this pear is, beep!, $100

Hi late-night Wednesday people, or early-morning Thursday people if you’re technical. Oh, and hello Thursday morning people, you count too. I’m sitting here alone listening to music and writing. It’s what I do. Look out, here comes the blog…

Tonight I had a funny series of thoughts that I thought might be interesting to document as a way of exposing just how anal I can be at times.

Setting the scene: Sharaun’s off at a hair appointment and I’m down on the floor playing with Keaton. Currently, we’re playing a new game I’ve just invented: Grocery Store. I’m taking the little plastic fruits and vegetables out of her toy shopping basket one-by-one and waving them over a pretend scanner in the coffee table, of course making a “beep” of recognition each time an item is successfully scanned. As I ring up her items, I hand them to her in turn and she puts them in a bag. Suddenly, I get a brilliant idea: This game would be so much more fun if she had some pretend money to spend on each item. My brain races, the process outlined below summing up the progression:

Oh, I should get her a little wallet to hold the fake money in.
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No, wait, girls have purses. Not wallets.
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Oh, she totally has toy purses, several of them, in fact. I’ll go find one.

I tell Keaton to “hang on” as I set out in search of one of her play purses. Unfortunately, my efforts turn up nothing (despite the fact that I seem to be constantly tripping over things like toy purses on my lights-out nighttime walks to the bathroom). I instead find some small paper bag with string handles. What this bag could actually be for, I have no idea – it seems to be void of any function save serving as an utterly useless miniature replica of a larger and, antithetically, quite useful bag. I decide it might be good for holding money, and grab it in a hurry to get back to the living room before my daughter has lost all interest in our game of Grocery Store. On the way back, my mind drifts again:

Now I need some play money.
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I could do quick green marker drawings on some printer paper and cut it up.
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No, that’ll take too long… she’ll get bored before I’m done and my efforts will be wasted.
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Monopoly. We have Monopoly. Monopoly has fake money in it.
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I remember my brother and I used to play with that fake money all the time.

I make a hard right as my left leg clears the baby-gate blocking access to the hallway, heading for the coat closet near the door (which, interestingly, contains nary a coat… and is instead stuffed full with a vacuum cleaner, steam cleaner, and a shelf piled with our board game collection – a coat closet usage model borrowed wholly from the model my parents followed when I was growing up). All the while I’m thinking:

Do I really want to borrow money from the Monopoly game? I know that it’s probably just going to be abused and eventually lost. Then the Monopoly game will be missing money when we want to play it next.
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C’mon, when is the last time we actually played Monopoly? In fact, have we ever played it?
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But, the game will be missing money!

Against all my OCD urges, I grab the Monopoly box and open it up and… Horror of horrors! This is a brand new Monopoly set! My mind processes swiftly:

For crap’s sake, this money is still all wrapped up in cellophane! Each denomination containing the proper “virgin” amount of bills, each bill crisp and new and untouched!
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I mean, if the thing was already well played-with and the corners of the twenties were bent and curled already… maybe I wouldn’t care so much, but I’m about to knowingly deprive future Monopoly games of hard cash. What will that future banker do?
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What if that future banker is me? How will I live with the guilt? What if someone needs twenties? Will I have to do that novice crap-banker move where I buy them off other players for hundreds?!
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But, Keaton… awww who the heck cares?

In the end, the above proceedings took all of a minute and I ended up having one of the most interactive playtimes I’ve had with Keaton in a long time. I sold fruit, she bough fruit; I sold vegetables, she bought vegetables. I beep-scanned them all, gave her change and even offered her friendly “good evenings” and “have a nice days,” as any cashier worth their salt would. Even though she did grossly overpay for an orange once, $500 is pretty dear for a fruit you know. I was honest though, and threw in a one-third scale plastic banana and a pressure-molded broccoli floret on the house.

Evaluating the impact to the integrity of a board game over the immediate joy of playing with my daughter… Those are the thought processes I’m up against, y’all… Lord in Heaven help me out once in a while.

Goodnight.

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Also written on this day...

• help get that Lupus all out peoples' junk - 2009
• one day though, things could change - 2007
• easin' back into it - 2006