Patreon Letter: 10th January 2019

Hi friends,

It's Jackson with the Patreon letter! It was Char's Counterattack Weekend and so things ended up being far busier than expected leaving me no time for the patreon letter. Which I thought was fine, I'll just take a few days to finish up Kingdom Hearts 2 and then write about that during the week. No biggy. But then Kingdom Hearts 2 decided it was the longest game ever made so I'm still not done with that and probably won't be until after III comes out at this rate. We're busy!

Which leaves me with a letter I owe you lovely people and very little to talk about. So forgive me if this one's a little scattershot. I hope the 3 hour Gundam makes up for it!

Also cw for extremely heavy talk about death and dying. It's been on my mind this week.

-

In what is undeniably my most white guy trait, I think about 25th Hour basically every single day. Most of the time I'm just in awe of the ending and hoot and holler every time another movie or game or what have you does something similar. But the rest of the movie is excellent too, and another scene I often come back to one between Phillip Seymour Hoffman and his hot student that he (a grown adult man) is very clearly into. She's mad about her grade and is playing into his crush so she can get a better one, he's enjoying this position of power, and she complains about another random guy who got an A because he disingenuously wrote about his grandmother dying. "You didn't care," she says, "nobody cares; that's what grandmothers do they die!"

Anyway. My Grandmother is dying right now so I've been thinking about this scene a lot. It's not the main focus of the scene, which is primarily a negotiation of power between a really sad and lonely man knowingly exploiting the position of masculinity he has to try to cover up how broken he is, and a young girl trying to walk the fine line of playing into that just enough to get what she wants. He ends up not changing the grade, and she storms out, understandably furious that he actively allowed her to act out this charade for him and yet has the gall to act like he's being a reasonable teacher who simply can't give favorable treatment and gives her nothing in return. It's a fantastic scene. 

But back to the line. It's just a short beat, a Houlden Caulfield esque faux profundity, this understanding that a teenager comes to and thinks they've seen the matrix, we live in a society and all that. On its most surface level it's a line about how disingenuous these characters are - not just the boy she's talking about, but by extension everyone. Nobody cares! That's what they do. We act like certain things are meaningful and important, but they are routine and therefore meaningless. Everyone dies. You're not special.

Obviously the movie does not subscribe to this nihilism, that's why it has a seventeen year old blurt it out to seem smart and mature so a pathetic man will want to fuck her enough to change her grade. The movie looks upon its cast as tragic figures in a world overflowing with empathy and compassion right in front of them if only they could get over their petty bullshit enough to see it. It's amazing how obvious that becomes when you're about to lose it all. It all comes so close to never happening.

And so here I am now, writing about my Grandma dying because I have nothing else to write about. Because I thought talking about The Anime Disney RPG would somehow be more interesting. I don't really know what that says about me, but hey. 

My Grandma has been unlucky enough to have a slow death. We watched her brain deteriorate in real time, as she's slowly forgotten me, my mum, everything around her. Every time she gets a lucid moment and remembers something it kills her all over again. She recently got an infection and was taken to hospital. She's just ready to not be in pain anymore, and so she stopped eating, it's obvious that she had completely given up. 

Except it was just a regular urine infection, which has got to be embarrassing, because now that it's passed she's totally fine. If she stays stable they could theoretically keep her alive for years. It's funny, in some stupid way. Just a grand cosmic joke of how apathetic the universe is to whether she lives or dies, to whether any of us live or die, there's no narrative closure here because that's not how the world works. 

So now she's in this limbo, a remnant of a person I love that I'm already grieving, trying to die and finding herself despite everything she has suffered momentarily unable. And when she does go we're going to be so busy having to clean out her house, pay back the nursing home costs and dealing with all the other logistics that we're going to be too busy to actually grieve. Plus I can't think of anything worse than to have to go to a funeral and talk to people.

I have no idea how long she has left. It could be a couple weeks, it could be a few months, perhaps even more. On some level it doesn't matter. I just want her to be at peace. I miss her so much, I miss how as a kid I always stayed over at hers so I could eat more food without my mum yelling at me. I keep thinking about how the last time I stayed over before things went south she was reading Fifty Shades of Grey, of all things. Of all things! Originally I was going to tie this letter back in to the movie and make a nice good conclusion but I don't have one in me. You should watch the movie if you haven't, it's really good! It makes me very sad, but it always makes me feel better about life.

I hope I have something a little more structured to write about next Sunday and less venting about my own shit. Thanks for just letting me get this out. 

I'll see you in a little over a week.

-Jackson