Sometimes good things happen when you least expect them.
So I’ve been depressed since, oh, let’s say November 6, 2024. I want to be clear that this is not a diagnosed or clinical depression, just, ya know, the weight of the world has felt heavier for the last year and change. It started with the obvious horrible moment when it was revealed that enough people that lived through 2016-2020 wanted to see that all happen again, and escalated quickly once we hit January 2025 with an inauguration that was rapidly followed by planes falling out of the sky. And since then, it seems the pattern repeats every other week: our moist president declares some ridiculous new policy, anyone with the slightest level of foresight predicts this will lead to disasters, and then, shockingly, disasters occur. Just as we are learning to live with “citizens may be extrajudicially executed by a federal agency” or “everything costs more thanks to incoherent executive fiat”, suddenly we are in a brand new war in the Middle East, and nobody knows why it even started. And the next day, we are told that we have been fighting this war for longer than my entire lifetime. It’s not great!
On a personal note (I don’t know why I say these things; this entire essay is a personal note), this has impacted my general productivity. I keep everything running smoothly for my “day job”, as “accomplish tasks for others” is something I can do without much provocation. But my recreational schedule has suffered. The Nintendo Switch 2 finally got a glut of good games this past Fall! But did I play through them? No! I have the darndest time focusing on anything that is “fun” and “long form”. So I can play Mario Kart World or Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds in half hour spurts, but the likes of Metroid Prime 4, Pokémon Legends: Z-A, or even the story mode of Kirby Air Riders is too much for me. And that only makes it worse, because I feel bad for not making progress on saving Paris from some weirdo in glasses, and then I don’t try to play anything else. I have a backlog, Mega Dragonite! I can’t play with you until I at least address whatever is happening in Absolum!
This is obviously related to why I have difficulty sticking to a weekly schedule on the site. I had a bit of a backlog of articles at the beginning of the year, but, by Fall, I was just barely hitting my (self-imposed) deadlines. That Luigi’s Mansion article was pumped out poolside on vacation! Now the task of “actually play a game to completion, and then write about it for a thousand words or so,” feels so daunting. I am once again trapped in a spiral of not finishing anything because I feel anything “new” is an insult to my ever-increasing to-do list, and then nothing gets done.
But I have been playing videogames! Specifically, I have played about 80,000,000,000,000 hours of Pokémon Go.
Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But Pokémon Go is still my go-to for general idle moments. I obviously play the game when I go for walks (and I like walks more than some dogs), but I also have made a game of organizing items, gifts/postcards, and my daily catches as I unwind. It is pleasant to relax in the evening hours and stand in judgment of which Pokémon shall eat candy until they are big and strong, and which shall be deemed unworthy, and thus become candy. It has become ritualistic, and I am sure I do not need to explain how a daily, stable ritual can help in the face of a continuously horrendous news cycle.
And then there are the Pokémon Go events. Pokémon Go Community Days and Raid Days have been weekend mainstays for years, but there have also been “get off your butt and travel” events since 2018. I flew to Chicago in 2019! I drove to New York City three years in a row! And, within the last year, my friends convinced me to get off my butt and fly to Miami for a pokédonkey. Since I had so much fun at that event (and it didn’t hurt to experience a Miami pool in a traditionally frigid December), I decided to bite the bullet and zoom across the country to Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos 2026 in Los Angeles, California.
Then I experienced something I never had before.
So the Los Angeles trip was a mixed bag. On one hand, it was unrelentingly fun. On the other hand, my dear hometown/home airport was hit by a blizzard (“bomb cyclone”), and what was supposed to be a quick weekend trip transformed into an entire week once my return flight was cancelled. That meant I got to spend extra time in Los Angeles! With my fabulous LA liaison, Abby Denton (to whom I am eternally grateful, so maybe toss her some bunny chow). But it also meant I had to remotely coordinate driveway shoveling, workplace concerns, buy extra underwear, and generally feel like a jackass for imposing on my hosts for additional, unplanned days. I was trying to get away from anxiety! Why do I have to wake up every day at 6 AM (Pacific Time) because my phone is blowing up with power-outage related issues!? And never mind the fact that once your flight home gets cancelled once, you have a constant buzzing in the back of your head that it might happen again. I want to go home, dammit! Don’t screw with me, fates and/or weather! Just let me have this!
But, ya know, I also got to go to Super Nintendo World, so that’s good.
There are better pictures of me, but I was looking right into the California sun
But back to Pokémon Go. Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos 2026 took place at the Los Angeles Rose Bowl Stadium and its surrounding area. For anyone that has ever been to one of these events, it was the same ol’ yarn: trainers are herded into a generally large area, someone gestures at a map, and then you walk in a circle for hours and hours in the hope a shiny furfrou pops up. There are criminally expensive food trucks, trainers with “trade offers” pinned to their backs, and the sporadic family where mom and dad are desperately trying to guarantee their children are not trampled by a nerd herd stampeding toward a confirmed four-star skiddo. Pretty standard stuff, give or take the Mega Night rave.
If you have never been to a Pokémon Go in-person event, I will confirm that it does things to your brain. Every Pokémon Go event I have ever attended has been at a location I have never extensively walked before (I am only saying “extensively walked” because Liberty Island was at least somewhere I had visited once. Everything else has been completely foreign to me). But, whether the event runs only a few hours or all day, by the time it is over, the spot is burned into your brain. You are walking over an area that is not only being interpreted by your usual human eyeballs, but also the aerial Pokémon Go map. You are mentally logging where the spawns you “want” are occurring, and revisiting particular locations as they become available. Maybe you are circling the eating area. Maybe you are trying to accrue as much mileage as possible. Maybe you are just sitting down where you can find a spritzee. But whatever the case, by the end of the event, you will know these locations like you know the routes of your hometown.
So it was kinda neat when, five days later, I immediately identified my Pokémon Go stomping grounds from 30,000 feet.
It was utterly random. Had the weather at home been stable, I would not have been on that flight. I was supposed to fly back in the dark. I had been granted the opportunity to choose my seat the day before, and I only chose that window seat because I wanted to confirm the check-in process as quickly as possible. I am someone that is usually glued to my tablet while flying (that’s where all my comics are!), and I do not often take the time to look toward a window. It’s probably just clouds out there! And, if I am being honest, I could have looked at nearly any part of California from the sky, and not recognized what I was seeing. I was all over Santa Monica the previous day! And that just looks like sand and ocean from way up high. If it was not this exact spot where I had spent ten hours waddling around, I would not have recognized it. But, no, I looked out at the exact right time at the exact right place and recognized the exact spot I had stood a few days prior.
(And, yes, I took a picture with my tablet, because I figured I would doubt my own recollection later. Sitting on a plane for hours does something to a man!)
So, after the flight had completed, my car was freed from the airport parking lot, and I drove a couple of hours back to my infinitely cozy home/bed, I took a moment to consider what had happened. I saw an exact place I had been from the height of a plane. How many people have ever done this? The old joke of “I can see my house from here” is a cute one, but who has actually seen a location they recognize from the sky? Not some random highway or body of water, but one specific place? Only, what, three generations in all of humanity have even had the opportunity, right? And we take it for granted, but only a limited number of people have ever had the resources and opportunity to get on a plane. And then the random chance of being at a window, and distinguishing an exact location? It is certainly not impossible, and there are likely pilots and people who need to fly often that do it all the time, but it is absolutely not common.
Most importantly: even if this happens for some people every day? It never happened to me.
My trip to Los Angeles was prompted by a Pokémon Go event. The last time I had been in LA for longer than 24 hours was when I was 16, and I had been meaning to get back to “the West Coast” for literally decades. With Pokémon Go Fest leaving (vaguely local) New York City this year, this seemed like a great opportunity to get in my annual PoGo experience and Los Angeles. And, one way or another, this vacation turned out to not be the trip I expected. But, even if I had to restock emergency t-shirts, it was the good kind of unexpected. I got to experience something that has happened to few people that have ever lived on this planet. And it was something fresh for this 40-something guy that often feels like his years of experiencing something wholly new are behind him. Despite everything happening right now in the world, I got to see and feel something downright exceptional.
New and wonderful things are possible, and sometimes they come from the most surprising sources.
Also, I did get a shiny, background Salamence.
That’s rad.
What’s next? You know what? Screw it! I’m writing about Xenogears. Please look forward to it!