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What Came Before

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From the ghost land of the easy life.

28 May 2005

Ethical Dilemmas. :
I cheat at Ghost Recon. I play all by myself and I can’t for the life of me figure the game out, all that sneaking around. I keep getting gunned down – so I cheat. Even in easy mode. I just want to figure the game out, but it’s so easy to keep going with the cheats on that once I start I don’t go back and play it for real. I’ve never been good at sneaking around. I’ll break off a relationship before pursuing another, no matter how much I like the first one if I’m so interested in the next one I won’t lie or cheat. I know I’ll be found out. I wish everyone believed that too then there’d be no one out there lying and cheating and feeling they’ll never get caught. I always catch people in their lies and deceptions. I’m actually listening to what you say to me and I’ll call you on your inconsistencies too.

Because I’m listening to you I expect you’re REALLY listening to me. More often than not I find that’s anything but the case. But hey I talk to myself, apologize to inanimate objects if I bump into them and I will talk to/yell at characters in films. I don’t do it out loud in a movie theatre but I do it nonetheless. I can occasionally be way more entertaining than the actual cinematic event. Hard to believe I know.

Thing is I don’t need to cheat at video games. If I try hard enough I can eventually work the game out in a few days stop getting killed in area A and succeed at moving on to getting killed in area B. I’m not patient enough to do that and there’s something that offends my time sensibilities in the expectation that I actually have that kind of time to waste learning the game. I like wasting my time in other more productive ways like watching Jamie and Adam bust myths on TLC, watching my hair grow, deciding what I don’t need in my life anymore as I’m growing and evolving into someone who doesn’t even have time to watch their hair grow. Ah aspirations.

See I haven’t really gotten everything I want out of life yet, but at least I’ve managed to pick my focus up off the highway, where I left it years ago, dust it off and convince it I’m not going anywhere without it again. It’s a real tough customer, my focus, but I’m tougher than the rest. Now chasing down my dreams is a tougher thing. They’re all tough nuts to crack and they scattered to the winds like the ashes of my dead father would, if my mother would ever take the urn out of the box it was shipped in 16 years ago. I deserted my dreams and now it’s like they deserted me. None of my dreams included being an ace video gamer, so I’m safe there. I’m worried that I may have to start cheating and adopt other peoples’ dreams, like Ed Norton’s character did in The Italian Job. Of course I’m totally not talking about materialism – I don’t dream of owning things. I dream about doing this actually, but doing it all the time for that sordid little thing called money. That we all know it makes the Western World go round doesn’t make it anything better than a necessary evil.

I’ve always hated money. I grew up in Northern Manitoba. I knew early on that money made all the difference in what you had and who you were perceived to be. My dad had a good job and one that could have effectively given all of us a great life. We lived off credit. My dad had debts up the wazoo because he was a huge drinker who never drank alone and paying friends or buying booze and mix for two every weekend, vacation and holiday day- plus smoking up to 5 packs a day between Mom and Dad – well that just takes a lot of money out of your pocket. I went to work babysitting as soon as I was legally old enough to do it, and my Dad was always there at the end of the night to take the money when I came home. Occasionally I got to buy something with the money I got. Mostly I got books and records or tapes. I’m not old enough to have bought eight tracks but a friend of my dad’s, a reverend, gave my dad a box full of eight tracks and 2 players. My sister and I thought we had hit the mother load with that because there were actual Kiss tapes in there, something we couldn’t get anywhere in town and no one else had. Turns out the reverend took an electromagnet to them and erased all the ‘devil music’. Still don’t know why he didn’t just throw them away then.

I felt cheated. I still do just a tiny bit. I had heard of Kiss at that time but never actually heard anything they had done. Back then my awareness of music was peripheral. I knew there were bands out there like the Beatles and Rolling Stones but had heard little or nothing of theirs. All I got to listen to was music my parents owned. Country and crooners like Englebert Humperdink, Tom Jones, Paul Anka and other idols of my mother’s youth. I knew all the words to Harper Valley PTA but never heard a lick of anything new until satellite tv brought our little slice of the world music videos. I was hooked and though I don’t watch them too much anymore, they all seem like beer ads to me now, I still remember what it was like to hear music in the land without radio. There was no way to cheat that unless we got a great snowstorm and someway somehow a signal from Kentucky found it’s way to the radio in my bedroom at 1 am on a school night. It always was a school night and the signal always faded away before the song ended.

I watched videos every night that I could and eventually lovely CBC north started up their own video show. The first time I ‘talked back’ to my dad was over that show. It was the first time I didn’t get punched in the face for the infringement and it was the beginning of the end of my relationship with dear old dad. He was complaining about something and I told him he should write them a letter and they might change it. There’s a back-story here. About a week before I had come home from school after spending the day hiding out in the resource room reading about spousal abuse and staring teary eyed at posters proclaiming tell someone, I went home and told my Ma that I didn’t care what happened to me or them or if I was believe or who was arrested/kicked out of the house. If Dad ever laid another hand on me I was going to call the cops, go screaming down the street, whatever it took to let EVERYBODY know. In hindsight I might have wanted to include my sister in that statement but I was 16 and wasn’t thinking that far ahead. Our little family didn’t talk much to each other and I had no idea what if anything Daddy did to anyone other than me. One little house, 4 little worlds being run within it.

I cheated you see. I broke the golden rule. I threatened the threatener and I got taken seriously. I was so wondering when and how he was going to kill me I couldn’t see anything else. When he died instead it was a massive relief. No one ever understood that. Everyone thought my old man was the coolest dude. Even if they did have an idea of what life was in our house no one ever asked me or talked about it with me. And I would have talked. I’m a cheater and I AM the weakest link. I think my father saw that in me. He was conflicted. A child of WWII. He grew up in Berlin and his father was an SS officer because, my dad said, “Everyone was if they wanted to live.” I don’t know jack about the family on my dad’s side. He said they all died in the war and when he died we found pictures of them in 1967, must have been a wild ride for those old Germans to be killed in Vietnam

My dad was someone I never really knew. I knew his anger, wrath and scorn. Once in a while I knew his laughter and kindness. I don’t really remember so much anymore, and that’s a good thing the way I figure. I knew a scared conflicted man who would be so drunk at nights he’d have been on the floor if the kitchen table wasn’t there holding him up. He’d call me down stairs to the kitchen where he was hanging off the edge of the table bleary-eyed drunk and tell me stories. I always went because you didn’t disappoint Dad. I went whether I had to go to the bathroom real bad or not. There I always met this sat red-eyed broken man who talked about being a kid and seeing his friend on his brand new birthday bicycle cross a bridge and get blown up. A slurring unhappy man who swore that poisoned chocolate bars fell from the sky and that he never really knew his parents or step mom because he was moved around a lot to be ‘safe’. I am my father’s daughter in so many ways. I have that sadness and conflict within me now. I am the product of his internal war alone not any widely known historical conflicts.

In his haunting stories my dad let me see him a little bit. The real him not the façade he put on to get by. He cheated me my whole life by being someone else. By not letting anyone ever know him he cheated the world. It’s not why I cheat at Ghost Recon, but it why I find cheating a complicated moral question. Everyone cheats a little bit; at least I’m honest about it.
ghost writer Ambrrrr at 8:38 PM

MenTal fUrbAll