Whether you love or hate my literary canon balls, they contribute to the overall canon of literacy. There are canons both to the left and right of them. You can hear the volley and thunder. Hell, I am the world renowned, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition…really I could do this all day. I mean it ain't nothing for me to knock some nouns off.
Point is, I'm a writer, not a biter, for myself and others. And I suuuuuuuuuuuuuuck at Scrabble.
Like not even a little bit. Full fledge night sweats at the thought of playing Scrabble. Okay, that's not entirely accurate. But I really don't get down with the Scrab'. Or do we call it the 'Ble. Or the word game. Whatevs.
Now what does this have to do with the price of boxing gloves at a Migos concert? I'll tell you.
I feel some type of way that, I, as a person who actually makes money due to his usage of The Great 26 in ways that provide hope, joy, and inspiration to humans big and small struggle mightily at a game tailor-made for a person like myself. You all know that I've got many leather bound books in my home, but the truth is, I've also read them all.
When I was younger, due to sheer boredom, I'd read the Encyclopedias. And when I tired of that, I'd actually spend time reading through the dictionary. It is with this knowledge that I find myself troubled that I retained not a damn bit of those words short of the words necessary to sustain life and employment.
I can take this a step further. I did pretty damn swell on my SATs but I can't remember the breakdown between math and verbal. I also don't think they do scoring like they did in the 90s (!!!) so its probably moot. But in 2001 I took the GRE so that I could attend graduate school at some place that wasn't Everest College or the University of Phoenix and I beastmoded the quantitative and analytical reasoning sessions. The verbal? Listen…on those computers the analogy questions would get easier the more questions you answered incorrectly.
I'm not saying that I had analogies like "Dog is to Cat as Man is to…." but I wasn't too far off. Even I couldn't explain how terrible I did. It was like the time I got straight A's in undergrad (including an A+ in econometrics) but somehow squeaked out a D+ in my differential equations class. To be fair, that was the 2nd highest grade given in that class that semester with the highest being a C.
I'm losing my point. It has seemed that despite my propensity to drop words like perpetuity in regular conversations and toss out circumlocution with the precision of a guy trying to knock the p***y out like fight night, I struggle when its time to show and prove and the smarty-art nigga proving ground that is Scrabble. I've been asked more times to play Scrabble upon stating that I'm a writer that I almost think folks look at it as some sort of personal challenge to test the word-mettle of individuals who get paid to slang nouns and verbs.
Of course, much of this is me projecting. Every time I go to the home of some person I respect mentally, and they own board games, I see Scrabble. And I want to play. I also just don't want to get exposed when I'm over here trying to put words like "donk" and "run" on the board with a smirk and be compelled to say "take that take that" right before somebody drops, "xenophobe" on the board. I don't even know if thats possible. But in my soul, thats what would happen. Then I'd be stuck with "ball" or some such word that doesn't quite live up to the dreams of my father. I often toss out the "The Black community frowns upon your shenanigans" meme to people; I'd hate for it to be given back to me in earnest.
I can see you over there, slyly saying, "hey P, it's okay. You're pretty awesome in every way, it's only right that God wouldn't let you rule the Scrabble boards too!" And you'd be right. But the irony isn't lost on me that a person whose job involves the words is pretty remedial at a game designed for people like himself.
Grand scheme? It doesn't matter. I'm murder at spades and Taboo (though I had a particularly bad showing a few weeks back, I'm blaming my team) and don't even get me started on UNO. So it ain't like I feel inadequate. I ain't Fantasia, #mynigga
But Scrabble. Do not f*ck with me for I do not got it.
*exhales*
So, don't leave me hanging. What should you be great at that you're amazingly not?
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