From My Cold, Dead Hands

The Boy has taken to video games lately.  He alternates between his handheld Leapster Explorer, the Disney website games on my laptop, and Angry Birds on the iPod his aunt gave me a couple of months ago.  His current favorite, though, is Mario Kart on his aunt's Wii.  He asks if we can visit her every day ... all day long.  He's showing signs of addiction.  A kind of Charlton Heston "from-my-cold-dead-hands" addiction. And he's good.  Like beat-his-dad good. Like child-prodigy good. I picture him years from now parked in front of a big screen t.v. in a dorm room seated on one of those hideous video rockers surrounded by empty pizza boxes and soda cans ... flunking out of college because he'd rather try to beat some kid named Hiroto from Japan at World of Warcraft or Prision Struggle or some other horrid, violent blood-bath of a video game than go to classes.   .......  I'm scared.

And I should be.  Did you hear about the kid who recently died from playing video games too much.  It wasn't the video game that killed him.  It was the pulmonary embolism as a result of sitting for 12 hours straight playing his XBox that killed him.  Video may have killed the radio star, but now days, video games are killing young 20-somethings. That's why I'm going to insist that the Boy run circuits around the house while simultaneously playing his Explorer from now on, and I'm definitely buying the Just Dance Kids for the Wii he'll be getting from his grandparents for his upcoming birthday....... yes, they are enablers.