You Pray for Dry Weather at the Sight of the Sun
an excerpt from the book length essay
J David Osborne is one of my favorite writers. Back when he was running Broken River Books, he was also the publisher of some of my favorite indie books. He and Kelby Losack have been doing the Agitator Podcast for a few months, which is mostly about extreme Japanese cinema. It’s funny and insightful and often quite weird. His novels are currently available as Pay-what-you-want at Gumroad.
His novel Black Gum was especially revelatory at a time when I was rethinking narrative and what I wanted out of my own novels and the novels of others. I had just gotten married, just moved into the first place I ever owned, owned almost no furniture, and one of my dear friends had just died. Had I not read Black Gum when I did, I may still be writing very different things, living a different kind of life. Black Gum was what I imagine Yasunari Kawabata would’ve come up with had he tried his hand at a crime novel set in Oklahoma. And, I mean, that’s about the best compliment I can give anything, honestly.
Today, his book-length essay You Pray for Dry Weather at the Sight of the Sun is available. It’s about fatherhood, birth, death, and the game Death Stranding. I was fortunate enough to read this a few weeks ago and it’s great. Exactly what I’ve been trying to do here with nonfiction. If you like what I’ve done here with these essays, you’ll love this book. Also, I haven’t played Death Stranding and I loved the essay, so it’s certainly not a pre-requisite.
Below is an excerpt from the book. I hope you enjoy this. And I hope you buy this book or check out one of J David Osborne’s previous books, or his podcast, or one of his next books.
11
The BB strapped to your chest laughs as you ride your electric tricycle down a mountain. Every bump brings it joy. You pull over, out of battery. Back to the long walk. Soon you’re climbing over boulders, and the BB is getting fussy. Your worn-out boots slip on the slick moss of the rock and the sixty pounds of packages on your back catch the wind like a sail and you faceplant. You wipe the mud off your face and check the child. He’s howling, wailing, startled by the fall. You disconnect him from your suit and rock him back and forth until he falls back to sleep. For a moment, you feel the peace of a sleeping baby, but you know it’s going to be shortlived. Those stormclouds are back, and the boy can sense the other side.
12
I am a stay-at-home father. My days are routine. The boy wakes up at six. He crawls over to me and punches my face until I wake up. I fix him a bottle while his mother gets ready for work. Soon it won’t even be bottles anymore, but those fruit pouches he can squeeze on his own to get apples and sweet potatoes, or purple carrots and kale. His mother leaves and I make myself a coffee. I put the boy on the rug in the living room and turn on a few of his toys. He’ll play with them long enough for me to get my head on straight. I’m a heavy sleeper, and I’ve spent the night on the MC Escher upside down staircase highway. I have to reenter the atmosphere.
After that it’s changing the diapers, practicing his walk across the floor, Sesame Street, reading, and then a nap. I get to work on whatever project I have at the time. I’m a novel editor, so I spend a little time in a world of Army Rangers or human/chimp hybrids, and then he wakes up. More bottle, a walk outside, swinging at the park, investigating the grass and trees, and finally chilling out on the bed. He likes Finding Nemo and the livestreamed aquariums on YouTube.
That’s just the schedule. There’s the rocking, dealing with his moods, soothing him when he cries, and if he’s in a bad mood, never being able to leave his sightline. It makes me feel tired, but I find that the best advice for this kind of fatigue is “don’t be a little bitch.” He’s my guy, and I was one half of the decision to bring him into this world. The way I see it, I don’t get to be tired, even though I’m thirty-five and my back has started to hurt.
As of this writing, I haven’t played a video game in a few months. I’d gotten a PS5 for my first father’s day, and I got through all the Dark Souls games, and Death Stranding, and then there just…wasn’t time, anymore. Not if I wanted to keep up with my work and write this thing. But playing Death Stranding oriented me in my new tunnel. I had this avatar, a man all alone in the world, carrying a child through bad weather and good. He represented my idealized version of myself, a tough man who wouldn’t quit no matter how wet and cold and beaten up he was. A few minutes rest and it’s back to the grind.
R got me a little made-in-China BB from Etsy. It sits on my desk with my 3D-printed Hermanubis. Two little psychopomps to guide me through my artistic endeavors. A reminder of this game that helped me face the biggest challenge of my life.
13
The actual experience of playing the game is cozy. I didn’t die at all until late into the playthrough, at a particularly tough boss, really the first time you have to shoot anything. While my wife was home on maternity leave, she and the baby would sleep in the room and I’d turn on the PS5, load up my pack, and set out across America.
I’d check my map and try to plot out the best route. Sometimes I’d read it wrong and end up surrounded on all sides by cliff faces. I fell over a waterfall once and respawned on the bank. I trudged through snow, avoiding boulders, and I walked along a desolate, oil slick beach.
The graphics look great, but I have a soft spot for bad graphics. There’s something about the rough polygons of the PS1 that creates a barrier where the imagination sits, like film grain. A dream barrier, necessary to enter the world of the game. In an interview conducted by Jacques Rivette, Jean Renoir lamented the death of tapestry, which occurred when advancements in technique led to more intricate sewing and more possibilities for color.
Renoir says:
“It sometimes makes me wonder whether man’s gift for beauty isn’t in spite of himself. His intelligence—what a devastating force! Intelligence is terrible. It makes us do stupid things. What if intelligence pushes us toward ugliness? What if intelligence makes us slaves, admirers of all that is ugly? What if our tendency to imitate nature is simply a tendency toward ugliness?
Technical perfection can only create boredom because it only recreates nature. Why the hell would anyone go to a movie if they could have the real thing?”
Motion smoothing, special effects, 4K…the better the quality, the less interesting it becomes. But in Death Stranding, I let the beautiful, realistic world envelope me. I get what Renoir is saying here, but the key difference is that the world of Death Stranding is not realistic at all. It’s empty and vast, and the gameplay concerns itself with balance, stamina, and weather, three things I don’t often think about in my day-to-day. It’s a game about walking, but I’ve never walked in a place like that.
14
Kojima is a wordy storyteller. I am a completist, so I sat through every CODEC call in the first two Metal Gear games. You’d know it would be ramping up when the piano kicked in. You were about to get a backstory.
Death Stranding is no different. It repeats motifs and explains its world and concepts down to the tiniest detail. The systems within the game are also intricate: you poop to make bombs, drink energy drinks for stamina, you even read e-mails to gain experience. There are dozens and dozens of small details that can turn this 40-hour game into a 100-hour game.
This is the complete opposite of how I like to tell stories. I believe that if you leave a lot of blank space, the reader will work to fill in the gaps. Insinuation can go a long way. It makes the reader an active participant in the story, generating ideas, putting the pieces together, injecting their own experience into that of the characters.
Kojima wants to take you into his world. When you’re there, you’re on his time. And boredom is a key element in this technique. I’m reminded of the films of Nicolas Winding Refn (who happens to be a character in this game), notorious for his long pauses in dialogue. That’s a feature, not a bug. You’re being forced to spend time slowly, to exist with the characters without any real input. No snappy dialogue, no quick cuts. You just…sit there. And whether you realize it or not, the work is sinking into your bones.
The reason people feel so attached to sitcoms isn’t because they’re well written. It’s because they run for ten seasons. My friend Eddy Rathke told me, about fantasy novels, “Sure, there are dragons and knights and shit, but really 90% of these books is just characters hanging out.” And that’s what people want to do, at the end of the day. They want to hang out with characters they like.
Art is visual, auditory, emotional. But it’s also durational.
So you get a long monologue from Heartman, a guy who artificially stops his heart every twenty-three minutes so that he can enter the afterlife and look for his family. When he goes into self-imposed cardiac arrest, your character is sitting in his living room. You look around at stuff. A ghost statue. A record. Book collection. Photos. You get XP for everything you look at. No matter how much you might want to get back out into the wild and trudge through mud and snow, you’re going to sit there.
It works. When you finally hear Heartman’s backstory, you’re invested because of how much time you’ve spent there.
The criticism that Death Stranding is “boring” isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just beside the point. It’s colorful, too. It’s finnicky. It’s designed to make you feel time, the game’s time, and when you finally do set out, it’s late at night, but maybe you can make it before bed if you fashion yourself a truck.
15
One thing I’ve learned from being a stay-at-home dad is when you’re watching the kid, you have to put everything else on hold. Thank goodness for podcasts, because otherwise I would be bored for a good portion of the day. The boy tries to get into whatever he can around the house. Toys are ignored in favor of vacuum cleaner cords. A lot of my day is spent scooping him up and replacing him on the rug, near his toybox, and attempting to play with him, which requires attention, which again, can get a little boring.
This is an aspect of nurturing, however. Making your life not about you. I might be bored, sure, but at the end of the day, who really gives a shit? So what? Was I given life to be entertained every second of the day? I don’t want a constant drip of dopamine in my brain. I want to read books, stare at walls, and go for walks. I blew out my serotonin receptors a long time ago. I used all that fun stuff up. Now is the time for doing something else, for focusing, for sinking into something beyond the surface.
And most of the art of today is designed to be surface level: smooth, attractive, immediate and disposable. I’m looking for wabi-sabi, things that aren’t quite finished, that still have a bit of the human in them. “Ugly” might not be the right word for it, but “boring” certainly fits.
A game about walking? Sign me up.
16
If the weather permits, I strap the dog’s leash to my belt, set the kid in his stroller, and wander around my neighborhood. One time, on a walk, a man at the bus stop walked out to the middle of the street and hollered at me. I turned around and said, “What?”
“I’m in the street!” he yelled.
Another time, I saw a woman riding a bicycle. She had bicycle tires looped over each arm. About six in total. She was cussing up a storm, trying to keep her balance. She did not fall.
Then there’s the overweight Filipino man who dresses like a sea captain. Or the old guy with the huge umbrella hat and the old-timey bike. Or the woman who looks like Ripley and yells at her laundry. Or the couple who wear spandex workout gear and make love in the aqueducts. I live between a homeless shelter and the overnight shelter, so these folks are always milling about the neighborhood. Some of them live in the woods, others in the bamboo. And at least two live in the aqueducts.
Strange vagrants or not, over time, Oklahoma’s landscape becomes familiar, like anything else. Flat brown grass and big blue sky. Bur oaks reach out over small red streams and pin oaks line the streets, leaves gone yellow from iron chlorosis. My neighborhood has houses of all types. One old cottage-style has an enormous mermaid statue over its awning. In one lawn, there are sculptures of men impaled on spikes. Bronze Union soldiers in one yard, piles of trash in another.
I like to take walks around these neighborhoods, especially now, when the air is crisp and I’m closer to the world of dreams. I feel connected to my memories. I feel connected to the body I live in. And I feel connected to my landscape, flat and familiar though it might be.
17
In Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, when cyborg Bato and the human with the mullet are flying into the Northern Territories, they begin philosophizing the way characters in GitS tend to do. They mention that human beings build cities as a representation of memory. Buildings are externalized memory. This seems to be an odd inverse of the “memory palace” idea put forward by Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600. No one knows why the Catholic Church killed him. Some believe it was because Bruno believed that every star was a sun with its own solar system. Some believe it was because he was a brazen occultist. Others think it was because he pissed off important people. What’s agreed upon is that before burning him alive, the church sealed his mouth shut with iron, then drove a spike up through his lower jaw, splitting his tongue. Anyway, he invented memory palaces.
A memory palace is constructed in your mind. You visualize the rooms, the halls, the ceiling. You stock each room with items. And each one of those items represents a memory. Using this method, Bruno could memorize entire books, including a work of occultism that has never been published, as it died with him 421 years ago.
So if a memory palace can exist in your mind, it stands to reason that your actual environment can serve as one as well. This happens whether you intend for it or not.
18
A building is built with stone or concrete or wood. Parts of the earth are repurposed to form a structure. In games, parts of the earth are repurposed to create hardware to create structures within an entirely empty world.
If memory palaces can be in the architecture around us, it stands to reason they could also be found within games. I feel a deep connection to the past when I enter the save rooms in the original Resident Evil 2. It takes me all the way back to the first place I ever saw the game, on a tiny screen in my friend Peter’s bedroom. Peter had a fetish for noses and once ripped his ballsack open on a barbed wire fence. He also choked me out for saying God wasn’t real. Peter was a character.
I feel a similar connection when I play Metal Gear Solid. I remember putting the controller on the ground and Psycho Mantis moving it around. My little brother freaked out. That memory is in there. The difference between a memory recalled and memory relived, inhabited are two different things.
Games and memories are the same metaphor spoken by the universe, whose language is pure meaning.
In his essay “Memory Games” in Heterotopias #7, Gareth Damian Martin writes:
“…Game spaces operate as much in our memory as they do in our conscious mind. It is our memories that build these spaces from the images we are shown on screens, that assemble them into anything resembling real space. And then it is our memories that hold these spaces, alongside the real spaces of our lives, for many years after we have stopped playing, so that if we were to turn a corner just-so we might enter into somewhere virtual rather than entirely real.”
Walking around in Death Stranding, you will come upon many different landscapes. Mountains, lakes, rivers, trees. Dead blasted beaches and toxic rocky hills. Are my memories in there, now? Can the sound of the trike revving up bring me back to 2021 when I’m old? Why does it feel like I lived in this game?
Just got back to this, really great.
This was gorgeous. Thanks for sharing this excerpt.