"Punctuation," the word, always sounded to me like the name of some creepy camp in Pennsylvania, like the one, not the one next to, but the one next to the one next to Crystal Lake.

( ) : ; look at that shit.

Anyway, there are two ways I am thinking about Q-Bert now, either if videogames were around when making Exile on Main Street maybe it would have been a single album or that maybe it would have been longer. The game might have either:

A. taken up way too much time thus, no "Just Wanna see his face,"

or,

B. the game would have kept folks busy and "off the drugs."

My brain hurts. I know, "your face hurts from staring at my brain." Well…whatever.

Q-BERT. The name is basically a floating pyramid in space made of ice cubes. That is bad-fucking-ass. The name is actually the dumbed down version of how people spell FUCK on websites with manners (*&%$#) but Q-Bert is a walking video game version of FUCK and he will run from your snake on the colorful pyramid of life in outer space til it changes color and become fucking ice-cubes.

DRUGS.

Also See: (drugs.drugs.drugs.drugs.drugs.drugs.drugs.drugs.drugs.drugs.drugs.drugs.drugs)

Q-Bert changes the colors of the pyramid as he ascends or descends the pyramid. Once Q-Bert has changed all the colors on the pyramid a new level starts. Oh also he has a hollow nose. Once in awhile you accidentally make Q Bert jump off the pyramid. It's like Billy Joel and houses… this shit happens.

Maybe Q-Bert shooting stuff out of his nose is meant to mean coke. An article came out the other day that talks about how Video Games are POSSIBLY as or more addictive than cocaine and can change your brain so that you remain, like, some kind of super teenager loser and stay totally immature. Fuck THAT!

I fell asleep today in the middle or writing this. I was listening to Germs (GI) which is basically one of the best albums I own. I love DISCHARGE so much too but Germs (GI), man, that is some fine punk ass record listening.

Anyway Gmail went out or something and I was tired so I took an hour nap. When I woke up I was having a bad dream but it wasn't really all that bad mostly it was just like cheesy and wanted to be bad and LO AND FUCKING BEHOLD I woke up and Glen Danzig's classical music album was on, Black Aria. Whoa man. Just whoa. What in the satanic cut-off black t-shirt world is going on here.

I gots to go to the recording studio pretty soon so here is the windup. Watch this.

If Q-Bert is standing on the upper part of the pyramid and is looking at you does that make him a weird masonic symbol? People are saying that Jay-Z is a mason. In my opinion that would only make him the same about of awesomeness he already is so, funny hat and all, have at it.

The snake in Q-bert is also very awesome and mainly the game is really dumb and one time when I was on a lot of serious-serious drugs I was playing Q-Bert and I was sure that Q-Bert had stopped on the board and was talking to me. Seriously. It was also in public but the only way anyone would have know was face sweat. LOL.

If you don't like this article then it is because you are (or possibly I am) stupid so enjoy this old but amazing jam I made.

P.S.

The best level is when the cubes are blue. That is the shit. Later.

REMEMBER – DON'T PLAY VIDEO GAMES SITTING DOWN AND YOU WON'T GET WANKED LOOKING IN THE MID SECTION.

STAY ATHLETIC ABOUT YOUR SHITS and also EVERYONE IS STUPID.

bye. iss yall. RUFF.

PREVIOUSLY: Galaxian 2 Handheld, New York City

David Ryan Adams is a musician, writer, and visual artist. A one time plumber and Hardee's employee, his new collection of original paintings is on view at the Morrison Hotel Gallery's Bowery space. His second book of poetry, Hello Sunshine, hits the shelves this fall. He will be appearing at the New York Public Library tomorrow night. You can find him in the B.C. Rich section of most guitar stores. He is amazing and much taller and far more handsome in person. Also, he has a new record label all his own, Pax-Americana.

(Above: your correspondent, at JFK.)

Handheld Video Games were the shit when I was in middle school. They were an almost impossible thing to hide in my day and there was many a backpack modified behind a pawn shop or a 7-Eleven in hopes of silencing the bleeping LCD screens in order for in-class game play. Handheld video games were to us back then what Twitter is now, I guess. Only it had nothing to do with other people really and it was more electronics designed for improving your capacity to handle a version of galactic stress. In other words it was nothing like anything at all including twittering or the internet.

I need coffee. Sometimes I ask myself these questions like, "WTF am I doing writing a column I mean I don't have any business writing a column I mean what am I doing trying to go crazy oh yeah maybe I am crazy ha ha ha ha ha" then it just keeps on going like that for a long time "ha ha ha ha ha." Not really.

Frogger, Q-bert and Super Mario eventually followed the Pac-Man/Mrs. Pac-Man console-type video games. They weren't all that much smaller but they were cool. I am pretty sure they ran on C Batteries which was a bummer if you lived far away from a hardware store or weren't tight with your Grandparents. Grandparents always have too many batteries and tons of C Batteries "just in case." What was all that "just in case" stuff? Zombies? HARDLY! They were worried about space critters just like in Galaxian. They prolly remember listening to the radio broadcast of War of the Worlds or knew someone who did. Space critters are problem. Hey maybe the bedbug infestation in NYC is really space critters. Either way you should pull up your jeans cuffs, fashion people on your week. Or maybe you don't wear jeans?

Like handheld games, I am becoming outmoded. I am like an old rustic garden spot, I only respond to love and maybe I am just too out of the way to even be gratified. Either way, who cares. This whole column is probably about my feelings, my metaphorical galactic battle-zone, the ultimate handheld game.

I found these few handhelds at VideogamesNewYork on a tiny stretch of sidewalk on 6th Street. Just across the alleyway that runs behind that new futureshock building I could hear the rumblings of folks falling out of McSorley's. Oh me! The store is packed with tons of old Nintendo and out-of-stock games. They carry used new stuff too. I found my handhelds on the second aisle all the way in back next to an amazing Voltex LCD screened system which they more than happily plugged in for me. RockBand (some weirdo new game where you press buttons of fake instruments) was on and the imaginary Beatles were on that thing. Some kid made a rude joke about one of the members of that band and nobody laughed but nobody cared either. Most people in a game store are out of touch with their feelings or have too many. Or maybe that is everybody, or maybe everybody is well-adjusted. How should I know?

This city does not have a metallic heart and it does not beat for me—only I imagined that in my swollen hands, beating away the night letters. Those keys opened no doors but to my own desperate need to belong. What a stranger a young man can be to his own dreams. This was me, always.

Handheld games are for people on the go and if you look around you should be able to find some shops, arcade-related—or just places that carry outmoded electronics that can be classic gaming. Even On The Go, we are, as DIO has said we are, "Hungry for Heaven." But remember, only a scuba-instructing minister can be a Holy Diver.

P.S. Danzig.

Previously: Tron, 1982 (Bally Midway)

David Ryan Adams is a musician, writer, and visual artist. A one time plumber and Hardee's employee, his new collection of original paintings will debut at the Morrison Hotel Gallery's Bowery space on September 23. The gallery will also be featuring a new series of works for auction, with the proceeds going to benefit the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. His second book of poetry, Hello Sunshine, hits the shelves this fall. You can find him in the B.C. Rich section of most guitar stores. He is amazing and much taller and far more handsome in person. Also, he has a new record label all his own, Pax-Americana.

Okay, now that paragraph there is amazing as fuck. But seriously nobody believes that shit even when you don't write about the subway spiders. That said, in Tron's "Grid Bugs" level you battle spiders… How is this possible? I mean, besides the fact that it's just a silly video game (well, not to me), how was anyone to believe there were spiders in this microscopic world within a world? You see, you ARE Tron.

You are locked into the grid, and—like it or not, this column is jumping all over the place.

There are workers outside the window blasting through a retaining wall bluff that had all these dying tropical plants in there. I like southern plants, I like oak trees and I like crepe myrtle trees a lot.

Anyway, everyone knows that the best shit about Tron is the black-light stripes around the game, the galactic ice-cream cone level where you shoot your way up through the existentialist cone into the rainbow-room-topped flowing "going off the air" electric show top.

I once was so high on LSD on this trip through the back roads of NC when I was a youngin' sprout that I recall my buddy pulled over to the side of the road for something or other. I walked over to this dumpster and I went behind it to take a leak (the whole thing was shrouded in trees and we were in the middle of nowhere (why a dumpster then, right?)), anyway—

As I was takin' a leak, the entire dumpster started to disappear right before my eyes, in a digital glitch type way, and all the particles and glips and beeps and bobs all kind of started to rise up and before my very eyes, as I was looking up into the baby blue fucking sky with white cotton ball USA fucking clouds, those blips and beeps became a swarm of bees. For real (or not, I was tripping).

Anyway all I could do was laugh.

That is totally how I feel about the spider screen. Those fucking spiders come out of the space ice cream cone store in the game and they are just all over your shit.

It's like the people coming out of Macy's or Barneys in their new cloaks, in their new outfits, to better plunder the world more colorfully. I am not the enemy. I just wanna skate and rebuild a few video games.

California is a state of mind, or whatever. Something. Something here about that.

As the columnist pounded his meat fists into the skin of the keys—one last go round for the day—he could imagine that towering futuristic city looming in his near future. Towers of light and blah blah….He was returning to the city. To the city. New York City.

The splintered light of the TV screen inside the game lit his brain and he turned to look out the window of time and realized, "I am not the writer I would like to be yet, certainly under pressure. Better use music."

Previously: Gravitar and Excuses

David Ryan Adams is a musician, writer, and visual artist. A one time plumber and Hardee's employee, his new collection of original paintings will debut at the Morrison Hotel Gallery's Bowery space on September 23. The gallery will also be featuring a new series of works for auction, with the proceeds going to benefit the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. His second book of poetry, Hello Sunshine, hits the shelves this fall. You can find him in the B.C. Rich section of most guitar stores. He is amazing and much taller and far more handsome in person. Also, he has a new record label all his own, called Pax-Americana.

This column was supposed to be about Gravitar and dentistry (because the game is like having teeth pulled—it's that hard!) and about neighbors. I mean, like the neighbors in The 'Burbs. (Tom Hanks at his best? Easily argued.)

But I don't think I can even finish this column today because I have a bunch of stuff I have to do to get ready for my big two weeks in NYC (woo hoo!). [Ed. Note—It's true. The other day he sent us a picture of a huge bunch of boxes he has to unpack. It looked positively Sisyphean. He also sent a picture of a license plate shaped like a bear. For some reason.]

I have not seen Danzig since I moved here and I am getting really nervous that maybe he doesn't even live nearby. My buddy Keith laughs all the time when I ask about him.

Anyway, I will see you next week with more content. Here is my note from the doctor:

—theDRA

P.S. The invisible universe screens on Gravitar are not fair. Here is a link to this mindbending game.

David Ryan Adams is a musician, writer, and visual artist. A one time plumber and Hardee's employee, his new collection of original paintings will debut at the Morrison Hotel Gallery's Bowery space on September 23. The gallery will also be featuring a new series of works for auction, with the proceeds going to benefit the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. His second book of poetry, Hello Sunshine, hits the shelves this fall. You can find him in the B.C. Rich section of most guitar stores. He is amazing and much taller and far more handsome in person. He is an American treasure like fruit bats or bungee jumping. Feel his fragrant fire here.

Previously: Gorf, The End Of The World, And The Legacy Of Danzig