Pocket Rockets

I know it's a joke to note that Pokemon Go has gotten America's screen-locked hermit children out of the house and under the harsh and unrelenting glare of Yellow Face in the sky, accidentally introducing them to exercise as an idea. And even though I'm usually the first one to jump way out in front of a series of hacky right-now pop culture jokes and make them my own, this time I actually mean it: I think the general perception is right.

I know anecdotal evidence is a tricky thing. It's the same impulse that makes people who own guns react to yet another mass murder with "Well I own a gun and I've never mass murdered anyone." It's slightly problematic from a rhetorical point of view because, yes, what they've just said is inarguably true* but it does nothing to shed any kind of light on the issue from a more broadly social or policy perspective.

But I can tell you that I believe this Pokemon Go stuff because yesterday, at about 5:45 pm Pacific Standard Time, my middle child went outside. On his own. Without being asked. Or threatened. Implicit in that is, yes, he's gone outside before, but usually at the request of myself, by the insistence of the state of California's truancy laws or because there's a chance there might be a spider anywhere in the house. I guess if I were being strategic, I could point out that just because he can't see them doesn't mean there isn't always a spider in the house, but his phobia is such that I'm not certain I wouldn't wake up one morning to find he'd removed all the drywall in his bedroom. You know, just to check behind it.

Of course there are more jokes to make about whether or not walking slowly in an irregular line counts much as exercise goes, but in this case we're dealing with a scale where the relative low marker is absolute zero. And further, there's an ostensible social aspect to the game, but that in my experience so far results in three or four strangers standing more or less facing each other, never once looking up from their phones or acknowledging anyone else's existence before sort of fading apart, uncoupled by the masked, invisible social entropy that underpins all internet "interaction."

I haven't started playing it myself. I know exactly enough about Pokemon (I'm the father of three now-teenaged suburban white boys, after all) to know that there are too goddamned many of them for me to want to venture beginning to care about any of it. It's all frankly a bit daunting here at the bottom of the slope beneath of the nerd avalanche of information threatening to come roaring off of Mount Pikachu at any goddamned moment.

The short answer is, I don't play because I'm a grown-ass man. Before you think that implies I'm too mature to care about such useless, mindless nonsense, you should know I spent about two hours this early evening having lightsaber fights with Lego versions of jedi. What I mean is, as an adult, blessed with hard-won long-term vision of the consequences of my action, I can project where this leads: directly outside, under the harsh, unrelenting glare of the Yellow Face, accidentally getting exercise. And I fucking know better.

That said, we'll see what my position is when national presidential poll numbers start freaking me out and I'm desperate for any distraction that won't get me institutionalized or arrested.


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*Or "probably" is better than "inarguably." Once you shoot up a room full of people, I guess it's a relatively small step to then later lie about it.