Jacob got his gun
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I never thought I would be reminded of my human frailty after playing a video game the other night.
Video games often feature death, in many gruesome and unrealistic ways. Often, though, the more wild and absurd ways to die in video games sneak their way into our minds to give us the irrational fear of that phenomenon eventually happening to us. At least, that’s how I see it.
I was playing a video game called League of Legends, which involves killing other players on an opposing team to take over their base. Out of the thousands of times I’ve died in that game, the one that happened night is still on my mind.
There’s a recently updated character who’s essentially a walking slaughterhouse. I won’t go into details, but the way he kills an enemy player is gory, unrealistic and over-the-top and leaves the player’s body utterly destroyed.
It’s one of the game’s most disturbing ways to die, but it’s not a terribly unique thing in video games. There have been worse ways to die, I’m sure. However, this specific death hit my mind in a spot that seated an irrational fear of being horribly mutilated or destroyed in some horrific way.
I recently heard a story from a coworker about a car accident he was in that left his arm looking “like hamburger meat.” Almost reaching over to clutch my nearly fully tattooed arm, I winced at that statement.
The aspect of having some part of me shredded or destroyed is such a perplexing issue for me to tackle. With this fear, I’ve gained a great reverence for what humans were given upon birth: two arms and hands that act as the most powerful tools in human history, capable of creating great masterpieces of art and science; and two legs and feet, the very things that gave us the primordial will to be mobile and travel.
And then I imagine the worst kinds of situations those appendages or any other part of my body could go through. For instance, if I were attacked by a shark and it bit off and ate my arm, that would ruin me. Here I have one of the greatest tools in history, the conduit of human civilization, reduced to being an animal’s lunch and eventually waste.
I would think the thought of something that was a universal constant, the fact we are born with these bodies and are capable of doing great things (most of us), being reduced to an ephemeral instance of loss would be soul shattering, especially with something permanent like a tattoo.
And, after a conversation with my coworkers, I learned this is a shared fear, though we have different interpretations. One coworker had been terrified of Metallica’s music video for the song “One,” which features scenes from the movie “Johnny Got His Gun.” Another coworker experienced sleep paralysis often.
I feel I would be too squeamish to read the book “Johnny Got His Gun.” The thought of not having limbs or the ability to communicate would be mentally agonizing.
But I, like my coworkers, don’t let this fear rule my life; it’s not a phobia and I never treated it beyond anything besides the occasional disturbing thought while driving on the highway. I see it more as the innate sense of self-preservation that led to my reverence for humanity’s tools. To keep my universal constants maintained and away from such a gruesome fate.
We’re all going to have something to fear, and we want answers for everything. It’s hard to fathom what it’d be like to be reduced to food in an animal’s stomach or to have a limb turned into a mess from an explosion, and there are plenty of real-world examples of people who have gone through this. For that, I applaud their ability to keep moving on with their lives, to not get incredibly bogged down by the crippling agony of not being whole.
-Jacob Runnels is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune.