Ah Pokemon. Good 'ol Pokemon. You know it's a magical world out there when all your friends are waiting, rivals are planning, and mystery into the unknown is conquered a day at a time. There's a lot I learned from Pokemon as a kid, maybe a bit too much even.
I'd like to believe that some good came of it but let's face it, I was one messed up kid who grew into an even more messed up man. So let's dive into the Card game, video game, television show, manga series, merchandise whoring sensation that is Pokemon.
What Pokemon Taught Me
- Most Of Us Are Destined For The Same Path -
Little ways back in the day we as kids were just getting our gaming legs on still. We'd recently had polygons and god bless 'em Nintendo, you just gave us this unnatural freedom that no human being let alone a child should have been given. Still. Something was missing though.
We had our quests, saving our princess's and slaying the evil person or thing. What we needed was a little bit more purpose though, something to feel a little more connected with the games we had. Then suddenly like the horrid undeniably inevitable tide that it was, Nintendo hit us with Pokemon Red and Blue.
Now we'd had a taste of Pokemon the animated show just short hand before it. That thing blew my mind. No I mean it, I could not understand how optical moving animation could somehow turn me into a junky for anything that ended with saur or oid. Needless to say, it was captivating to us.
The very concept of Pokemon was the ultimate trap for any kid who was lonely and hell if I know how many of us were so lonely only digital monsters that we beat half way to death and enslaved until they became our friends, could fill that void.
Pokemon did, dear lord did it ever. I feel like I'm getting away from the point though, I would go deeper into the remembering of how I beat nearly 150 creatures unconscious because I loved them so much but my newest counselor says that would be regressing. What I do mean to talk about actually is how that adventure made me think on one thing in particular.
We all want to be great at something in our lives. We even after a long while maybe start to imagine that we are the only ones that make a difference. Video games taught me that way too much, and of course ripped away that power from my hands in a soul crushing way. As they should have.
Yet we get so wrapped up in our own lives, telling ourselves over and over how important we are and being made to see that importance even if it may not be there. When it comes to the world of Pokemon you are so unimportant that an old man breaks into your own home, gets into your room and turns out the lights until you wake up.
Then after the screams have ended and you know that serious and tired face of his means business, he asks what gender you are. You are so non-individualized that they can't even tell if you are a boy or girl. This man has seen some shit but isn't that the biggest red flag of life? The elderly whom look towards the youth, who know the system over years to the point they just can't care.
The truth is that I always just assumed Professor Oak really was a busy guy with a busy schedule. In the anime Ash, the main character of the series, missed any chance of choosing his Pokemon because he woke up late. The rest made it before he even had Poke-wet dreams. Yet the Professor still had interest and care for the boy and remained throughout the series. The Professor Oak in the games just seems so tired and uninterested that it made me think maybe I'm not the first or only.
Not even for that day. How much you want to bet there was like fifty kids before me, each home he had to break into without any regard or care and how many more homes he was going to go through next in the same day. This is an old man who just can't be bothered when he's seen it all. Fuck Ash though, I got to choose my pokeball and darn it all to hell I live with my choices.
It didn't end there though. In the Pokemon world I'm just a kid, starting their adventure and making my way, traveling through forest and caves, deserts and oceans, town to city and nearly murdering any and all in my way because I love-I love them all. All of them. I just-want to-....I'm trying to be the pokemon master. Catching all 150 Pokemon is the dream.
Now sure I have my own special selection of pokemon types but there is something I catch unto right away. I'm not the only one out there in all those places. I can hardly move a few feet before the wild life attempts to eat me, I'm also dealing with other trainers who want to mug me. Now at first I see them only as strangers who need a beating but then I start to think.
These are just people too. Trainers with their own dreams from their own town. So many of them looking for the exact same thing I am. Different times, different style, different paths, yet all the same dream and in the way sharing in the same destiny. Only I'll do my best to ruin that destiny because I can. Even the rival I'm set with at the start of the game has it out for me. That's not just their goal though. You think their life long dream is to ruin me? No, that's just a long the way on the road to greatness.
It just doesn't end there though. If nostalgia serves any of you right with the Pokemon Titles on Gameboy color then surely you remember the Link cables. That little wire of wonder that made trading pokemon and battling with your soon to be not friends. They were becoming masters themselves. Maybe a step ahead of you all on the same path.
After awhile it sort of makes sense why there are a lot of people who seemed so pissed when you ride that bike into town and flash your badges like it's mardi gras. You're living the same dreams they probably had. You just might even become one of them.
I'll level here, I always assumed you really do because I cannot remember being showered in a godly light after winning my final badge. I didn't ascend the mortal realm and become the ultimate master of Pokemon. I just sort of..slipped away into obscurity. I always sort of imagined I became Brock's Dad but I still have some things I need to sort out.
It sounds like a bad thing but if you've read any of my other writings then you know I just cannot get enough of cold hard lessons that a seemingly child friendly world can provide.I just got more comfortable with the knowledge I'm not always going to be on this singular unique path. I'm going to walk it with so many other people and I already have. Still do and baby...It's somethin'.
It's the kind of lesson that humbles you after awhile because we're not always going to be what we think we are or do what we think is the most original thing this earth has ever known. What we can do though is define those experiences and make it unique for ourselves. We don't just live it, we learn it and exploit it- I mean we cherish it....I still wanted to be a master.
- The Rocks In Our Path Have Purpose -
It's funny how your views can sometimes change and most of the time not. I always got pissed off when the bad guys did bad things because that's just not cool or good. That should be it's own word. Gool. Seriously though, It has and will continue to always feel so gool when we vanquish our greatest foes and the forces which stand in our way. When I was a kid though those forces were rocks. Or little trees.
Sometimes the ocean but that one kind of speaks for itself since I in no way wish to still cross it. In a lot of the games I played I just sort of never really looked all that deeply into the battles I would cross or the baddies ass I would kick. It all sort of just blurred into an objective after objective after game over, you win. Then Pokemon came along and gave me more of these 'feelings' with fake people.
When you're training to become a Pokemon Master you really are training yourself too. You're learning so much and taking so many things into account but the only way that is going to happen is if you get the crap beaten out of you by gym trainers and way better trainers too. At first I got frustrated but then I started to think over the frustration. I'd always been mad at myself because my skills were just not good enough.
The challenges were there though and they were not impassible, they were just different. Different in a way that demanded I find a weakness in and better myself in order to achieve overcoming them. That and watching the show sorta...maybe helped. It wasn't about getting angry, getting angry had been pointless. What I needed was results. That's when you know you're training. When you are really going for the results.
Maybe I had a little bit of guidance behind me in the form of a rage tumor that would only grow bigger and bigger but that wasn't the important thing. We're always so victimized by the challenges we face in our day to day lives. This guy was an ass hat, this girl scoffed when you wished her a nice day....dad urinated on the sofa...again... yet we hardly ever collect it as an experience. Something to challenge ourselves.
Instead we sort of most of the time treat it as a circumstance designed to ruin our very existence or threaten our sanity and non-ammonia ridden air. Sure you can tread whatever path you really want to when it comes to your own day and life, but in the end would you rather wallow in the emotion or find a way to strengthen yourself? I'll admit one of my many mental illness. I have a great hatred for gulping and chewing.
Maybe it goes back to how I was slapped for chewing so damn loudly when I was a kid, or maybe it is a mixture of other things. The point is that I had the habit of gripping my knuckles and praying for the sweet relief of hearing loss early in my life. I live with messy and noisy eaters though. I'm pretty sure that could be some sort of sitcom based situation but in reality I just, I just got so pissed off inside.
I let them know it too and it's an all too shameful thing when you have to face the irrational side of yourself and really know you are being the world's biggest dick. That's why I started to listen more. To try and expose myself to the horrid gullet of the human throat and just try and settle myself. I'm still not all that perfect with it and maybe sometimes I have to grit a knuckle or two but that's the challenge.
I could go on, and oooon, aaaaand oooon about how disgusted I feel, how people should control their body noises better especially when eating in company but that's not what has to happen. Before we think of pushing others we have to push ourselves. Our burdens can also be our triumph if we let them be. I am surrounded by the thing that drives me mad but at the end of the day should I not try and face it, even overcome it?
Pokemon taught me that I need to face my problems not as problems but deliverance from the casual expectations in order to better the solutions and my mind, no, my life with them. I want it to be known though, those who work at McDonald's that just cannot cut you slack for being a little late- three minutes late to the breakfast cut off time are clearly not human and are in fact soulless demons attempting to suck the happiness from your tears. That's not a lesson. It's real.
Now I know some of you are just having a good chuckle so as my next challenge I will do my best not to kill any one of you for doing so.
- There is No End. Not as we know it -
Earlier I'd mentioned how I did not become god of the universe as we know it. Well the Pokemon one anyway. I'd been the master but I sort of just faded out from there. I'd caught all my pokemon but more would eventually come. They always did and still do. I'd collected the badges but there would be more of them too in the future. In the end I faded out into obscurity until my life came fluttering by with the next Pokemon Title.
One might call it reincarnation, I like to think of it as Dream Embers. You ever have that fleeting feeling where you think about death and how you'll be in the ground forever and oh dear lord what if there is only darkness? Yeah, well good luck with that. I sorta faced many ways I could have died as a kid whether it was disease, long falls and broken bones or just my Brothers. Pokemon just sorta walked in and made me think differently.
Pokemon reinforced this odd sense of continuation in me though. I'm Neutralist Protestant so the love is everywhere and no one loses in my eyes. Still, I think at times we all for the briefest of moments get that shaken feeling of morbid wonder of the end. Our continuation.
All the things that we own, all the work that we do, the contributions to humankind and all the things we have left not to do as we sit at our computers this very moment. Even when I was young that especially followed me. When you're told things though sometimes it just doesn't stick. Church didn't stick for me, neither did my parents. When you play through it ( Live it for children ) the thought is just all the more relevant.
When that adventure started back up again the fading I had witnessed had vanished. The dream embers had rekindled and grown again as I followed the same path with the same people in the same world all for the same reasoning. There is this great sense of futility to it all yet at the same time it's so beautiful. Mastering our lives, growing, walking the same path and eventually fading into obscurity. I once feared being forgotten.
Yet even now as I do all my work, writings and art, philosophical and irrelevant, I fear little of the end when it comes and oh shall it come. Hell, even now as I write these words I imagine them being read by no one and yet that brings me ever closer to comfort.
In a way we all live through each other whether we know one another or not. When we become no more of this world we still remain anew in the passions of those that would follow in the same steps we took. All of us on a quest of different means, thoughts, views, times, and all the same path.
Pokemon, you're beautiful and you gave me some hard lessons I won't forget let alone not take with me to the grave. Though you were also the most selfish Bitch that needed to JUST LET ME HAVE ALL 150 POKEMON! HOW MANY ARE THERE NOW?!
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11 years, 8 months ago
10 Jun 2014 05:30 CEST
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