Having your back go out leaves you spending a lot of time, well, flat on your back. You get to catch up on all the little things. Things you’d previously been too busy to ponder. Reconnect with your family. Write long letters to old friends you haven’t seen in ages. Take up chess. Learn Finnish. Or you can get hooked on mindless word games on your phone.

It doesn’t happen overnight. Historically, I’ve been so scared of the mindless robot I’d become if I allowed myself to play games on my phone that I havenʼt in fact bought any. Ever. I’m deathly afraid of Angry Birds. Ok, I got the free Angry Birds Lite last year…and an angel chewed off part of my soul’s face. My life is meaningless enough. To buy Angry Birds is to admit you give up, you’re done, there is no god, who are you kidding, you’re fooling no one, space is merely a real estate construct and time an excuse for more parking tickets and the parade of ugly into the engine of absurd that constitute life according to the immutable laws of a screamingly indifferent universe is in fact a vulgar waste of everyone’s time and why don’t you just stop already. That’s just the end user license agreement.

But did I listen? Word games. How astray could I go? Keeps the mind active.Helps
avoid dementia. Alzheimer’s. I
bought this game called Word Scramble. It’s kind of like Boggle, where you get a grid with letters and you have to make as many words as you can in three minutes. Except when you play Boggle in the real
world it’s fun. It’s a sort of a gentle competition. I’m good at word games. I beat my kids, they think I’m amazing for a brief moment…when you play online
it’s completely different. It’s like the whole world is watching. Or worse, playing. They
tell you how many words you could have formed with this set of letters. And
it’s not pretty. If you make fifteen words, the total number of
possible words is not twenty. Nor twenty five. No. They write ‘You Scored 47 points!’ all smiley face and then in small type below ‘and found 25 out of 104
words’. A hundred and four words? are you kidding me?
and I found twenty-five? Wait, that’s not…r u positive…? and in case you were wondering, they
conveniently list them for you. Oh sure.Part of the

algorithm

So you look at the list. Some of them are obvious. I found bite but not bites.

Darn, didn’t see ‘diet’. Story of my life. But then you look further. Easies?–

Pleasies. That’s not a word. That’s a typo. Ditas? what? ok, maybe. Doits?
Dobie? umm, I’ll let it…wait. TEIIDS??? are you kidding me? T-E-I-I-D-S.
you’re telling me that’s a word. That’s not a word. That is NOT a word!! So I
look it up. In a REAL dictionary. A red, American Heritage, hard cover, dog-
eared, insanely beautiful dictionary. With my name on the front in gold
embossed letters just below the title, like I’m the author. I got it for my bar-
mitzvah. And guess what? Teiids is not in there. So it’s not a word. Nyah
nyah nyah nyah nyah, poo poo ka ka!

And you yourself are getting a bit dog-eared but you think you’re ok and
you move on to the online version and it’s worse. you play these three
minute rounds and you’re frantically racking up points, you feel like you’ve
created words non-stop, you’re way over 50, you’re at, like, 75, 85, over 90
one time, and the game ends and a little screen comes up with the winner
at the bottom and you’re not it and furthermore it includes helpfully ‘you
were 32nd out of 51′. WTF???!!! Who ARE these people? And yr like ‘I can
beat that’ so you keep on playing but now yr mad and you actually get
worse, you have this frantic, manic edge, yr completely ignoring yr kids, of
course, but also ignoring simple words, easy words, slam dunks like ‘but’
and ’saw’ because you’re trying to create seven letter words, in fact all
seven letter words or more, and you’re just making words up but you figure
if this flippin program thinks ‘teiids’ is a word, YOU NEVER KNOW. So yr
putting in, i don’t know…ejacted…clarsti…srgacle…straclate…that’s a
word. really. It’s like, um, a verb, der. latin,’1. to strangle with one’s own
pottery 2. using ceramics or ceramic shards to effect a strangulation’.

Now yr just desperate, hypnotized, you can’t stop. every waking moment.
at breakfast. at dinner. holed up in the john. What’s that knocking? So
insistent. dad…daad…DAD!!! Ugh!…the family’s given up. yr mumbling to
yourself & making private calculations & you suddenly realize that Js are
just really really annoying. Or not annoying at all. yr like ‘they’re so under-
used. let’s fix that’. jerst. what’s wrong with jerst? It’s not a word. Not a
word. Really? Define ‘word’…jarble. jaarbie. jickle. jikle. jik. jik. jik. You could
go on like this forever. Literally forever. it’s what they want. i know. i saw
them. they told me. they wnt yr dimn. yr nimd. imdn. mnid. mind. mind?
Wait, that’s a…and some primitive protective mechanism in your mind kicks
in at long last and causes you to remember why you refused to download

games in the first place. hit exit. hit it. hit exit. hit exit. hitexit hitexit hitexit.
Wait that’s seven-letter….hit it…! Ah. Safe. That was close. Where was I?