Patreon Letter: 6th January 2020

Oh fuck it's a new decade. That's a bit weird. 

Hello everyone, it's Jackson here with a patreon letter! 

So this week I was going to write a letter about VOTOMs - the greatest mech anime ever made - and how Takahashi's approach to metaphor within the genre contrasts nicely with Tomino's. It would have been a great letter. And it will again, probably next time I sit down to write, but the past few days I have been distracted by somewhat of an unlikely source: I've got really into Pro Evolution Soccer 2020. Sorry, eFootball PES 2020. The point is I'm back thinking about Football again and I have a lot of ennui about it. 

The game itself is fantastic. I am sure there are lots of issues, as with all long running series like this most of the fans are upset about the changes not made, the improvements that never come, but coming back to the series for the first time since PES 5 on the original xbox, it is easily the best on-pitch football game that I've had the pleasure of playing. 

I have occasionally dipped into playing FIFA in the decade and a half since PES 5 and it's fine and fun enough, but it's great to have a game that's so precisely about the control of space and slower paced tactical thinking that is a large part of the sport. FIFA was a game where i sprinted up the pitch and depending on the difficulty, either scored, or played a through ball and then scored. In this game of PES I'm having a great time playing Master League with their default team (a bunch of very bad players), trading new players and working my way up, refining my roster and tactics as to best facilitate the short pass possession build up that I like to play. The point is, it's a very good game and I've sunk a bunch of time that I can't really spare into it over the course of the week.

However it is making me think about football a bunch and that's giving me what is known colloquially as a "brain crisis." 

As a kid I followed and played football a lot. I was a huge Chelsea fan because my dad was a huge Chelsea fan (I feel obligated at this juncture to point out almost all my football fandom was when I was very young, the 1997 FA Cup win is the Chelsea silverware I care about, so pre-abramovic), and we'd play football in the park together all the time. I vividly remember racing out of bed to ask him to take me to the field in Raynes Park that was used as a club training ground, because on the days it was empty it was the only set of goals that had a net. I remember this because he was waiting outside my bedroom door to tell me that he was leaving home again. 

In 2015 I stopped talking to my dad entirely when he called me to inform me he was taking my mum to court to force the sale of our house at the exact moment I had moved back home to transfer to a local university, because I needed local medical and personal support systems. We couldn't afford a new house in London and so have had to move to the middle of nowhere where I have no medical support, no local friends, and no support systems. He used the money he got from us to buy a record store. He got away with this by arguing in court that my mum made up my autism. I don't think I will ever experience a betrayal on this level again in my life.

And thinking about football makes me miss him. I know this is the normal contradictory feeling that everyone gets about their parents they've grown apart from, but knowing it's common doesn't exactly make it easier. I miss him so much dude! I would love to go to the movies with my dad again, and tell him I've started caring about football again this week and maybe we could bond over that. I want it more than anything. 

After my dad left, I kept playing football for a while, but eventually switched to basketball as there is no worse person on the planet than the teenage boy who is good at football. High School was, as it is for all good people, an experience beyond nightmarish and as an undiagnosed autistic kid who wanted to be accepted more than anything, I spent my days being psychologically tortured by every other boy at the school. Which, whatever, I'm over it now I guess - like, I'm not obviously please don't @ me lol, but I've come a long way - but playing this game has re-opened a lot of old wounds in ways I didn't quite expect. It's not that I'm reliving the specifics of High School, it's bad for all of us in varying ways, it's more that I feel like I've spent the last few days mourning the youth I didn't have, and by extension the life I'm not living now.

I used to be huge into sports. I have now gone an entire decade without playing any sports even casually, beyond like a few pick-up games of basketball in the park. This is in large part because of how awful the Sports People at school were, and thus the groups I found myself in, but also for a whole bunch of other reasons small and large that it's useless trying to turn into a coherent narrative, that's not how being alive works.

This also doesn't have a conclusion other than I'm really enjoying the video game and it's kicked up dust in the form of a lot of emotions and trauma that I thought were in the past. And it's fine, I'm fine, this post reads a bit depressive but I promise I'm handling this better than I would be a few years ago. But it's still weird. Growing up is weird, seeing yourself change is weird, and feeling the spaces of possibility close is weirder still. I would love to go back, be a kid again, have a great relationship with my dad and not run away from sports to being alone in my room watching movies and playing games because of how I was treated by everyone in high school. But we'd all love to do it all again, I think that's just a defining feature of being human.

Instead I will simply do my best to look forward, and enjoy a video game. Sorry this was all introspection and no criticism, that should be a little different next week. Maybe I can have a little therapy, as a treat. 

-Jackson