Beats Entropy

I bought NBA 2K9 yesterday. I did this in spite of having to hide the older version at my girlfriends work; such was the devil hold it had on me. I justified this upgrade by the added benefit the new 5 on 5 online play gives: I could lock my self in a murky room all-day, and chat with the scholars and gentlemen of the gaming world. It was worse than I expected. X-box live is the window to the masses I stopped taking the bus to avoid; the idiot love child of absentee parenting and globalization gone wrong.

In the course of two hours of play, I dealt with the morons and sociopaths of every electricity bearing nation.

Consider the following:

• :I had a Chinese Ray Allen, deaf to our round eyed pleas for teamwork, miraculously acquire English fluency when we stopped passing him the ball. I then named him the Kowloon baker and demanded he stop firing up bricks [1]. He suggested his long range bombing was our only chance to win; I suggested he stop brutalizing Falun Gong practitioners, and close out faster on perimeter D.  My teammates lauded me for my churlish ethnocentricity, and pass first point guard skills.

• - Three separate grade schoolers call me a Ni**er, and one threatened to beat my ass the next time I stepped out of my house. When I questioned his ability to locate me (let alone carry out the assault) he informed me he’d already noted my IP and would be there by sundown. I suggested he finish battling puberty before taking on a second front…what with winter coming.

• - A Rastafarian began audibly crying because he was getting abused in the post by Yao Ming. I tried to comfort him, but his Patois was too thick; his grief too profound. He eventually gave up and stood motionless under the basket for the rest of the quarter…the other players weaving around him like a very sad pylon.

• - Our entire team was treated to a ten minute monologue about how our shooting forward had to take a huge dump, and how the pause time allotted us would be insufficient to the deed. Also, by some genetic quirk, he was able describe this future loafs length and shape and composition, in alarming detail.  And this man had a poets tongue: the dump made as full in my mind, as it was in his colon…only I’ll carry it with me forever.

• - I found out the ability to speak in complete sentences was apparently lost in some great tragedy (bout 1993) and replaced with the ability to hit bullshit layups that I was clearly defending properly.

Oh well, maybe I’ll go back to playing hockey.

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[1] This is a sports joke. There will have been a few of them in this piece. I realize this is outside of the purview of much of our readership…so just try and enjoy the cultural intolerance of the nickname and we’ll get through this together:. Like a family.