Candy Land is hell.
I’ve written a whole lot of words on the internet through the years, across multiple blogs and Facebook and whathaveyou. I’ll be putting some of the stuff I choose to remember up here, mostly unedited, though perhaps occasionally contextualized or clarified.
The following was written on 20 May, 2016.
I have perhaps discovered the heart of our nation's ethical bankruptcy, and it is the children's board game Candy Land.
This is my kids' first board game, and I—ostensibly one of the two people they should look to first for moral and ethical clarity—spend the entirety of each game hoping that they learn to cheat, and then employ that skill with great constancy and efficiency.
I want them to cheat and win and end this terrible, terrible game as quickly as possible. When they're on the back third of the track, I want them to peek at the next card, see that it is the wretched Gingerbread Man or the Candy Cane or the godforsaken Candy Hearts and—with great arrogance and utter disdain for the rules—unashamedly reshuffle that nonsense to the bottom of the deck or the discard pile while I pretend to be distracted by my phone.
I want them to say "my turn" five straight turns. I want them to accidentally jump up two levels when they move. I want the board to shift just a little, so that their little plastic kid token slips off the pitfall space to the one next to it, and we all pretend like we forget that they’ve been stuck for the last three rounds on the blue rectangle ten spaces from the end.
Is this why people decide that their kids need religion? Is the next step church on Sunday morning, so that I can point to something greater than ourselves, a higher power to which they can aspire that doesn't encourage such total disregard for the established rules that allow for a civil society? They certainly can't look to me, not after 47 seemingly endless games stuck in the morass of the Molasses Swamp, all spent hoping that they do anything but follow the rules.
It doesn't matter how quickly the game ends, though. It doesn't matter how many looping eons have passed between the garden of Candy Hearts and holding Kourt with King Kandy in Candy Castle, and Total Victory. The coda to every game is the same, terrifying refrain—I won! Let's play Candy Land again!
