The Sad Game I Played

Once upon a time, I had a troubled Nintendo Entertainment System that sometimes wouldn’t play video games. The console, like a picky eater, refused to consume the occasional game that I gave it. But far more seriously than being a picky eater, the console refused to fulfill its sole purpose – to display games on my TV.

I found, as I’m sure millions others did, a low tech solution for this high-tech machine’s problem. You had to blow on the game cartridge. Sometimes, maybe if the video game cartridge like me that day, it would display my game. Other times, blowing on the cartridge did nothing. This blowing exercise became a kind of sad game where I would I could win or lose the right to play,  even though I had already bought the console and its software. This sad game, some might say, “blowed.”

Then one day I didn’t have to play the sad game anymore because the console stopped working. Dust fell from the sky and covered the console, like a blizzard covering grass on a front lawn. The game was over.