"It was all Pac-Man and board games"

My latest at toronto.com

As of this writing, things seem to be calming down over in England after days of rioting; eventually, a point is reached where folks are just kind of done with smashing and burning, you know? Now comes the fun part: blame. And amid all the rhetoric, I've encountered only one person who's got it right, an unnamed cop who dares to acknowledge to power of video games:

“When I was young it was all Pac-Man and board games,” the officer told the Evening Standard. “Now they're playing Grand Theft Autoand want to live it for themselves.” A columnist for the Telegraphagreed, saying “The riots were like a video game that had kicked its way out of the Xbox.”

If you detect a tone of bemused, kids-these-days headshaking, they come by it honestly. Today's rioters have it easy, with photorealistic virtual worlds and instant online communication to inform and inspire their depredations. Back in the early Thatcher Days, though, young thugs looking to get stoked for a night's looting really had to apply their imaginations to the era's blocky mazes and bleep-blorp sound effects.

What do you think they had to be inspired by when they ripped Brixton apart in '81? Pac-Man — and its explicitly extralegal knockoff, Lock N' Chase — excellently modelled the tactics of darting down narrow alleys, gobbling drugs and occasionally turning the tables on the coppers, but games at the time were more concerned with outer space than the inner city. Berzerkand Kaboom! had to suffice, mostly by their titles alone.

Our nostalgic lawman does miss the mark a little, though, in naming Grand Theft Auto the culprit. Sure, the GTA games are a little rampage-y — and GTA IV protagonist Nico does use text messaging! — but their antisocial romps are exactly that: antisocial. Solitary, single-player sprees, without looting, amid indestructible buildings! Surely, the hoodie squad must be getting their inspiration elsewhere.

I can imagine only one scenario: there is in England an underground of would-be rioters passing around bootleg copies of 2002 riot simulator State of Emergency. That game's got it all: huge crowds of screaming humans-turned-animals, karate-versus-cops action, and a sickly veneer of “anarchist” justification. Disaffected, violent youth congregate in dingy “bedsits,” hunched over chugging old PlayStation 2s, working themselves into mob mentality through the most efficient means: their thumbs.

It's sad, really, that a few bad apples have been inspired by a 10-year-old bargain-bin title. It paints such a skewed view of their community as a whole. Every day, people in these neighbourhoods go about their lives under the influence of honest, work-positive video games. These places aren't just rat's nests filled with thugs who play State of Emergency; they're communities filled with people who live decent lives inspired by games like Cooking Mama, Bus Driver and, yes, even Police Quest.

Troublingly, authorities ignore the simple fact that, as well as inspiring antisocial violence, the mind-controlling properties of video games can empower civilized society's response. Mayor of London Boris Johnson broke off a vacation to return to the city and ... make some statements? What a missed opportunity! He should instead have been whisked to the nearest Super Nintendo and made to play a couple hours of Final Fight, the street-fighting simulator featuring pro-wrestler-turned-mayor Mike Haggar.

If violent video games could inspire a few thousand wannabe toughs to riot, imagine the effect Final Fight would have on an actual, real-life mayor! A few rounds in the role of the shirtless Haggar, cleaning up his town with nothing but a lead pipe and a single suspender-strap, and the game's irresistible mesmeric power could have turned Johnson into a living weapon, worked up to the point where he was ready to clear the riot zones singlehandedly. Or, at least, alongside a friendly karate expert.

I wish I could do something videogame-inspired to help. I could go and be inspired by Vigilante, say — except plane tickets are expensive and I unfortunately never got inspired by Airline Tycoon. No, all I can do is sit here, inspired by Reader Rabbit, following the story on the news sites before finally allowing myself to be inspired by Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing to comment upon a world that seems everywhere inspired less by LittleBigPlanet than by Run Like Hell.

"When work is done and drink is beer..."

With Lover Boy loud all afternoon and the sun was even out all day.

Beer in hand and accomplished, these Hemingway sips.

Fucking hell if we didn’t meet challenges today

And overcome without overwhelming

And sail without sails, or a fucking rudder, for what and all that I know.

Whew. I love it when the tide does that.

Sid.

xoxoxo

I have an oddity.

I have Mr. Rogers shoes.

I mean I have the whole fucking thing down solid and it just happened.

I come home and switch my postal uniform for my home uniform. I even swap shoes. Shirt and Jacket for a Montreal Canadiens sweater.

Slacks for plaid cotton pyjamas;

head for heart.

Man I am changing it out like that.

And fucking shoes, Mr. Rogers shoes.

I am a neighbourhood father.

And drunk.

-Sid

Eckhart Tolle, you fucking mentally-meandering dullard, Beauty arises from movement.

The comets speed faster than anything we have ever even seen ever.

From a good and solid fucking, a human is made in 270 days.

Love is born in less time.

Cancer eats everything always at all times eventhough it means that Cancer will die, too. That’s fucked up. And it happens very, very fast.

Where is the stillness in that you fucking be-doted twat?

And how dare you hide behind the Dalai Lama. As who is he, Diaspora?

I am a Quebecois in Alberta; you are a German in Canada. We are all Diasporai.

The Dalai Lama knows nothing for you to hide behind, my man. He has never known drunken poverty or hated heart-break for a lover.

How can you be a man and never know the Herculean gut-punch of love?

The sick of a Sunday, 5 p.m. still drunk and fuck tomorrow’s going to suck.

All these things happen in spite of stillness.

These things are learned on the balls of the feet.

Do you think Cheetahs are made to be still to find their own beauty?

Let’s move, my man, let’s go.

-Sid

xoxox

Sometimes it would be better to work in the mines.

Sometimes it would have been better to have been Elvis Presley, fat and stoned and finally dead.

Sometimes it would be better to be a lawnmower and at least useful twice a month; in the summer.

Sometimes.

After a few I am always ready to try the things that would sometimes be better sometimes.

But I get up and go to it again.

"Who doesn’t want a frog that says, “digum”?

I used to love it all and walked like that for that exact reason.

I seem to have found it and really I mean really I never want to do that shit again.

Thank you, lovers, for sifting the shit and spitting me into the right pile.

Especially you, Sugar Smacks.

Thanks for being the cereal I could never have as a child but as a man and out of rebellion and misguided freedom bought a box and ate it all in one night.

There was a reason I never had it when I was young.

It’s only as a man that I can see that through free-action I am better off heeding wisdom than scuttling will-power.

-Sid

Priests wear blue collars.

I work on the set of Taxi.

There is the short fat balding one,

there is the funny crazy one; the wacky guy. So zany.

There is that mouthy cunt, what’s-her-name.

And the accent-guy, fucking foreigners.

There is that one guy we can all relate to because he is us, detached and cool.

There is that vehicle in which we always envision ourselves. Like a soul.

It never says a thing because it is the last thing and sometimes the never thing that we ever think about eventhough the show brags it’s name: the taxi.

That quiet little cab just sits there and waits to carry these fools. It never says a thing.

It never moves a man to cry; but I do.

I weep for that little yellow taxi in that Taxi shop.

Surrounded by idiots and failures.

I work on the set of Taxi.

There is that mouthy cunt and there is the joker and there is the boss and there is the cool-jerk.

And here is the cab.

-Sid

xoxoxoxoxooxox

Discovering other paths ought to make us wander further into the woods, yes?

What if our souls, after so many, many flights, never return to our bodies?

What if I never really got off that plane in 2008 from Tokyo?

What if I never left that ferry to Gibraltar?

What if I never stepped drunk from that train into the Serbian night in 1994 and never got turned back?

What would I know? Who would I be?

What if you never met me in Vancouver in September?

So much of everything would be different.

But you did; and I did all of those things, too.

I love vapour trails and looking up and thinking about the origin and destination of those planes and the passengers; all headed somewhere they were needed or even loved.

I wonder if they have had dinner yet or are wondering outside their view? Who is watching them fly past?

I am, on those clear Alberta skies.

And blowing kisses, too.

Because landing is the best thing ever.

-Love Sid.

xoxoxoxoxo

“The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait: and both without impatience — they give no thought to the little people beneath them, devoured."

What is it about a pine that makes me feel better all the time with those soft arms out and reaching for a sap-filled hug?

What is it about a pine tree that makes me wander like that and hold you tight forever with a hug, my soft arms; boughs tight and sap-filled.

What is it about this existence that makes us all weep at the thought of it all and again the next night for the same reasons.

What is it all?

What is it about a woman? What is it that fucking drives me like a Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C turbocharged two-stroke diesel engine; 108,920 hp.

Fuel.

Fuel drives it all, be it love or sunshine or oil.

Hello, fuel.

-Love Sid

xoxoxo

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

I don’t think that flowers blooming make any noise or sound even.

I know for sure that fallen leaves crunch underfoot in retreat on October afternoons in Alberta.

I know that from chasing your scared soul across provinces, GMC Sierra in high gear over mountains; cigarette in clenched hand as you read maps and they all lead here all at once.

You are all the cherry blossoms all at once drifting down and snowing my earthed path.

You are my path.

I love you, Starfish.

-Love Sid

xoxoxoxo