Over the years, I’ve played lots of video games and loved a great many of them: from side-scroller bliss with the Mario series to adult meditations on humanity (The Last of Us), Nietzschean philosophy (Dark Souls), and surviving grief (Silent Hill 2). While some of these were moving if not profound, the game that changed my life the most was “LOGIC LEVELS.”

This game stands out because it ultimately propelled my interest in logic and gates and also making hands-on learning fun. This seed would lead to the dial-up internet on a SCO V Unix in a shell, it would lead to the BBS era, it would lead to the philosophy degree and the linguistics and … just pretty much everything that I like. In some ways, there was a seed of me-ness on that Commodore 64 5¼" diskette.

As for the game play, perhaps showing is better than telling:

But what’s been so vexing about this game is that for the last several decades, I couldn’t remember it’s name and had the frustrating task of describing something that meant a lot to me, but which the world, largely, seemed to have forgotten.

In the Fall of 1995 I was gifted this book. The cover was the one pictured. It came to me in October, a month that has come to rule my life in so many ways. There, or then, in my first Fall as a freshman, I drank in the adventures of Carlos, an ethnology student at UCLA, and his (mis)adventures with psychoactive drugs under the tutelage of the teacher/sorcerer/shaman Don Juan.

The central conceit was simple: a graduate student from UCLA in chinos who is curious about peyote shows up in the desert at a bus station. He meets a Yaqui “Indian” called Don Juan whom he interrogates about peyote (which or, rather “whom” Don Juan calls “Mescalito,” lovingly). In pursuit of answers, Castaneda dips a toe into the world of Don Juan’s shamanic reality. And, like any good ghost story, having dabbled with the awesome primal power of the supernatural unknown, he runs away, afraid.

And here I was in 2024, with my nose bandaged up and a steady run of blood coming out of my surgically opened nose. I took Byron out into the cold for a walk and I saw the same edition of this book in the little library around the corner. Knowing I would be spending a lot of time in the coming days in bed, I borrowed it, so that I could re-experience Don Juan’s shamanic world.

Amazingly, it still holds up. In part, I think it succeeds because we small apes never really quite feel at peace in this vast universe where so many much-bigger things wheel around us at all times, indifferently.

Mammals evolved as prey and even now, even as man stands as the peak apex predator, we haven’t let our adaptive default mammalian anxiety go. We’re nervous, shifty, suspicious and ready for flight or betrayal; we wheedle and prevaricate in the face of being held to account. Other niche apex predators are calm, even ridiculously relaxed because they’ve accepted the Game of Thrones condition that their apex role requires. It is a world that is lethal, absolute, and unforgiving. Most of the time the penalty for error is death, but there are few moments with anxiety.

We have not evolved to have that cool.

To whatever degree our species resisted being another warm-blooded snack, it did so by means of knowledge. Therefore knowledge that quells anxiety is revered in us. That knowledge is called “magic” or “insight” or “revelation,” and the human who possesses it is called prophet, sorcerer, or shaman.

And that is the tantalizing promise of The Teachings of Don Juan. The rather-dull character Carlos is shown a world of power, of the animal, of the final where the only chit for play is death. But what Don Juan promises Carlos, and the reader, is the gaining of true insight. Tantalizing, no?