Cascadia Calling, 2025.11.24
"Toothed, crinkled leaves hold this treasure to the light"
As we head into the darkest (though critically not coldest) months of the year, I find that I have less will for the full cadence of life. This isn’t the depression that some people suffer from in Northern winters. I have no trouble getting out of bed in the morning and I am genuinely fond of the clouds and the icy fogs that come in off the Salish Sea in the mornings.
In the evenings, though, I find myself unwilling to go through with the tasks that make up the full scope of my life. Going to lift at the gym takes more energy. Blank pages more often seem an intractable problem. Dinner is increasingly likely the be an assortment of only-slightly-expired groceries. I’m not sad or anhedonic. I think I am fighting the mammalian urge to hibernate. Modernity no longer permits us to have our innate annual rhythms.
My preferred method would be a kind of sky burial. Sky burial is the practice of feeding the dead to wild animals. The most familiar example (and where it gets its English name) is the Tibetan practice of leaving the dead exposed on a mountainside for vultures to eat.
In the Pacific Northwest, I might rename it “forest burial”. In my mind my friends take me out deep into the woods, perhaps to the foot of Kulshan. They’ll lay me out in a clearing. They’ll say whatever words might mean something to them. They’ll raise a toast. Then they’ll pile back in the car and leave me there.
Perhaps the birds would get to me first. Or depending on the time of year, maybe a bear, hungry from the winter, would sniff me out. Black bears would probably prefer salmon to my flesh but I’ve never known them to be picky eaters.
The personal highlight of the week was the publication in Marrow issue 15 of my essay “All the Ways I Can’t Be Buried”. (It is accompanied by a striking header image by Thomas Reisner.)
I also highly encourage you to read the whole issue. It’s full of achingly beautiful pieces. If you have time to read only one brief one, I was particularly struck by Julie Shulman’s “Cloudberry”.
I have to confess that other than reading some of my co-published authors in Marrow, I haven’t consumed much other art this last week. As happens every year or so (in fact often over the winter holidays; a pattern that could be conditioned by any number of factors), a video game has gotten its hooks into me. This time around it’s a new sci-fi crafting/shooter called Arc Raiders. It has a tight, frictive gameplay loop: start a round, strip a post-apocalyptic world for parts while fighting off robots and competing looters, return to base, build things, repeat.
The world building is sparse, and full of the worst excesses of the modern trend towards “environmental storytelling” in games. I put that in scare quotes because it too often means “let’s not hire writers, let’s just scatter some evocative set piece bullshit all around the place”. As a method for actually conveying narrative, I don’t think it’s been done well in the past decade, with the sole exception of 2022’s Elden Ring.
Arc Raiders, despite its pleasing gameplay, is no exception. There are oblique hints to an apocalypse. Characters make repeated reference to calamities that they seem to go well out of their way to explain1. Giant husks of buildings and building-sized robots litter the world for you to explore, but none of them actually provides any clue or detail about the world itself. For all the player knows, they could have been intentionally built there as some kind of post-apocalyptic theme park a-la Westworld and nothing about the game would really change.
The interactions with other players are interesting and have gotten the most press. The game provides all the mechanisms necessary for cooperation but doesn’t at all prevent bloody competition. You can talk to players in your immediate vicinity to coordinate, coerce, and/or shit-talk them. I’ve more than once been betrayed by other players after spending significant time and resources helping them survive and fighting off robots with them. Some players shoot others on sight. Others go out of their way to signal cooperation and at times genuinely go through with it.
I saw someone describe it online as “the prisoner’s dilemma, but make it Mad Max” which isn’t too far off the mark.
So while I haven’t been much for art this week2, I expect to have plenty of downtime over the long weekend to read, listen to a few records, and hopefully do a little bit of proper hibernation.
A kind of maddening inverse of the “As You Know, Bob” trope.
Before people go after me in the comments, yes video games can be art, but Arc Raiders isn’t and doesn’t pretend to the title.