Snarky Dad

I have to give the YouTube algorithm credit. It always finds the exact blend I’m looking for, stuff I already know and love, plus new things I might find interesting, and annoyingly, I usually do. Maybe that’s my attention deficit doing the heavy lifting. Maybe the algorithm is just that good. Either way I lose an evening and I’m not even mad about it.

This week it handed me 15 Gorgeous MS-DOS Games Ever Made (Way Ahead of Their Time!). I don’t agree with the whole list, Magic Carpet is in there, and I’d have swapped it out for any King’s Quest, or Quest for Glory, but that isn’t the point. The point is that it landed like a kick straight to the gut, and the gut it kicked belonged to a teenager in the 90s.

I sat in front of that PC through the entire evolution. Green CRT screens, with bleeps and mechanical clatter standing in for a soundtrack. Then a Sound Blaster, and suddenly the machine had a voice. Then VGA. Then Super VGA, which at the time felt like someone had opened a window in a room I hadn’t realized was dark.

And here’s the part nobody warns you about: today’s top-tier, photorealistic, ray-traced everything still cannot reproduce the feeling of an overly chromatic Sierra screen. King’s Quest. Quest for Glory. Too many colors, all of them wrong, all of them perfect. It was captivating. It was, and I’m choosing this word deliberately, magical.

I would have been happy to leave it there. Pleasant nostalgia, mild melancholy, bed. Then I remembered last Wednesday.

Last Wednesday I got to MMA practice extra late, which meant skipping the warm-up. I walk into the dojo and everyone is already in full swing working classical boxing. Sensei spots me immediately. “Get over here.”

“Yeah, I just need a few seconds to warm up.”

He scoffs. Not a big scoff. Just enough.

So I do the best two-minute warm-up a man my age can do, which mostly consists of listening to my own skeleton creak, feeling a few muscles spasm in protest, and then generously describing the result as “warm.” I made it in with just enough time for two rounds before the end of class.

I sparred with a guy I genuinely like. Early twenties. Looks about fifteen to me, but everyone does now.

Cold, I move like a sack of potatoes. Not normal potatoes, the huge ones. I turn slowly, I respond slower, and I telegraph everything I do. Meanwhile this little bastard is bouncing around me like a raver at some early-2000s party who had already taken two ecstasy pills and then dropped an MDMA just to make sure they were working, jabbing from one side, and by the time my brain has finished processing the punch that already landed, he’s somewhere else entirely, throwing the next one from an angle I hadn’t budgeted for.

The bill arrived later that night. I woke up with a cramp in my leg so committed that I genuinely thought I was about to meet my maker. And the only thought in my head the entire time was: don’t yell too loud, because waking the missus or the kids means the pain gets a second act, with commentary.

In fairness, it used to be worse. These days I take magnesium bisglycinate before bed. Not any particular brand, I grabbed whatever was closest to hand at Super-Pharm, and it’s a local one that would mean nothing to you. It’s the same compound whatever the box says: magnesium bolted to two glycine molecules, which is the version that doesn’t send you sprinting to the bathroom the way other magnesium happily will.

It hasn’t declared total war on the cramps, see: Wednesday, but it took the edge off them, and the part I didn’t expect at all is the mornings. I wake up noticeably more refreshed than I used to. I started taking it to sleep better and got a partial cramp discount thrown in.

Heads up: some links here are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through them, I get a small cut at no extra cost to you, one step closer to the man cave. I only link gear I actually use. Sometimes what I own is a local brand you can’t get on Amazon, in that case I link the closest match I can find and I’ll say so.

Which brings me to the realization I’ve been circling this whole time.

The 90s and the early 2000s feel like they happened two weeks ago. The memories are right there, no dust on them at all, the bleeps, the Sound Blaster, the colors that had no business being that bright.

My body keeps a different set of books. My body knows exactly how many years have gone by. It has counted every single one of them, and it issues an itemized statement every time I skip a warm-up.

So somewhere between the head and the legs there’s a gap, and the gap is not two weeks. My head says two weeks. My legs say a couple of decades. And the legs have receipts.

If this earned a laugh, you can buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/snarkydad. No obligation, no judgment, just caffeine.