Scott C. Jones

I quickly discovered that wrestling was a much more intimate sport than football was. Instead of going outdoors to a breezy, hundred yard-long field for practice, you went into the school’s smallest, darkest, most claustrophobic room. Instead of wearing a uniform that was so bulky and dehumanizing you needed to iron the names of the players onto the back in order to tell them apart, you wore a thin piece of spandex and cotton (a singlet) that left nothing to the imagination.

When the equipment manager handed me my singlet for the first time, I felt like a showgirl in a movie who’d just been handed her new “costume,” which, of course, always turns out to be a tiny piece of lingerie on a hanger. “They expect me to wear this?” she says without fail. More…

[New here? Get yourself up to speed by going back to Day 1 where I explain why I'm playing 101 levels of Donkey Kong in 101 days.]

There was a brief period of time–one week, maybe two–in high school when I was known as “The Hero.” ”Hey everyone, here comes The Hero!” people would say. Or, “Make way for The Hero!” Or, “Ha, ha, The Hero is having spaghetti for lunch today!”

No kidding, people said these things to me. And when they weren’t saying these things to me, they were slapping me on the back, or delivering high-fives, or stopping me between classes so that I could recount the event–or rather, The Event–that had temporarily transformed me from a mortal into into a minor god. More…

[If you're new here, 1. welcome, friend, 2. get yourself up to speed by going back to Day 1 where I explain why I'm playing 101 levels of Donkey Kong in 101 days.]

The overheated lobby of the Holiday Inn Express at three in the morning smelled like a ghost had just finished smoking a cigarette then promptly peeled and enjoyed a mandarin orange afterward. Now that I think about it, that’s one more descriptor I’d like to see in advertisements for hotels: “clean,” “simple,” “no bulls***,” “you will not get bedbugs,” and “no cigarette-smoking, orange-eating ghosts live here.”

I gave the tired eyed woman behind the front desk my credit card, then took the elevator up to the second floor to my room. By the smell of things, the cigarette-smoking ghost had apparently been haunting up here as well, despite the fact that there was a large no-smoking sign prominently displayed on my door. More…

[If you're new here, 1. welcome, friend; 2. get yourself up to speed by going back to Day 1 where I explain why I'm playing 101 levels of Donkey Kong in 101 days. You good? OK. Let's move on.]

The plane finally reached the gate in Syracuse at around 2:30 in the morning. After the majesty of the United terminal at O’Hare in Chicago–the soaring glass and steel ceilings, the bona fide brontosaurus skeleton, the Coach leather goods store which sold handbags which cost as much as a used Honda–it was difficult to reconcile where I’d been two hours earlier with the threadbare carpeting and boiled-hot dog smell of where I was now: Hancock International Airport in Syracuse, New York. And I wasn’t the only one having trouble with this transition. Everyone exiting the plane appeared to be frowning at the low ceilings and malnourished ferns. More…

Three objects–a sombrero, an umbrella, and a diamond ring–have appeared without fail in all 16 levels of Donkey Kong (Game Boy, 1994) that I’ve played thus far. From the start I have assumed that these objects were nothing more than evidence of the type of surrealist logic typically found in videogames a la eating a mushroom to grow in stature, or shooting a snake which turns into an egg which one can eat for a health boost.

Artist's rendition of the sombrero-ring-umbrella trio.

Yet this morning, as I collected the sombrero, umbrella and ring for the 17th consecutive day in a row, an entirely new theory occurred to me. What you are about to read is a fictional transcript of a meeting that might or might not have happened in the Nintendo offices in 1993, approximately one year before Donkey Kong shipped.

“OK, guys, we need something for the player to collect in this game,” the lead designer says to the rest of the team. He holds a pencil above a pad of paper. “Let’s hear the ideas, people.”

“What about an apple?” one programmer says.

“No fruit,” the lead designer says. “Too much like Pac-man.” More…

Fact: Airplanes bound for Syracuse are always about as small and old as airplanes can get. That night’s plane out of Chicago was no exception. Picture a tube approximately 20 feet in length, with single seats on the left and pairs of seats on the right. As I walked down the aisle in search of my seat, I began hunching myself until I was practically doubled over, looking less like a man in search of seat 11A and more like I was experiencing severe gastrointestinal pain. Even Frodo Baggins would have felt claustrophobic inside this godforsaken thing. More…

As soon as we learned that the flight to Syracuse would be cancelled, everyone, like beavers in the wild, promptly began building what appeared to be little campsites in the gate area. Rolled-up jackets became pillows; newspapers and magazines functioned as makeshift blankets. One man, lucky enough to have an actual blanket with him, stretched it between two banks of chairs, fashioning a cozy tarp for himself and his wife. It was impossible not to be jealous of them. Two people had a terse exchange after one person’s newspaper-blanket crept over into the “campsite” staked out by another person.

Fun Fact: Charles de Gaulle Airport has been rated the worst to sleep in overnight.

Only a few minutes ago we were all enjoying our Mounds bars, consuming bottles of Fiji water, and shopping for this month’s issue of Dwell. Now? It was borderline Lord of the Flies in here. Only in airports can you have a Coach leather goods store selling $1,000 handbags a mere 10 yards away from a man taking an impromptu bath–shirt off, water splashing into his armpits, the whole thing–in a restroom sink.

I knew this kind of thing would happen to me someday, knew that, on one of these cross-country holiday flights, I’d have to endure one of these cliched strandings that always get reported on the morning news, complete with video footage of travelers looking dazed and cursed, their hair flying all over their heads. This year, I would be one of those travelers.

A few other questions floated out there in the void. I thought: What if I never get home? What if this plane never takes off? What if I’m here…forever? These were completely crazy questions, I knew. But trust me, the mind tends to jump its tracks when it’s midnight, and you’re halfway across the country, and you’re sleeping next to a shuttered Brookstone. More…

I love landing in Chicago. Changing planes always blows for a million different reasons. But if you have to change planes, and I mean have to, this is the place you want to do it. O’Hare is modern and clean. It’s easy to navigate. There are plenty of good food options. And, best of all, the United terminal features a bona fide dinosaur skeleton.

Hello, old friend.

I exited the plane and treated myself to a Jamba Juice. A bored Mexican man fixed a Mango-A-Go-Go smoothie for me. Then I found the dinosaur skeleton and peered at it for awhile. Drinking a smoothie while looking up at a dinosaur skeleton at the O’Hare International Airport has kind of become an informal holiday tradition for me. I do it every year.

Once my smoothie was gone and I’d enjoyed enough dinosaur, I reported to my gate for the next leg of my trip. The gate for this leg–the Chicago to Syracuse leg–was, as usual, located at the far-, no man’s land-end of the terminal, at one of those group-type gates, where all borderline-negligible flights always depart from. More…

I boarded the plane, huffing and sweating but beyond relieved to have my “entertainment bag” back on my person, squinting my way along the length of the aircraft. I found my seat only to discover someone already sitting in it. It was a rotund, moon-faced woman wearing a knit cap that was too small for her head. “Excuse me,” I said, tapping her on the shoulder, very gently. It was obvious that the woman was faking sleep, her eyes shut tight as she no doubt prayed to her gods with all her might that I–the window-seat occupant–would not show up for the flight. Her brow furrowed, which meant that she was feeling my taps on her shoulder, yet she kept her eyes shut. She didn’t want to open them to the reality that she would now have to move to her true seat–the middle seat, a.k.a. the most terrible seat in the world–now that I was here. Side note: Who invented middle seats anyway? That obviously very cruel and very short, very narrow-bodied person is hopefully relegated to sitting in a middle seat in hell for all of eternity. More…

This is the eighth and final level of the Big City levels, which means I’ll be leaving the urbana, i.e. the trash cans, behind after today. What sort of new milieu lies ahead? Who knows. This is also one of those once-every-four-levels boss fights with Donkey Kong. First impressions of today’s level: it’s a fairly traditional-looking level. It has three tiers of girders, Pauline (screaming, per usual) at the top, Kong in the middle, and Mario (me) at the very bottom. Let’s begin. More…