Daniel Fairbanks thought that the war in apartment 812 had gone through its fiercest battle, but then, last Tuesday Shelly told him, “I’m taking the White Album vinyls.”

That single sentence ignited a night full of accusations, idle threats, and broken promises.  Daniel thought that, as the bigger Beatles’ fan (“Remember when I was at the midnight launch for Beatles: Rock Band?”) he should get it.  Shelly appealed to the fact that Daniel didn’t even have a turntable: an argument so rooted in semantics, that Daniel didn’t think it worth addressing.

Eventually, Daniel decided to let go of his claim, instead taking Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, because it was “less self-indulgent.”  Shelly didn’t take kindly to the implication.

Two hours into it, they were going over the details of the break up, like they’d done several times before, each trying to find some meaning in the whole bloody mess and coming up even more confused on the issue.

Today was mostly spent in silence, which both of them  needed and then hated that they needed it. Daniel’s packed belongings made the already-small apartment even smaller. He was having a hard time of packing, mostly because he was so disorganized. He just shoveled stuff into boxes. One box was marked “books”, “dvds”, “papers”, and “mugs.” He counted 8 boxes labeled “books” when he was certain, in retrospect, he could’ve fit everything into just two.

He was sure he had scrubbed the last traces of himself from any common living area. The living room had had shelves full of boardgames, Rock Band instruments, and the tangled web of wires that comes with having more than two consoles. Now all that was left was the couch, the TV, and piles of boxes.  It looked so pathetic.

All that was left was to venture into the part of the newly divided apartment 812 that she had annexed. He reached for the door knob, stopped himself, and, instead, lightly tapped on the door. “Yeah?” she asked.  She was at her desk against the far wall, her back to him.  Unlike the living room, their former shared bedroom was full of life.  Shelly rearranged the room, though, and while the base elements were there – her desk the bed, shelf full of books — they were in some Bizarro configuration. Like they’d been a victim of a furniture swapping burgler. The room was also a lot cleaner.

He dropped down to the floor and looked under the bed.

“What are you doing?” she asked.  She turned around, a fine veneer of contempt plastered on her face. Daniel paused, making sure he wasn’t unintentionally doing something.

“I’m…umm…just grabbing the N64,” he said.

“Why?”

“To pack it.”

“It’s mine.  I bought it.”

“Well, yeah, you bought it as a gift.”

“No I didn’t.”

“It totally was!” he squealed.  He meant to sound confident, but instead had a Luke Skywalker whine to his voice. He kept rummaging under the bed and found it easily.  It was an ugly translucent turquoise piece of plastic, and Daniel thought that the coating of dust actually made it look better, like an artifact.  He grabbed it, along with that menacing claw of the controller.  He picked them up, went back to neutral ground, and put the 64 into a box labeled “plates.”

Shelly was at the door. “You don’t like Ocarina of Time. That’s, like, the only game worth having on this thing!” She leaned on the frame, and surveyed the perilous towers of boxes. “Who doesn’t like Ocarina of Time?”

Daniel sat on the couch. “It’s overrated.”

Shelly rolled her eyes.

“No, seriously. The story isn’t really that great, and the gameplay doesn’t really benefit that much from the switch to 3D. I prefer ‘Link’s Awakening.’”

“Of course you would.”

“What’s the supposed to mean?”

Shelly opened her mouth to say something, then stopped herself. “Nevermind. Just give me the N64 back.”

Daniel got up and grabbed the box with the console. “No, tell me.”

Shelly stepped out of the door frame, floor creaking loudly, and looked at Daniel, sizing him up. Daniel knew she wasn’t going to pull any punches. “Link’s Awakening,” she said. “It’s totally a write off. Link goes around, causes trouble and than wakes up, consequence free. Ocarina of Time is about aging, and responsibility and consequences. Things you clearly have no interest in.”

“Wow. Analyze Zelda games and insult me: Is there anything you can’t do with that bachelors in English? I mean, aside from getting a job.”

Shelly shook her head. “Typical,” she groaned. But she didn’t retreat and didn’t move. Daniel wasn’t going to be able to use petty name calling to get out of this one. It was time for another tact.

“Look,” he said, leaning forward on the couch, “there’s a lot of sentimental value. I never told you this, but my brother and I would get up early on Saturday mornings and just play together all day. You know how things are between us now, well, it just reminds me of a better,” he paused to sniff, “it just reminds me when we were closer, y’know.” He covered his face with his hand, and turned it away from Shelly.

“You are unbelievable. You didn’t have any consoles growing up.”

“Shit.” Daniel sighed, more disappointed in the quality of the lie, than lying itself.

“You just lied to me. Again. Awesome.” She turned around and headed back into enemy territory. “It’s mine, Dan.”

“Wait, wait, wait, wait!” Daniel bolted up. He quickly weaved around the jungle of boxes. Shelly stopped.

“Look, what if we played for it?”

Shelly turned around.

“What?”

“We play for it. One round of a game and we decide who keeps it.”

Shelly shook her head, but said, “Fine. What should we play?” Daniel got on his knees and pulled out a small basket with games. He put the basket on his lap and started to rummage through them.

“Mario 64?”

“How would we do that?”

“See who can beat the game the fastest?”

“Pass.”

“Pokemon Snap?”

“Pass.”

“Pokemon Puzzle League?”

“Nah.”

“Pokemon Stadium?”

“What are you, twelve?”

“Smash Brothers?”

“Nope.”

The click of cartridge on cartridge stopped. Daniel took out a game and showed it to Shelly.  Tetris. The great equalizer. It took them a few minutes to clear the boxes off the couch and hook up the N64. They played a marathon match. At first, the two former lovers calculated their moves and attacked the game with singular focus and purity of mind that would make the Dalai Lama jealous, but slowly, as the hour slipped by, the feeling of petty rivalry dwindled.  Shelly let out a manical laugh at a three line combo, while Daniel managed to compliment her skill a few times too. In the twenty minute game, no blood was spilled and no malice leaked out. They had fun, and for the first time in three weeks, they forgot that they hated each other.

Shelly threw the controller down hard. “Suck it bitch! I won!” She shouted.

“Alright. Fair and square.” Daniel pointed to the 64. “It’s yours.”

Shelly didn’t move.  She just rubbed her sweaty palms on her jeans.  “You know what. You can keep it.  I’ve got the Gamecube, anyway.” She smiled sweetly, like she used to, and Daniel was lost in her eyes for a moment.  Then, he remembered: the Gamecube.  What was to be done with the Gamecube?

By Hardcasual’s Canadian correspondent, Filipe Salgado.

It all started so innocently.

“Oh, we’re going to your Aunt Laura’s house? Well, I was just reading about something that I’m sure the kids would love. Oh, and it’ll be just like our days back in school, in Charlotte. You’ll never get this. A pinball museum. That’s right – a pinball museum! Old machines, from the ’60s and ’70s! Just like we used to play. Yeah, and it’s right around there. So… If you think so, maybe we should stop by. I mean, if we have the time.”

We should have known he was full of shit – Dad had lived with Mom long enough to know his way around a bold but well-stated triple-reverse-psychology “suggestion” better than we could have ever imagined. But none of us expected the scene as his hour of free playtime at the museum came to a close.

His fingers, still gripping the “Charlie’s Angels” machine’s flippers, are nearly purple with — it’s hard to say. Tension? Skyrocketing blood pressure? The effects of the full-body orgasm he’s been having since he walked through the door? Without turning his head, though, he says through clenched teeth to Mom:

“Take the kids, and the car. I’ve wasted my life. I’m never leaving this place.”

Dad’s never cried in front of us before, but tears are streaming down his face now – but they don’t seem to have anything to do with the fact that he’s just abandoned our family forever. No, now that his hour has officially run its course, he’s walking right past us as he thrusts his wallet directly into the hands of the nerdy young cashier.

“Take it all. Fuck it. I don’t need it. Just don’t get near me, and don’t ever try to take me away from here.”

Without another word, he’s back at a new machine, and as we stared, confused, in his direction, we could make out his muttered “oh, the action is fast on this one” and “I haven’t played pinball since Rhonda got pregnant and ruined my life.” We looked at each other – Mom’s name isn’t Rhonda. Rick, my older brother, starts to cry, too.

A comforting hand begins to pat us on the back. As we turn around, we see the pimple-faced cashier from the front desk. He offers us our father’s wallet – light a few $20s, but otherwise intact.

“Boys, don’t worry about your dad. I’ve seen it a million times before – he’s going to be going through this for a few hours, but once he starts losing his energy, he’s probably going to find himself down the street at a bar, drinking away all of these memories. Just like he has everything else since you were born.”

Rick looks up with him with tear-stained eyes. “You mean, Dad will forget all about this pinball craziness and come back and love us again?”

“A man never forgets pinball, son. But the world can keep them apart – and when they cross paths, sometimes something like this happens. He’ll be okay – or as okay as any man can be.”

We looked at each other, and the man far down the aisle performing an elaborate series of hip-checks on a “Gilligan’s Island” pinball machine. We had known him as our father before – but we realized that we could never really know him.

George Mitchell and his family entered the Chuck.E. Cheese and were immediately assaulted by the roving trills of two dozen token operated machines. On top of that, there was the ugly crooning of a Radio Disney hit over a fuzzy speaker system, and some Spanglish barking coming from the kitchen. The Nickelodeon lights were squint-worthy, only a few beats away from being dangerously close to Seizure Town. There was something so clean about the place that it must have actually been very unclean, like a hospital or a kitchen.

“We’re late,” Cynthia, the second youngest Mitchell girl, said with a snap of her bubblegum. She pushed her younger sister in the back – a pair of frizzled ponytails bouncing around – and made her way towards the closest mirror to check her make-up. “We should’ve just parked in front of the K-Mart.”

“I didn’t like the look of those guys,” George said. “They looked like they might strip our hubcaps and use them for toboggans.”

His daughter would have rolled her eyes at her father’s tenuous grip on teenage delinquency if it wouldn’t have interrupted her emergency mascara re-application session.

George took the place in as the family took their seats at a long bright orange bench. The Chuck E. Cheese reminded him of the one and only time he’d been to a strip club. The place was called Flirts, and it was located on the fringe of Reno. He remembered the smell, like burnt neon and hair product. Everybody who worked there seemed three days into detox. The more he looked around, the more George realized that the only difference between this place and that was the kids.

Victor, George’s oldest son, summed it up: “This place is so fucking lame.”

“Language!” his wife, Angela, shrieked. She slid her purse off her shoulder and, as she opened it, gave George a long, exhausted shake of the head, as if to say, Who’s terrible idea was this? At that moment, one of the methadone zombies appeared and walked the family through the pizza menu.

“We’re actually part of a party,” George declared. “My nephew, Alex Bloki.”

The zombie pointed towards a small group of kids tucked away at the corner table, like they were being quarantined off for being too excitable. George recognized his gangly, awkward 11 year old nephew (by marriage), by the crown of his bright red hair. He was looking down into his lap, his hands folded in such a way that there was no mistaking it for anything else: he was playing a handheld video game. Three of his friends, each more awkward than the last, sat around the table too, looking equally pathetic taking bites from wedges of cardboard made to look like pizza.

Victor groaned. He gave a pleading look to his father. George returned the look doubly, saying, If I’m in this, so are you.

“Ang-e-la!” a woman screamed. George’s wife jumped out of her seat, stood up like a bullet. She stood at attention as she received a half-hug from Debbie, her sister. Half-woman, half-Avon lady.

“Debbie!”

Before he could drown in a high frequency swarm of chattering, George made a break for the restroom. On his way he walked the length of the restaurant, trying to follow the poorly displayed signs. He walked past the skeeball, basketball, Galaga, Robotron, Q-Bert, Ms. Pac-Man. Every game he played as a kid. All of them empty. There were even a few George had never heard of before, like Drum Mania and Time Crisis. George felt a rush of nostalgia and excitement.

He could play these games with his children!

George returned from the bathroom with a goofy look on his face. He found Victor playing with Deb’s gold plated iPhone. “Did you kids know there’s an arcade over there?” he asked. His question fell on deaf ears. “They have tons of games,” he continued.

“We’re not blind, Dad,” Cynthia said.

“Then why aren’t you kids having fun? Don’t you like games anymore?”

Alex, the birthday boy, who no one had seen or heard approaching the table, spoke up in his loudest voice, “YEAH, LIKE FARMVILLE!” The Mitchell family jumped in their seats, as if startled by a gunshot. “I DON’T LIKE PLAYING THOSE GAMES BECAUSE YOU DON’T GET ACHIEVEMENTS OR ANYTHING SO NO ONE KNOWS HOW GOOD YOU ARE AT THEM.”

“I think you get tickets,” George said.

“MAYBE THAT WOULD BE COOL IF YOU COULD SCAN THE TICKETS AND HAVE THEM IN YOUR CONSOLE, KIND OF LIKE VIRTUAL TROPHIES.”

“You can trade them in for prizes.”

“YEAH, BUT WHAT’S THE POINT OF DOING IT IF ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS DON’T KNOW YOU DID IT?”

George studied his nephew. “You could probably go home with a laser pointer if you spent all night on the ski ball.”

Alex looked at the ground, then back at his uncle. He looked ashamed, as if he didn’t know before that he was talking to a retarded person and was now replaying over the conversation in his head to make sure he wasn’t being mean. “I THINK MY CINNAMON STICKS ARE HERE,” he proclaimed, then took his Nintendo DS out of his pocket walked back to his friends.

George turned to Victor. “There’s a game where you can shoot people, but as a team. You play as partners.”

“Time Crisis,” Victor said.

“You can use pedals to take cover. Isn’t that neat?”

Victor’s lips parted. He looked up from his phone, at his sister, looking for help. His vocabulary was strained trying to articulate the crudeness of a pedal-based cover system in a post-Gears of War landscape. He finally decided on, “You’re right. That is really neat, Dad…”

George could tell his son didn’t find this at all ‘neat’. In fact, he could tell he was being humored, and, being a proud man who didn’t enjoy being out of the loop, he decided he wasn’t going to allow it. “I’m going to grab some change from the car and grab some tokens and we can play some games.”

“Sure, whatever.”

Minutes later, George guided Victor around the red carpet labyrinth. The tokens jangling in his pocket creating a joyous sound that reminded George of childhood trips to the corner store — or, at the very least, the TV shows he used to watch where people did that. George steered his son toward the technicolor epicenter of gun, where. he was overwhelmed by the sounds and the sights. He felt dizzy and drunk, but his son remained completely calm.

Victor squirmed a bit, knowing his father expected some reaction out of him. George thought the sheer technical prowess of the arcade’s full force would knock him out. Clearly, he had overestimated the power of the joystick. He walked over to a the cabinet playing the demo mode of Die Hard: The Arcade Game.

“Die Hard is a pretty cool movie, huh?”

Victor looked away. “Sure is, dad.”

George calmed himself. “All right. Fine. I don’t see how playing one of the best action of movies of all time wouldn’t impress you, but that’s neither here nor there.” George pointed to the two kids in the corner. “Those guys are having fun.”

“Dad, I’m pretty sure they’re stoners.”

“What?”

He spoke in a whisper, “They’re high.”

“Oh,” George shook it off. “What about pinball?”

He grabbed his son by the shoulders and brought him over to the official Chuck E. Cheese pinball machine. Different parts of the board lit up in a mishmash of colors, each triggering a burst of siren sound. Reds, greens, yellows screaming in a primal invitation: Never had the idea of playing with a giant rat been more appealing.

“What do you think?”

“It’s cool.”

“Stop humoring me!” George shouted and threw up his hands. “I know you don’t think it’s cool! You think it’s boring! Everything we do is so boring! I take you to the beach, it’s boring! I take you to Disneyland, it’s boring! We’re at the most distracting place on the entire planet and you’re still bored! Look at all of these games. You can be a space man, or John McClane, or Jimi Hendrix, or…whatever that thing is,” he said, pointing to the Q-Bert machine. “ What do I have to do to get you to get into something and not just humor me?”

Victor, a dark-eyed young man with a long, full face, had up to this point played the part of the adult to a T. Now, however, he shrunk in his clothes and became boyish. He looked about to cry.

George sighed. “What do you play, Victor?”

Victor shrugged, then George expected Victor to grab his PSP, but instead, he went for his phone. He fiddled with it a bit and turned it towards his father. “It’s called Mafia Wars.”

George stared at the numbers, trying to make sense of it all, but even if he could understand how the game was played. It wouldn’t explain how a spreadsheet had enamored his son, but Tekken 6 didn’t warrant a raised eyebrow. He listened attentively as his son explained the game to him on the walk back to the orange bench, where the family was finishing off their second Hawaiian style pizza.

When they left a few hours later, the family was shocked to find the Camry’s hubcaps missing. Standing there in the parking lot, his hands on his hips, George should have been angry. Instead, he smiled, and laughed to himself all the way home, content in the knowledge that he wasn’t completely out of touch with today’s youth after all.

Written by Hardcasual’s Canadian correspondent, Filipe Salgado.

It’s the silence between the songs; that’s the agonizing part. After the bows have lowered and the audience has applauded — in those two minutes when the conductor readies his sheet music and the spit valves are emptied — that’s when Mark Loverbaum really feels his night slowly ticking away. He feels his slick hair greying, and any chance of browsing stock trading websites on the internet late into the night disappearing in the ether…

Loverbaum is seated in section B, row 9 with his family. The mezzanine. His teenage son plays tuba in the Markeell Junior High marching band, something he and his wife do their best to promote every way they can. When they got a flyer in the mail for the upcoming fall concert series, they jumped at the opportunity to showcase their support. His wife picked the night, and Mark bought the tickets. The minute he clicked the little PURCHASE button, his fate was sealed. It would be no ones fault but his own. He had no idea what he had in store for him.

My God, how boring! Twenty-two obscure hits from the seventeenth century, all of them sounding the smae, compiled by an esteemed creative director that no one has ever heard of, played perfectly by sixty-six musicians no one has ever heard of, with the strained, unexcited expressions on their faces that the audience has. So rehearsed, so soulless, so fucking long…

Mark glances at his playbill in the inbetween spaces. He takes his glasses off and rubs his temples. The next piece I’d by someone named…

Russian Folk Piece?! Oh, for fuck’s sake! It’s like these guys pride themselves on digging up old bullshit that time forgot, but they don’t get that time forgot it because it was meant to be forgotten! Let old shit stay buried, maestro! Mark wants to climb out of his seat, out of his suit, out of his skin, but he can’t because he wants to show his son and wife how much he appreciates this: the arts. Even though right now he’d do anything for a quick hit by the Moody Blues. Or maybe something by Steppenwolf.

The conductor raises his arms. The philoharmonic readies. The audience inhales. The music begins. Mark’s eyes go glassy. He’s about to retreat into the back of his mind – that place that one goes when faced with unescapable boredom.

Wait a second… He knows this song… It’s Tetris! Yeah! It has to be! He’d recognize that song anywhere! Mark leans forward in his seat and looks at his son with a goofy smile on his face. His son seems to only half understand, but totally game for the excitement.

The experience is magical. For six minutes, Mark can practically see the blocks descending from behind the upper velvet curtain and settling atop the heads of the brass section. A box appears to the right of the stage, beyond the percussion on the raised platform. It visualizes the next shape in the series. A block, a zag, a zag, a line. A tally appears in the gilded ceiling of the concert hall, rocketing upward as a Tetris clears the horn section.

He’s filled with memories from his pot-fueled teens in the murky basement of the corner arcade, his greasy pizza hands throttling the joystick. He’s transported to the night when he got the seventh highest score on the chart in front of Elizabeth Dulane, who kissed him on the cold concrete by the jacuzzi at two in the morning. He’s surrounded by long-haired friends on the roof of Shortall’s Bar the night before the first winter blizzard.

Then, as quickly as it began, Korobeiniki ends. The audience applauds, the conductor bows, and Mark Loverbaum instinctively stuffs his hand in his pocket to pull out another quarter.

Amidst a flurry of discussion of President Obama’s recent State of the Union address, news reached Hardcasual this morning that the President had, in fact, been kidnapped by ninjas.

While the President’s Day weekend promised to be a joyride for many Americans, who planned to finish Mass Effect 2, drink a metric assload of cheap beer, and completely ignore the Winter Olympics, a generation is now forced to ask themselves a serious question: are they bad enough dudes to rescue the President?

One  New York City local, Lindsay Calderbank, was quick to react. “I’m not a dude. And I’m not even all that bad. But I voted for Obama. Absentee, in North Carolina, where it really mattered. But I find the gender implications of the question more than a little troubling. I mean, what if there was a female president? Would we seek bitchy chicks? I mean, is that a double standard?”

Another man, Justin Wooten, told us, “I don’t see why the President was captured by ninjas, anyway. I mean, ninjas – that can’t exactly be the result of some international policy. There’s no country right now that’s keeping an army of ninjas. And if there’s a rogue group of ninjas out to fuck shit up – well, I’ll wait until I hear their demands before I decide which side I’m on.”

The world currently awaits to hear the answer, posed to one American at a time – “are you a bad enough dude to save the President?”. But there seems to be no clear one. One of the first to respond to the call was Joe Biden, the Vice President, whose delay in response was only momentary before he declared: “The nation needs a clear path from this point forward. And the President is probably going to get offed by those ninjas either way. Wait, was that too blunt? Strike that from the record. This whole conversation is off the record. I apologize for my recent statements. Fuck, where’s Rahm?”

Experts on recent President-kidnappings have suggested that the government seek at least two individuals, at least one of which has a “power punch”, and another who may or may not have learned the eastern technique of the “roundhouse kick”. But those on both sides of the aisle can agree that the journey may take them across slow-moving 18-wheelers, slow-moving trains, and perhaps even a oddly-containing city block.

Although the job seems near-impossible, the rewards are not to be sneered at: The government has promised a pepperoni pizza to the American heroes who act quickly to save our President.

There’s no denying it, Metro City is a terrible place to live. Crime is so bad here that people don’t leave their homes for fear of being mugged, even though most people don’t have anything worth being mugged over. The populace is beaten into submission and have, in their complacency, willingly turned their streets over to the gangs, who wander around town, busting open oil drums and cans, searching for weapons to pawn for drug money.

The new mayor, what can he do? He ran on a platform of change; he said he was going to clean the streets up in his campaign ads, but everyone knew that was kind of bullshit. He’s just one former professional wrestler. They’re an entire city full of punks, thugs, and strongmen. It seems like all is lost in Metro City. The good people here, they might as well pack up their bags and head to their places of origin.

Then, one day, it happens. The mean streets of Metro City finally meet their match. Two men – both trained in the ancient martial art of kicking ass with impunity – walk from block to block punching and kicking people to death.

Punch punch kick. Punch punch kick. Kick.

Who are they? They’re men on a mission to save the mayor’s daughter from the Mad Gear Gang. The people whose blood coats their fists might not be involved in that situation, but they’re getting their asses kicked anyway. No one on this street is innocent today. Everyone is dealt with equally.

These guys mean business. They lay down the law. They don’t have the time to stop and ask themselves, ”Do all these people even belong to the gang that is holding the mayor’s daughter for ransom?” No. Of course not. But that’s the deal. If you’re on this street right now, you’re getting your ass kickboxed out of commission.

Punch punch kick. Punch kick. Punch punch punch. Kick. Kick. Punch.

The fists and feet are flying so fast that none of these methhead, long-haired street rats can react fast enough. They amble in from every direction, trying to get the best of these two, but end up head first in the concrete, chipped teeth in their stomachs.

Do their victims die? These guys don’t even bother to check. They move on to the next block, and then the next one, because they’re desperate for more ass to kick. And it’s true what they say: ask and the Lord provides. Pretty much anything with a pulse has it put it rest, even the boss of the slums is laid out.

They descend into the subway, where the scene is different – murky, with graffiti – but the gig doesn’t change. There are hundreds of men to disarm and then pummel into submission here, too. They have weird names like Tad and Grock. Nobody has a gun, because everyone wants to prove to themselves that they can kick these guy’s asses.

After the subway it’s on to somewhere else. It doesn’t matter where. It’s all going to be the same, no matter where they end up. Plot, variety, sense of place — that’s all window dressing to two guys on a warpath. They’re moving full speed ahead, regardless of their mission, two crazy windmills dishing out as much nonlethal pain as possible for another hundred blocks.

Punch punch kick. Punch kick. Punch punch punch.

The mean streets behind them are left bloodless, but a little bruised, and the mean streets ahead of them, well, we can’t possibly know that, but we can safely assume that it will include punching to death a lot of people.

The sun shines bright over an American city – Seattle – a city built by the hands of Americans and run on American industry. It is the best of what we have to offer: with real culture, and class, and, unlike several of its metropolis kin, it is surviving one of the worst recessions the country has ever witnessed.

That is, until the Dow Jones Industrial Average careens around a tight corner, nearly flying off the embankment and into the choppy river waters of the harbor, managing to straighten out just in time to pull off one of the most breathtakingly ugly crashes the market has ever seen.

Time slows to a crawl. A frame of a moving van launches skyward off its axle and collides with a stray bit of The Walt Disney Company, which pings back towards Earth and glides along the pavement. Fragments of what was once Procter & Gamble lay nearby, their edges charred by flame and greed.

A nearby crowd of pedestrians scatters in every direction, their faces contorted into terrified masks, as the world’s largest stock market index continues on its rampage. It clips the back of an oil tanker and spins seven times in the air, then lands derivative-first on top of a hot dog cart, and it isn’t done there…

The points! The digits roll and show no signs of slowing. A two-times bonus here, a three-times bonus there, as stray bits of the Dow Jones launch into the atmosphere, colliding with the fragile European markets. They fall to pieces, shatter into ruins, explode brilliantly.

There are screams, tings, crunches; the soundtrack to a disaster played in slow-mo. A man is running with his briefcase in his hands and shouting SELL SELL SELL so slowly that it sounds like SAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLL SAAAAAALLLLLLLL SAAAAAALLLLL. He is promptly sliced into two by the business end of Pfizer.

There are bonuses coming in from places so far from the site of the crash that one would have an impossible time tracking it. A few thousand points come in from a warehouse in London, which the sizeable chunk of Kraft Foods has just destroyed. Another thousand come in from a small town in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where the majority of the town has lost their jobs to the burning carcass of Boeing.

Minutes have passed, but this is only seconds in real time, and the catastrophe only gets worse. There’s no stopping it. The Dow Jones was, or is, a behemoth, a tanker truck of unthinkable size, barreling forward at such speeds that not even a brick wall or the U.S. government can stop it. It has ruined the harbor, caused a pile-up that will take years to clean up, and put countless livelihoods in danger, and won’t stop until it has lost all momentum. No invisible hand can grasp it.

The digits flip past the current high score. Double it. Triple it. It keeps counting until it can’t go any higher, and starts all over at zero to show that it means business. The crash continues until it finally ends, with everything in pieces, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average bottom up and miles away from where it began.

The turn is over, and the controls are handed over to those which are too big too fail, who stand by and watch with smug expressions as the people of Seattle are burned alive in their cars. Blackness for a moment, then the clock ticks down to zero and a brand new engine roars to life.

The dust has long settled at Moo Moo Farms. It’s a miserable sight. The varied contestants – Mario, Donkey Kong Jr., the guy with the mushroom for a head – they all went home years ago with their trophies in hand. The Monty Moles have even packed up their bags and moved on with their lives, unable to cope with a life where they couldn’t pop their heads out of their holes with the singular, suicidal purpose of being nailed by a speeding go kart.

The Mario Kart Grand Prix has not been back to Moo Moo Farms for over a decade now – though the contest coordinators have scheduled a race or two at a nearby meadow. The farm itself, which depended on the business of those who watched the races with creamy milk moustaches on their faces, closed its doors in 2002. The grass has gone from green to grey, and the dirt track littered with jagged rocks.

Though the picture looks bleak, there is a lingering sign of life speeding around the track. It is propelled by an unseen force, rigidly darting from side to side as if on a track: a blue spiky turtle shell, the bane of the frontrunner’s existence. It is an item so annoying and accurate that it was banned from play in future tournaments, one that instantly seeks out whoever is winning and punishes them for being the best.

This particular shell was somehow forgotten when the last race ended over ten years ago and has been going around the track ever since. With no front place runner to harass, it circles the track on autopilot, a confused machine in an endless loop.

Today, at midnight, it will complete its 1,112,392th lap. That’s no landmark, but the regularity of the thing – like the steady ticking of a clock – makes one wonder, What has happened in the world since this weapon was first sent out? A million lives have been lost, another million gained; wars have been fought and won and lost; hearts have been sewn together as well as ripped apart; the world has turned around and around and around as the little blue shell makes its regular trip around the track.

The blue turtle shell is only the tip of the iceberg. One has to wonder, are there still banana peels rotting on the brunette slopes of Choco Mountain? And how many fake item boxes have been left to the elements out in Yoshi Valley? These are the things we never think about when the confetti has been swept away and the winners and losers have all been chosen.

No one will come to blue turtle shell; no one knows it is here. Perhaps one day an unlucky bird will spot an earthworm in the soil and explode in a mess of blood and feathers, we don’t know. All we can be sure of is that, if left alone, the blue shell zipping around Moo Moo Farms will seek, for eternity, to spoil the race for an individual who no longer exists: the champion in the making, the driver out in front. And so we must let it be.

Two combatants enter the ring. They toss their gloves to the ice and raise their fists in the air. With the black backdrop behind them, they look like the survivors of the apocalypse, two blocky marionettes engaged in the oldest art form known to man: pugilism. Their banners wave, brightly lit in the empty air around them.

“I’m going to knock your ass out,” says Peter, gripping the N64 controller in his hand. “Then we can go meet Whitney and see Titanic.” He’s lanky, with bright red lips and a fresh buzz cut.

“No hurry, dude. She’s seen it twelve times already,” replies Aaron, Peter’s best friend. He’s short, pudgy, dressed in his favorite hoodie. They sit on the ground with their backs against Peter’s bed, surrounded by Dungeons and Dragons Handbooks.

The combatants throw their first round of punches. Why do they fight? Because the man in red and white has been shamed one too many times by the one in forest green. The man in green is pummeled into submission. The crowd goes wild.

“Fucked you up!” Peter shouts. He rises from the couch and tosses the controller to the ground. “Okay. Let’s go. I want to hit Krispy Kreme on the way.”

“One more,” Aaron says, his gaze focused on the screen. “This Madcatz controller is stupid.”

Peter sighs. He looks at the television screen. The 3rd period of the game has begun. There are no points on the board, because they’ve been fighting the whole time. “But we’ll have to play more hockey.”

“Just keep checking my dude.”

Peter picks up his sticks and the two spend a minute checking each other as hard as they can. The puck, a circle of flickering rainbow, lies unused in the area behind the net. Aaron sings “Uninvited” a capella as his character boosts across the rink, colliding headfirst into Peter’s.

Finally, the fight begins. Yet again, the world around them disappears. Health bars pop up on both sides of the screen. The gloves have quite literally come off and only one of these players is going to come out with their dignity intact.

Peter wins again, but his victory is an empty one. They’re going to have to skip Krispy Kreme in order to make it to the AMC on time. Aaron takes the time to wrap up his controller, as if to show what a great sport he is.

The two get in Peter’s Corolla and listen to Cake on the radio.

You’re never there, you’re never there, you’re never ever ever ever there.

They drive through the McDonalds across the street from the elementary school they went to, because it’s on the way. Aaron looks out the window at the kiddies playing on the jungle gym and asks Peter if he thinks his computer can handle that new Starcraft game everyone in 2nd period Trig is talking about.

After the movie, when Leo has died and the jewel has been thrown into the ocean, Peter and Aaron drive back to Peter’s house. They raid the fridge and flip through old National Geographics.

“Want to play Tactics?” Peter asks.

“Nah.”

“Tekken 3?”

“That’s okay.”

“Wayne Gretzky?”

Aaron smiles and nods, his ego healed. Peter pops the 64 on and the two proceed to check the hell out of each other. The color commentary repeats the same key phrases over and over, a bit confused as to why no one is actually playing any hockey. When the inevitable fight begins, Peter and Aaron rise to their feet to mash on the buttons as fast as they can.

This is 1998. Bill Clinton was president, El Nino was the word on everyone’s lips, and the fighting in Wayne Gretzky 3D Hockey made the hockey parts feel completely unnecessary.

Excerpts from “Shooting for the Presidency… From Downtown!”

The election of Barack Obama was no fluke. For 8 years America suffered under a government lacking in morality and fortitude. When tragedy struck on September 11, 2001, they countered not from a place of intellect, but of fear and cowardice. In Barack, America saw change. And they saw hope. They saw in this man a boy of a broken family, a teen that fought bigotry and a man who got nothing on my ‘oops! Half-white man can’t jump!

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If in 2012 the American public wants to rewind and watch the Bush/Cheney approach once again devalue our great nation, Sarah Palin is an apt, if aggressive candidate. But if what they want is a power forward with an inhuman mid-range jumper, vote Malone. Karl Malone.

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We are more dependent than ever on fossil fuels that come from oil wells installed in the very nations who fund, house and inhibit our most dangerous enemies. Now, the people in Lawrence, Kansas and the people in Toledo, Ohio and the people in Flint, Michigan, they say a problem is only a problem if you have a solution. And they’re right. So here’s my solution: dunk. Every day. The raw kinetic energy, combined and harnessed, may be our only way out of this crude circle. And if it isn’t hey, we’ll still have mad ups.

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America is in an economic rough patch. We can’t buy a bucket.