Games Over

Started on a sixty-four, no way to save the run Typed a hundred lines of code then watched it come undone Power switch, poof, gone, nothing in the can Learned early: build it for the love, not the plan Cassette to floppy, three-and-a-half in my hand Zip disk, USB, now it's cloud on demand Eighty-eight in the classroom: BASIC, Pascal, the rest COBOL, RPG, putting logic to the test Then the Army came calling, desktop publishing trade Laying type into pages, that's the groove that I made And the layout turned to markup, the markup turned to web One skill flowing to the next like ink that never dead GamesOver, mishear it once and it sticks "James Moberg" in a hallway, now it's carved in the bricks But it's deeper than a handle, let me tell you what it means I don't strive, I don't perform, I don't chase the machine (Games over, games over) Age of Apocalypse, watched the Man of Steel fall Wrote a comic-collector app, put it up for y'all Lotus Approach database, free download on the line Shipping software to strangers back in ninety-something time Ninety-seven, Allaire, ColdFusion in view Learned the whole thing in a weekend, knew right then it was true Ninety-nine, Monterey, went full-time on the build Apps I wrote back then still run, the foundation never spilled Never chased a fad, never bet it on a trend Leaned on open standards so the work would never end Only thing I regret? Trusting giants too long Half their products in a graveyard, so I built my own song The world says hustle harder, climb until you break Prove it, post it, perform it, for the world's own sake But I laid that burden down, found a different kind of rest "Games over" means the striving's done, and grace already passed the test Not by works, not by sweat, not by clout I accrue The game I couldn't win was already won for me, it's true GamesOver, mishear it once and it sticks "James Moberg" in a hallway, now it's carved in the bricks Deeper than a handle, let me tell you what it means I don't strive, I don't perform, I don't chase the machine