An Open Letter to
My 22-Year-Old Self.
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Dude,
You need to lay off the Playstation, specifically Medal of Honour. Seriously. Sure, a first-person World War II video game is a lot of fun, especially for someone like you who maintains a keen interest in World War II history. But this game is dragging you way down the wrong path.
First of all, the fact that you can't beat Medal of Honour should not be taken personally. It is not a test of your worth as a man and no one will ever think you're cool for beating it, anyway. Second, you've become bitter. A lot of your friends have girlfriends and no longer exhibit the same desire to drink Southern Comfort straight from the bottle until 4 a.m. as they once did. In turn, you've begun cursing this shift in priorities as a surrender of their ability to keep it real. "Pathetic bastards," you say, "they've allowed themselves to become controlled by their girlfriends." Here's the thing, though: when your friends go home at night, they are having sex with these girlfriends. You, on the other hand, are playing three to four hours of video games, not to speak of the time spent searching the Internet for cheat codes. Don't pretend like you don't know what I'm talking about. Anyway, even if your friends were as whipped by their ladies as you suspect, at least it's a result of regular human interaction. Regardless of whether or not you want to admit it, you are whipped by a child's toy with 32-bit graphics. Not that bad? You don't even have a job. Do free men feel compelled to spend a week taking apart their video-game controller, cleaning each piece, and putting it all back together again because the buttons won't react quickly enough to thumb pressure? No. No, Mike, they do not.
You'll be interested to know that a throat infection at the age of 26 will keep you bedridden for three weeks. During this time, you will lead the allied forces to victory and discover that the ending of Medal of Honour truly sucks. Basically, it amounts to sneaking into some sort of verboten Nazi missile lab in the mountains, fighting your way to the controls, and launching a missile which is then inexplicably redirected at the lab. The explosion is horrendous; it wipes out everyone at the base except for you. I know: as if that would work. A celebratory anthem sounds, a list of programming credits runs, and that's it. What's worse is the personal sense of triumph that you had been expecting is rendered flaccid not only by the lacklustre ending, but by the realization that this is what you just spent four years of your life working for. If this weren't bad enough, in the weeks and months following your "victory," you'll become painfully aware of the correlation between excessive amounts of Playstation and your inability to meet, approach, or date women. This isn't the way to go, my friend.
Yours,
Mike Jones (age 27)
Vancouver, B.C.
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OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
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An Open Letter to My 22-Year-Old Self By Mike Jones
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