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I've only got myself to blame. It all started because I thought it would be a good idea to get a Playstation 2 (PS2). Then when I got my wife, Sharron, interested in role-playing games like Gauntlet and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, I thought I was oh, so clever.
It was two in the morning on a weeknight when I realized something might have gone wrong. "We should go to bed," I said. "Just one more level," Sharron answered. Uh, oh, I thought. Now there was no one in our house with any willpower. She has literally fallen asleep with the game controller in her hands. Don't worry, I was considerate. I woke her up several hours later as I was headed out the door to work. A couple weeks later, again at two in the morning, my wife realized that something was amiss. "Who's idea was this?" she asked. "Who said, 'We should get a Playstation'?" I tried to blame innocent parties like the Bush Administration, but she didn't fall for it. She just shook her head and pressed the "X" button, then the "Y" button, then she moved left, and, well, you get the idea. On those nights when we did go to bed, Sharron would have dreams about killing monsters and getting gold. She tried to take my pillow. "That's my gold!" she said. "Look! There's a big old chest over there!" I said, and she rolled over and grabbed the alarm clock. It kind of startled her the next morning when it went off in her arms, but her reflexes are pretty good now, so she just chucked it across the room. Sharron loves those games in the arcade where you get up on the platform and try to dance to songs. When she saw that we could play them at home using the PS2 and dance pad attachments, we had to get it. So now we were playing PS2 games and exercising at the same time. Soon we were working up a sweat. "This isn't right!" I exclaimed. "I bought the PS2 so I could sit in a big chair in front of the TV and not have to move anything except for a couple thumb muscles. I never expected to have to burn calories!" The same company that makes the dance pad game also makes a karaoke game. You plug in the headset, sing along with the words as they scroll by on the TV screen, and the game rates how well you sing. Here was another game Sharron could kick my butt at. Wasn't it bad enough that she had destroyed all my armies and conquered the world in Risk? On multiple occasions! What was going on here? The karaoke game caused us to get ostracized from (okay, thrown out of) our neighborhood. It had something to do with the neighborhood dogs howling at all hours of the night as if there was a continual parade of ambulances going by. Actually, a real ambulance stopped by our house one night. Somebody had heard me singing karaoke and assumed that I was in great physical pain. Easy mistake, I guess. We live in a trailer now, on the outskirts of town. We couldn't afford rent anymore, anyway, what with the cost of all the games, attachments, and memory cards we buy. Nor do we really have time for secondary things like friends, or bathing, but we have our PS2, and that's what counts. "You realize," my wife said, "that we don't have a life anymore." "I know," I said, "but have I got the solution to that!" I pulled out a brand new copy of The Sims, in which you control characters in a simulated neighborhood as they go about their lives. "See!" I said as we got into it, "It's almost like the real thing." So that's what happened to us, in case you're wondering, or if you're one of those bill collectors or family members that is still trying to find us. Somewhere out there, somebody's having a conversation that goes like this: "What happened to the Smiths?" "I hear they bought a PS2." "Oh, that happened to some friends of ours." "It's sad, really." "Yeah... I'll miss them." But don't worry, whoever you are. We may have forgotten your name, but that's okay. We're having fun. |
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