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There are four ways to play the videogame Rock Band: play guitar, sing, play drums, or play bass. Those are listed in order of enjoyment for me. The reason I don’t like playing bass is because I don’t see how it affects anything. The other three have immediate feedback and I can tell how I’m doing. If I’m doing well at bass, the only reason I know it is because I’m getting the multiplier and not failing. I can’t hear the bass line, so it might as well be me playing random notes.

It’s funny/scary how geared I am toward immediate results. I sometimes feel like I lack the ability to consider the future – I eat this Dove bar because it tastes SO GOOD right now, and even though some part of my brain knows the cumulative effects of eating Dove bars will some day wreak havoc on my body, that knowledge doesn’t stop me from eating it… or the next three in the box. It’s the same reason I can’t motivate myself to work out – I know that getting on the treadmill today will help Future Me, but Present Me doesn’t like how he feels during the process, so he doesn’t do it. Future Me can deal with that stuff later.

Future Me can also figure out how to retire when he gets to that point, and where to put all these old game consoles Present Me is collecting, and how to deal with the house projects Present Me has been putting off. The way Present Me looks at it, Future Me will be older and wiser and will know how to handle all that, and he will forgive Present Me at that point.

I can barely even type that in jest, because it’s too close to home. How can I train Present Me to look toward the future? If I were given three wishes, I think one of them might be the ability to see what would result from my immediate actions. Even having the predetermined-path-indicators like Donnie Darko could see for a while be help a little, I think. If I could see that my half hour on the treadmill today added 3 days to my life, maybe it’d help me get up on the treadmill.

Any thoughts? How have you helped your Present Self start now to help your Future Self? Or is it just a matter of playing bass forever, knowing you’re headed in the right direction just because you haven’t failed out of the song?

Last year there was a documentary released entitled The King of King: A Fistful of Quarters (Tagline: “Don’t get chumpatized”) about the world of competitive videogaming. Many of you, I suspect, weren’t aware there was a world of competitive videogaming until just this moment. Not only is there, but it’s a booming business and full of drama and intrigue, apparently.

The documentary follows Steve Wiebe as he attempts to break the official worldwide high score in Donkey Kong. The score he was attempting to break was 874,300, set in 1982 by Billy Mitchell , who also held records in Pac-Man and Centipede. I won’t give away the rest of the movie, as it is strangely fascinating, even if you don’t play videogames yourself. (Note: if you live near me and would like to borrow it at some time, just let me know!)

Donkey Kong is a particularly hard classic game, and anyone who has even gotten to the elevator-filled third screen is even now shaking their head at the remembrance of it. Games have changed significantly since then, and many modern games don’t even have a point system. In the early days of videogames, though, the points were the thing – indicators of skill, bragging points, and goals to be reached. Twin Galaxies has, since 1981, been the “official” keeper of gaming records, and as the documentary revealed, the process of submitting a score is quite rigorous. One referee talked about the eight hours of videotape he was needing to watch to verify someone’s attempt a breaking the record for Nibbler, a game I was only just barely aware of.

While I loved videogames from the first time I ever saw one, I’ve never been all that good at them. The idea of breaking any sort of record for Q*Bert or Defender is so foreign to me that it passes into the realm of the laughable. I found out somewhere along the way that there’s always someone you’re better than… but there is also always someone else who’s better than you. My ability to finish Guitar Hero in Medium might be impressive to someone who struggles with Easy, but someone who can play a song flawlessly in Expert puts me to shame.

That mindset has filtered into the rest of my life, for better or for worse. I don’t have a desire to compete for the most part because of it – I know the chances of me ever being the best at something are so ridiculously slim that I’ve learned to get to a “happiness level,” a place where I enjoy what I’m doing but am not stretched to push myself further. It doesn’t take a very sharp eye to see where the problem lies in that outlook. While it has, for the most part, removed certain stress causers, it has made me complacent and even stagnant.

These days I play through videogames for the stories. I want to enjoy them like I enjoy movies, and even fighting games have a layer of storytelling to them. I want to beat a level so I can see the next part of the story. A really engaging game can be a 10-, 25-, 0r 100-hour movie, and I want to see what happens next. That’s carried over into other areas, too. I enjoy what’s going on right now, and I’m curious to see what happens next.

I’m just hoping against hope that I don’t get chumpatized.

My brother is two and a half years older than I am. While that means a lot of different things, one of the things it means is that he started getting mailings from the various Armed Forces a lot earlier than I did. Unfortunately for him, the Army was always offering him all these what I thought were neat things for him to request more information. A seventh grader thinks a pair of wristbands or a T-shirt is infinitely cooler than a high schooler thinks they are. So, since he could get these cool things for requesting more information and I couldn’t, I would sometimes send the postcards back. In a few weeks, the bundle of more information would arrive at the house, along with whatever thing I thought was cool at the time.

What I did not understand at the time was that the arrival of the postcard at Army headquarters meant – to them – that my brother was interested in joining the Army. So, to follow up with the more information and the silly whatever, they would often call my brother. I remember him more than once saying on the phone, “Um, I’m sorry, but my brother actually sent that card in because he wanted the compass.” I think he even made me tell them once.

Seriously, though, what else were they expecting to have happen? The whole point of them offering the pencils and hats and carabiners was to pique someone’s interest and maybe hit on someone who thought, “okay, sure, why not?” and join up, all because of the little thing that got mailed along with the more info. I’m sure it happened all the time.

My brother never did join the army, and neither did I (I often considered it, but my fear of water kinda made that decision for me). I have long forgotten most of the Army-branded things we collected around the house, except for one: an Army flashlight.

It was cheaply rubberized and had a camouflage pattern, with a stark-white “ARMY” emblazoned on the handle. It was about six inches long, and there might have been a hole in the end of it to loop a cord through, I don’t remember exactly.

Like most of the Army stuff we got, it was fairly cheaply made, but it did work. Two AA batteries would give it enough juice to light the tiny bulb. Make no mistake – this was no Maglite, this was a pathetic attempt at impressing kids. Sure it worked on me, but it was still pathetic.

I remember this flashlight so vividly because it was so poor. My room at night was pitch black. We lived out in the country, so there were no streetlights providing a soft glow through my windowshades. Lights out meant lights out. I kept this flashlight by my bed, and if I needed to get up during the night, I would use it to light my way to the door of my room and to the stairs. Only it wasn’t a powerful enough flashlight to show me where the door was – seriously, this was a majorly poor flashlight. The only thing I could do was set out in the general direction of the door and point the flashlight at my feet. There was enough light to illuminate any obstacle that threatened to trip or maim me, even if I couldn’t see the doorway. By adjusting each footfall, I was eventually able to reach my goal.

I’m not sure what eventually happened to the flashlight. I suspect it just fell apart one day of its own accord. I have a couple of new little flashlights now, both of them have bright LEDs in them, and they more than light up where I need to go. But I still occasionally remember that old Army flashlight.

A couple of years after the flashlight had shuffled off this mortal coil, I had occasion to speak on the 105th verse of Psalm 119: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” The verse made a whole lot more sense to me after having that flashlight – as long as I set out in the generally-right direction and took care to take carefully-illuminated singular footsteps, I’d eventually get to where I needed to be.

I still have problems setting long-term specific goals, but I like to think that I carefully consider each next step, and I’m ever hopeful that I’ll end up where I’m supposed to.