As the pandemic deepened I fell into a clinical depression.
The doctor told me to find a hobby to obsess about; he wouldn't prescribe pills because, he said, I suffered from a rare genetic lack of pleasure centers in the brain. I think he called it 'being of Norwegian descent.' A harmless hobby that would consume all my waking hours would take my mind off my imaginary misery.
The old poop.
So I took up chess. I started playing it online with people all over the world, on a cyber chess club.
But after just a dozen attempts to finish a game I gave up. It was the most boring thing, outside of sorting gravel, in the world. I began instead to bake pans of cornbread and leave them at nearby bus stops for the dozens of homeless people who tried to sleep at them. I found it easy to obsess about cornbread variations. Each time I made a pan I changed the recipe slightly. One time I added a can of creamed corn. Another time I added a jar of tamed jalapeno peppers. Peanut butter. Scallions. Mango peach salsa. Chickpeas. And so on. I felt happy and fulfilled. My depression receded, just like my hairline.
Naturally my friend Crazy Henry, with whom I was living temporarily, until I found another job, had to kibbitz at all my chess matches.
"You should sacrifice a pawn" he'd whisper to me over my shoulder.
"Do you even know which pieces are pawns?" I asked him heatedly.
"The ones you keep losing?" he asked innocently. When I finally quit playing on the cyber chess club, Crazy Henry took over for me. And began to win.
He did not have an intuitive knack for the game. No -- he just played so erratically and with such a complete lack of logic or planning that his opponents quickly became disoriented, and had to be led away from their computer screens, defeated and sobbing, by their spouses or companions. Soon Crazy Henry was going toe to toe with grand masters from Russia. He beat the pants off of all of them.
Inevitably his unusual gamesmanship led to trouble. Everything Crazy Henry puts his hand to leads eventually, unavoidably, to complications.
This time is was some men from Las Vegas. They were the big beefy type of gorillas that can crack their knuckles over a range of several octaves. They asked Crazy Henry to throw a chess match, as a favor to their boss, Big Swinburne. In return, purely as a sign of his gratitude for this little inconsequential favor, Big Swinburne would let Crazy Henry keep walking about without the aid of crutches.
"Have some of my friend's cornbread, okay?" was all Crazy Henry said in return.
I was a little hesitant about that particular batch. I'd added some pandan leaves for a bit of a tropical tang -- but I wasn't sure if you could actually eat them in safety. The two hulking brutes grabbed large slices and gulped them down, letting crumbs rain all over the living room carpet.
Before they were loaded into the ambulance, I got the mailing address of Big Swinburne out in Las Vegas so I could mail him the remaining portions of that particular pan of pandan cornbread.
As for Crazy Henry, he decided that playing chess online was too dangerous, so he started a Winter Croquet team, called the Frosty Mallets, and is now somewhere up in Canada as team captain. So I have the apartment all to myself.
And I have turned my attention to baking Irish soda bread.
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