Veritable Tantrum

On Wednesday, July 6, 2016, the world went off the fucking deep end.

Our mindless habit of burying our faces in our phones was already a crux upon which the bane of elderly disillusionment of younger people stood. But we’ve reached the zenith of blindness to our surroundings, ignoring everything as we walk into dead bodies and oncoming traffic.

The world went off the deep end over Pokémon Go, a game that, if you haven’t heard of it, will require you to shelter in place for the rest of your life to avoid milquetoast preteens — and 28-year-old manbabies — walking into traffic with their phones in their hands.

This game will have killed more people than malaria within the next 12 months, and it will be in their honor that those of us who survive another day continue the cumbersome pursuit of something that isn’t a damn Rattata.

Seriously, besides the obvious nostalgia factor, it’s not entirely clear why people are shitting their dicks en masse over Pokémon Go. Because Pokémon Go has had an incredibly mediocre launch so far.

Right now, Pokémon Go is not a good game. It is plagued with bugs and crashes every other time it’s opened. It looks wildly uglier than its ostensibly realistic advertisements, which show the Pokémon you will never catch in the real game unless you know irksome Pokéhacks beforehand. Its servers crash more than a drunk driver, which has pushed Niantic to slow down the game’s international rollout.

Yet against all logic, I’m addicted to Pokémon Go.

I have the meaningless and humiliating drive to conquer all 151 of these little fuckers in hopes of reaching the rarified atmosphere of being a Pokémaster. I walked two miles around Catonsville in 100-degree heat last Saturday only to catch worthless Pidgeys and even more worthless Zubats.

Even my friends and I have started a group chat called PokéLords wherein we share info about where we caught certain Pokémon and rumors about where the best ones are located.

I may have walked two miles in the blistering heat to play a game on my phone, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I enjoyed it. That’s the worst part about this game, but also the most appealing thing about it. We’re only doing it because it’s the newest resurgence in the decades-old Pokémon craze, and the fact that I feel no shame is the most shameful part.

That is until I look through my inventory of six Zubats, eight Pidgeys, and 11 Rattatas. Most of the Pokémon in my collection are just idiot monsters, which, I found out early on, you can transfer to Professor Willow in exchange for evolutionary candy.

In other words, you’re handing off these worthless yet innocent-looking vermin to a guy who will murder them for the sake of research. Getting a Pidgeotto involves littering the world with thousands of Pidgey corpses, just like getting a human centipede involves people in the middle dying from eating too much diarrhea. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

But I did just evolve one of my Rattatas into a Raticate, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t give me a slight sense of accomplishment. The rest of my Pokémon are goddamn losers, but at least I have one giant rat to show for my effort.

UPDATE: I deleted the app at approximately 4:46 p.m. this afternoon. Fuck this thing.