Monday at 9AM. In a few minutes I’ll depart Starbucks for home. Waking later today (continuing to battle this congestion) nonetheless a cup of coffee energizes body and spirit for another day.

I am not into game playing. I’ve cared little about board games, card games, etc.. Certainly there are reasons for my diffidence toward games. In my past, my formative “growing-up years” I did not learn to offset the the possibility of losing a game, with the pleasure of playing. I prefer not to lose. I always choose to play, if there is a possibility that I might win.

Family members, with maybe one exception, all take enjoyment from playing many kinds of games. I envy them. They have learned things about themselves resulting from the temporary agency adopted in the course of playing a game. I’ve understood for some time, that one learns really important things in the course of doing one’s best, even when you lose.

I have started a book by C. Thi Nguyen, Games Agency As Art. Nguyen is a skilled communicator. He challenges me to “lean forward” to explore the possibilities within this neglected aspect of my development.

I expect that our family summer vacation will present as in past years opportunities for playing games. This time around, I plan to put my reluctance “on hold” to go ahead and opt-in with everyone and just see what happens. Is declining to play an alternative form of losing? If the striving entailed in the play is the whole point, how can one lose?

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Today this tagline appeared in the New York Times email that I receive on a daily basis.

Trump bemoaned the state of the N.F.L.’s media deal in an interview, suggesting the cost of watching games could spell doom for the league.

How ironic I thought to myself. The poster man-child for the Neo-liberal capitalism infesting our society complains that the fever for ever more profit amounts to self-cannibalization. Of course he’d be the last man to add 2+2.

I recall what Nietzsche had to say about the last man, an incessantly blinking fool.

Lo! I show you the Last Man.

“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” — so asks the Last Man, and blinks.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest.

“We have discovered happiness” — say the Last Men, and they blink.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loves one’s neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth.

Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or men!

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche