Around the Hypnotic Set

I’d ordered cards, a puzzle, some color-by-number books, a chess set and a game of Monopoly.  My kids were raised playing the Hong Kong version of Monopoly, where Boardwalk is “The Peak” and you get a five-thousand Hong Kong dollar note instead of the five-hundred you’d otherwise put in Free Parking.  You get used to landing on Wong Tai Sin and Central and with comparative ease, the mind adjusts playing in Pearl River Delta rather than the Jersey shore.     

Amazon did not have the Hong Kong version available for shipment and so I procured the classic Monopoly, which seems very alien to my daughters.  And none of it lasts more than a minute once you all roll and start making your way around the hypnotic set.  Buy as much as you can as quickly as you can . . . strategic thinking in Monopoly is pretty straight forward.  But whereas most other such games have limited attraction as the years roll on, Monopoly casts a spell of familiarity, as if you’re revisiting a playground you used to frequent where you learned the operating manual of the American hustle.   

Lady luck is fickle.  Sometimes you roll well.  And sometimes . . .  Who me?  I landed on Park Place early.  Later I got the “Advance Token to Boardwalk” card in the Chance pile and not long into the game had hotels on both properties.  And it would just be a matter of time before someone would land there and be completely unable to pay and I would use whatever they scraped together to meet the rent,  to buy or trade more for my burgeoning portfolio.  Soon I had the corner with Baltic and Mediterranean and though it took some time it was now only really a matter of time.

I don’t know if the story is apocryphal or not, but I’d read somewhere about a game of Monopoly that John Lennon was involved in during that “Beatles 65” period, when he was singing songs like "Money", where as the story goes, he played for keeps and was maximum aggressive, hell-bent on winning, delighting in other's losses.   I don’t suspect he would have played any different in the period right after he wrote “Imagine” either.  Compassion and kindness only prolong the inevitable in Monopoly. 

Thursday 3/19/20