people whose manufacture I bear some responsibility for. There are also people who liked some of the stuff we did and wanted to make things together. If that’s all I ever did, it would be enough.
Because Gen Con exists in a kind of geographical gravity well from which creatures may not escape, I met a bunch of people I’d never had a chance to previously and they were determined to say nice things about me. They had been in the Service, and described crowding around a monitor with their friends to see the new strip. Or perhaps they had “put away childish things,” only to rediscover roleplaying through our podcasts or live shows. They could escape the booth if it ever became too intense, and some did.
A hero of mine came by, and I talked way too much, but it was my booth and there was no easy way to exfiltrate without generating a fanciful scenario. Eventually the pressure just built up until, I presume, he ran away or was launched into space. It would be hard to imagine that someone felt about me the way that I feel about him. Even after twenty-seven years of doing this, my first instinct would be to tell you how you’re wrong.
(CW)TB out.
