{"id":75514,"date":"2016-11-07T14:12:52","date_gmt":"2016-11-07T18:12:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/?p=75514"},"modified":"2016-11-07T14:18:22","modified_gmt":"2016-11-07T18:18:22","slug":"this-is-no-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/?p=75514","title":{"rendered":"This is no game"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This piece by Jack Handey, which appeared in The New Yorker<\/a> January 9, 2006, made us laugh just as hard again this morning. Thank you, Mr. Handey!<\/em>)<\/p>\n

This is no game. You might think this is a game, but, trust me, this is no game.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t anything like that. Or where paper types something on itself and sues scissors.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t something where you yell \u201cBingo!\u201d and then it turns out you don\u2019t have bingo after all, and what are the rules again? This isn\u2019t that, my friend.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t tiddlywinks, where you flip your tiddly over another player\u2019s tiddly and an old man winks at you because he thought it was a good move. This isn\u2019t that at all.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t something where you sink a birdie or hit a badminton birdie or do anything at all with birdies. Look, just forget birdies, O.K.?<\/p>\n

Maybe you think this is all one big joke, like the farmer with the beautiful but promiscuous daughter. But what they don\u2019t tell you is the farmer became so depressed that he eventually took his own life.<\/p>\n

This is not some brightly colored, sugarcoated piece of candy that you can brush the ants off of and pop in your mouth.<\/p>\n

This is not playtime or make-believe. This is real. It\u2019s as real as a beggar squatting by the side of the road, begging, and then you realize, Uh-oh, he\u2019s not begging.<\/p>\n

This is as real as a baby deer calling out for his mother. But his mother won\u2019t be coming home anytime soon, because she is drunk in a bar somewhere.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s as real as a mummy who still thinks he\u2019s inside a pyramid, but he\u2019s actually in a museum in Ohio.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s twenty-three, and, secondly, he really is a hobo.<\/p>\n

All of this probably sounds oldfashioned and \u201csquare\u201d to you. But if loving your wife, your country, your cats, your girlfriend, your girlfriend\u2019s sister, and your girlfriend\u2019s sister\u2019s cat is \u201csquare,\u201d then so be it.<\/p>\n

You go skipping and prancing through life, skipping through a field of dandelions. But what you don\u2019t 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\u2019m sorry.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

You will never know what it\u2019s like to work on a farm until your hands are raw, just so people can have fresh marijuana. Or what it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t hate you; I pity you. You will never appreciate the magnificent beauty of a double rainbow, or the plainness of a regular rainbow.<\/p>\n

You will never grasp the quiet joy of holding your own baby, or the quiet comedy of handing him back to his \u201cfather.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I would go to parties and laugh\u2014and laugh and laugh\u2014every 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, \u201cGive me all you got,\u201d 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 \u201cantler\u201d fell off.<\/p>\n

I went waltzing along, not caring where I stepped or if the other person even wanted to waltz.<\/p>\n

Food seemed to taste better back then. Potatoes were more potatoey, and turnips less turnippy.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cJump! Jump!\u201d 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\u2019ve realized that this is no game.<\/p>\n

Maybe one day it will be a game again. Maybe you\u2019ll be able to run up and kick a pumpkin without people asking why you did that and if you\u2019re going to pay for it.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

One day we\u2019ll just sit by the fire, chew some tobacky, toast some marshmackies, and maybe strum a tune on the ole guitacky.<\/p>\n

And maybe one day we\u2019ll tip our hats to the mockingbird, not out of fear but out of friendliness.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s one single idea I\u2019d like you to take away from this, it is: This is no game. The other thing I\u2019d like you to think about is, could I borrow five hundred dollars?<\/p>\n

(Author\u2019s 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.) \u2666
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(This piece by Jack Handey, which appeared in The New Yorker January 9, 2006, made us laugh just as hard again this morning. Thank you, Mr. Handey!) This is no game. You might think this is a game, but, trust … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[4630,568],"class_list":["post-75514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-jack-handey","tag-the-new-yorker"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paNJ2E-jDY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75514"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75547,"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75514\/revisions\/75547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}