Gospel, Xbox, Pt. III
By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
The crew was ready. The supplies were full. The wind favored us. The voyage… well, the voyage is what we damn well decided was the voyage.
But then the f&$#ing Kraken always ruins everything.
Yet at least we still got a lot of laughs out of it, especially because we were virtually and literally all drunk. Save Drex.
The four of us are different characters that make up a group of a particular kind of misfit.
bashf00l, codename “Sean,” is like an always laughing Jim from The Office or a less creepy and annoying James Franco. He’s the one that gets us to cut loose when we are all stuck on being sweaty and try hardy (mainly me but Drex is right behind). He’s very agreeable, easy to please, and good at working on making sure we are all having a good time and not some of us having it at the expense of the others. He also was a hell of a water polo player in his heyday, but he likes to keep that on the DL.
Drex, codename “wasuregenjitsu,” codename “Isaac,” is like Samwise from Lord of the Rings, a less anxious Ron from Harry Potter, a C3PO you’d like to grab a drink with. Referring back to the idea of “metas” in gaming, Drex is the first one to know about it, first one to hate it, first one to reminisce about the glory days of that one perfect meta seasons ago. Drex is also one of the nicest people I’ve ever known, who, like bash, does a really good job of accommodating to the group’s preferences while still playing whatever we play in the way he wants to play it.
You know a bit about “Vince,” but in our quad squad, VinnyDoCuzHeDuz likes being the “functional” captain. By “functional,” I mean the pragmatic nuts and bolts what the crew is doing leader. He’s like a less sullen Jon Snow, a Ron Swanson if Ron Swanson laughed more and spoke less. Just like the others, accommodating comes pretty naturally for the guy. A big ole ego he does not have. He wants to have fun and he tends to have the most fun when we all have fun.
And then there’s yours truly. ObiwanCalobi182. Cross J.D. from Scrubs, splash in some Ben from Parks and Recs tendencies, and then add the overly spiced egotistical assumptions of being the leader of the group’s heart, like Jeff from Community. I’m bossy, I’m fussy, I’m sarcastic, I’m talkative. And I really, really, really love all three of these guys in my neurotic, often self-centered way. I’m usually the one that needs to apologize if apologizing need to happen.
We don’t actually have a crew name, but on Rocket League, when we play chaos, we are the Salt Squad. How that started, I don’t know.
But the game where the Kraken always does us over is Sea of Thieves. If there is an online gaming equivalent of a drinking game, I’d say Sea of Thieves is your best bet.
Spawn on a random island, gather the cannons, the bananas, the pet monkey, the ship and cannon and sail skins, and be ready, ye scurvy pirates.
The great thing about this game is what we in the gaming addict world call “quality of life.” Essentially, there are games where the developers actually want their community to have fun. But most developers, actually, publishers, want their gamers to give them a shit ton of their money. They don’t care about the fun to be had while playing their games. We gamers hate them and want them to stop their predatory antics.
But Sea of Thieves wants you to take a load off with the homies. It wants you to crash aground while everyone scrambles, laughs, and then scrambles again to fix the damn helm. It wants you to steal the chickens from that random douche bag you met "on the sea” over the internet and piss all over his parade by throwing them over board (it sounds bad, but it wasn’t; guy was a total dick).
Most importantly, it wants you to enjoy being “with” each other, if not literally.
See the thing about the four of us I’ve always enjoyed, something bash himself has stated lately the past few times the whole crew has been online, is that, frankly and simply, we all get along. No one person is more important than the others. Having fun and enjoying each other’s company matters more than the play of the game, matters more than who got the most kills, matters more than who got the most goals.
And it is has been so helpful for me to learn how to overcome my own insecurities.
See, I want the play of the game. I want the most kills. I want the most goals. And, truth be told, I often want the other three to make note of how great I am. But frankly that’s what hinders us more than any other thing.
There’s still this seven or eight year old part of me that wants the other kids at recess to like me and think I am cool. I’m not sure who would be who; I’m not sure if bash is a 30 something equivalent of my childhood friend Aaron, can’t quite figure out whether Drex is a 20 something stand-in for Tanner, and I don’t know if Vinny is a an almost 30 something double for Eddie. But for a lot of intents and purposes, they are.
I don’t want to get ditched on the playground again. I don’t want them to move away from my school because they weren’t close enough to me. I don’t want them to stop being friends with me because “their walk with God is at a different place than mine.” All of these things I did experience with friends who mattered then the same way that these Xbox BFFs do now.
But the thing is… they haven’t left. Even when I randomly stopped talking to them over the mic. Even when I insisted we play a game I specifically wanted to play. Even when I gloated like an arrogant SOB about one of the few times I do get play of the game.
They are good dudes. Some of the best men I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. And they keep showing up, even as many others IRL suddenly go MIA.
This is a love letter of sorts to y’all. My equivalent of a Merry Christmas to guys who have seen me through a lot of hard times and who has put them through a lot of annoying times.
You three mean the world to me.
Because for a long time, I only ever gamed alone.
I feel less lonely now in my life than I’ve ever felt, even when I was actually in relationship. Because I’ve got the best of pals over Xbox and also IRL.
Lookie98 is a codename for Lukas. The guy is a big deal. He’s also one of my closest friends. Won’t launch into specifics but he has got a big following on that social media for being insanely talented.
The guy loves himself some basketball, too. Though continents apart in cultural upbringing, with a far different fashion style, and a love for chess which predates Queen’s Gambit and will never be had by me, he and I essentially have the same heart. We are competitive to a fault. Opinionated to a fault. Passionate to a fault. Authentic to the point that it often confuses people at best and frustrates people at worst.
Another place where I am working on insecurity is NBA2k. And FIFA, less so. Sports games are stupid. Lookie98 agrees. But we still play them. And we still love them.
Yet 2k is maddening to the point of being moral compromising. While I can tolerate the most aggressive and vehement of violent tantrums from children aged 2 to 14, all while keeping my cool inside, all of whatever cool cred I have is eclipsed the moment Robert freaking Covington can’t hit a wide open fricking three in the corner (there’s the one) .
I don’t know why it makes me more mad than actually important things that should make you mad. Righteously so, like Trump saying pretty much anything about social issues or the church’s historical silence and complicity in racial injustice.
I don’t actually think it makes me more mad, it’s just that I have no ability to respond to emotional disregulation in the midst of Lookie98 somehow getting that guy open for a floppy when I’ve tried literally every trick in the fricking book (ok, there’s two) to guard the shooter.
Honestly, I’ve literally told the guy that I can’t play the game anymore because I hate what it does to me inside. Why does it matter so much that I am not winning a digital sports game against a close friend? Why does it seem like literally nothing else in the entire world matters when CJ McCollum can’t do CJ McCollum things on a game that could never accurately digitally simulate such a dynamic player and dynamic game like basketball?
Beats me. Apart of me still wonders if 2k is the devil’s game. But maybe God is trying to teach me something here. It’s probably something to do with letting go of little things to focus on the big thing.
See I tend to make the smallest things the largest things. I make the fact that I’m single a worse sentence than life without parole. I make the reality that I can’t get another blog published on Relevant as grim a fate as a COVID diagnose. I swear I don’t mean write these things to make light of that; inside, sometimes I literally do these things. It’s really, really silly.
But I’m in process. We all are.
Just like my Rocket League aeraling skills. Just like defending that stupid ass floppy in 2k. Just like finding contentment being single when I think I quite literally want to be married more than any other male in the existence of ever (hyperbole, intended to be funny, still mildly true).
Lookie98, let’s try the sliders at 57. Seemed like the two of us get the least irate when at least we can hit a 3. Because he, like me, absolutely flips his lid when he doesn’t do well in a digital sports game.
It’s because he has the same heart as me.