Strange memories on this nervous night at the Dojo. Ten years later? Eleven? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. The dojo in the early 2000s was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the dojo half-crazy and, instead of going home, surfing at Ryos place or some random shenmue websites, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the admins, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for some reasonable post)... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that…
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Shenmue 3 forum, then up the SEGA forum or down General.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…
So now, less than ten years later, you can go up on a steep hill in the dojo and look back, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.