Game boy

Monopoly is great when you’re winning. You can plop your wingtips up on your ottoman and chomp on your imaginary cigar with glee as you gloat over your prize properties and generally act like an all-around ass. When you’re losing, it’s intolerable. It’s like slow starvation at the hands of a sadistic dungeon master, only in that scenario at least you don’t have to worry about mortgaging Marvin Gardens to afford the rent.

My last game was a head-to-head barnburner against a fop named Jeeves. It was an epic affair. Epic! Just when it seemed he had me on the ropes, with the Boardwalk/Park Place one-two punch in his portfolio, whammo, I nabbed up all the railroads, slapped some hotels down on Indiana Avenue and watched him lose first his shirt, then his dignity. It’s a terrific game for braggadocious geeks like me who revel in their opponents’ humiliation. My chest swelled with a machismo that was equal parts Muhammad Ali and King Kong.

Which made me feel even more ridiculous when I was reminded that Jeeves is a computer.

Nobody plays actual board games anymore, so I have to rely on artificial players to get my nerd on. I play most of these games on computer programs called emulators; they’re basically software that allows your machine to run old video game systems, the Super Nintendos and Game Boys and whatnot. The legality of this is a little hazy -- there are much cooler ways to be an outlaw, lemme tell you -- but it’s generally considered acceptable if you’re downloading backups of games you bought legitimately. Not that anyone checks. I seriously doubt the FBI is going to bust down my door because I’m running the 1991 Sega Genesis version of Sonic the Hedgehog.

As I grow older, my tastes are shifting from rock-em-sock-em beat-em-up games to adaptations of some of the classic board and card games I remember from youth. Part of me knows this edges me closer to the realm of the lame. You don’t get invited to a lot of parties because you absolutely crush it at Clue. There are two reasons why this doesn’t particularly bother me. One, there’s only so long you can test your reflexes stabbing robots in the neck with an eight-foot-long samurai sword before it starts to get tiring. Two, if I’m lucky enough to reach old age, I’ll put the seniors in my independent living facility to shame with my jaw-dropping Scrabble skills. I consider this training. Watch how I play my X tile, Maude, and bow down before me.

And really, what’s the harm in revisiting some of the games I played with family when I was a kid? It’s a nice little jolt of nostalgia. As a grade schooler I used to go head-to-head against my mother in the Game of Life, a classic dice-rolling romp that takes players on a journey from birth to retirement in the time it takes to bake a chicken. You start by choosing a path, career or college, and then nudge your plastic car along the board attempting to hit certain milestones -- jobs, marriage, kids, etc. Now that I’m a cynical old fart there are certain milestones I’d like to add to the game: first shave, first downsizing, first time taking medication for an inflamed thyroid. By the time you reach the game’s end, with a bad case of cataracts and a 401K ravaged by a tanking economy, you’re tired of it all and impatiently awaiting death. Granted, this is a darker version than most people are used to, but I think it could do well among goth types and the emotionally disturbed.

Hearts was another big one in my household. Most people know how to play it now because of its inclusion in Windows operating systems, but in case you’ve spent the past 20 years sewing soccer balls in a Taiwanese sweatshop, all you need to know is that it’s a trick-taking card game in which the queen of spades is bad. Very bad. So bad, in fact, that she can change the course of a game in seconds. Emotions tend to run high during a typical game of Hearts -- at least mine do -- so when the queen is played you start to hear language that’s typically reserved for an army barracks or Quentin Tarantino film. Salty talk that could melt a statue of the Virgin Mary into a puddle. No computer or video game system can emulate this fully. Part of the charm of playing it 25 years ago was to learn new curse words, and this is partially to thank for my ridiculously inappropriate vocabulary, replete with at least 75 variations of “jerk.” In a way, Hearts gave me the tools necessary to survive on the Massachusetts turnpike.

Thanks to my laptop I can still indulge in this stuff. But something’s lost in the translation. A computer player doesn’t curse under its breath when it gobbles up the queen. It doesn’t giggle uncontrollably when you plunk down your Scrabble letters to spell “butt” and “goober.” And the action takes place on a screen instead of real life -- otherwise known as “reality.” Indeed, reality is being increasingly nudged aside by the virtual, and I can feel its absence every time I plunk down a checker or domino and hear nothing but the whirring of a processor in response. The games remain, but the tangibility has been lost.

Only in Monopoly is this an advantage. See, when a real-life player is losing badly, they always have the option to get up from the table and leave. The computer never leaves. It sits there and takes its punishment like a good little robot while I clean its everloving clock. It’s a small comfort in a digital world, but I’ll take it. In a way, I guess that’s progress.

A sad Sunshine State of affairs

Florida is like junk food. It’s okay in small doses, but overlong exposure to its artificial preservatives will eventually kill you.

Color-wise it even has a candy-coated veneer. Every time I go back I’m reminded of this. Traveling to Orlando for work a couple of weeks ago, I took a shuttle from the airport to the hotel and got a pretty comprehensive tour of the area as various parties were dropped off in town. Pastels and sudden bold splashes of pink bombarded my eyeballs, to the point that I was unsure whether I should check into my room or start hunting for Easter eggs.

That’s what folks in medicine call a symptom. The disease is tackiness. I need to be measured in my criticism here, because it’s easy to hawk spitballs at a place that’s not your own. Beyond the Mickey Mouse ears I’m sure the state has its own unique and worthy culture, traditions that would ignite in anyone a very human spark of recognition. But it also has Hulk Hogan and a five-story animatronic King Kong. So it’s kind of asking for it a bit.

Since work was my reason for being there, there’s a possibility this trip brought some bitterness to the fore that didn’t exist in the past. It’s hard to appreciate the good things about a place when you’re slogging away on your laptop in a hotel room while pool sounds and laughing families are right outside your window. If I’d had more money I would have paid to swap places with someone for a day or two, with them covering a stuffy suit-and-tie convention and me doing tequila shots in steakhouses and eating shrimp with butter. Come to think of it, that would make a good premise for one of those cute Disney “swap” movies. Guess it’s time to get my agent on the phone.

I’ve got a long history with Florida though, and in my memory it’s always has that Crayola sheen. My introduction came courtesy of a trip to Disney World my family took when I was 6. At that point in my life I only had eyes for Pinocchio, so anything potentially unsavory about Florida -- the cloying humidity, the neon green fanny packs -- never even registered. I was eating ice cream and hanging out with Donald Duck, which to a child that age is the equivalent of sipping fine Chardonnay while getting a foot rub by Scarlett Johansson. It never mattered that I was surrounded by a forest of legs with tube socks pulled up to the knees. It’s possible to have a genuinely magical time on that odd little sandbar, assuming you’re in kindergarten and severely nearsighted.

Later in life you start to develop a more discerning eye. My aunt, uncle and cousin moved to Florida when I was in my early teens, and at 14 I flew down to spend time with them. I had just come back from a transcendent experience as a student ambassador touring Australia, so I was feeling especially worldly that summer, toting around my hand-carved boomerang like I was Crocodile freakin’ Dundee. We did the customary tours of various theme parks, which my cousin and I were still young enough to enjoy, but the rest of the time we just sort of hung out -- getting up late, running around outdoors, playing video games until our eyes fell out of our sockets. It was during these moments, the slice-of-life moments, when I really started to take in my surroundings. And, perhaps unfairly, I was able to compare it to some very fresh mental images of the land down under.

That was when I first noticed that almost everything in Florida hurts to look at. Combining the overbright aesthetic of Las Vegas with the sun-bleached weariness of a desert shantytown, the landscape and architecture is by turns piercing and dull -- it’s like a pair of hot pink boots that have been coated in sand and left outside to dry for about 2,000 years. Even the vegetation is all sharp angles and jagged edges. Palm trees have a weapon-esque quality to them, as though you could rip them from the ground and stab a dragon with them. This might be cool if dragons actually existed, but alas, they do not, and so palms have somehow missed their true calling slashing the breasts of mythical beasts.

Flat, unvarying terrain does little to help the situation, especially since said terrain has been developed by businesses to the point of saturation. When my cousin got married in 2010 I traveled to Florida yet again, and my uncle gave me the nickel tour of a 45-minute stretch of highway in and around the Port Charlotte area. He pointed out various towns as we passed through them -- “This is Punta Gorda, this is Englewood Beach” -- but there was nothing distinctive to discern one municipality from the next. Strip malls gave way to strip malls, pink gave way to pink. Flat remained flat. Finding a shoe store or a place to buy a TV would have been a cinch, but anything resembling local character had been washed away by commerce. It reminded me of old computer games from the 1980s where you move to the left side of the screen and then your character reappears on the right, caught in an endless loop. At least those ancient games are still fun to play. The only downside is that they never programmed a Target into King’s Quest, so the hero Roland can never find a decent place to buy a pacifier and a DVD of “Get Shorty.”

Touching back down in Portland I was reminded of how much I love Maine, with its lush green, mountainous vistas unmolested by Disney stores and Foot Lockers. As an occasional vacation destination, Florida has its place. As for the rest, well, when Dorothy said “There’s no place like home,” she wasn’t lyin’.

Greet expectations

Sometimes I don’t see what’s right in front of my nose. Nothing exemplifies this like the greeting cards that are tacked up on my refrigerator, which -- I realized just the other day -- date back to 2014. At several points I must have taken them down to clean off the fridge, then tossed ’em back up without thinking, a kind of reflex only involving the lizard portion of my brain. That, folks, is what you call oblivious.

In my defense, though, they’re greeting cards, which don’t typically attract a lot of attention. They’re not diamonds or rabbits or even a square pizza; these things are unusual, and you tend to notice them no matter the circumstances or location. “Look Ethel, is that a rabbit eating a square pizza? And he’s wearing a diamond necklace! Egads!”

Greeting cards are pretty mundane items, all told, and yet there’s an entire industry built on them. This has always been slightly puzzling to me. The basic idea behind a greeting card, of course, is that you want to send a message to someone, usually in acknowledgement of an event or milestone: Congratulations on finally passing that kidney stone, I’m so sorry for the loss of your pet catfish Rasputin, etc. So you browse the racks at your local drugstore, find some art and some words that vaguely express your sentiments, and say, “Yep, close enough.”

It’s extraordinarily rare to come across a card that’s perfect, absolutely perfect, so “close enough” is the prevailing sentiment when you finally make your selection. Which means the whole Hallmark business model is based on people shrugging and going, “Meh.” I’ve rustled up more enthusiasm buying tube socks.

This apathy tends to show up on the insides of these cards as well, where truly heartfelt sentiments are in short supply. A genuinely touching card is a rare event, like a 100th birthday party or a coherent Pauly Shore movie. The precisely worded, poetic message crafted by the greeting card writer is often followed by a quickly scribbled “Miss you!” or “love xoxoxox” from the sender, which leaves you with a hollow artifact you might look at once or twice more and then toss. Or, if you’re like me, you stick them on your fridge and leave them there until they start to decay like some slow-rotting apple core.

Every once in awhile you get a good one. When I was in high school I had a girlfriend (amazingly) who gave me a birthday card with a pretty lengthy, handwritten missive on the inside, in which she expressed heartfelt sentiments that made the prewritten message seem like stilted fortune cookie text by comparison. It’s the first card I can remember that I actually wanted to keep, and I did so for a long time -- in fact it’s probably still in an attic somewhere, steadily collecting mold alongside old paperback novels and a 1997 copy of Game Informer magazine. Never mind that the relationship ended in spectacular fashion when she left me for a dude on a motorcycle. It’s still a nice memory. I learned two things during that time: Greeting cards can be more than just a piece of cardboard, and I need to buy a motorcycle immediately.

Unless you know somebody who’s willing to write something genuine, the best cards to get are the ones with money or gift cards in them. Not to be materialistic or anything, but if you’re not going to put a little elbow grease into the message, then at least slip in a bonus; it’s unexpected, and it gives the recipient the same feeling they’d get if they hit up three cherries on the slot machines. My aunt was pretty good about this. Every year on my birthday, from the time I was a child, she’d slip a $10 bill in the card and tell me to go nuts, usually in a thick French Canadian accent. Of course she kept this up until I was about 30 or so, and at that point, $10 didn’t really make many waves in my bank account. Adjusted for inflation and cost of living she could have gotten away with dropping me a hundred-spot and throwing in a case of Heineken for good measure. But it was sweet, and always appreciated. The gesture was what mattered, although heck, 10 bucks is 10 bucks, and at the very least it helped pay for those tube socks.

I always preferred gift cards to money, though. The starkness of plain ol’ cash is kind of intimidating. There are too many possibilities and inevitably I end up overthinking it and spending it on something stupid and foolish. I got 50 bucks from my grandfather once and blew it on a giant wall-sized poster of Saturn, thinking I would re-decorate my apartment with some kind of space theme. Never once did I consider that my decorating skills are on par with a lobotomized rhesus monkey who’s high on angel dust. Gift cards give me a mission, a focus. Greeting cards even come with little slots for them now. This is smart. These companies finally realized that people don’t want trite little haikus -- they want a trip to Best Buy so they can buy a tablet computer the size of a solar panel.

My family doesn’t buy me cards anymore, and they know not to expect them in return. I’m not saddened in the slightest. Whenever there’s an event, like a wedding or a holiday, I either pick up the phone or show up in person. Sentiments worth sharing are worth sharing in our own voices. A greeting card can only be a pale imitation of what we really want to say, and even if we’re not glib or eloquent, there’s more poetry in the gesture than there is in spending seven bucks at a drugstore.

Not that there aren’t exceptions. Those cards on the refrigerator aren’t outstanding in any way, but they’ve got longevity going for them. Maybe I’ll keep them there. One of them’s got a snowman on it, but  if nothing else it lends the place a little charm.

Pants on fire

“How do you like the casserole?” my mother asked.

My fork stopped about halfway to my mouth. On it was a pile of said casserole, bits of pasta with burnt edges held together by some kind of paste I can only assume was Elmer’s glue. Wafting from this cluster of food-like material was an odor you typically associate with county fairs, the ones with big belching heifers and dirty chickens.

I had two options. I could tell her the truth, which would hurt her feelings and cause awkwardness around the dinner table. Or I could flat-out lie and tell her the casserole was spectacular.

“It’s really good,” I said, and left it at that.

This minor exchange took place nearly 20 years ago, but I’ve never forgotten it because I still haven’t lived down the guilt of having lied to my mother. I’m hardly the first person to have done this; people lie to their mothers all the time, and usually about bigger stuff, like why they stayed out with their friends until one in the morning, or why their breath smells like a Coors truck that crashed into a pot dispensary. At least it was a white lie, meant to salvage her feelings. That takes the edge off a bit, although it stuck me with that casserole for months.

Lying is a part of being human. We’ve all told white ones, and most of us have told some not-so-white ones. Usually we get the more malicious lies out of our system when we’re children, still experimenting with various personality styles. I still remember a sixth-grade classmate, “Miles,” inventing a story about a gang of older kids who supposedly ambushed me while trick-or-treating one Halloween, threatening to steal my bags of candy. According to this fictional tale, I was so overcome by fright that I burst into tears and fled, cutting across neighbors’ lawns and mewling like an injured kitten. This was obviously a lie meant to embarrass me, but I got the last laugh. I weighed nearly twice as much as Miles, and spent most of the next day’s morning recess eating a chicken sandwich while sitting on his head.

Pathological liars are the worst, because their lies are obvious and come at you so rapidly it can actually be fatiguing. They rarely have any purpose to them. My parents own a duplex, and when I was a kid there was always a revolving door of families moving in or out of the second-floor apartment; the Johnsons would arrive, stay for a year, and then once the bedrooms were sufficiently stinky and the walls scribbled up in children’s handwriting, they’d leave and make room for the Smiths, who’d stink up the works even more. It was an interesting way to grow up.

When the “Humperdinks” moved in I was encouraged to make friends with their son, “Chet,” who was about my age. I tried. But Chet was a pathological liar. We were in the backyard swimming pool one summer afternoon, and I made the classic mistake of telling him something about myself. I mentioned that I liked the novels of Stephen King.

“I wrote a book once and sent it to him,” said Chet.

I waited a beat, anticipating that there might be some forthcoming punchline, maybe a “Just kidding” or a “Gotcha.” Nothing. Chet didn’t even recognize the silence as being uncomfortable. He just smiled and waited for me to respond.

“You wrote a book? And sent it … to who? To Stephen King?”

“Yup! And he wrote back and told me it was awesome! He said it was the perfect book!”

I hated this kid.

Even at the tender age of 12 I considered myself something of a writer, but even if I hadn’t been, even if I’d been a budding street juggler or rodeo clown, it would have been easy to sniff out this particular lie. It was just too preposterous, and for so many reasons that I actually have to arrange them in a numbered list: 1) You don’t write novels at the age of 12. 2) If you do, you have to be some kind of savant. Chet Humperdink was no savant. His main interests in life were Sonic the Hedgehog and coffee cakes. 3) You send novels to publishers, not to Stephen King. 4) If you do, he’ll do the sensible thing and throw it out. He doesn’t have time to provide feedback on people’s passion projects. 5) In a bizarro world where he did read people’s manuscripts, he wouldn’t call any book “perfect.” There’s no such thing. And 6), if you can write novels at the age of 12, you’re probably not living in a duplex in Lewiston and flunking sixth-grade English. Probably. I’m going with the odds on this one.

Summoning up the most skeptical tone in my repertoire, I asked, “So what’s your book about?”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

Yes, Chet. Yes I am.

In a way I was fortunate to have encountered a person like Chet early in my life. Nothing beats the liar out of you like seeing someone do it badly. Nobody’s ever 100 percent honest -- you can’t survive life without a modicum of tact, and small lies are often a form of this -- but you can be as honest as you can within the bounds of reason. By all means, compliment someone’s clothing even if it’s ridiculous. Please, praise your art-challenged child on her awful drawing of a monkey flying a spaceship. But when you start spinning outrageous yarns about playground ruffians and best-selling authors, you’ve crossed an ethical line in odious, cringe-inducing fashion.

Oh, and Mom, if you’re reading this, I didn’t mean what I said about the casserole. That was a total lie. I swear.