 When tragedy strikes,
America mobilizes. Actual heroes like firemen and the police leap into harm's way
while other heroes get busy making stickers that show someone pissing on the cause of the
tragedy. Soldiers prepare for war while hot chicks who can play the violin rush to
assist rockers such as Limp Bizkit in their desperate attempts to retool songs about bitch
fucking into sad tributes to heroes. Heroic watchdog groups upgrade emergency phone
numbers that used to be a joke in your town to the status of offensive joke and alert us
to movies, dolls, games, and, perhaps most insidious in their potential for sudden
shock, Magic Eye paintings that might in some small way remind us that 7000 people were
slaughtered on American soil. Providing an ongoing counterpoint to this grassroots
activism, the television shows the actual planes hitting the actual towers in an endless
loop. And keeping us informed through all of it, the previously insolvent and
underappreciated "America Under Siege" magazine:
I'd kind of hoped that my life spent in the simulator would have prepared
me for battle when the time finally came. Unfortunately, it seems to have mainly
prepared me to play new videogames without having to first read the manual. As it turns
out, the sedentary life of a gamer has made me physically weak and also a coward.
I'm furious, but scared and impotent when it comes to meting out the Rutger-Hauer-style
blind vengeance that I crave. I've spent thousands of hours playing Heroes of Might
and Magic, but here, in the end, I'm simply a Victim of Might and Magic. Inactivity
has left me with brittle matchstick arms. With one hard slap, a Muslim child could
make me explode into a cloud of dust like a mummy. Touched by a relatively harmless
Islamist sparkler, I'd evaporate in a burst of flame, also like a mummy. Gaming has
effectively turned me into a mummy - a motionless,dessicated South American mummy like
you'd see on Nova, though, not the Egyptian kind that can climb walls and punch a hole
through your chest.
With any kind of heroism based on fighting or even moving around pretty
much out of the question, I really began to wonder if there was any way for me to help.
Then it hit me: In movies, like say Jurassic Park 2, sometimes a character will
display some seemingly useless talent, like say gymnastics. But later, during a
crisis, they're able to utilize that talent in some constructive way, like say using
excercise to kill a dinosaur. But then that thought didn't really lead anywhere.
But then later it occurred to me that video games are my gymnastics, and that the
entire history of OldManMurray is like the scene where a character displays his useless
talent and you're wondering "what the Hell was the point of that?" And
now's the part where you find out what the point is.
I am a gamer. That means I've become too frail to enact any kind of
real justice, and so providing real justice will just have to be delegated to those more
suited to it. My talent is sitting alone and amusing myself by pretending to be
Sylvester Stallone pretending to be Rambo. And if that hasn't made me actually able
to eat things that would make a billy goat puke, it has at least transformed me into the
perfect weapon for showering America's enemies with towering acts of simulated
revenge. What's the point? I am quite possibly the weakest non-baby male in the
country, so if I can find a way to strike back, then so can you.
Using the world league option of NHL 2002, my plan was to beat an
Arab-Muslim country so bad that they'd be humiliated forever. In preemptive open
defiance of what I was sure would be protests from Muslim groups, I christened my plan
Operation Infinite Goals. |
