Pokemon Go! An Anecdote

So it has been over a year since the Pokemon Go! phenomena first launched, and I am not at all ashamed to say that I have been a player ever since. A lot of people got real cynical and mean about how excited the players all were, but I just have never understood what the hell there is to be so mad about! It is a free app that you download on your phone that immediately encouraged people to get outside, go for walks, get exercise and socialize in a perfectly harmless way while filling the world with whimsical little cartoon creatures. What is so bad about that? Oh! And the people talking the most trash usually have Candy Crush installed on their phones, like that is somehow less stupid than Pokemon Go!... Right. LOL.

It is hard to go out looking for the little bastards in the summer time when the weather is so dreadfully hot, but I still get out and go "hunting" once in a while. Last summer when the app first launched, every park in the city was filled with people of all ages, but mostly with pre-teens and teens who would normally be sitting at home watching TV or staring at a computer screen. One fine summer day in June, I was out and about enjoying meeting all the new people playing the game and one person in particular caught my eye. It was a teenager, maybe sixteen or seventeen. He was a bigger kid, I don't want to be unkind, but this fellow was more than just a bit overweight. But there he was, running in the park. Not just walking, I mean running flat out, checking his screen every so often to see if there was something new to catch or if one of his eggs had hatched. I was stunned by the energy he was expending, and he looked like he was having so much fun! There were some other kids at the basketball courts, pointing, laughing and generally making fun of all of us. One of those mean teenagers yelled out at the boy who was running.

"Hey fat fuck! You think you're gonna lose any weight chasing Pokemon like a retard?!"

Without missing a single beat, without breaking his stride at all, the big kid yelled right back at him "You're damn right I'm gonna close this weight chasing Pokemon! And then I'm gonna get with your girlfriend, she likes Pokemon too!" and he just keep right on running while the mean jock stood stunned.

The moral of the story is this: you can be the happy guy running around catching whimsical imaginary creatures and not care what other people think, or you can be the mean jock yelling mean things and look dumb doing it. Choose wisely!