Insidious Adaptation

Standing at an intersection at some residential part of Chicago. A quiet, three-way intersection where my brother and I resided to post-up and look for a ride to our hotel. Him holding his phone, and I, a shopping bag, we walked here, to save a total of $6 on the Uber trip back. Personally, I wanted to walk off a little bit of the pizza we just ate, but my brother is a little more frugal with his calories, likes to save em up I guess. “How old do you think that sign is.” My brother asks, pointing to a moving truck.  There is a woman, and a child, the woman is hugging the child over the top of him. “MMM… adults at least.” I respond. “Yea, adults, she’s probably dead now.” My brother says referring to the woman. “Honestly, if it was the 90s she would be smoking, she’s probably not that old.” I enjoy these types of conversations. Our jokes proceed. We make insightful instances up in our head, about the kid being on drugs, mom being remarried, how the sign they posed ...

As an average child raised primarily in the 90’s video games were still at their infancy in terms of their regularity in people’s lives. I mean, yea, Atari was around like 20 years before my time, but it wasn’t like a staple in a household yet. Not like the 90s brought about, not like our house anyways. Nintendo was cool, Sega was fine, but when the Nintendo 64 came about, and a game called Gauntlet Legends was discovered, my brothers and I had the ability to take our bickering to another realm.  The game was set up so that all players shared the same screen, so, the further players got away from each other, the more zoomed out the screen got, leaving tiny bumbling figures at ends of the screen, sometimes stuck, glitches we found early on in the game. Sometimes if a heard of bad guys came out and attacked one member of our group, then the rest could run away and leave him to lose all of his life. When a chest or food was found, life-giving forces in the game, there was a scr...