Believe it or not, love songs, coming from me

[phantasm]

1.

You stack demands on my shoulders

You tell me to get good grades in school

You tell me to take responsibility and set a good example

You try to civilize me

You try to control me

You can try to bind my mind

But my heart is a wild animal, yeah

You can't control me

You try to saddle me

You try to leash me

But my heart is in love, and my heart is a wild animal

2.

My heart's on fire,

But when I see your  face I freeze.

3.

Will you catch me  when I fall?

Will you steady me when I stumble?

Take my hand and we'll soar through the clouds, I swear.

I'll never let you go.

Just promise me, you'll stand by my side.

Be there for me when life takes me for a ride.

[phantasm]

4.

Run away with me. Let's never look back.

Let's take life by  the horns and go on the attack.

All we need to take on life is each other.

When I'm with you, I feel like I'm as strong as Superman.

5.

Every time I see your face,

I hold my breath.

I can't help it.

Your beautiful face takes my breath away.

Every single  time.

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I don't know what it was about last night. Some reason, I found myself musing about love songs.

There are a lot of love songs out there that feel like they're an outgrowth of the teenager experience.

I wanted to try to tap what romantic love might feel like for a teenager. So I put pen to paper last night.

Just now I decided to post  'em on this website.

[artolmaeus]

yes

[phantasm]

Thanks for reading, artolmaeus.

[artolmaeus]

re-reading this, the teen song thing, reminds of the era when every boy band song started with "girl..." Girl you know it's true, ooh ohh ohh

[anirbas]

Clap! Clap! Clap!
Tickled to see you kick the box in your head
completely over and do something different for you!!!

Good job, Phantasm!

I didn't write romance poems for a long time because I didn't feel romantic. Misharae taught me, you don't need to be in love, to write romance. Just imagine it and write what you see when you get there. A nod to Mishie, sweet Queen of the Dark. I still miss her so much, Phant. So, so much.

[phantasm]

I have never been in love.

The closest I've ever gotten was a girl in the 4th grade who I had something of a crush on. Our interactions were limited-- our seats were on opposite sides of the room. She was blonde, blue-eyed. And as skinny as a rail, just like me. In high school there were a few girls I desired. Everybody desired them. Those girls always had boyfriends. And because I saw the destructiveness of gossip early on, I opted out of the gossip network, which meant I got precious little social news, which meant I was always behind on who was dating whom and for how long, etc. I have never been on a date.

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I have a half-assed "theory" about human emotions.

Clearly, children can feel love, fear, hate, revulsion at an extremely young age, perhaps as young as age two. Perhaps earlier than that. Clearly, those emotions are real. And yet, adults often look down on the emotional lives of children. "You don't really know what fear is. You have no idea what it means to be really afraid. Have you ever met a skinhead on the street and found him looking at you funny? No? Well, I have and damn that was a scary situation. I thought he was going to knife me. Fortunately, a cop on foot happened to walk between us and nothing happened."

It's especially bad when teenagers, having hit puberty, start feeling what the teens call "love."

An Adult: "No, you are NOT in love. I've been in love and what you're feeling isn't it by a long shot. Whatever you're feeling is shallow and meaningless compared to real love. You have no idea what it means to have a real relationship with a woman."

My "theory," such as it is, is as follows:

We can compare human emotions to computer processing power.

We start at the 8-bit level, like a classic Nintendo.

Then we evolve into 16-bit level, like a classic Sega.

Then we grow into 32-bit level, like a classic Playstation or Nintendo 64.

Etc.

The human brain has incredible processing power, but we aren't born with it "fully switched on," for lack of a better phrase. We have to grow into it. So, at first, our thoughts and emotions are on the simplistic, low resolution side. As we age, our thoughts and emotions become increasingly complex. Eventually, our interior lives become so nuanced and complex, that it's easy to look down on people who are less developed than you are.

An adult with 32-bit emotional growth hears a teenager at an 8-bit level say, "I'm in love," and it's easy for the adult to say, "No you're not, you have no idea what love really is." The adult thinks the teenager is comparing their experience with the adult's experience, but that's not what's happening. The teen is expressing his emotional state as he understands it.

When I wrote those poems, I was attempting to reach back, to limit my thinking and feeling to the way I used to be as a teen.

I wanted to see if I could generate the emotional state of 8-bit love. If I can do that, maybe I can work my way up to 16-bit. Then 32-bit. After all, I am already an adult.

It didn't quite land the way I wanted it to, though. The poems feel kinda flat to me..............

[artolmaeus]

I adore your theory and some of my happiest memories are playing games on an 808/808A processor....8bit was surely a solid with many holes, but we could fill those holes for ourselves in our way and no matter how perfect or imperfect just that we took action, usually left us feeling better for it, with every intensifying of the cluster became more of a forced perfection to where anything less than absolute perfect things, could not be accepted. I believe the lower the bits the closer to human emotion modeling you get because we only have a small skeleton of the things we share and all the rest are made through the act of us making them what they will be. The higher the bits, the more spectator than participant we become ...

[phantasm]

>>The higher the bits, the more spectator than participant we become ...

I don't completely agree with that statement...............

It probably depends on what games you've been exposed to in the last couple of generations of games. One of my favorite franchises of all time is Sid Meier's Civilization. There was the original game, which I never played. My entry point was Civ II. Graduated to Civ III. Then I found I was playing more Civ III than I was working on my creative projects. Wound up breaking the CD-ROM of Civ III in half to stop myself from wasting my life, which I felt like I was doing at the time. Sometimes I regret that decision.

As a result, I decided to purchase Civ VI, and at the time I bought it, it was oh a couple of years old. Well, that sucker knocked my socks off, baby! Some of the rules are different which is frustrating. In Civ II you could use rivers as if they were roads, which facilitated exploring the continent the game generates randomly. You have to push your military and scout units into the darkness to discover the lay of the land, resources, lakes and rivers, oceans, etc. In Civ VI, rivers are barriers and it takes a turn to cross a river. So yeah, I miss the old rules. But the graphics are sooooo much richer. Some people think it's a bit 'cartoony,' but that never bothered me.

The big thing in Civ VI is complexity. You start out with only one city and a few technologies like road building and irrigation. But in this franchise, as you build cities and spread across the landscape, you pursue lines of research to advance your technology and knowledge of the world. So you climb a technology tree, and it takes X number of turns to research any given technology/knowledge, say pottery or philosophy. Well, Civ VI has not one tech tree, but TWO. One for ordinary technology, the other one for government and ideas. Kinda crazy for me at first, but got used to it after a few games. Also, in Civ VI you can pursue the development of religion, which is a first for the franchise. The names of religions are really placeholders. You can choose what traits your religion will have, which is, well, hard to explain in a post like this. But if you have a gaming strategy in which you always choose to develop, say, Christianity, you can have completely different types of Christianity for your civilization, depending on the traits you choose to develop. No game has to be like the last game your played.

Civ VI gives you a shit ton more to think about than Civ III ever did. And that's why I love it so much. To the point that my love for it could trash my life.

For complicated reasons, I haven't played Civ VI in a number of months. That version of the game is as addictive as fuck. So I have to choose my battles.

Go to YouTube. Type "Civilization 6 tutorial" and watch a gamer give you a demo. That gave me some idea of how to play before I bought the game. It is a big, huge, beautiful, amazing gaming experience. This franchise only benefits from greater computing capabilities.

[artolmaeus]

I am a supernintendo/pinball/ms pacman. In all these games, there is memorization and keypad work...timing and accuracy....I have been exposed to PS4 games and to some degree, more happened on the screen than the controller...likewise, in work conditions, the higher up you are the more one seems to make without being direct labor. As direct labor, it is hard to watch much, but, higher, as a manager, you see more and can see more because you are removed from direct labor. Also, more money, less time in struggle, you can buy time from others, fixing house, fixing car, cleaning or cooking.....the more "bits", the less it seems has to be done and people, removed from survival or direct labor, the more spectation there can be. Now, borrowing from the Gurdjeffrian"4th way" concept is to be more objective while you are turning the crank allows for spectation as a direct laborer. I am curious to watch the Civ 6 tutorial, but I fear I would be so ignorant of earlier levels of Civ, somuchso that I would not get it...I am not a gamer and have not been for some time. However, it seems to me the value of starting the Civ series at game 1 forward is an initiation best taken before watching the advanced video. John Lennon played the turn by saying "“The time you enjoy wasting, is not wasted time”. Civ VI sounds a worthwhile venture....still, the more you learn Civ will get you to a point to watch inputs change outcomes, the more bits you have to put together, the more you get to spectate the permutations...I am trying to sell something I have not worked the cost-benefits ratios on, and well, I am a factory laborer, not a salesman.....the idea in my mind is that, especially in Civ, it is like I am telling Itzak Perlman about a violin I once held....oh the Dunning Kruger pocket tag is usually on my lapel...thank you for a delightful response