Teenage Angst and the Super Men
By Robert Larson
7 May 2008
There are a few very specific times when I remember being extremely frustrated at life. I was about 16 and living in that very small apartment with my mom and my Annie. Back then I was working at my Dojo, going to West Los Angeles Baptist, and kicking serious online ass playing Ghost Recon with a team I competed with.
One Sunday morning I woke up after a full weekend of practicing with my team mates, ready to compete in our toughest match yet. We all had our tactics down . . . . other pimply faced nerds worshiped us online, they always asked us for advice on how to get better at the game . . . . and of course, would we consider recruiting them into the team? On the Sunday morning of our big match against . . . . whatever their names were . . . . my mother said I had to go to church instead. I remember blowing up . . . . completely in awe of how she could consider this less important than say . . . a soccer game, which I had missed many a church days for in the past. She said something along the lines of soccer being a sport and this is just a computer game . . . . and I came back at her about how tough it is to compete, how many hours we spend practicing, and how much these guys were relying on me to come through with my superior sniper support skillz haha. I hadn't joined the military yet, and as far as I was concerned, this was as close as I was gonna get for a few years. I ended up convincing her and getting a new found respect for this geeky passion of mine . . . . I can't remember if we won or lost but who cares.
The Shaolin Monks were coming to Los Angeles around that time, and it was all my company would talk about . . . . the monks the monks the monks. My sensei would show us videos of them supporting themselves on the tip of a spear, or running along walls for ridiculous lengths before finally setting foot back on the dirt.
I didn't admire these guys . . . . I envied them. These were men that were doing exactly what they wanted with their time, they were training to do all these useless things that had no real world application: they didn't go get jobs, they didn't support a family, they only cared about this one thing and here I was getting rebuked by both my Sensei and my mother about how much time I spend playing this game online. I saw no difference at the time. As long as you are doing what makes you happy, does it really matter how much you are giving back to the world around you? Was it really more of a worldly contribution to stab yourself with swords and spears till your skin could refuse the pierce than it was to flick a computer mouse to make a virtual character spin around, duck, zoom, steady, and take out some 14 year old Korean kid's soldier from accross the map.
Years later I found myself growing up little by little, what a surprise. Years later I found myself having a whole new respect for not just the Monks, but life itself. I stopped playing computer games on any sort of regular basis, and at one point found myself next to my Sensei in China with a whole new obsession, photography. There I was in the presence of real life Monks, who do simple things repeatedly their entire lives, and get infinite respect . . . . and then I noticed the monk on his cell phone, and the other group of monks in the corner selling their little beads, apparently monks need money too. Turns out the monks need a lot of money, after all they have a special team who travels the world to perform those flashy tricks for all of us first worlders; first worlders who seem to have forgotten the idea of passion; and that focusing every bit of energy you have into yourself and improvement can get you a long ways towards becoming what seems to unpassionate people as near super human.
And so I took this picture with this thought in my mind.
"lucky fuckin bastard, your already there arn't you!"
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