I hate chess

Wolf Redboy

November 23, 2007

Today I gave up chess for the infinitieth time, because why push wooden chess pieces across a board when you can be writing the next great novel, writes Voltaire.

Today I gave up chess because I remembered guys like Aleister Crowley and Aldous Huxley and Jack Parsons - Sex and Rockets - the same guys who practiced witchcraft and black magic. Parsons blew himself up in his laboratory and after he was dead the cops found a videotape in a box and on that videotape in a box were pictures of his mother fornicating with a dog.

Not that I have such high aspirations.

But Crowley's words pass through my mind when I practice my levitation card trick. Or just in general. "I saw those guys playing chess and suddenly decided that I did not want to end up like them," he said, probably practicing his levitation card trick.

I mean, Crowley was on his way to becoming a professional chess player, a future Kasparov, when it suddenly hit him. "I don't WANT to play chess! I want to be a MAGICIAN!"

Chess is a black hole - it's a dark angel - it's an incubus that plays upon all of my OCD higher monkey evolution double helix strand OCD sensibilities. It's a caustic selfish-gene, it's a totally absurd reality where pleasure reward centers rule the brain.

Good mental exercise? Yes, says Franklin.

But no, says Voltaire. "Why be pushing wooden chess pieces when you can be writing the next great novel."

"All women should learn how to play chess," says the author of Cunt.

And "Good at chess, bad at life," says Woody Allen.

I'm with Allen and Voltaire and the guy who blew himself up in his laboratory and kept videotapes of his mother fornicating with dogs.

Fuck chess. You stay away from me, chess.

Except on Thursdays when I take lessons from the Octopus and Tuesdays when I meet the chess club and Saturday mornings when I play Katy and Sunday nights when I play Ben and long hot summer days when there is nothing else to do and when my best friend Chris is in town and perhaps every morning to start the day like when I'm depressed which is the best feeling in the world.