The best score I have ever achieved on Dig Dug got bested. So I’m back in training. On the flip side, I breached 100,000 points on Donkey Kong for the first time – about 118K in total, as a matter of fact. If I had achieved that score in front of a Twin Galaxies referee, I would now be ranked around #50 on their leaderboard, right near, I am not lying, “Will Forte of Los Angeles, California” (see page 6 of the rankings). I am better than MacGruber at Donkey Kong. Hells yeah.
One of my co-workers got a whiteboard and stuck it to the side of the Ms. Pac-Man machine, and so we now have a visible leaderboard of our own to declare the current office champion on particular games. I currently own 4 of the contested 6, and I know I can take down Jr. Pac-Man where it’s currently at. I also have top scores on a dozen other games on the machine, but I don’t put them on the whiteboard, because since no one else plays those games, I think it would be pretty jackass-ish.
And I know this probably sounds patronizing, but I don’t actually want to take that Jr. Pac-Man score yet, for the same reason I didn’t go back to Ms. Pac-Man until the high score had been pushed up pretty high. I have no interest in just grabbing an insurmountable #1 on every game; I think I’ll get stagnant, or over-paranoid and threatened by anyone who gets near me. Maybe I wouldn’t be a good Cobra Kai (Strike First Strike Hard No Mercy SIR!), but I don’t want good players demoralized away from a game before they’ve competed with each other enough to become really good players. Because then those really good players do things like beat my best-ever Dig Dug score, and suddenly I, too, must improve myself.
One of the side effects of my recent ambitions in the lit mag world is that I’m reading more short fiction. And there’s a new kind of pleasure involved in it, because I’m starting to feel like one of those amateur magicians who knows just enough to see the machinery, to understand how jaw-droppingly good the pros are when they pull off something. I feel like I can measure myself against what I’m reading, respect myself enough to say that both the author and I are playing the same ballgame, and start looking at where I’m doing well and where I can appreciate someone who is doing it better, but not SO much better that I could never imagine myself doing as well.
It’s making me hungry to write more stories, submit more stories. It makes me want to get better – so I may never be Jonathan By God Franzen, but I would bet you if I worked hard I could get into more lit mags. And once I do that – well, I am working on a novel, aren’t I?
I’m a firm believer that big goals can be reached via a progression of little goals. Each one should challenge you, each one should force you to grow. Sure, walking around the block isn’t the same as climbing a mountain; but if you don’t pick somewhere to start then you’re probably not actually interested in doing more than dream about it.