There needs to be a word for
Missing someone you’ve just met
All the past absences preceding their present presence
That temporal ache of
Never will have having had
The sequoia-root connection
From knowing them your entire life
Sometimes
I wonder if love and sex and ineffable human connection are at their core, just
Fine
Like a B-tier Marvel movie
Something pleasant and inoffensive enough to pass the time
But blown out of proportion by centuries of bottomless marketing budget
Books and movies and Broadway musicals and Taylor Swift songs
Slow-motion women eating yogurt in commercials
Shirtless men on paperback romance covers photographed from the mouth down
Hallmark holiday movies and Pornhub
All saying, “This thing,
This exaggerated, perfect version of the thing
That you only find in incomplete, temporary, compromised
And ultimately somewhat unsatisfying forms
Of course it exists
And it will find you
As long as you ignore all these versions of it that are only
Fine
And while you wait, to help it find you, why not buy
A Car That Will Advertise Your Sexual Prowess
Cosmetics From Your Friend’s Multi-Level-Marketing Enterprise
Premium Subscriptions To Every Dating App
A Stranger Who Trims Your Toenails For You
Another Car Because The First Car Didn’t Accomplish What It Was Supposed To
Ripping Out All The Hair On Your Body With Hot Wax
A Membership To A Gym Where Every Wall Is A Mirror
Shiny Gems To Attract The Magpie Gaze Of The Opposite Sex
Okay, You Know Where You Went Wrong With The Other Cars, So This Time For Sure
A Neckline That Goes All The Way To Your Butt”
Maybe it’s okay for these things to be Marvel mediocre
To leave you after an hour or two going
“That was pretty fun, yeah?
I liked that part at the end where they said the thing”
And mostly forget the details by the next week
Maybe you’ll end up with a big wedding crossover
(“I was so surprised that they made an appearance”)
Spin off a few kids
(“Well, they can’t all be winners”)
And inevitably come to an anticlimactic end
Due to cancellation or contract renegotiations
And maybe that’s okay
Maybe that’s enough
Maybe that’s
Fine
It changes you
Being food poisoned
To trust something enough to let it in
And feel it stabbing like a knife
Twisted from within
The physical pain gets you first
Doubled over on a couch
While in the kitchen, unbiased third parties
Go through the cupboards
Taking what needs to go
Later it’s the emptiness that gets to you
All the gaps left behind
You don’t even know what used to fill some of them
But you feel something missing all the same
There are old staples you thought would always be there
That you find yourself replacing
With the cheapest options
Not getting attached
Knowing they’ll be replaced again someday
You try to get back out there
But find yourself focused only
On expiration dates
‘Best by’ stickers
And all the other red flags
You find yourself quick to distrust
Ditching half a gallon of milk
Before it has the chance to go sour on you
Taking just one morning’s worth of eggs
Before throwing the rest of the carton to the curb
Some you give up on entirely
Seeing mold and parasites
In every speck of discoloration
Sure, that loaf of bread seems nice
But you’ve been burned before
And you start to think
As one by one you let every possibility drop
From your weak and thinning hands
That maybe you’d be better off without it
This untrustworthy stuff
That always hurts you in the end
Maybe you don’t really need it at all
Maybe you don’t need
Peanut butter
Filled pretzels
Are never
Quite as good
As I think
They will be
But I still
Keep
Eating them
This could
Probably
Be a metaphor
For lots of things
In my life
But it’s also
True about
Literal
Pretzels
The time portal is opening!
The beautiful time portal is opening!
Gateway to fantastic futures and marvelous memories
The time portal is opening
In my bedroom
On a Friday evening
What delights shall it bring?
And here they come
The time travelers!
The wondrous time travelers!
There is a boy who looks
Very much how I looked when I was twelve
And an old man who looks
Very much how I might look with a little more gray in my hair
And a top hat
And a monocle
And a little robot squirrel
There’s quite a lot going on with him, actually
And he’s saying
“But if you remain on the path you’re on
This is the future that awaits you”
And the boy looks at me
With deliberation
Until they leave
And the time portal
The beautiful time portal
Is closing.
With your left i
You spy
An imaginary world of lies
While likewise
Your right i can devise
A world in equal shape comprised
Of concepts that may try,
But cannot, truth deny
Now if two i-lines
Should intertwine
These dueling visions do not make you blind
Rather you find
They are combined
And come together in your mind
To form a world of negative incline
As so do mine
But if you take the world your i‘s have spun
And do not run
As we bring both our visions ’round
‘Til they compound
It might be found
That we have shared a bit of most uncommon ground
That i times i times i times i, when all is said and done
Could see this world as one
You are pretty, only pretty
And I love you for it
Not pretty and kind
Or pretty and funny
Or pretty and good at cards
You are perfect
In the only way that can be seen
Without knowing you
Upon the screen of your perfect image
I cast all other perfections
Perfections of mind and heart and personality
And see myself perfected by you
And know that the only thing wrong with me
Was not being with you
Not some misalignment of my mechanisms
That might require adjustment
You turn and smile at me
And for a moment everything is as it should be
For you are pretty, only pretty
And I love you
But then you approach
And with dread I realize that soon I will know you
Your perfections interrogated
Your flaws, so uncomfortably like mine, revealed
And what then?
When fantasies like scabs are peeled away?
If you are pretty
Only pretty
Will I love you?
I don’t know what I want
And I only want
What I don’t know
The laugh
Through the door
Of the doctor
At the age
And worn condition
Of my orthopedic inserts
Before returning
Businesslike
To inform me that
Insurance
Will not be approving
New ones
Why do I come to this brook
For memories of clear currents
And smooth stones in my palm
When all I ever find
Is industrial brown
And bits of broken glass
‘Settings’
‘Delete Save’
‘Are you sure?’
Three mouse clicks is all it took. Three mouse clicks and a moment of clarity. I have deleted my save file for Trimps, the idle game that I’ve been playing for the better part of four years.
I let out slow breaths through pursed lips, as if I’ve turned in two-weeks notice, broken out of a toxic relationship, or bought a house. As if I’ve made a significant change to my life.
* * *
Trimps begins with starvation.
A box informs you that you have 0 food and gives you one option: Gather. Selecting this button begins a slowly filling progress bar, 1 food every 1 second. A short time later, a second box presents you with a new option: chopping wood. After enough wood and food has been gathered, you can start building structures: a trap to catch the local wildlife, known as a Trimp, who you can train to farm for food or chop wood for you. You gather more trimps, and build them huts and then homes, and then you can mine metal and train them to mine metal and teach them science so they can research new developments like weapons and armor and then send them to battle where they unlock new tech to research and maps that increase your production and
And. And. And.
The game has regular paradigm shifts, moments where the exponential growth takes a sideways step into some new and unexplored direction, to the point where I’m sure I’ve forgotten about entire chunks of the gameplay. But at its heart, Trimps is a game where Number Go Up.
* * *
I created my own precursor to the clicker genre when I was seven. I found out that if I took a calculator and started out with ‘1’, and then hit ‘+1’, then every time I hit the equal sign, the number would keep getting bigger. I started mashing that button, thrilling as the number reached 10, 100, 1000. I wanted to get that calculator all the way to a million, however long that would take. I got to somewhere in the 20,000s before the batteries died. There was no way to save my ‘game’, and my parents did not consider this pastime to be a good use of my time or their calculator.
I’ve succumbed to the ministrations of Number Go Up games for longer than I like to think about. I can list off the most persistent of them like a chain of regretful lovers: Cookie Clicker, Wall Destroyer, Antimatter Dimensions, Universal Paperclips, Idle Dice, the really bad one about space mining, AdVenture Capitalist, Exponential Idle, Egg Inc., Idle Zen, Clicker Heroes, Idle Research, The Monolith–and I know there are many more of these games that I have very rightfully forgotten.
And behind most of these, Trimps has been slowly chugging along in the background. Most commercial clicker/idle games quickly reach a point where they stop being fun–the exponential growth stops feeling so exponential, the troughs between new gameplay shifts grow tedious, the dripfeed of dopamine stutters to a halt. This isn’t a result of poor development–the boredom valley is present by design, there to coax you into the game’s revenue stream: increasing your production for a while by watching an ad for an even worse game, or spend microtransactions on boosts and bonuses that will make the game feel exciting again…until it slows down once more a few hours later.
The profit line was always how I managed to break up with an idle game–despite spending several hours on any of these games, my brain drew the line at pumping cold hard cash into the increase of meaningless digital figures. When the Fun Train slowed to a crawl and the conductor came back to check tickets, that was my cue to jump off.
To its credit, Trimps (and a few others from that list) never pulled these kinds of tricks. It wasn’t a commercial product, it was just a free online game some guy made and steadily updated over the last eight years. If you reached a point where progress slowed down, there were no ads to watch or money to pay–it just meant you had caught up to the latest stage of development. The next update would bring some new element to keep the gameplay fresh again.
And so Trimps became a small part of my daily routine, a little mathematical morning ritual to engage in. Sometimes, in the early game, I would spend most of a day on some progress point that required more active playing, but mostly, it became a thing I checked in the morning along with social media. Run maps, start a new run, spend resources, see you tomorrow.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my longest running idle game took hold around the start of the pandemic. As counts of infections and deaths spiked, I could check in on Trimps and know that these numbers were the ones under my control. These were the numbers that were supposed to go up. No matter what happened outside, in the world of Trimps, things were always getting better.
It’s been three and a half years of exponential progress, and things in Trimps don’t feel better. They just feel bigger. And though the numbers continue to increase, they don’t increase in interesting or exciting ways any more. There are no more big changes to push for, no more milestones to reach, just a daily check-in and rote management of my boundless numerical wealth.
So I deleted it. Three years erased in three mouse clicks. There is neither regret nor euphoria at this change in state. It’s just a thing that happened.
* * *
It’s the following morning. My hands don’t remember what I did last night, and by familiar habit they pull up Trimps. ‘T’ is all they have to type–my browser already knows my most visited site starting with this letter. Where my Scrooge McDuck vault once lay, filled with quadrillions and nonillions and every other number with too many zeroes–there is now only one zero.
Food: 0 / 500
My stomach growls in sympathetic response, and I wonder what I will do now with this little hole in my life, these two of three minutes every morning that used to be filled with busywork. But the answer soon comes to me:
Anything.
Mindless Productivity 