The day was like any other December day in Ohio — drab, dreary, and dreadful. Yet, what began in the morning hours and continued throughout the rest of the afternoon and on into the black night was a feat unsurpassed in its glory and splendor. It was like shaking hands with God, after which He reaches down, gently tugs on your testicles, and says “How’s yer father?” It was a bright ray of May sunshine on all of the unopened flowers of romance, still waiting, sleeping, in their dormancy. Birds began to sing; wild animals gave birth; we played basketball in the driveway — it was as if time had leapfrogged four months and summer vacation was in sight. It was the day my brother beat Mike Tyson.

It was ten, maybe fifteen years ago. My brother Leon couldn’t have been more than seven or eight at the time. Up until this point, he had showed no competency in any endeavor at all, save for memorizing the uniform numbers of the players on local basketball teams. But this day. When he put himself to bed at the end of this day, he was weary and spent, for he had bested the unbestable. He had conquered, from start to finish, with no codes or pussy-ass shit, one of the most difficult, challenging, blister/tendonitis/eyestrain-inducing games ever to be inserted, removed and blown into, and reinserted in an original Nintendo home entertainment unit. That’s right y’all — I’m talking about Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!

On this night, on the eve of the yearly anniversary of his birth, I toast him. Leon, few people ever have their moment in the sun. At seven or eight years of age, you had yours. You WERE the sun, and the moon, and the stars. A flame never burned so brightly.

Go Buckeyes.

I could have beaten that video game. I could have but I didn’t. Why? Too much work, man. Once you get to Tyson, Punch Out! is a really hard game, at least if you don’t use the cheat codes. Nothing is as intimidating to a ten year old video game nut than those big, lightning quick badasses the game throws at you in the final stages. Soda Popinski, The Sandman, Super Macho Man. And of course the King of the Ring himself.

Even making it to the final match was a huge deal. Before anyone had done it, Tyson was a myth, a holy grail. No one could even get to him, no one ever had, not even the game’s designers. Then one night, my friend’s brother “got to Tyson”, and my friend called to say “Guess what? My big brother got to Tyson! Wanna come over?” And I said no. Maybe that’s why I never bothered to beat the game: my false pride displayed at that moment kept reasserting itself – I was above Tyson. Plus, it had already been done, you know, that particular mountain had been ascended. There were other, newer, cooler new games to beat.

But probably it was mostly that I was scared to death of Tyson. That fucker was so fast!

I tried playing Mike Tyson’s Punch Out! again a few years ago, and I was terrible. I couldn’t remember any of the opponents’ patterns, and what I did remember was exactly the opposite of what they actually were. Glass Joe kicked my ass like six times. This was around the time I discovered I had become terrible at all video games, great and small, even (especially) ones at which I had once been indisputably the master. Kid Icarus, Metroid, The Legend of Zelda. When I was 11 I ruled, and now I sucked at them all, and even more at the newer, faster, brighter, more aggressive games they’re marketing today. Super Mario Kart? Forget it. My female friends kick my ass at that. My reflexes are molasses.

So I’m left here with my $4,000 gigahertz-up-the-ass-mostly-for-game-playing PC, waiting impatiently for the release of SimCity 4 (the time between Punch Out! and SimCity could usefully be called The Rise of the InterCaps in VideoGame Titles), and I’ve become the dorkiest of dorks: the “mature” video game player. What’s next, flight simulators and massive “joysticks”?

God, I want a Playstation 2 for Christmas! I want that youth back! Gimme it back! Just for one day! I swear I can beat them all. I swear it.

I’m down to 20% brainpower! Alert! Alert! MY HEAD GONNA ‘SPLODE!

I probably need a girlfriend or something.

Wait, no I don’t. What a ridiculous idea! To clutter up my already mismanaged life with notions of love and romance and adequate lubrication. As if I weren’t distracted enough! And I would suddenly have to start putting thought into my appearance. And probably I would be obligated to start caring about other people in general and their interests. Who needs the grief? Oh, and what if she nags? What if she wants to set guidelines I have to follow? If she wants me to «shudder» improve myself? What a needless complication of my life that would be!

Oh, but the girls… the girls is pretty…

I apologize for not posting much lately. It’s because of the sniper.

Which sniper, you ask? The one that’s been in the news lately. Killing people one by one over in Maryland or Delaware or some such state, with one of those really, really long rifles that can shoot very far, and with deadly accuracy.

In fact, I read somewhere that the rifles are so long that the sniper actually shot the people from a good two states away. They were small states, of course, being in the east. Nevertheless, it is not much of a stretch to presume that the sniper will soon have access to a rifle which can hit the midwest from the east coast.

I have been afraid to leave my house, lest I immediately be shot in the head. From what I gather, this has been the reaction of the vast majority of Chicago residents. No one has been outside for weeks. The exhausted local news teams haven’t left the studios since Day One of this tragic misadventure began. A great many people have put bulletproof screens in their windows. I am not sure where they got them, since they haven’t been outside, and presumably all deliverymen feel too open to attack and are lobbying for doors on their trucks before they resume their duties. But up the bulletproof screens have gone.

Little do those people know that sniper bullets are not ordinary bullets. They are really more like mutant superbullets, able to pierce just about anything, including heads and bulletproof screens.

In an effort to protect myself, I have enclosed my head in a block of steel. The steel is just thick enough that any sniper bullet will only cause minor damage. In the meantime, I haven’t been able to lift my head off the ground. This is why I have not been able to post.

See? It all adds up. Snipers!

However, I have figured out a way to thwart the sniper. When he’s not looking, I’m going to grab the barrel of his rifle, which I presume I will find protruding around some corner or other, and I will, with the help of some firearms engineers that I just happen to have been friends with from childhood, extend the barrel of the rifle until it is so long that any bullet fired will simply go all the way around the world and smack the sniper in the back of the head.

It’s a thought.