Tonight I learned a very valuable lesson.  You can not live your life regretting actions you took in the past.  Obviously I can’t say this as some global principal that everyone should live by, since I’ve never killed anyone (who didn’t deserve it) or anything like that where I might find living life with an ever-present regret a reasonable way to live life. But for the most part, we can’t regret what we did, or in this case, what we didn’t.

Tonight I learned that I’ve been living a lie.  Our story begins when I was just a wee little tot back in the red brick house off of Springfield Avenue in Essex County New Jersey.  It was the same hood that Lauryn Hill and Queen Latifah called home just a decade or two before I.  It was the first time I lived in the Continental United States, my first residency in any of the 50 states, and it was a year or two before my life really jumped off (in which I rode the crazy train to Tokyo).  It was also the home in which my brother and I received our first video game console.

A shared Christmas present sponsored by a consortium/joint-venture between Mr. and Mrs. Baumer and Mr. and Mrs. Claus, a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was bestowed upon us.  It was more than just the best present we had ever gotten (and ever would get), it would set the tone for what would be the rest of my life.  I write you now, nearly twenty years later, a proud owner of both an Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii.  That NES helped sculpt me into the fine citizen that I am today (fuck all of you ‘video games make children violent’ idiots, I’ll kill you and steal your car).

At the time, that console was bundled with a game cartridge that had both the original Super Mario Bros. on it as well as the Duck Hunt shooting game (with light pistol included).  Also not to beat a dead anti-video game horse while it’s down, but to this day I’ve never eaten mushrooms that have made me feel larger than myself, nor have I indulged in ever firing a gun.  I have lived in countries where both are perfectly legal, and am regularly handed coupons to firing ranges here in Hawaii. So there’s Exhibit your an Asshole.  But that’s besides the point. The point is, many many many hours were spent on that NES machine with my brother.

We played Duck Hunt quite a bit.  Each waiting our turn to hunt those purple and blue faced ducks out of the single hue blue sky in hopes of seeing the giggle puppy come up full-handed and sans his giggles. Never, never, never, did it occur to us that the game was two players.  Tonight, while quickly catching up on some bookmarked threads in some forums that I frequent, I see a quick note about how Duck Hunt was in fact two players and my brain left my head (by way of my ears).

Destroyer Of Worlds

That’s right folks.  You could control the fucking ducks.  I hope your mind is blown as much as mine was.  So there/here I stood (I was actually sitting), uncertain of how I should react.  Should I pine for those years back in which me and my brother could have taken the helm and directed the ducks out of each others scopes which would have resulted in us both being much better shooters?  Would that extra challenge have laid the foundation to make my brother an even better Buck Hunter than he grew up to be? (That’s right it says: “Baumer is one of the most lethal shots on the East Side”).  Had we known, could that have been ‘the most lethal shots on all of Manhattan’ or perhaps ‘the world’?

We’ll never know. And I’m fine with that.  Well maybe not tonight, but tomorrow I’ll be fine with that.  Well maybe not tomorrow either, but someday soon I’m sure I’ll be fine with the fact that I never knew until almost twenty-six years of age that Duck Hunt was two players and that you could control the ducks.  Today I learned that one day I’ll let go of the past. Until then, I’ll just let go of the pants.

These two pages from the book I’m reading speak to me.  One’s unexplainable love for New York City, one’s inability to reason why important decisions are made the way they are made, one’s insufferably racing mind that can rarely lock-in to the here and now.

“Hugh,” he said, “there’s something I was going to ask you.  You’ve got enough money put away you could live high if you wanted to.  Why in God’s name do you live in a little box of a room in a back-street hotel and hang out in the fish market when you could go down to Miami, Florida, and sit in the sun?”

Mr. Flood bit the end off one of his sixty-five-cent cigars and spat it into the scuttle.  He held a splinter in the stove until it caught fire, and then he lit the cigar. “Tommy, my boy,” he said, “I don’t know.  Nobody knows why they do anything  I could give you one dozen reasons why I prefer the Fulton Fish Market to Miami, Florida, and most likely none would be the right one.  The right reason is something obscure and way off and I probably don’t even know it myself.  It’s like the old farmer who wouldn’t tell the drummer the time of day.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Mr. Maggiani.

“It’s an old, old story,” Mr. Flood said.  “I’ve heard it told sixteen different ways.  I even heard a muxed-up version one night years ago in a vaudeville show.  I’ll tell it the way my daddy used to tell it.  There was an old farmer lived beside a little branch-line railroad in south Jersey, and every so often he’d get on the train and go over to Trenton and buy himself a crock of applejack.  He’d buy it right at the distillery door, the old Bossert & Stockton Apple Brandy Distillery, and save himself a penny or two.  One morning he went to Trenton and bought his crock, and that afternoon he got on the train for the trip home.  Just as the train pulled out, he took his watch ofrm his vest pocket, a fine gold watch in a fancy hunting case, and he looked at it, and then he snapped it shut and put it back in his pocket.  And there was a drummer sitting across the aisle.  This drummer leaned over and said, ‘Friend, what time is it?’  The farmer took a look at him and said, ‘Won’t tell you.’ The drummer thought he was hard of hearing and spoke louder. ‘Friend,’ he shouted out, ‘what time is it?’  ‘Won’t tell you,’ said the farmer.  The drummer thought a moment and then he said, ‘Friend, all I asked was the time of day.  It don’t cost anything to tell the time of day.’ ‘Won’t tell you,’ said the farmer. ‘Well, look here, for the Lord’s sake,’ said the drummer, ‘why won’t you tell me the time of day?’

‘If I was to tell you the time of day,’ the farmer said, ‘we’d get into a conversation, and I got a crock of spirits down on the floor between my feet, and in a minute I’m going to take a drink, and if we were having a conversation I’d ask you to take a drink with me, and you would, and presently I’d take another, and I’d ask you to do the same, and you would, and we’d get to drinking, and by and by the train’d pull up to the stop where I get off, and I’d ask you why don’t you get off and spend the afternoon with me, and you would, and we’d walk up to my house and sit on the front porch and drink and sing, and along about dark my old lady would come out and ask you to take supper with us, and you would, and after supper I’d ask if you’d care to drink some more, and you would, and it’d get to be real late and I’d ask you to spend the night in the spare room, and you would, and along about two o’clock in the morning I’d get up to go to the pump, and I’d pass my daughter’s room, and there you’d be, in there with my daughter, and I’d have to turn the bureau upside down and get out my pistol, and my old lady would have to get dressed and hitch up the horse and go down the road to get the preacher, and I don’t want no God-damned son-in-law who don’t own a watch.’”

(1944)