i keep telling myself it's only a game

When I was a kid we played Monopoly a lot. I can remember many hours spent on our stomachs, propped up on elbows. We stretched out on the floor, flanked by snacks and little piles of fake money. In particular, I remember playing with my dad and my sister at my dad's post-divorce residence. There is something intensely ironic about playing a game in which you become the owner of many properties when your family lives in a trailer. Embracing that irony, my father once took his fistful of pastel bills, after beating us into bankruptcy (as he did every single time) and ran into the yard, amid the double-wides, and proclaimed "I own this town!"

While I know it is ridiculous, I always regarded my inability to win at Monopoly as an indication of my future financial prospects. As I got older, I began to feel greater anxiety during games of Monopoly with friends and became inordinately frustrated when I lost. I literally never won. Ever.

For several years, I stopped playing. It wasn't like I "quit" Monopoly. After one graduates college, the opportunities to play any board game diminish considerably, and Apples to Apples pretty much cornered the post-grad market. In fact, I think it had been at least four years since my last attempt at simulated capitalistic success when, this Friday night, I chose to be the dog competing against a battleship and a shoe.

The board wasn't open thirty seconds before I called my dad to ask how much money everyone got before play begins. He didn't even inhale; he rattled out: "2 five hundreds, 2 hundreds, 2 fifties, 6 twenties and five of everything else." He might as well have been reciting his name and birthdate. As I said, we played a lot of Monopoly.

I brought out the board without thinking of my former Monopoly complex, but it was only a few turns before I began feeling anxious. Fortunately, we were drinking heavily.

Within minutes, my personality changed. When my cousin landed in jail, I said things like, "Say hi to your mom in there." When she won the free parking money, I told her my tax dollars were feeding her children. I scoffed when our friend gave her a break on rent because she was about to go bankrupt.

I became....a republican.

But the thing was, I wasn't enjoying it. I honestly don't know how conservative people feel happy! I wanted to win the game, but I didn't want anyone else to have to be poor. I had this terrible inner conflict between my competitive self and my socialist self. I kept cursing my choice to have only two guests, rendering games like Taboo impossible.

Thus, two hours into the only Monopoly game I ever could have won (victory wasn't a definite at this point) I had that one last drink I shouldn't have had, and fell asleep. I'm not sure I could have handled the end of the game, regardless of the outcome. Thank goodness in the real world I don't have so much or so little that I have to worry about it. Seems like we could fix it so everybody felt that way...