A Bicentennial Man

Not sure if I ever mentioned it, in these columns I’ve inflicted on you over the past decade, but I was actually born on Christmas day. As a child, it’s as exactly not-awesome as you can imagine. I recall one particular Christmas when, after watching my cousin unwrap a spectacularly awesome electric train set, I turned to my own excitingly large and heavy oblong parcel, tore off the wrapping and discovered… a pair of yellow boots.

“We’ll be doing a lot of bushwalking,” said my father. And we did. A lot of bushwalking. I liked videogames, he liked bushwalking. And those were good boots for walking. They helped me walk right out of the house and into a basement apartment owned by my sort-of pseudo-aunt. Then they helped me walk up to the bus stop and on to the bus and across the city to a converted power station where a certain magazine hired me to scribble my observances on their back page.

That was ten years ago. Since then I’ve found and lost love, been booted out of several different kinds of accommodation, acquired and failed to shake a crazy ex-third flatmate named Victor Ninox, eaten dog, seen a $75,000 Landcruiser go BASE jumping without a parachute, and nearly fallen to my own death out the back of a military C-130 high over the Nevada desert.

And through all of this I’ve worn the yellow boots. Laced tightly to my feet. These boots are nearly fifteen years old. They’ve been resoled nine times. Large sections of their leather uppers have been patched. I can’t imagine how many litres of waterproofing I’ve smeared over them each time the humid drizzle that Sydney calls winter comes around. And the laces. I’ve spent a significant portion of my meagre income on laces. Bloody good laces, at that.

People have asked me, fans - such as they are - of the columns: What the hell do yellow boots have to do with PC gaming anyway? And I’ll tell you: it’s weird to wear yellow boots. It’s weird to wear the kind of footwear made briefly popular by African-American boy bands in the late 90s. It’s weird to keep wearing them for a decade. It’s weird to keep walking past shoe shops with all kinds of high-tech supportive footwear in the window, boots lined with Gortex and anti-bacterial super-materials, boots that weigh nothing but against whose soles rusty nails bend ineffectually. It’s weird to stick with an old, outdated way of doing things.

In fact it’s weird in exactly the same way that it’s weird to pay $1500-$3000 on a huge, howling piece of vastly overpowered machinery that sucks 600+ watts of juice from your wall and will, at some point, crash so fundamentally and completely that you’ll be driven to tears. It’s weird to be a PC gamer in a world where the Xbox 360 can run RAGE without you first having to hack the .ini file. In a world where you can play Ubisoft games without always being connected to the goddamn internet. In a world where if you drop $100 on a game and don’t like it, you can just take it back to the shop and exchange it, no questions asked.

To stick to the PC in that world, that takes a certain kind of person. The kind of person who’s a bit different. A bit mentally atypical, except in a good way. There used to be more of us, you know. More PC gamers. But the lure of commoditisation drew many of them away. Especially the poorer ones. The ones who only ever had $500, and already owned a decent TV, and saw most of the same games appearing on 360 and PS3.

When I saw them nervously shuffling out, quietly dropping their aged ATX towers off at the local community charity recycling thing, I pitied them. I thought there goes a man (and it was always a man) who will now be richer in bank account, but somehow poorer in spirit.

But all of our times come around at last. For me, it was the day, not so long ago now, that I went to put on the yellow boots, and the tongue on the left boot just came right out in my hand. The leather where it was attached to the vamp had become so creased and abraded from thousands of bendings, had simply given way. I sat there with the tongue in one hand and for the first time I thought: These boots look really, really tired.

There was also a gigantic American cockroach in the right boot, but since this is Sydney that wasn’t actually that unusual. I just threw it out into the hall with all the others.

Anyway, I had myself a bit of an existential brain fart right then. I turned to see where my unbelievably crappy and out of date PC sat next to my desk with its side off because if I put the side on it overheated and blue-screened all the time. And I grabbed the tongueless boot and hurled it with all my not-very-considerable strength into the PC.

The result was… spectacular. A shower of sparks. A greenish flame. A sudden conflagration as the sparks rose up and hit the huge pile of magazines, press passes and other crap all over my desk. When I remembered the aerosol cans of Lynx in the middle of all that, I fled the scene.

Outside, on the footpath, as I watched the fire brigade douse down what remained of the nondescript red brick semi I’d been rooming in, Vic of course arrived and put a comforting arm across my shoulder.

“A fitting end,” he said, even though he had absolutely no context for what had just happened. “A fitting end.”

And so I walked away. In stockinged feet.