THINGS NEVER SAID #65:

“I went to the place where all the chess guys play chess . . . but I didn’t know how to play chess. I never learned. What I told people in those days was I only ever learned checkers. The idea was that I would lull the wannabe Bobby Fischers into a false sense of confidence. And then, at the last moment, I’d hit ‘em with checkers stratagems injected into a chess context . . . but that didn’t ever work, because those chess guys were all over my ass as soon as I ever started moving those chess pieces all wrong, just started shouting at me, ‘Stop! You can’t do that! The hell is wrong with you? Get outta here!’ . . . but, actually, things were even crazier than I just told you . . . because I didn’t even know checkers. I told people I was a checkers guy to trick them off guard . . . but then when I sat down to play I hit them with my Axis and Allies skills-boy, did that piss everyone off! I’m slapping down playing pieces for tanks and bombers and munitions factories-the chess guys are like, ‘The fuck is this? Get your shit off the board!’ I’m even making the battlefield sound effects of guns and cannons and explosions and heavy bomber engines. You’d think that would’ve won people over . . . but it gets worse. After pulling this kinda shit on the chess guys for a few years-oh, I traveled from place to place all over the country to outrun the bans on my ass-I went home one evening only to find that my Axis and Allies board game had left me a Dear John letter. Right there on the shelf where it used to be . . . if there was ever a time I wished I couldn’t read . . . I had become such a relentlessly irritating person that I ended up pushing that Axis and Allies board game set into spontaneously manifesting consciousness, literacy, and the power to levitate itself right out the door. That’s how irritating I was back then. It was something . . . I look back on all this . . . and I’m impressed. Because, in recent years, I haven’t done anything like that. Got married. Had two kids. I got a pretty good job. Money in the bank. Diversified investment portfolio. I have a mistress. I got a woman on the side. I play all kinds of tennis. My joint health is spectacular. My cardio’s next level. I never get dizzy in the sauna. I meet up with my boys two nights a week for Texas Hold ‘Em. I’m loved. I’m respected. I’m viewed as a rock solid adult type of guy. My mother’s so happy I stopped being a massively weird fuck-up. My father shook my hand . . .and I tell you . . . I can barely stand any of it . . . Look . . . back then, with my antics, I got to the point of inducing consciousness within a bunch of inanimate board game components, okay? Who does that?! I did. I was like unto God with my powers and shit once upon a time . . . and then I got scared . . . gave it all up to do what a million other people do . . . honestly . . . I only ever played Axis and Allies like . . . once? It takes so long to set up, and then it takes forever to actually play-and the whole time I’m like, ‘Dude. This is just fighting World War II all over again. We could’ve already fought World War III!’ . . . we’re always re-fighting the last war, I guess . . .”