I’m out of blog posts, exhausted, and super depressed about everything going on in the world (which is why I’m out of blog posts, but I’ll write about that later). So, rather than try to kick my ass into gear in order to pretend that I’m still writing these a week ahead of time, I’m going to fully admit that I’m writing this on the eleventh, that I’m probably going to have to edit this after it posts tomorrow, and that all I can seem to do right now is take refuge in what scant comforts remain to me after I burned through them in the first year of the pandemic… [this is why I try to write them early enough that I can edit them before they go up since the rest of the post doesn’t really support this idea here]. The primary comfort amongst them being The Legend of Zelda and Majora’s Mask in particular. I feel a little weird, writing about it right now, but it also feels kind of appropriate given that it is a game about preventing the end of the world while the world is constantly ending. About finding joy or love or peace as the world falls down around your ears. About grief and endings and healing throughout them. I’m pretty sure that all the recent thoughts buzzing around my head are a result of something I read and a discussion I had rather than something I wrote, but it still feels like I’ve touched on this recently even though I have clear evidence I haven’t.

Sometimes, given the cyclical nature of life and my predilection toward recognizing patterns and predicting outcomes, it feels like I’m trying to warn people about the end of the world repeatedly. I was so frustrated, back in 2015, when I was telling people to take the threat of Trump seriously and everyone brushed me aside because there was no way he’d: be allowed to continue running; be taken seriously by the media; be able to compete with the other republican candidates; get past his latest gaffe to carry on. Then, in 2016, that I was making a big deal out of nothing because, surely, he: wouldn’t get the republican nomination; couldn’t break away from his sexual assault allegations; would get brought down by the “pee tapes;” wouldn’t beat Hillary Clinton. Then he won the presidency because no one took him seriously and lots of people stayed home on voting day because they were sure Hillary Clinton had the presidency locked-in, even as the media had a circus with the whole “but her emails!” thing.

I’m not prophet or anything, I was not alone in sounding the alarm bells, but it was still frustrating to have tried to warn people for well over a year that there would be dire consequences and then to see people only take the threat seriously AFTER it was too late to do anything. Then, as the pandemic started up, the same thing happened. Then the insurrection and its aftermath. Trump’s continued campaigning. His bid and eventual winning of the presidency this year (in 2024). I feel like I can see the moon falling, do my best to warn people, and then ultimately must resign myself to working by myself to prevent it from happening or, at the very least, protecting as many people as I can from its eventual impact, neither of which is ever enough compared to how much might have been done if people had just listened. I had a lot of similar problems as a child. I was routinely abused by my elder brother, verbally and physically, and my parents seemed blind to what was happening. Punishments never stuck to him and we shared a room anyway, so punishing him usually wound up with me being treated worse. I could tell when he was gearing up for something worse than usual and my protestations to my parents fell on deaf ears. They refused to see the patterns, to believe what I was saying, and to see the harm he was doing or even capable of, despite his history of it.

Which is why, as a child, I did not have a problem believing that a contingent of the townspeople in Majora’s Mask didn’t believe that the moon was going fall despite it literally getting bigger in the sky every single night. Why I did not find it strange to see people around town in the final night of the game, as the music dramatically shifted and the clock at the bottom of the screen changed from the normal clock to a timer counting down until the end, the increasingly urgent ticking of time matching the increasing frequency of the ground rumbling. After all, adults in my own life looked at problems and said they didn’t see anything all the time. It was all too easy to believe. To play the part of the hero who was struggling on their own, failing to stop things in time only to wind up repeating the same problems over and over again because nothing could ever stay fixed. I was obsessed with finding a way to do a “perfect” run of Majora’s mask where all the good people had their problems solved, where all the monsters had been defeated, and all the people saved before I eventually beat the skull kid and ended the threat once and for all. I didn’t realize it until years later that this was me attempting to cope with my inability to do anything of the sort in my family life, with my parents and brother and younger siblings.

Now though, as I look at the replay I abandoned last winter when it started to become clear that I’d once again need to take the threat that Trump posed seriously because every person, system, and norm that might have done something about it via the prescriptions of their place in the US government had refused to do so, I find it easy to determine why I set it down and didn’t pick it back up again. After all, I played Majora’s Mask as a child to combat the lack of control I felt in my life and I, in the present, didn’t want to just fall back into the habits of my horrible childhood. I mean, I’ve been actively in therapy for a decade and a half now in order to avoid things like that. I also wanted things to be different this time. I wanted to have more agency, to feel better about what I was doing. I wanted to be able to come back to the game eventually and not see myself in Link’s desperate attempt to fix a world that just keeps breaking every time he fails to save it. Now, as I gear up for what’s going to be an increasingly rough winter, I find myself once again falling back into the patterns of my childhood, not because I can’t stop myself but because they helped me survive then and will help me survive now. Now, when I think about how I’ll fill my winter evenings, I think of Majora’s Mask and my abandoned personal quest for a Perfect Run and find myself wondering if maybe 2025 is the year that I’ll finally make it happen. It’s not like I can really control my life right now, as things are. All I can do is roll with what comes up and try to minimize the damage done, so maybe spending some time trying to exert what control I can would be more healthy than not, for once…