Hello World!

I am writing today’s entry while sitting on the toilet. Alright! Now that I have probably lost half my audience and my Mom is the only one left reading (at least that’s what she’ll tell me) I have a confession to make: I am not actually sitting on the toilet. Nope, the toilet is nowhere near me. In fact, I haven’t had a bowel movement in a quite some time now. I am not incontinent. Rest assured, for those of you that may have been concerned, my bowels work just fine. I need to change the subject. I am finding it quite difficult to continue in any sort of scholarly direction given that I started our first entry by lying to you all and then assuring you that my bowels are okay. In fact, I just used the Ctrl-F “find” feature and discovered that my two most used words are “toilet” and “bowels”. If there’s anything that I learned from the FX hit TV Show The League, however, it’s that the majority of important phone conversations among men take place while sitting on the toilet. Which segues me so artfully into my next point.

The majority of the show, however, does not take place on a toilet.

Even though I am not sitting on the toilet as I write, I could be. In fact, I might as well be. That’s the beauty of it. A moment I like to refer to as...wait for it...The Day the Board Games Died. Yes, that just happened. It’s like when the guy in the movie says the name of the movie in the movie. Hell. Yes. The Day the Board Games died is a curious moment in our generation when any and all elements of our human connection started to move online. In a random pot luck order, our conversations, our moments, our thoughts, and eventually, our games moved online. We stopped looking each other in the eye when we stopped to talk. If we stopped to talk. Our conversations often contain that beautifully awkward benchmark where our phone vibrates in our pocket and we instantly grow anxious. “Why the hell am I listening to you right now? I could have gotten a text/email/tweet/pinterest, or worse. I could have been tagged in a photo on Facebook in this is that brief window of time where I can save myself! Why did my friend bring a camera to Vegas?!? WHY ARE YOU STILL TALKING?” Then we stopped taking a break to chat. Sadder yet, when we stopped looking each other in the eye and having conversations, something inside of us still yearned for that human connection. So we turned to the only place we knew. The Internet.

I say “we” because I am guilty too. I am very comfortable sending text messages and tweeting from the safety of my room (or porcelain throne). But not Board Games. No. I love board games. I think they can test anything and everything wonderful about a person’s character. Someone wins (I usually do), and someone loses (the other guy), and I revel in that. I play for that moment. I play because for that brief evening we laughed, we competed, we yelled, we won, we lost, we may have cried, we may have fought, but in the end, we did it together. We rolled the dice. We drank the beer. The internet is trying to steal it. I won’t let it.

What victory looks like.

I’m taking back Game Night. I won’t let a benchmark of our humanity slip away. I want to beat you, and I want to look you in the eye when I do it. Who knows? If game night makes a comeback, phone calls might too. If phone calls make a comeback, maybe grabbing coffee will. And if grabbing coffee makes a comeback, maybe it won’t be so weird when I stand outside your window in a tan duster holding a boombox over my head playing Peter Gabriel (Say Anything, watch it).

Say Anything (1989)

 Hello World. I’m excited to be here. Now, let’s roll some dice.