The only thing that could make it worse is if the pieces are Civil War figurines.

The list of my true hates has been static for a long time. Various things have threatened to climb on the list (Emily Fucking Dickinson, puns, Mensa, douchebaggy professor beards, etc.), but most of my hates occupy the vast second, third and fourth tiers. But it’s time now to add a third item to the two that make up the top level, and that item is: chess.

Chess. Shatner’s unclean UNDERPANTS, do I hate chess. Reasons include but are not limited to:

--Board games should be played either family-style, with kids & adults hanging out and having fun together, or friend-style, with booze and rampant skullduggery. Chess lends itself to neither, and thus, I have no use for it.

--The overused strategery metaphor. If a writer or director for print, stage or screen wishes to convey two opponents outthinking and outmaneuvering each other, a battle of wits and street smarts and moxie, chances are, they’re gonna bring in chess sooner or later, either verbally (“This guy’s three moves ahead of us, Chief!”) or actually (recent episode of Monk) or sometimes super-extra-literally (second season of Twin Peaks). And seriously: Must we, really? Are there no other metaphors, or is there just the one?

--Its use as cultural shorthand for “very smart person, probably a genius.” You don’t have to be smart to play chess, and you aren’t stupid just because you can’t or don’t want to. It helps if you have a touch of the Asperger’s, or just an engineering mind, but for instance, my social-retard freshman roommate could play, and that crazy bitch was as dumb as a dented box of stale corn chips.

--Obnoxious kids that play it. Nothing is more obnoxious in the world of Kid Obnoxiousness than the kid who’s good at chess. In-fucking-sufferable, these little twits. And it’s sad, because they’re obviously making up for an inherited lack of social skills which probably isn’t going to get better as they approach adolescence, but that doesn’t stop their smugness from making me want to give them a super atomic swirly, eight years old or not.

--The fact that I do not understand it and cannot play it (like with magic – you can show me, in intricate, painstaking detail, how a goddamn magic trick works, and I will still stare at it, baffled and angry, still not getting how it fucking works).