I need to get involved in some new activities. My life’s getting a little stale. I’m just doing the same things over and over again. I tried getting into fishing, but I found it incredibly boring. I knew it would be boring before I started, but for some reason I thought I could make it interesting. I went down to the docks and set up my line. Then I waited like an hour. Then I waited another hour. Nothing. I got so sunburned. Boredom levels reached an all time high.

After the second hour, this old man fishing next to me asked me if I would watch his lines while he went to go to the bathroom. He hadn’t caught anything either, and he had set up like eight poles. If I were I a fish, and I saw eight evenly spaced out worms, that would, to me, be a dead giveaway that somebody’s fishing. The old man was taking forever and, like I said, I was really bored, so while he was gone, I tied the hook of my line to the hook of one of his lines. When he came back, I started reeling it in like I had caught something, which made it look like his line had caught something also. We both tugged on our lines for about a minute or so, but I couldn’t help myself and I started laughing pretty hard. As soon as I started laughing, my grip on the pole slackened, and so did the old man’s. So he figured out what was going on pretty fast and started yelling at me in some language that sounded like Polish or something Eastern European, which made me laugh even more. Then he took out a knife and started at me all crazy like, so I ran away.

I was too scared to go back and get my pole so I went to the park and thought about starting a new activity: sitting around and feeding the ducks. I always thought feeding the ducks was such a peaceful sport. I imagined tearing off pieces of bread and giving them to the ducks, eventually teaching them how to do tricks, or at least showing them how to march behind me single file. But this activity turned sour immediately. As soon as I sat down at the bench, this one duck flew out of nowhere and landed like a few feet away from me. He started honking really loudly and waddling over to me. I stood up hoping to scare him off, but he just kept advancing and honking, or quacking I guess. I gave up and ran away.

I had never met such a mean bird. Actually, that’s not true. One time when I was in Ecuador, we went to this lady’s house in the mountains. When we got there, the guy who drove us told me to be careful, because this lady had some really mean turkeys. Mean turkeys? I thought either that this guy was crazy or that I had simply mistranslated what he had said to me because, there weren’t any turkeys, just chickens running around. But maybe two hours later, the driver was talking and all of the sudden just stopped, mid-sentence his mouth hanging open. I tried to ask him what was wrong, but he could only point. And sure enough, maybe ten feet away there was a group of turkeys, and they started slowly walking toward us, making weird, terrifying gobbling sounds. The driver immediately ran to the car and, not knowing what these poultry were capable of, I followed him. We drove off and no matter how much I asked the driver why he was so scared of the turkeys – what kind of threat did they pose? – he just couldn’t choke out an answer.

So finally I just gave up on new activities and bought an old Nintendo DS and a copy of Nintendogs. I named my virtual pet Scruffy, and things were getting along OK at first, but, and I really can’t believe that somebody programmed this into the game, I let Scruffy out for an unsupervised walk, I’m telling you it was a legit option, and then I forgot about the game for a few days. When I picked it up, the Game Boy alerted me that Scruffy was foaming at the mouth and was threatening my neighbor’s kids. The only option available was to put the dog down. Can you imagine? What a sick, twisted video game.