#101

Penny Arcade was only three years old the first time I decided that it sucked. Didn't read it for six years. Came back around and read it for three. Quit again, came back again. I don't even think about it anymore. Reading Penny Arcade has become an autonomous process, and thinking about it a normalized part of my psychic function. Jerry Holkins' voice--not his mouth-sounds, which I have heard only briefly once, as I do not consume much of PA's video product nor have I ever attended a PAX, but his writing voice, the voice of the newspost in particular--is a distinct and powerful voice in my own head; I can converse with myself in it and pit it against other voices, I can use it to think something through as "Tycho" might, to have an argument with him as an opponent in order to seek perspective, whatever. His voice is very obviously detectable as an influence in my own writing. As surely as I know how any one of the Animorphs might react to any given situation, what they might say, how they might feel, how it would harm or help them.

This has been me dating myself. Just maudlin and worthless. Some kid I work with made me feel like a barnacle-encrusted protrusion of rock on a wasted headland where the tides wear away the shore but gently, a few grains of sand an hour, the sun tracing a thousand thousand lines across a sky which gives no shelter. The protrusion was once a mighty sea-mont, but now, I am but a riven twist of salt-chewed, crumbled stone. 

That's mainly chronovertigo talking; I was only eleven and a half the first time I saw Penny Arcade, and I am a young man, not yet thirty (for a brief spell). Still, at this point, that was quite a while ago. It's incredible seeing what the past has made of what what was once your future.

--JL