Ah, city living. New Yorkers have at their disposal, in addition to an infinite number of cultural opportunities and convenient scenes from life’s rich pageant, hundreds of ways in which they might acquire a championship headache. I refer not only to the myriad metaphorical headaches afforded by the Big Apple – fellow commuters refusing to stand clear of the closing doors, for example, or the process of apartment hunting, which appears from a distance like one giant headache, but which upon closer inspection reveals itself as a phalanx of smaller headaches goose-stepping towards you single file, and no sooner has the pain of forking over the ridiculous broker’s fee ebbed away when the ache of hiring a moving van, and finding a place to park it in the same borough as your new apartment, takes up its post behind your left eye, and I don’t suppose I need to mention the agony brought on by a trip to Macy’s at any time during the month of December – but also headaches of the literal variety. Eight million people would generate an ungodly amount of noise even if they didn’t sit honk their horns in traffic, which they do, or drive their behemoth trucks over loose metal plates in the roadway, which they also do, or sit in their cars and say things like “well, would you look at that – a fire engine with its lights on” instead of getting out of the fire engine’s way, thus prompting the fire engine to sound its air horn until they finally put the car in gear and clear in the intersection, which they also do, or find any excuse to have a parade down Madison Avenue at nine in the morning on a Sunday, which you had better believe they do, and I don’t wish to suggest that Bisexual Diabetic Pacific Islanders In The Automotive Industry haven’t made a significant contribution to society, but nor do I believe that they merit the privilege of driving an amplified jug band past my window when I have a hangover.

Luckily, New Yorkers can control their own headache destinies. We can beat the neighborhood construction crew to the punch by giving ourselves the headaches of our choice. My favored method: over-indulging in Corona until the wee hours of the morning, neglecting to close the blinds when I totter home, and neglecting also to relocate the cat and his toys to the bathroom before getting into bed. The cat, whom we might politely call “an early riser,” will first give meowing a try, and if meowing fails, he will hop back and forth over my head until I wake up, and since the cat seems to have only the most general idea of what “over” means, sooner or later all thirteen pounds of restive feline lands on my head, and I wake up to an intolerably bright apartment, a crushing headache, and the prospect of chasing the cat over and around and behind every piece of furniture so that I can put a door between him and me, and once in the bathroom with the cat, I down a few bargain-brand aspirin and inspect my sorry self in the mirror before crawling back to bed and reflecting that it takes a certain kind of face to carry off “the pawprint look,” and I don’t have that face. A few hours later, I wake up refreshed, release the cat from his tiled prison, and remember how much fun I had building the headache in the first place.

Now that I think about it, I get headaches from a bunch of things I love to do, no doubt because most of them involve staring at things for long periods of time and I almost never remember to wear my glasses. Watching an entire Real World marathon on MTV inevitably brings about a dull throbbing in my cranium (cast which induces the most immediate suffering: Boston). So does stringing bead jewelry, an activity I should have grown out of long ago but which I still enjoy, and after I finished one particularly complicated three-strand bracelet, one of my eyeballs moaned, “Goodbye, cruel world,” and fell into my lap. The headaches must serve to punish me for wasting time I could have better spent cleaning the bathroom, or editing my book, or doing something else unamusingly productive, because the severity of the headache always corresponds to the amount of time frittered away, as well as to the relative frivolity of the activity. For example, fifty-four minutes on the phone gossiping with Wing Chun and simultaneously giving myself a pedicure results in only a mild tingling, whereas discovering a freeware pinball game on my hard drive, not liking it that much, and playing it for two hours anyway just to reassure myself that it does sort of suck induces a fiery pain around the entire circumference of my head.

Video games present a particular problem because I am constitutionally unable to play a video game one time and get on with my life. I get obsessed with certain video games, and nothing will rid me of my preoccupation with them except to play them over and over again until I get sick of them, or until I suffer an aneurysm. The disease took root early; my family had one of those TI-400 “computers” that took cartridges, and in addition to Math Basketball and Spelling Wiz and the other educational “games” that my brother and I played once and never touched again, we had real games like Ms. Pac-Man and Space Invaders and Blackjack & Poker. Dad made the mistake of explaining the rules of blackjack to me and advising me on how to formulate a betting system, and the next thing my parents knew I had four hands going morning, noon, and night, and my mother would have to drag me bodily away from the monitor for meals: “No, you cannot get doing the dishes ëcomped,’ and stop calling me ëthe pit boss,’ for heaven’s sake.” (I should point out that my video-game illness may have a genetic origin. My mother had a serious Ms. Pac-Man monkey on her back for awhile herself, and I would come home from school, get a snack, and ask my brother where Ma had gotten to, and a triumphant cry of “and so, Inky, WE MEET AGAIN” would issue from the basement and answer my question.)

After that, I had a brief flirtation with International Soccer; the game offered a menu of different languages to play in, which tickled my fancy for awhile, but I soon tired of hollering “schnell” at my defenders and starting saving my pennies to buy a role-playing game for use on our Apple IIc. The purchase of Wizardry cost me months of dog-walking money, but I think I got more use out of game than out of just about anything else I’ve ever bought. I sat on a folding chair in front of the computer until my back cramped and my eyes swam, patiently mapping maze levels and charting the spells and hit points of my characters for hours on end, and when a member of my warrior band got knifed to death by an orc or smothered by an evil mist, I wept real tears. Even after more compelling amusements like boys and mascara shoved Wizardry aside, I still pulled the box down from its shelf from time to time to take one more shot at finding the evil wizard. I never succeeded. A few years later, the TI-400 gave out for good and my brother successfully lobbied my parents for a Nintendo system for his next birthday. Mr. Stupidhead and I didn’t get along very well in those days, but our shared infatuation with Super Mario Brothers allowed us to spend many peaceful hours together. Mr. Stupidhead always went first, and his turns lasted forever, and then I would go, and my turns lasted about forty-five seconds, because whenever I made Luigi jump, Mr. Stupidhead provided a corresponding fart noise, and I would giggle hysterically and send Luigi plummeting to his death by mistake, but I didn’t mind. I liked watching my brother play more than I liked playing myself anyway. The only drawback to our halcyon afternoons on the couch: we got the Super Mario music stuck in our heads for weeks at a time, and we hummed it all the time. We even harmonized with each other while humming it.

The disease went into remission briefly in college, only to recur with even more virulence when I got a Mac and started playing Mah Jongg with a single-minded devotion that would have earned me straight As had I applied it to my studies. Every night, Supersize stopped over to pick me up for dinner, and every night she stood there tapping her foot for a while before asking, “Can we go, like, today?” and I said, “Yep, just one second, I just need to find the other bamboo tile,” and another few minutes would pass with Supersize tapping her foot and me clicking away, and Supersize would point out, “Sar, I think you have a problem,” and I would say, “Uh duh I have a problem, I can’t find the other freakin’ bamboo tile,” and she would give up and leave without me. But nothing approached my all-consuming passion for Crystal Quest. My friends would come over and play CQ and get forty thousand points and feel all proud of themselves, and then their scores wouldn’t even show up on the “leader list” because I’d already packed it with two-million scores. On more than one occasion, I started playing to kill time before class, only to cut the class because I couldn’t tear myself away in the middle of the nineteenth level. One time, Ernie came over and wanted to get a snack at the WaWa Market. Without taking my eyes off the screen, I handed her a five-dollar bill and asked her to buy me a bag of chips. Ernie went to the WaWa, ran into her ex-boyfriend, went over to his room, drank a beer, watched most of a movie, and wandered back to my room two hours later. In the interim, night had fallen, and Ernie found me exactly where she’d left me, in the dark, hunched over my screen, muttering “damn throwing stars,” and when she handed me the chips, I said something like, “Wow, that didn’t take long.” Frequently, I would have to lie down and put a cold cloth on my forehead after an extended session of CQ.

Eventually, I got so frighteningly good at Crystal Quest that it got boring. Then, for years, nothing – not a single game so alluring that I would risk permanently ruining my eyesight – until the weekend Mr. Kite rented Tekken 2. We spent the entire weekend jammed onto Mr. Kite’s little couch, and I mean the entire weekend. The Biscuit and I went over to his place on Friday night on our way out, wound up staying for four hours, invited ourselves over on Saturday and played for another four hours, staggered home with palpitating eyeballs and went to bed, had erotic dreams about the Tekken characters, woke up on Sunday morning and phoned Mr. Kite to inform him that he didn’t have to play if he didn’t want to, but if he wouldn’t mind leaving his door unlocked, we’d just come on by, and did he need any snacks? By Sunday night, I had a migraine and a blister on my thumb, but I could execute every trick move in the game, as well as a few the programmers probably didn’t even know about. The rest of that week, Ernie and Mr. Kite and the Biscuit and I planned to buy a game system and share custody among the four of us so that we could play as much Tekken 2 as we wanted to; fortunately, that scheme never panned out, because if it had, I would have gone blinder than Ray Charles by now.

Lately, I’ve had too much work to do to spend inordinate amounts of time playing Tetris and Minesweeper, so my headaches of late have come from more prosaic sources – credit card bills, telemarketers, the cloud of dust occasioned by changing the kitty litter. But I eagerly await the next time I limp away from my computer after thirty-six holes of PGA Golf, even though I probably have better things to do, because – like ice-cream headaches – going about giving yourself one is the best part.

Oooh, Martial Law!

Beat my CQ score, if you dare.

The aftermath.

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