My Addiction, by Matty Smith

The following is a true story.

It started a few years ago, at my first job in Hollywood. I was workin' for a real bona fide production company-- yessir, the kind of movie company that made fancy movies like Coach Carter, and Norbit. In fact, the company did make Coach Carter and Norbit. I entered my first foray into the entertainment world an enthusiastic, eager and, unfortunately, gullible young lad.

I never thought Hollywood could change me. Turns out, like the millions of others who set out to make it in this harsh mistress of a town, it did.

It started off simple enough. I'd answer phone calls, say hello to Tom Welling when he walked in. The usual stuff. But as the days got longer, and the phone calls from the director of Summer Catch starring Freddie Prinze, Jr. stopped coming in, a different kind of monster rolled into town. A monster named Boredom. Suddenly, instead of rubbing elbows with Samuel L. Jackson and making with the googly eyes with Britney Spears in a whirling Hollywood fever dream, I was rubbing elbows with a big empty desk and making googly eyes with a Windows ME default desktop wallpaper. It was then that I spotted it, that sweet siren's song of a program icon, beckoning me like the serpent to Eve.

One made-up compound word: FreeCell. To some it is merely Solitaire with skill involved. But I know its true face: black magic.

It was easy to control at first. A game here, a game there. Win, loss, didn't really matter much to me. I was just a kid, foolin' around. Three of clubs on top of a four of diamonds here, set the ten of hearts aside there. Easy peasy. But then something dark broke out from inside me, like a wild tiger exploding from a thicket. Suddenly my win-loss record counted. Suddenly that other girl interning there was confused by how much I played the game and why I actually cared if I won. Suddenly I'd go to bed at night and instead of my usual talking dog adventures, my dreams were overtaken by thoughts of compatible card combinations and how many cards I could shift to other piles with given amounts of open spaces.

I had it, had it bad. Addiction.

This riveting story to be continued on a later day...

Here's a great video written by Becky Bain as a reward for putting up with my stupid crap all the time: