Aspirations

Let me tell you a little something about my hopelessly specific spiritual ASPIRATIONS Are you familiar with Roller Coaster Tycoon? It’s kinda critical to this so I’m gonna dig in a little bit here. You’re running an amusement park, see? And your job is to build out obviously the titular roller coasters but also the entire park layout, and when you’re ready to open you hit the button and people coming up to the entrance, paying for their admission, and wandering around this whole thing you built. You’ve gotta put paths connecting all your different attractions, because visitors can only travel on paths, you have to put in trash cans or they’ll litter, you have to put in bathrooms or they’ll whine that they’re gonna piss themselves or worse. The whining. It’s a somewhat useful feature of the game? But it can get annoying. They whine if the roller coaster is too much (sometimes they puke on the path), they whine if they get lost, they whine if they can’t find an amenity they need. You get these little alerts that pop up when someone’s in distress, and you can click the thing to center on whoever’s currently in crisis. I sometimes like to think of the universe as a videogame, running on some impossibly complex hardware somewhere I can’t point to or imagine. The simulation hypothesis is popular among a subset of nerds, and it’s a fun thought experiment if nothing else. Don’t get too married to it, everything is metaphor in the end. When folks talk about their spiritual aspirations, there are few camps most fall into. Some people wanna kill God, some people wanna BE God, some people wanna meet God and have a nice chat over tea. And yeah, some days I definitely want to find whoever it is that’s running this place and Show Them What. But that’s not my real aspiration. See, sometimes, once in a very rare while, you’d be playing Roller Coaster Tycoon, right? And you’d get the alert that someone was in distress and click the thing to find whoever the sorry bastard was this time. And it would take you WAAAY the fuck to some far-flung corner of the map you haven’t developed AT ALL, with no path leading to it and no possible way anyone could be there. Only that’s where your visitor was, screaming in the wilderness and unable to find their way back to where they belong. You couldn’t be mad at them. Even if you normally get annoyed at the visitors, even if you’re normally a sadist who wants them to suffer and laughs when they throw up, even if you had a million other things on your mind that had nothing to do with them or the game at all. No, you would just sit there, dumbfounded, trying to figure out how in the flying fuck this one guy defied all the laws of this tiny little bottle universe they live in to wind up somewhere they absolutely could not be. And you’d pick them up by the scruff of their little virtual neck and plop them back on the path of their intended reality. I want to be that guy. I want to break reality and confuse the fuck outta whoever’s watching.