I Can't Stand Losing
Loss is a relatively big deal in a Risk game when you are 12. Then it becomes a lifestyle the older you get.
An inevitable cold war (possibly outlasting the game itself by months), which erupts over a territorial loss, is a fashionable outcome at any weekend Risk marathon involving potato chips, soda pop and innumerable rolls of dice.
Everything starts with an innocent stationing of troops or a strategic alliance forged to oust another player, but then it all turns brutally tragic.
The death toll - albeit of badly rendered plastic foot soldiers bearing rifles - becomes a breath-catching, roll-by-roll series of battles contingent on pure chance. Then comes that final, embittering quashing of your last wee man.
What follows is the big gloat - that customary right of all winners - and the annihilation is complete.
With years, the games evolve. The stakes get higher. Forget plastic. We lose the people we love best, to circumstances weighted in favour of shock, as the human core collective gets rocked harder than our frail frames seem ever capable of handling.
But what's in vogue is still losing, and as we get used to it the same way we try to understand the return of culottes, we know the odds will always elude us as the metaphysical roll remains beyond our reach.
The rules don't change. We just feel more powerless. The years don't seem to make losing easier; that hope we might have harboured as children, is it possible for an unspoken promise to be broken?
Now each loss reduces us to defeated numbness.
And we are all sore losers: we lose the one who embroidered your first and favourite dress, the one who replaced an absentee father, the best friend who loved too freely but without wisdom, the child you never thought would beat you to the grave, the partner who is part of your soul.
Death and I make strange bedfellows. Each night it is my sarcophagus, forcing me to consider its malingering presence. Each morning I wake up to a prayer to whoever for health and longevity for those I love, or that if they must leave before I do, that I will somehow find some strength to face a life with a little less than the sum of my parts.
I still can't stand losing. I hate waiting for that predictable big gloat even more.
An inevitable cold war (possibly outlasting the game itself by months), which erupts over a territorial loss, is a fashionable outcome at any weekend Risk marathon involving potato chips, soda pop and innumerable rolls of dice.Everything starts with an innocent stationing of troops or a strategic alliance forged to oust another player, but then it all turns brutally tragic.
The death toll - albeit of badly rendered plastic foot soldiers bearing rifles - becomes a breath-catching, roll-by-roll series of battles contingent on pure chance. Then comes that final, embittering quashing of your last wee man.
What follows is the big gloat - that customary right of all winners - and the annihilation is complete.
With years, the games evolve. The stakes get higher. Forget plastic. We lose the people we love best, to circumstances weighted in favour of shock, as the human core collective gets rocked harder than our frail frames seem ever capable of handling.
But what's in vogue is still losing, and as we get used to it the same way we try to understand the return of culottes, we know the odds will always elude us as the metaphysical roll remains beyond our reach.
The rules don't change. We just feel more powerless. The years don't seem to make losing easier; that hope we might have harboured as children, is it possible for an unspoken promise to be broken?
Now each loss reduces us to defeated numbness.
And we are all sore losers: we lose the one who embroidered your first and favourite dress, the one who replaced an absentee father, the best friend who loved too freely but without wisdom, the child you never thought would beat you to the grave, the partner who is part of your soul.
Death and I make strange bedfellows. Each night it is my sarcophagus, forcing me to consider its malingering presence. Each morning I wake up to a prayer to whoever for health and longevity for those I love, or that if they must leave before I do, that I will somehow find some strength to face a life with a little less than the sum of my parts.
I still can't stand losing. I hate waiting for that predictable big gloat even more.
Peaceful Pig's two cents' posted 5/23/2006 11:05:00 pm
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