This year I decided to make adjustments. That is because people keep falling by the wayside. By that, I see a lot of people in my circle giving up, giving in, getting fat, dying, letting go – falling by the wayside. They never recover from the divorce. They never get up again after loosing their job, missing the big promotion. They never stopped partying like a teenager or doing “recreational” drugs to the point their brain (and life) has been permanently damaged. They fall by the wayside like flotsam in the mainstream of life, whereas (for now) I keep dog paddling wherever the eddy pushes me…
My New Year’s Resolution is to play more board games with my family.
“Board games?” family asks.
“Bored games,” one sister replies.
“Why?” asks mother.
“Board games are a centralization of thoughts and interaction on a primal level for the youth and elders to participate in a test of skills like in the olden days when fur-clad people had to teach and test the young ones how to kill a mastodon and out-wit the Dire Wolf by acting out imagined situations. Board games are modern man’s invention to recreate the legacy of human trials. I want to see what our offspring (nieces/nephews) can do… ”
What are the young ones thinking? They are suspiciously inactive with those busy little minds growing in their cranium, silent machines creating new ideas and imagining plans. New Engineers. Future academia. The world’s face not yet shown. What are they thinking?
They are bored already with Odd Auntie Michele, I think. Not at all interested in mining or the human condition. They can care less about Grandpa’s job or “the war” (which one???) or farming. We are boring to them, this species of short humans whose existence on the planet can be measured in months, days and a few years. Thirteen years old and already so full of acquired knowledge stuffed into their heads by teachers at the helm with a bent toward GREEN and wolves and fairy dust. What will they think of when it is their turn to save the world?
That is why the board games now: they in their youthful thin bodies with burning, reactive little brains, and us old ones in our saggy bags of skin and seawater with our soggy old brains pitted against each other. One very intensely concentrated on formulating a strategy, the other observing and digesting body language for tell-signs…
“Your turn…”
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