For those of you who aren't afraid of a small bit of reading, I trust
that you'll find the following well worth your investment of time.
The rest of you? Your wimpering & wailing about more than
one sentence to read will fall on deaf ears. Huh?
Seriously,
give this a few minutes of your time (maybe a bit longer for the short bus
riders) & I'll double your money back if it wasn't worth the
price of admission. -RAE
This is no game. You might think this is a game, but, trust me, this is no
game.
This is not something where rock beats scissors or paper covers rock or
rock wraps itself up in paper and gives itself as a present to scissors.
This isn’t anything like that. Or where paper types something on itself and
sues scissors.
This isn’t something where you yell “Bingo!” and then it turns out you
don’t have bingo after all, and what are the rules again? This isn’t that,
my friend.
This isn’t something where you roll the dice and move your battleship
around a board and land on a hotel and act like your battleship is having
sex with the hotel.
This isn’t tiddlywinks, where you flip your tiddly over another player’s
tiddly and an old man winks at you because he thought it was a good move.
This isn’t that at all.
This isn’t something where you sink a birdie or hit a badminton birdie or
do anything at all with birdies. Look, just forget birdies, O.K.?
Maybe you think this is all one big joke, like the farmer with the
beautiful but promiscuous daughter. But what they don’t tell you is the
farmer became so depressed that he eventually took his own life.
This is not some brightly colored, sugarcoated piece of candy that you can
brush the ants off of and pop in your mouth.
This is not playtime or make-believe. This is real. It’s as real as a
beggar squatting by the side of the road, begging, and then you realize,
Uh-oh, he’s not begging.
This is as real as a baby deer calling out for his mother. But his mother
won’t be coming home anytime soon, because she is drunk in a bar somewhere.
It’s as real as a mummy who still thinks he’s inside a pyramid, but he’s
actually in a museum in Ohio.
This is not something where you can dress your kid up like a hobo and send
him out trick-or-treating, because, first of all, your kid’s twenty-three,
and, secondly, he really is a hobo.
All of this probably sounds oldfashioned and “square” to you. But if loving
your wife, your country, your cats, your girlfriend, your girlfriend’s
sister, and your girlfriend’s sister’s cat is “square,” then so be it.
You go skipping and prancing through life, skipping through a field of
dandelions. But what you don’t see is that on each dandelion is a bee, and
on each bee is an ant, and the ant is biting the bee and the bee is biting
the flower, and if that shocks you then I’m sorry.
You have never had to struggle to put food on the table, let alone put food
on a plate and try to balance it on a spoon until it gets to your mouth.
You will never know what it’s like to work on a farm until your hands are
raw, just so people can have fresh marijuana. Or what it’s like to go to a
factory and put in eight long hours and then go home and realize that you
went to the wrong factory.
I don’t hate you; I pity you. You will never appreciate the magnificent
beauty of a double rainbow, or the plainness of a regular rainbow.
You will never grasp the quiet joy of holding your own baby, or the quiet
comedy of handing him back to his “father.”
I used to be like you. I would put my napkin in my lap, instead of folding
it into a little tent over my plate, like I do now, with a door for the
fork to go in.
I would go to parties and laugh—and laugh and laugh—every time somebody
said something, in case it was supposed to be funny. I would walk in
someplace and slap down a five-dollar bill and say, “Give me all you got,”
and not even know what they had there. And whenever I found two of anything
I would hold them up to my head like antlers, and then pretend that one
“antler” fell off.
I went waltzing along, not caring where I stepped or if the other person
even wanted to waltz.
Food seemed to taste better back then. Potatoes were more potatoey, and
turnips less turnippy.
But then something happened, something that would make me understand that
this is no game. I was walking past a building and I saw a man standing
high up on a ledge. “Jump! Jump!” I started yelling. What happened next
would haunt me for the rest of my days: the man came down from the building
and beat the living daylights out of me. Ever since then, I’ve realized
that this is no game.
Maybe one day it will be a game again. Maybe you’ll be able to run up and
kick a pumpkin without people asking why you did that and if you’re going
to pay for it.
Perhaps one day the Indian will put down his tomahawk and the white man
will put down his gun, and the white man will pick up his gun again
because, Ha-ha, sucker.
One day we’ll just sit by the fire, chew some tobacky, toast some
marshmackies, and maybe strum a tune on the ole guitacky.
And maybe one day we’ll tip our hats to the mockingbird, not out of fear
but out of friendliness.
If there’s one single idea I’d like you to take away from this, it is: This
is no game. The other thing I’d like you to think about is, could I borrow
five hundred dollars?
(Author’s Note: Since finishing this article, I have been informed that
this is, in fact, a game. I would like to apologize for everything I said
above. But please think about the five hundred dollars.)
posted by Ralphs_Alter_Ego on Wednesday 11th January 2006, 20:58:44
"As the light
changed from red to green to yellow and back to red again, I sat there
thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and
yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way."
"It
takes a big man to cry. It takes an even bigger man to laugh at that
man."
"If a kid asks where rain comes from, I
think a cute thing to tell him is "God is crying." And if he
asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is
"Probably because of something you did."
"Many people never stop to realize that a tree is a living thing,
not that different from a tall, leafy dog that has roots and is very
quiet."
"If you go through a lot of hammers
each month, I don't think it necessarily means you're a hard
worker. It may just mean that you have a lot to learn about proper
hammer maintenance."
"The funny thing about
driving your car off a cliff, I bet you're still hitting those
brakes."
"If you're ever on fire, I think
it's best not to look in a mirror, because that will really get
you in a panic."
"I think that a hat that has a
cannon that comes out, fires, and then goes back in is at least a
decade away."
"If you go flying back through
time, and you see somebody else flying forward into the future,
it's probably best to avoid eye contact."
"My favorite uncle was Uncle Caveman, we called him that because
he lived in a cave and every once in a while he eat one of us, later
on we found out he was a bear."
"Happiness is
not a circus clown rolling around in a big tractor tire so that his
arms and legs form 'spokes.' Happiness is when he
stops."
"Instead of having "answers"
on a math test, they should just call them "impressions,"
and if you got a different "impression," so what, can't
we all be brothers?"
"I once met an assassin
who's nickname was fart. I ask him why he has this nickname and
he tells me it's because he's s
This Is No Game
