Eh, I'm starting to feel the edibles kick in and I have been thinking about this for a while now: I pity Phil. Not in the sense that I look at him and feel bad for him, but I look at him and feel bad for what he's done to himself. We can talk endlessly about how fucked his body is, how fucked his mental state is, how unhealthy and toxic his interactions with people are, but to me that's just symptoms of the larger problem:
Phil has no agency.
Regardless of how based in reality that statement is, the important part is Phil believes it so wholeheartedly that it might as well be real. Every fuck up is the result of someone else not doing their job correctly, and hurting Phil. To getting hit in fighting games, to losing his partnership there's nothing that he will acknowledge is in his control. Even positive things, like we've been talking about the yoga stuff and how he claims the clean Seattle air fixed his back. Let's take his word for that, just for now for the sake of argument. He did nothing to fix the problem that supposedly was causing him so much actual distress in his life that he couldn't drive. He'll talk about practicing for big tournaments like EVO, whole thing was rigged against him. Machinima fucked him over, curse, levaria, twitch, his own parents, set him up for failure or else didn't give him clear enough guidelines.
That's where the pity comes from, for me at least. I'm not the sort of person to think that anyone is entirely irredeemable, and to me that includes Phil. But for people to be able to redeem themselves they need to realize that they can make changes in their own life, and I don't think Phil knows how to do that, or if he does it scares him too much to make that step. That's why I pity him: doesn't matter how much money he banks, or how little he has to work to get it. I have my ups and my downs, but I am at least able to see that I can control my own life and try to direct it to the best future I can have. And Phil doesn't and will probably never know how that feels.