You've just turned twenty-three. This is the year where things stop feeling fun, where you no longer look forward to summer. You still nurse crushes in a distant kind of way [...]. You worry about the future, but only in a logistical sense. Where will you live? How will you pay the rent? What to eat on a Tuesday night? How to spend Friday?
The question of who you will be no longer seems relevant. Because you aren't growing anymore -- this is the year you finish all that.
This year is when things end.
Stop, you're making me feel old! And you're not the only one. The defining feature of my generation might well be the premature mid-life crisis. Have there ever been so many guys in their twenties walking around as if they're already crocked? In Victorian times, a twenty-year-old was still an adolescent and a thirty-year-old still a youth. Further back, the twenty-three-year-old John Milton lamented that he wasn't yet mature enough to write anything interesting. Today, a twenty-three-year-old is more likely to lament being a spent force. What has turned so many people into whining old gits in the prime of their lives? I suspect the fetishisation of youth in advertising and the media is partly to blame. Youth is something you can keep selling to people without ever having to deliver the goods -- and the sooner you can start selling, the better.
None of which is meant to diminish the undeniable trauma of being twenty-three in the twenty-first century. Today's young graduate faces a whole host of problems: starting work, aimlessness, suddenly not having his life mapped out for him, lost dreams, lost loves, an inordinate amount of self-pity, and so on. As things stand, I don't know what to make of these problems, because I'm in the thick of them. I don't have any perspective, and perspective is important if you want to produce a well-proportioned work of art and not an embarrassing mess. An example: on my twelfth birthday, I sat down to write my autobiography. The first sentence was "I write this as I am maturing from the carefree age of eleven to the more serious and responsible age of twelve." And while the quoted extract from Blue Chairs might not be as painful as that, I still think it's going to look silly with a few years' hindsight.
Blue Chairs, then, is full of meditations on the end of youth, The Ex-Girlfriend, office life, George W., dreams and doughnuts, all conveniently delivered through some kind of incoherent drug trip. An easy-bake oven appears in the game, which is a coincidence because the game itself was made to an easy-bake oven recipe. Take some lazy surrealism, ready-made symbolism, and poorly-worked-out ideas, mix together with a suspected author appearance, half-bake for two hours, stick on some of the bits that are hanging off, and something semi-palatable is bound to result. It's lazy stuff, and nothing irritates me or wastes my time more than artistic laziness.
I'm sorry I ended up hating the game; I was originally well disposed towards it, not least because I shared the PC's disdain for Dundalk. (Only later did I realise he didn't mean Dundalk, Ireland.) The ASCII art is quite striking, and the writing is obviously an order of magnitude better than most of the stuff in this comp (though that said, it contains its fair share of clunkers like "an entire building the color of a heart not yet broken" -- ugh! -- and "what does it mean to dream that you are dreaming?"). But ultimately, I want the work of art on my plate to be the result of either genius or perspiration, and Blue Chairs is neither. It was not a surprise to learn that it was inspired by that thrown-together piece of shit Time Bastard. If I'd entered and won praise for something like that in the comp, I'd feel like I had pulled off a successful swindle.
Rating: 4 (5th place)