MadMup.com

This is Bucky from Get Fuzzy.

The English language is a beautiful thing. Oh, sure, it’s a difficult one – I can’t imagine trying to learn it as a second language (“The tough coughs as he ploughs the dough” anyone?) – but it can be downright lovely. I love the way some words sound, the way they roll off the tongue. I often get phrases stuck in my head the way some people get tunes stuck in theirs.

I’m not sure if it’s my love of words that makes me love Scrabble or if it’s the other way around. Either way, there’s hardly anything I like more than a good game of Scrabble. My preferred method is to sit down to an actual game board and feel the tiles and spin the board and enjoy the conversation over the game. I’ve not played timed games, and I’m not sure I’d like it. The slow pace of a casual game suits me well.

I’ve literally been around Scrabble for as far back as I can remember. When my dad would have deacon’s meetings at church, my mom would play Scrabble with the other deacon’s wives. I would watch sometimes, but when I was a kid, it was boring to me. I didn’t really understand it. and I certainly didn’t know most of the words they were playing.

I don’t remember when it was I tried it the first time, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t do much better than “cat” and “food.” I didn’t play again for a long time.

The summer of 1995 is when I began playing in earnest. I traveled with a summer drama team and my mom and dad bought me an Official Scrabble Dictionary before I left on tour. I bought myself a travel edition of the game to go along with the dictionary and played a lot of Scrabble during those 12 weeks. The thing about Scrabble is, the more you play it, the better you get at it. You learn new words and start to remember more and more with each game. It was a great introduction to the game I’d seen for so long.

Since I essentially learned how to play on my own, I followed the official rules included with my travel Scrabble. When I got home from tour and started playing with my mom, I learned that the deacon’s wives had varied a bit from the official rules – nothing major, just little things like end scoring and first tile rules, but they were in the rules, so like the brash young upstart I was, I suggested that’s how we play – after all, it’s how I’d played all summer… and how the game was meant to be played. To my dear mother’s credit, she didn’t smack the nonsense out of me and graciously adapted to this new way of playing.

There is something about playing by the actual rules that makes the game for me. They define and guide the game, making it the perfect balance of luck and skill that it is. Changes to the rules change the feel of the game and make it less enjoyable to me. “Let’s play a casual game!” you say. “Let’s include proper nouns and let me look up words in the dictionary to see if they’re real words before I play my tiles!” “Oh,” I’d reply, “and here I thought we were going to play Scrabble.” I don’t care for variations like Literati for this same reason – it’s not Scrabble. I have no desire to play Super Scrabble, either. What good is a score of 500 if it’s artificially inflated by the changed board? A 100-point word in Scrabble is a heckuva play. I imagine that a 100-point word in Super Scrabble happens if you accidentally spill your tiles on the board, what with its quadruple word score spaces and all.

I’ll never be a championship-level player, and I’m fine with that. I’ve read what they do to become championship-level, and I’m not ready to do that. Memorizing lists of 2-letter words and hooks and prefixes and the racks of letters you’re mostly likely to get — it seems a bit more OCD than I want to let myself get. I have a page-a-day Scrabble calendar, I know a few Q without U words, and I know way more 2-letter words than you might suspect existed, and I’m comfortable with that level for now.

As I mentioned, sitting down to a real board and playing is my favorite method, and a two-player game is preferred. More players changes the letter drawing and has more randomness to it. The two-player match is the true test of skill. I don’t play against the other person so much as I play against myself, trying to do better than I have before. I don’t even mind losing – though I wouldn’t want to lose all the time – as it’s the process I enjoy. Playing with someone who is better than me is a good way to learn new methods and new words, and I welcome it, even if someone (Marshall) has beaten me five straight times.

I play online these days, as Scrabulous has made it easier. Yes, it’s very clearly a rip-off of Scrabble and should be closed down by Hasbro (something they are in the process of, actually), but it plays exactly like Scrabble and has some great features, like letting you play your turn when you have the chance (rather than a whole game all at once), keeping track of your every bingo (using all 7 of your tiles for one word) and keeping track of your rating. There’s a version of it in Facebook that is particularly useful, and it says I’ve completed 79 games there and am in the middle of 7 more. I don’t like that I can’t converse with people while I’m playing, and I miss the feel of the tiles and being able to shuffle them manually, but I also get to play a lot more and against a lot of different people all over the country and the world. It also challenges my trust in people, because there’s no way to know if they’re using helpers or word-finders, and I have to believe they are not, and that’s a good exercise for my non-trusting self. After all, they have to believe the same of me, so it’s a fair trade.

I played Sudoku for a time a couple years back and was enjoying it, but found that I was having trouble doing crossword puzzles and playing Scrabble. There was something about the thought processes involved that made it hard for me to do both – logic versus language or some such. I gave up Sudoku pretty quickly.

When I was younger, I would get joke books from the library, books by Bennett Cerf featuring jokes and puns that were probably old when they first appeared on vaudeville stages years before being published in his books. For some reason, I would read these books over and over (which I’m sure affected my sense of humor) and try to memorize my favorites. It never seemed to work, and the worst ones would get stuck in my brain.

There was one about a lion who got it in his arrogant head to go around and pester the rest of the denizens of the jungle asking them why they weren’t as strong and powerful as he was. After several beasts hemmed and hawed their way through their answers, the joke ended with an ant answering the lion with, “Gosh, man! I’ve been sick!”

Yeah, pretty bad, I know. I guess I’m just feeling a kinship with the ant these days. I can pinpoint almost to the minute when I got sick, or at least when I started feeling it. A week ago this past Monday Greg and Marshall were over playing some games and I had to go meet Ned for a bit. As I was leaving the meeting with Ned, around 9:15, I started shivering so much that I actually had trouble putting my car key in the ignition. Up until that minute, I never knew a person could shake that much from (what I thought was) the cold. After I spent the whole night alternately burning up and freezing, I figured out I was maybe sick.

After a day and a half of that, I decided to go to the doctor. Ryan volunteered to take me, and I took him up on it because I didn’t feel like I could drive, even though the doctor was about two blocks away. The doctor took X-rays and poked at me and pretty much said I’d need to wait it out, but she prescribed antibiotics “just in case.” Lee took me after he was off work to pick up those and the codeine-laced cough medicine, and I also stocked up on soup and a few other things.

That was Wednesday. From then until I went back to work this past Monday, I spent all of my time either in bed or on the folded-out couchbed in the living room, feeling sick enough that it was even hard for me to play my moves in Scrabulous.

I’m still not feeling all that great, but I’ve managed. I’m looking forward to not moving much this weekend, if I can help it.

It’s funny how disconnected I got in such a short time. In six days I saw two people I knew, and they were all at the front end. After Wednesday, I didn’t see anyone until I went back to work. I didn’t talk on the phone because talking made me cough, and I didn’t even keep up on email that much. It made me realize how easy it is to drop out if you want to: stop picking up the phone, quit updating your various online presences, don’t answer email – moving into a cave in the mountains is hardly even necessary at that point.

I’m not sure why, but it’s easy for me to tend in that direction. I like people and it’s good for me to be around people, but it seems like when I’m left to my own devices, I turtle. It’s probably directly related to my laziness. It’s hard to be around people, hard to be friendly, hard to not say stupid things and hard to not hurt people. It’s easier to hide away, the idea being that if I’m not around people, I’m not causing them problems.

That, of course, is a negative, almost fatalistic, outlook on life, and it certainly isn’t healthy. But, just like some person tends to be a shopaholic and someone else tends to drive over the speed limit, this is my tendency. And, just like those people have to be constantly vigilant, so must I. Being sick makes it too simple to take the easy route.