Bo knows video games...

I feel like I’ve been forced on to ride a ridiculous roller coaster of emotions lately. First, there was anger at Lance Briggs for demanding to be traded from my beloved Bears. Next, there was confusion at my beloved Bears for trading away Thomas Jones for very little. Third, there was hunger. (I gotta eat.) Then, there was loopiness from the aforementioned Valium. And lastly, I’ve been confronted with a bit of nostalgia, but I’ll get to that later.

What’s up with my Bears? What have they done to upset Briggs so much? Those McCaskeys are trouble, I guess. If Briggs wants out so bad, and you’re going to deal Thomas Jones away (only to move up in the second round???) anyway, why not package the two of them to get someone who can make an impact. I do have a lot of faith in Cedric Benson’s ability to punish opposing defenses with his power running game, but the 1-2 punch of Jones and Benson was pretty lethal. Hopefully Adrian Petersen will prove to be a capable reserve.

But football aside, I’d like to take a moment to talk about nostalgia:

Nostalgia: a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.

Nostalgia seems to be gaining in popularity. Sports teams have been wearing “throwback” jerseys in many of the major sports. We’ve been subjected to numerous movies that are simply remakes of old ones, or based off of old television programs. VH1 has given us numerous “I Love The (fill in your time period of choice)” shows.

For me, nostalgia reared its head in a different way. Since I am pretty much home bound for a while with my back injury, I’ve been looking for ways to keep myself entertained. I tried reading from my new book, The Illuminatus Trilogy, but my Valium has a tendency to cause me to doze off while reading. I realized last night that we have an X-Box in the house that nobody has used in a few years. We only have one game for it (Madden 2004), but I mentioned to my roommates that I may break it out this week to help pass the time. It was then that one of them mentioned, “You know…we’ve got a Nintendo downstairs that you could try to get working.”

My eyes lit up at the thought. Now, I should make it clear that I’m not talking about the new Nintendo Wii, the GameCube, The Nintendo 64, or even the Super Nintendo. What we have here is the original 8-bit machine that was introduced twenty-one and a half years ago. It was with great exhilaration that we began to connect it to the tv and try to play. Naturally, as any of you who ever played one of these machines remembers, the games don’t always work at first. You’ve got to blow in them to clean out the dust and wiggle them around until you can finally get them to work. This took a while, but before you know it, I had Contra playing in the machine and was pressing up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, B, A, select, start and Nick and I were off killing aliens with an abundance of extra lives.

It…was…awesome.

So nostalgia is a powerful thing. For a solid hour or two, I had given no thought to my back discomfort and was in a pretty happy state.

Almost made me forget about my Bears and their interesting moves of the day.

So remember something that used to make you smile today…it makes the pain of daily nuisances disappear.

Much luv,
Rob
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Song of the Day: “Bust A Move” by Young MC