During this month’s session of the Metagame Mastermind (my glorified accountability frat), I vowed to quit chess puzzles. My addiction is probing into new ways to consume chess content, so I found myself binging game analyses all morning.
I was watching a game in which world champion, Magnus Carlsen, plays a modified “bongcloud” opening and fails to develop any pieces to the center by move seven. That's how I feel right now, sitting limply on the couch at the crack of noon.
I fumbled the opening moves of this day. I had a stomach ache and a head ache and I didn't play any solid developing moves in the first hours of the morning. I played an interesting line that normally brings with it a lot potential by meditating for ten minutes at the day’s start, but after that, I fucked around with my own foolishly similar bongcloud opening—a frivolous and meandering start.
Now it's noon. I'm still in my morning change of clothes. Mid game, and I have no control of this temporal center of the day.
But just now I came up with a wonderfully interesting line: this frickin sweet chess metaphor.
With that, I forked my head ache and my stomach ache with a well placed stack of tamales for lunch. From there I easily captured my stomach ache and my headache retreated to the back rank where it's pretty much impotent.
This allowed me to develop my chess-metaphor to the center of the board right at noon during mid game, coming up with a solid piece for publication just when I needed it. With that, my opponent castles weakly on his queen side, and I do the same, connecting my rooks to launch a full attack. I might just be able to pull out a winning endgame before evening.
When I started this metaphor, I wasn’t sure who my opponent was. Maybe my various ailments, maybe entropy, maybe the metacrisis playing itself out at the scale of my little life-drama. But I’ve decided to frame my opponent as my partner in the Metagame Mastermind session I'm orchestrating.
He is a brother of mine and he satisfies my brother hunger—a real good friend and solid dude, and he reads these publications, so I want him to pay attention because part of our little accountability arrangement is to motivate each other to get fucking active on or daily and weekly goals.
Listen up, Vest Man. I'm dominating the board and having fun doing it. Framing the day's game this way gives me the decisive boost of thumos that comes from competition, and it’s gonna help me win across a few interconnected games.
As a child all the way up until my twentieth year, I hated competition. I only liked playing games I could dominate easily or I avoided them at all costs. I enjoyed making my friends laugh until someone else did it better, then I’d turn my deconstructive mind-stories on them like a fire hose.
Perhaps a typical only-child move, I either stayed in the center of attention or stuck to my own, journaling in the dark.
In the past year, a whole host of developmental growth spurts have joined forces with my obsession with chess to change my hanky-panky relationship with competition and sportsmanly conduct.
The game of kings inspires me to win with gusto and to lose with grace and awe. The first few months of serious chess play was a roller coaster of pride and anger. Blundering badly and rage-resigning left my psycho-spirit-body ragged from self flagellation.
As I slowly learned the tactics of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, I was able to separate from these malignant inner voices and slow my heart rate during games so that I could play more discerningly and decisively, two of the hallmarks of adult masculinity. Even when I lose a game, I feel solid, stable and in right relationship to myself and my opponent if I mulled carefully over variations and potentials rather than rushing to orgasm on the board.
Seeking reward and accomplishment is a strategy that has returned low yield for me in life. It served me with a handful of self-destructive drug habits and an interpersonal anxiety that severely handicapped my receptivity to the daemon for years. In four days I’ll have been sober for a year. That’s enough orientation towards journey over destination to convince me of the merits of tantric living (don’t cum, not just in sex, but in the other stuff, too).
One of my father's best lecture punch-lines is that the process is incredibly important. The Journey is the destination, if you will, although he never used those words exactly. Playing good chess without jumping around the board frantically attacking and avoiding forks is no way to go about life. Playing to win is certainly better, and to do that, you have to play to learn.
To be fair, the friend I'm addressing here plays better chess than I do and has beat me many a time while I flutter about the board, resigning all the way. So fuck my chess metaphor, let's upgrade this challenge.
To my dear friend reading this: will you rise to the occasion today? Will you start executing on your commitments and enjoy a metagame well played?
Oh yea, baby. Let's see where this takes us.
Check.
I will rise to the occasion, but even better, we've been rising on every occasion. Execution is alike an active act and a passive act, so sometimes, rising means waiting for the occasion, playing a standard opening and letting the position bury you in your morning clothes. Then, as a predator awaiting near the muddy riverbanks, the thumos becomes the thing contained and the vessel containing it: the act of a shaman that breaks through the patterns of a narrower perception and becomes the enabling constraint that seizes the potential into capability.
And by means of inverse gravity, the initial swing of the game, the opening of/to the in between of meta, finds a brother across what before were the walls of time and space. The brother develops the pieces imprecisely, blindly and not fully deliberately, and yet, that calls upon you, and me, to shake off the mud and channel the thumos.