Commanderblue's Elegy

When life hits and you open your eyes for the first time to that big, expansive world--you only wish you can close them back up again, and resume dreaming. Dreaming about nostalgic days: about endless, online messaging where your numbed body conjoined with the chair it saturated; those insomniac hours of the night where you were tenacious to fall asleep just because of that itching, insatiable zest to triumph over the climatic moments of a video game (be it Zelda, Mario, or Spidey). Conjuring up a misty, vignette of those bittersweet junior high days where outside life was bleak, but life online was bright. You’d recall the electricity in the air, that incessant humming, which kept this board alive. And you’d scroll down, page by page, viewing a litany of messages and reading a friend’s update about how she or he belittled themselves by playing games rather than doing homework--for what is homework but an obdurate obstacle in the way of youth’s jovial and most frivolous enterprises? That of which I am referring to is the Spider-Man 2 board, the Spider-Man 2 game, the Spider-Man 2 regs, and all of the commendable and cordial times we invested into this dissipating page.

Age certainly resonated with me. I can plug in my old system, pop in the game, and pick up the controller and start playing. But I know it’ll never quite be the same (graphics aside, and we have next generation systems to thank for that cosmetic advancement). I’m talking about the experience, the novelty, and the long gone days of this board, and the game, which will never be reclaimed to fruition.

Now I want some peanut M&M’s.

"I'm your huckleberry."-Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in Tombstone