Today I hooked up my playstation 3.

I'm a "high tech" guy and normally I am ultra-compulsive about things to do with software, source code, and networking. But I treat Playstations as consumer electronics (they are) not computers (that too) and go into what I call "bozo mode." In Bozo Mode you just plug stuff together, mash buttons, and see if it works. I get great pleasure out of doing this, in fact, and comparing something like this to a Windows PC is always depressing.

Let's see... This goes here. Ahhh, left/right audio, projector. Plug it in, pour some Jack Daniels, hit a couple of "on" buttons and the screen clears. Set-up, more button-mashing, and I take a big slug of Jack and unwrap the CD (I know, but it looks like one) and shove it in the front. Poof! Game!

Burn Out: Paradise

With a title like that, who can go wrong? I am transported to another world. I'm given a car. And some road. It's silent and beautiful. Because I left the sound turned off.

When I hit the power switch on the sound system, the room is filled with the glacial guitar intro to J.J. Cale's "Fate of a Fool" from '5.' At first I realize that, since this is paradise, it's entirely appropriate that Mr Cale's music would be the soundtrack. But then I realize that I have the audio cables crosspatched with the MP3 player - in paradise, tonight, there will be no engine noises, just guitar solos.

I Begin A Quest for Meaning

Mashing a few more buttons, I am able to get my car to move. Total time for me to figure out the basics of how to get around in my new world: 40 seconds. In fact, it's pretty easy! In no time I am flying into oncoming traffic at a high rate of speed, weaving desperately and trying hard not to spill my Jack. I notice quickly that the denizens of Paradise are a lot like the denizens of Los Angeles - they drive all over the road, lost in their own agendas. But I feel sympathy for them because obviously, they are on a quest for meaning. Eternally beautiful Paradise is theirs and, except for that nutcase who is going 150 miles/hr headlong into oncoming traffic, everything is peaceful, clean and - BAM wrecked.

Wrecked

I am wrecked in Paradise. But, as advertised, I am immediately re-in-car-nated and floorboarding the right-hand pedal of The Lord. In the lower right of my screen, there is a little number "miles driven" scrolling upward. Is this why I am here? Am I to, as Robert Burns wrote, drive many miles before I can sleep? Does Paradise have a purpose other than to be wrecked, or to periodically - whoops - wipe out a fire hydrant? Aha! I see a ramp! Perhaps it's escape! Perhaps...

I leap the ramp, with J.J. Cale and Eric Clapton's rendering of "Don't Cry Sister" from 'the road to escondido' wailing a counter, and suddenly I have found the purpose of Paradise: scoring points. It appears that my life in Paradise will be circumscribed by the vain attempt to leap my car through billboards.

An Existential Crisis

This realization makes me take a breather while I get another glass. Is this it? I know people who are deeply concerned about getting to Paradise and now that they are here, all they seem to want to do is drive around in neat orderly lines until I run them off the road in - BAM wrecked! There! Maybe Sartre was driving that van I just forced into the concrete. That was an existential statement if I ever saw one!

But quickly, my usual philosophical objections to Existentialism start to re-assert themselves. Never mind that it was made up by French intellectuals ("strike one!") existantialist philosophy says that your meaning is what you make of it. So, I look around Paradise, with my new-found existentialist vision and realize that there's not a whole lot that I can make of it. I could join the happy hosanna-singers in their econoboxes and wreckage ("strike two!") or I can self-actualize my own value-system, and decide what I want to believe in. I ponder. Mr Clapton starts playing "Layla" (the acoustic version) and my existential crisis deepens as I engage my bullsh_t filter and start to really ponder my dilemma.

Because, and I know you'll agree with me, I cannot adopt my own meaning in this Paradise. My ability to mean anything is utterly circumscribed by - the fact that my car does not have a nuclear rocket launcher, and I am not the pixel-Godzilla. ("strike three!! existentialism is OUT!") This place is a trap! Perhaps there are miles of roads, but an eternity exploring them will quickly become hellish. Paradise is what you make of it, indeed, but you've got to have the ability to change things, in order to "make something" of it. I despair. I drink. I ponder.

"Free Will" - can I be said to have any choice at all? I can sort of go off the roads, or I can turn around or smash into things. But I'm utterly constrained by my starting position on the map, the car I was in-car-nated in, and the mysterious, unknowable software rules running in the vast blackness of the playstation. The playstation is a little universe all of its own - an electroverse, trapped in a cabinet in a house in a patch of dirt on a tiny planet in a small solar system in a little spiral arm of an ordinary galaxy - one of billions. No wonder I can't get my stupid car to jump through that billboard.

Paradise, Hell, What's the Difference if you Ain't Got Nukes?

So, I turned it off. And put on Apocalyptica's cover of "Nothing Else Matters." I wish they'd left the "Else" out but it still rocks.

Love ya,
mjr.


(PS - I feel I need to explain a few things. This little bit of bizarreness was inspired by Mark Twain's "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." Twain's story is brilliant, and clever, and I can't even hold a candle to it - but I tried to evoke a few of the problems he points out with the concept of "Heaven" - namely that it's more boring than an eternity of CNN election coverage, and, well, frankly, the whole idea is stupid. Project Gutenberg has it here:
[link]
It's a quick read. I Highly recommend it.

Of course Twain preceeded the existentialists. I find existentialists, atheists, and agnostics to be, well, well-intentioned and hopeful in the face of obvious nothingness. Guys, it doesn't matter how badly you wish for it it ain't there.)