The Life and Times of doomcock69
Nat Mesnard
The first thing I have to tell you is that wasn’t always his screenname. As with anything, there’s a process. A series of events, a whole life history leading one inevitably toward such an appellation, epithet of irony, worthy of 4chan glory, a name that’s toxically funny. That’s what I believe, anyway: one after another, the events of our lives add up to who we become.
At age twelve, in those early internet years, he went by cubsfan85. His first screenname, the beginning of a series of digital identities extending off into life’s vanishing point. 85 because that was the year of his birth, and the Cubs thing because of living in Chicago, of course—suburbs of, to be exact, line after line of perfect houses whitewashing that area’s major drug problem. The name fit, I guess. But, I mean, what didn’t? Even back then, he was a guy who, on the surface, appeared to want nothing at all. It was his sole strength, this unyielding muteness of spirit. A quality his parents could not, would not, understand.
But of course there were things he wanted.
For example, cubsfan85 desired the computer his father, an electrical engineer, built for him. Even if that meant assembling it by hand there in the carpeted pod of the man’s cluttered office. His father had a known rage that intensified in the face of anxiety, often exploding into righteous fear. Like when cubsfan85 kept dropping the tiny screws and touching the faces of the green breadboards—it wasn’t long before his father shot at him, “Hold it by the edges, God damn it, didn’t I tell you that twice already?”
And yet cubsfan85 persisted. He did not retreat to his room, his notebooks, his worn box of Magic: The Gathering cards. Instead, he placed the soundcard he was holding back on the desk and emitted a vague, mostly unintelligible noise that went something like “Fhu. Aah!” It was a combination of a grunt and a growl and the beginning of a curse word and a frustrated yelp. He followed it with a muttered “Sorry.”
His father, in response, rolled his eyes.
It was hard to imagine what he’d do when that screen bounced to life, lit with electronic power. And yet there lay, on the far side of this trial, the promise of solace in distraction. Of course, cubsfan85 would not have said it this way at the time. Even now, I don’t think he can articulate how he knew that computers would be so magical. Maybe it was just that his dad liked them, and at this early age, cubsfan85 wanted to be like his dad. But personally, what I think it was is he could sense the vibrations of his future. His entire life unfolding from that single point in time. But I don’t tell him this. When I talk this way, he tells me it’s not rational. Horoscopes are a lie, he says. Tarot is just a bunch of cards.
They closed the PC case. The thing booted up, emitting a series of ill beeps. His father exhaled, shaking his head. “We’re sunk.” His temples pulsated.
But it was only that the IDE cable to the hard drive wasn’t seated properly. They fixed it, and white text flowed down the screen.
You will find this difficult to believe, but cubsfan85’s parents actually encouraged him to use the computer. It was a different era, I guess. Maybe you remember it? AOL sent you a flashy new disk every week, orange and pink and psychedelic, always with that triangle housing the little running man. Ah, that dialup modem sound—the tone, the static, the possibility. The uncanny sensation of being transported.
And cubsfan85 was pulled onward. He sailed across email and pop-up advertisements, explored GeoCities, landed in web forums and IRC. He learned DOS commands and tried his best to be l33t. But most importantly of all, there were video games.
Even at age 12, cubsfan85 sensed the world was not for him. His body was useless to the Little League team to which his parents had optimistically assigned him. And his mind raced, thoughts swirling out far ahead of words. If he could have spoken clearly, he might’ve expressed the terror inspired in him by his parents’ divorce. Their separation lurked, a dark cataract he rushed toward. Behind his flimsy skiff lurked beings slavering for him with sharp teeth. Or maybe it wasn’t a monster at all—he rather liked monsters—but a sickness blighting his old village, rendering it a place to which he could never return.
The only thing for it was to go off-world.
Seated in front of the screen, cubsfan85 pored over the manual of X-COM: UFO Defense, his first real video game, the game that would come to define his identity as a gamer. You are in control of X-COM, he read, an organization formed by the world’s governments to fight the ever-increasing alien menace. Just the installation was a complex enough, and the game didn’t get any easier from there. Back then, there were no tool tips popping up over buttons, no dialogue boxes asking, Are you sure?
And yet cubsfan85 enjoyed the difficulty. The pain of defeat each time he lost another mission made him angry, and anger pulled him on, propelling him to rethink, to rework, to replay. Hire two less scientists. Buy six more grenades. The game was about management—people, resources, time—and all that could go wrong.
Deep in the flow of X-COM, cubsfan85 lost track of the house’s post-apocalyptic quiet. It was Battlescape mode that commanded his focus. Randomly generated tactical combat levels, chess on steroids. One enemy on overwatch, a rogue shot to the face, and even a Commander you’d been leveling for months could go down. Memorizing solutions was impossible. You’d think cubsfan85 would have been confounded by a video game that stymied lesser adults in that era. But the adventurer in him refused to yield.
Now of course there were times when cubsfan85 wasn’t on the computer. After the divorce, he’d visit his father on weekends. Their days together fell quickly into a series of TV marathons, conducted amidst delivery pizza and sandwiches, and the satisfaction of never having to go outside. He didn’t understand 2001: A Space Odyssey, but he liked Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, and Battlestar Galactica. And cubsfan85 loved Mystery Science Theater 3000 because it made his father laugh. Most of the time, the man sat beside him stoically, his face a rictus lit by galaxies and command rooms, eyes half-asleep but never sleeping.
Returned home on Sunday evenings, cubsfan85 made a beeline for his PC, tossing his overnight bag on the bed. Since the divorce, his mother had become investigatory, forever querying Cubsfan85 about his needs and feelings, her voice high and panicked. He flipped on the computer, trying to communicate without speaking that he was indisposed. Was everything okay at school? Did he want pizza for dinner, or pasta? How was the new apartment with dad? Was there anything he needed?
The one need cubsfan85 could identify was a superpower. The ability to rewind time. He hated how choices became permanent, the past forever beyond influence, immune to change. He had suffered the consequences of his own poor decision making too many times, let alone the choices of others, like his parents, which inescapably transformed his life.
Let us envision cubsfan85 one night, there in X-COM, his best soldier team positioned inside a Terror Ship, and facing down a pack of slavering Chrysalids. The correct choice was to blast the aliens to hell with his commander’s grenades. Then cubsfan85 caught sight of an item he’d never seen. Alien Entertainment, it was called. And this orange, pixelated TV screen painted on the Terror Ship wall was the only evidence cubsfan85 had ever seen that these threatening creatures ever got bored. They, too, craved distraction, engagement as entertainment, a break from the mindless grind of relentlessly attacking human troops.
He paused to consider his options. The grenade he’d planned would demolish the Chrysalid standing near his commander, yes, but the Alien Entertainment would explode along with it. And damn it, he wanted that item. So cubsfan85 direct his commander to shoot at the Chrysalid, withholding the security of the grenade.
It was, of course, a miss.
His later transition to yazath0th, when it did happen, was a revolution. A new game, a new self, an irrevocable shift complete in the span of only a few critical days. Life folded over itself, its geometry collapsing and reforming the future, for the first time, into possibility. And yet he never forgot the pain of that evening. Mission unraveling before his eyes, commander in sickbay, Alien Entertainment lost, the greed of it and the folly of it choking him. That cold suffering lived in him for months. If I had to speculate, I’d say it never left.
He’d never been one for magic. But then there it was, not long after he entered high school: EverQuest, the ancestral MMORPG, predecessor to those years of fear about video game addiction, and violence, and even Satanism.
But never mind the cultural narrative. Our protagonist, busy navigating life’s ever-shifting maze, was hardly aware of it. His new high school was crypt-like, full of new monsters. And that year, possessed of a computer of her own, his mother had landed in a community of year 2000 doomsayers. “The engineers built in a fatal flaw,” she explained to her son over dinner. “After the rollover life as we know it could go dark.”
He had built himself a new computer that summer, using Christmas money and accumulated allowance to secure a top-of-the-line NVIDIA video card, a fast processor, and a hyper-cooled case. That night, he eyed his rig warily. Could society shut down because of computers? The future stretched out before him into darkness, unknowable depths. When his monitor came to life, it glowed lantern-like, resisting the encroaching night.
He’d found a whole world in EverQuest’s Norrath. It was a planet inhabited by gods and dragons, countless creatures living in castles and forests and caves, the full high-fantasy imaginary. There were enemies to kill, quests to complete, and real people sitting on this and other continents, all come to Norrath as avatars to join each other in battle.
As yazath0th, he was a dark elf enchanter. A devotee of the patron God Terris-Thule, the Dream Scorcher, an elf of the abyss, reviled across Norrath—at least by NPCs. The other players, however, found they needed him. He didn’t quest much. Instead, he spent his in-game hours crafting a spell that let characters regenerate mana faster. This magic was what everyone wanted. To game the resource limitation—damn mana—to go faster, to do more. He made a fortune hanging about the docks in north Ro. And people talked to him, making appeals in that peculiar, truncated internet half-English that made him feel so at home.
That was where he met ave11ana.
Now in the back of his mind, I guess yazath0th knew this other person could be anyone. Older. Body and gender in life different from those of the on-screen character. But did that matter to yazath0th? Of course it didn’t. His friend, the barbarian shaman, EverQuest expert, loved him. And if ave11ana never professed love, exactly, he experienced this friend the way he experienced a lover. Do I mean that these two described sex scenes to one another, shared pornography, displayed their bodies on webcams, as internet users sometimes do? No.
What I mean is, ave11ana was simply there. Always online, as much as yazath0th was, and when his heart gave way beneath so much surrounding darkness—as it seemed to do often these days, despite his intent to remain strong and cold and angry—he’d log in to chat. At ave11ana’s guidance, yazath0th left the docks of Ro and became an adventurer. He became a caster who charmed, stunned, and mesmerized his way through battles with startling efficiency. His companion taught him the good stuff. Character builds. How to grind. And about places even beyond Norrath. I now admit one such place was DeviantArt, where yazath0th discovered his companion’s penchant for scantily-clad furries wearing fantasy armor and boasting very large, very human-like tits and dicks.
At this point, yazath0th’s mother could not have possibly imagined how to monitor her son’s use of the world wide web. She was busy anyway, occupied with her growing paranoia, an effort that consumed evenings and even weekends. She requested that yazath0th spend weekends not with his father, but with her. It was for practical reasons, she told him. She needed help with organizing shelf-stable foods, like her buckets of grain.
Lucky for yazath0th, ave11ana was not someone to ever suggest they should “meet.” Their friendship did vacuum up yazath0th’s time, though. They worked together, killing scarabs and smugglers. And they talked—honestly, about I don’t even know what, but nevertheless full novels worth of chat text, a Remembrance of Things Past’s worth of glorious, pointless communication.
And what of school? Did yazath0th truly have no real-world friends? Well. In the first few weeks of ninth grade, he had post hoc ergo propter hocked himself right out of any friendships. As it turned out, no one liked being accused of committing logical fallacies—even when that was just true. That left him with the Magic: The Gathering crew, boys he’d known from middle school. He sat with them out of habit, but they understood nothing. Their parents bought them chocolate milk and Christmas presents. Took them to the beach. Held BBQs to which their sons were invited, even if they did not want to go. Meanwhile yazath0th wasn’t invited anywhere except the natural foods store, where his mother bought him fruit leather as a reward for helping her load up the cart.
He existed in this state of total invisibility for quite a while. And yet, even if he would have liked to absorb into the digital ether entirely, in the real world yazath0th continued perniciously to exist. In the spring of his 16th year on this earth, if you had asked yazath0th what was happening, he would have said it never occurred to him that grades or the state of his bedroom really mattered. He’d have said these things were picayune, the concerns of mere mortals—and yes, he most certainly talked like that at this age.
Ironically, yazath0th was failing math.
Outside of school, he was beginning to recognize an underlying pattern, a shared art among numbers his brain felt hungry to play with. But yazath0th’s handwriting was so obscure, he couldn’t read it himself. He transposed one number into another, arriving at solutions that were obviously wrong. Besides, the problems his teacher assigned him seemed unconnected with any reality that mattered. He crumpled his tests, leaving them in his backpack until they became graphite-smeared, unrecognizable garbage.
His mother told his father and his father asked his mother, “What do you want me to do?” His mother said, “I don’t know, do something, I need help. This is all just so much.” His father did not know how to help, of course, and that was why they had divorced. But that weekend he turned to yazath0th on the couch.
“Hey,” the man said. “No more of this EverQuest crap until your grades are better.”
“It’s not crap,” yazath0th replied.
There was a pause. “Don’t tell me that,” said his dad. “Listen to me. If you keep playing video games for the rest of your life, you won’t amount to shit. You have to decide to be something in this world. You have to try to do something, to be something. If you just sit around like this your life will erase itself. Do you see that? You have to try, son.”
But yazath0th said nothing in response to this prophesizing. His father’s face was dark, distant, his eyes somewhere far away, necromantic, in touch with some dark force even yazath0th could not comprehend. There was a silence. Then his father spoke again, his tone more practical. “So until your grades pull up, no more computer stuff.”
“How are you going to enforce that?” yazath0th asked.
“Your mother and I have agreed.”
He lay there that Sunday, wide awake. More than ever, yazath0th felt evil now, a tentacular doom coating his helplessness in dark rage. The powered-down computer formed a dark lump on the desk. Ordinarily, he’d have heard the reassuring sound of its interior fan, but the room was strange and silent now, bereft of its usual living texture. Behind his eyes he saw ave11ana’s visage calling out to him, voice forlorn. Where are you, yazath0th? Where have you gone? I’m drowning. I’m drowning here alone.
A different person than yazath0th might have lashed out in anger. Broken something, maybe, or played EverQuest anyway on the sly. But yazath0th, reviewing his options in the darkness, remembered the folly of his X-COM Alien Entertainment greed. It was moments of impulse—greed, anger, that rushing feeling he got sometimes like everything was on a rollercoaster to hell—that made him vulnerable. That much, at least, was clear.
The next morning, he approached his mother. “How high do you want them?” The woman set down her coffee cup and looked up from her spiral notebook. “Want what?”
“My grades,” yazath0th said.
“Oh.” His mother laughed awkwardly. “I’m not worried about your grades. I’m worried about you. I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
Her son delivered the tiniest of indifferent shrugs, his face a pall.
“After the rollover, you know, you might not even be able to use the computer at all.”
“Would straight Bs suffice?” yazath0th persisted.
She shrugged. “I guess that would be good enough, yes. I just want to know that you’re connected with the world. You know? That I haven’t totally lost you.”
“I’m right here,” yazath0th said.
He knew what he was going to do: he was going to grind. A no-risk approach, this calculated application of patience. The persistence, he thought darkly, of the damned. And inside, the fear, which you clamped down so tiny, so tight that it didn’t affect your nerves, so much as drive them. A reactor core of Elder God energy.
Now we all know—and yazath0th would be one of the first people to remind us of this—that correlation does not imply causation. But the fact still stands: he abandoned his somewhat silly, distinctly Dungeons and Dragons-themed screenname not long after meeting Lisa.
Oh, Lisa. Lisa! Lover of magic, maker of art, eternally recovering Catholic. His first girlfriend. And, in the end, his ex-wife. But at the outset, she was the person who caused him, for the first time, to gaze boldly into the future, contemplating with no small amount of joy and even eagerness what might happen to him—even as exactly what he’d been waiting for was happening, happening right now, in the bed of her locked single dorm room.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
It was the fall of his senior year in college, and he was narrowing in on finishing his Computer Science degree. He even imagined himself getting a software development job and an apartment. Things real humans do. And if he occasionally experienced bouts of depression rendering it impossible for him to leave his room, that hardly mattered. He applied those hours to his games, this library of digital chores he used to occupy his mind.
His roommates had to drag him to the anime convention where he met Lisa. It wasn’t that he would rather have studied, though that was also true. The truth was, he hated crowds. Being among strangers made him feel simultaneous ecstasy and panic, and it took him hours to recover. Sometimes days. And yet in the end, he agreed to the trip.
I can’t say what changed his mind, beyond that sometimes he caught glimpses of a world not always about to end. Again, I think it was simply cosmic that one such sunlit ray struck him on the eve of Anime Central. It was the fates, come to laugh in the face of his father’s grim prophecy of erasure, calling him on.
When he caught sight of Lisa on the convention floor, dressed as Revolutionary Girl Utena in her pink wig, his first thought was that she reminded him of ave11ana.
It was funny, because he had never even seen ave11ana. But nevertheless, he had a picture in his mind. Or, not a picture exactly, it was more like a sensibility, an attitude, a resonance that felt strange and beautiful. Whether Lisa knew it or not, he detected this in her. He left his roommates behind without another word to dog her. That was how he acted: like a puppy. She let him follow her from room to room, this woman. All he knew about her at first was that she seemed to enjoy the attention.
It was a convenient diversion. He was in a lull between video game obsessions, had found himself in weird areas of the internet, forums that made him feel uncomfortable, but into which he sometimes delved, happy to be feeling anything. He lurked more than posted, but he knew the language, got the lulz. One of his roommates was a 4channer, and just last week had achieved cataclysmic social glory by posting a picture of his penis online.
But Lisa. For a second, she made him forget all that.
And so he trolled the Anime Central sales floor, desperate to buy her something. Not sure what. It was so easy to get the wrong keychain or plush. Misread her particular nerd lineage. His hand hovered over a box of strawberry-flavored Pocky. Not quite. Instead, he grabbed a dark green box instead, a dark chocolate variety. Men’s Pocky. When he handed Lisa the box, she laughed, and wrote her AIM name on the back of his hand in ballpoint pen.
They did long distance until she graduated. His world became split. Life A on the weekends. Life B at all other times. And, God damn, Life A was pretty great. He went on picnics, for God’s sake. He had sex. In bed he was gentle with her, proceeding with something like disbelief. He sought her approval, following her lead in all things intimate. The only thing he refused to do was slap her. And Lisa did ask for this, more than once. He always said no. The mere request made him feel alien, numbed for days.
Whatever that hitch was, he ignored it. His life was characterized by such traps. Encountering one during sex didn’t scare him, exactly. In fact, it felt somehow familiar. The way his mother laid the groundwork for fear in each expression of love and connection. His father’s constant and justified existential dread. But never mind that. Overall, he was feeling lucky. By the spring semester, he’d finished all the necessary credits for his degree. Some folks from school were talking to him about founding a software business here in town. And for those other, darker times, he had EVE Online.
Maybe you know this game. If you don’t, I will tell you, it was perfect for him. There was that endless flow of grinding he’d come to love in EverQuest, plus a space aesthetic looping back to his sci-fi roots. And more than any other game he’d played, EVE Online felt real. In EVE, see, everything is controlled by the players. There are no quests, no cutscenes, no overriding story provided by a team of developers.
It was like he was back in X-COM, but this time playing as one of the soldiers he’d once sent off to be murdered by ETs. He piloted his frigate out to asteroids where he extracted loads of veldspar, did a few weeks of pure grind. Venture out into low-sec space and you’d be murdered by pirates, all real players, trolling to PK newbies. It was fun for a while, but bounded. The next step was to join a corporation.
He filled out an application for a corp in the Goonswarm Federation. Soon he had a manager, and that manager gave him a job as a guard. He outfitted his Thorax cruiser with hybrid turrets and drones, followed a team of mining ships into low-sec space, where he’d once been attacked. Now he was protected by people he trusted. In EVE, that was everything. Here was vood0_j: online every evening, an Icelandic IT pro who talked Linux distros and tech support bullshit on chat. Here, katyQt, an American EVE social butterfly who kept insane spreadsheets and knew what the big players were doing all the time.
And then there was doomcock69.
Yes, at long last, here it is. The infamous handle. Guilty not of being a troll, but of trollish behavior, he chose the name in part because his roommates thought it was funny. It was good, thought doomcock69, for people to avoid taking their leaders too seriously. And in the world of EVE Online, that was exactly what he saw himself becoming.
Meanwhile, back in Life A, he proposed to Lisa just before summer really set in, presenting her the ring while overlooking the Chicago waterfront. She’d helped plan the whole affair, but she squealed and hugged him as if it were a surprise, and she said yes.
His parents were not as happy, somehow, as he had expected. His mother, long past her year 2000 fervor now, had moved on to other paranoias. She wanted to plan the meals so as to assure everything was pesticide free. His father, who had years back begun to self-medicate with what he called his “craft beer habit,” was less controlling. He only said, “Lisa’s nice,” but in a way that made his son think his father didn’t like Lisa at all.
It did not occur to doomcock69 that his parents saw his marriage as a test: once doomcock69 got married, he could then get divorced. In this one respect, his parents were of shared mind. The failure of doomcock69’s marriage would imply a failure of their parenting, a breakdown played out upon the ancestral stage and written into the history of yet another family. An inheritance of brokenness passed on.
And all this in the minds of both parents before the wedding planning had even begun.
Sometime not long after his honeymoon, a few of his EVE corp friends talked doomcock69 into joining a frigate competition.
You could get noticed at in-game events like these, there, seen by CTOs and CEOs from some of the more elusive corporations, ones you couldn’t just join by application. The night of the competition, doomcock69 outfitted his frigate with three narrow band jammers. They’d make his spaceship un-targetable by three of the four possible ships he might face in the competition. “Huge risk,” said katyQt. “What if someone runs a Punisher?”
“Then I’ll lose,” said doomcock69. But he didn’t.
He slipped into bed at three AM, buzzing with intensity. Tomorrow, his name would be everywhere online, trumpeted across EVE forums. He slid into the slight mattress hollow on his side of the bed. Could he sleep easily on this rare night? Even the startup he worked at in the real world was seeing remarkable success, the project lasting through their beta release. They’d been talking over a more sustainable business model just this week.
And Lisa was happy. Wasn’t she?
Next to him in the bed, his wife’s body formed a dark lump, about a foot of space between them. He closed his eyes and listened for the sound of her breathing. In the years that they’d been together, he had learned to link himself with her, recalibrating his inner clock to tick according to her rhythm whenever she was in the room. By virtue of her joy, he too could experience that feeling. Tonight, though, she seemed restless. Awake, she turned over and faced him.
“I’m sorry I woke you up,” said doomcock69. “It’s just—”
Lisa interrupted to kiss him deeply, placing her hands on either side of his head. When she pulled back, she gazed deeply into his eyes.
“What?” doomcock69 asked, failing to parse the source of her intensity.
Lisa smiled. “I’m ovulating,” she said.
She saved him, is what I think.
Not Lisa. I mean his daughter. That beautiful little goblin. When she was born, doomcock69 stared into her ugly face, realizing he had made a mistake about what he thought love was. This joy was terrifying, painful in its gravity. And its source—she tore them apart. Hit hard with postpartum depression, Lisa wouldn’t get out of bed for weeks after. And there was the late night crying, all the latch troubles. Dead tired, Lisa told him he had to sleep on the couch. “You toss and turn. You talk in your sleep. You wake me up,” she said coldly, her face hard with survival. This exodus, naturally, sent him deep into EVE.
From there in the Delve region, swathed in his guilt, he could see he was not here, never had been. The revelation would have been useful if he’d been equipped to do something about it. But knowing something is true doesn’t mean you can change it. His wife said she needed him to be “present,” but doomcock69 did not understand what she was requesting. In his mind this phrase eventually took on the meaning, “Be other than you are.”
It was Lisa who asked for the separation, not him, but he knew it was coming. And while he did not know how to be present, doomcock69 could at least look ahead into the cascading disintegration of his personal universe. He understood that the life he was losing was a place he’d merely stayed for a while before being ejected.
Okay, so why am I saying that his daughter saved him? Wasn’t she the beginning of the end, the linchpin of his crisis? Yes. And without her, he’d never have transcended his trap, this suburban samsara. He’d never have reached out to me.
I’m thinking of him tonight as I’m playing Dark Souls, battling Asylum Demon and Iron Golem and Seath the Scaleless. It’s an off night, so his ex has the daughter, and we’d been talking earlier before he logged off to go find food.
I die again, my body tensing. The feeling is icy eradication. A gust of breath exhaled over my soul, as if by that Elder beast he’d—sort of—named himself after long ago. I always remembered him from our EverQuest days. Like him, I’ve changed my screenname multiple times since then. But we found each other. I told him I’d always be there for him, and that hasn’t changed. Some part of me would always be his ave11ana.
In my estimation, that marriage was over before it began. He has explained to me that with Lisa, he was two people. Or maybe even more than two, a series of people, a progression of identities he could never entirely understand, or totally inhabit, or control.
Amidst the custody shit, the family drama, the dividing of friends, and all the rest, Lisa’s parting knife-twist was a shot at his intelligence. “Somewhere along the line,” she pronounced, “you bought into the bullshit idea that keeping your mind busy with video games equates with being smart.” When he tells me she said that, I understand it hurt him. It also makes me wonder if she ever really knew him at all.
I have my own diagnoses. The father, anesthetized by functional alcoholism as self-medication for generalized anxiety disorder, alternating between disconnect and emotional abuse—himself abused by his own father, yet another inheritance of brokenness. The mother a story of constant terror, her heart a bottomless pit of greed for safety. And the drumbeat of the Millennial achievement mill, our Silicon Valley cult-de-sac, in which boys and men sought the glory of being a conduit through which money passed. Amidst this, the story of our doomcock69 becomes predictable, and yet I love his story.
Probably because it reminds me so much of my own.
He says he’s back with food now. Nothing fancy, just a turkey sandwich. I pause Dark Souls and switch back over to some listicle about video games for kids. It’s still going to be a couple years before his daughter is old enough, but we’ve been chatting about it.
i feel like I need a new screenname, he types out.
I reply, doomcock69 not very fatherly i guess
ya, he replies.
It’s late. I am drowsing. My mind courts its usual patterns—thinking through Dark Souls, all the crap you have to do to get good in that damn game.
0ldbear, I suggest.
He asks, why
I pause, considering what to type as my reply. The notion of renaming him feels cosmic. If I never meet him in “real” life—as yet, we have no plans—I hope he will carry this with him, becoming something his daughter remembers. That is why I’ve proposed something so sweet. I admit to sentimentality. But you already knew this about me, didn’t you? It’s been on display throughout this epic tale. I feel such pathos for my companion, this man, this boy who was once called cubsfan85, yazath0th, doomcock69.
See, there’s a children’s book named Old Bear. That’s what I’m thinking of with this new screen name, I tell him. It’s a tale, see, of a bear hibernating. As he sleeps, this animal dreams of the seasons. In spring he naps inside of a flower. And then in the summer it rains blueberries, and he sticks out his tongue to catch the fruit. In the fall he sees fish in the water. And then comes the winter, a dream winter, again. “The cold went on forever,” the book says.
It saddens me deeply, this story. The bear is old, and sleeping, he passes through each of his seasons. It is clear to me he’s well on his way towards death.
This is how I see us. In dreams we find each other, in echoes, encountering each other or at least our holographic projections, these cyclic attempts to transcend what we cannot, to name ourselves and in this naming rewrite our history. Take the world and its multiple realities, dream, virtual, emotional, shadow, all as our own.
And yes. There is a part of me who wishes to have my own story told, the way I have told the story of 0ldbear. But I know he will never do this for me. To bear witness to the grand sweep of the universe’s causes and effects—and my own place amidst them—is, and forever will be, beyond him. And if this hurts me, well, it is an inevitable pain, one I carry with me, a trap of my own, the pain embedded in every love I’ll ever be able to share.