Pokemon Go-Away

I’ll admit, I’m a little bit behind on the whole Pokemon craze. When Pokemon Go debuted, many of my friends approached me and asked, “Spinner-are you on the new wave?” to which I could only shake my head and giggle and shrug and blush.

It’s not that I have anything against Pokemon (although it aint perfect-still can’t believe Jynx is a thing that people are OK with), it’s just that my household was never the most “Poke-friendly” place on Earth.

You see, my father is a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, and as such, he has a healthy measure of psychological trauma. One particularly scarring memory he carries is from the time he was briefly captured by a renegade unit of Viet Cong. They took him and his platoon and trapped them in a small dark room where every day they would project the elongated shadows of dead bugs on all the wall and say that they had an army of mutant insects that were going to eat them. The platoon later realized that this was a ruse when the Viet Cong got lazy with their storytelling, but the damage had been done: my father would forever be afraid of unknown monsters.

When I first brought home a deck of Pokemon cards my father flipped. He was totally spa-ajd’d. He took the Pokemon cards from me, threw them into a pot of boiling water, and stood around it chanting in strange tongues, hitting himself in the head, grabbing his crotch, and dancing. I went off to my room, suspecting it would be the smart choice to let him be. Later that night I heard my digging in the backyard, presumably dumping the boiled cards into a hole.

Understandably, this whole experience kind of turned me off from Pokemon. It’s just not something that I think I’ll ever get into, given what I’ve seen. It’s my choice and my life, and frankly, the more people bug me about it, the more fatigued I get. So I hope that the above tale justifies my decision to refrain from Pokemon, and gives pause to those who want to assume its import in the lives of everybody.