Monday, March 20, 2006

I’m told it’s wise to ease into bedtime, steering far away from potential sources of stress, by doing any number of sensible things: listening to music, reading a book, going for a walk, playing a game, or deconstructing the latest Doonesbury while taking a drag on the trusty opium pipe. How subject-verb agreement is possible right now, I have no idea, because the current mood is white hot rage.

For the past 20 minutes, I’ve been playing an utterly exasperating game. Picture a long Egyptian hall, with the exit at one end and a bottomless pit at the other end. You start near the pit. Swelling orchestral accompaniment. The goal is to make it to the exit, hit four switches along the way, and complete the run in under five minutes.

Sounds easy, right? It would be simple, were it not for a steady stream of obstacles sweeping through the hallway, cunningly crafted to hinder your progress and push you into the pit. Some obstacles are nothing more than walls with a window or two. Other obstacles are entire rooms you need to negotiate quickly, lest you, the room, and all your goddamn frustration plummet into the pit.

“Sorry, you failed this time. Try again,” intones the digital carny every time you lose.

After the fifth time I plunged to my death, I wanted so badly to throttle something. Perhaps I didn’t explain the game clearly enough, in which case I offer an analogy. It’d be like putting a fat kid on a cycling regimen and telling him to book it down the freeway. The only problem is you starved him for weeks and, more deviously, you replaced his wheels with gigantic cheddar rounds, and he can’t stop falling off his bike, eating the wheels, and crying. Sisyphus, I know your story well.