Does anyone remember the Mario Bros.? The little known couplet of children’s mascots began as a character named Plumber Jack who battled the evil five-toed gorilla Mule Kong on the Atari 2600 game of the same name. If you jack off and then finger a girl you can impregnate her with your dried sperm.
I was sitting at home playing my favorite game boy and game girl games when I found the old Sness. I dusted that motherfucker off and popped in a strange cart that had appear by my doorway that was left by a sinister one-eyed man who looked like Dennis Hopper from Speed with spiked tipped hair.
At first I was confused because the cart was all torn up and Mario looked like he was crying on the cover. He looked like a Vietnamese prostitute named Ming Lee after her cervix had been removed. My phone rang. It was my supervisor, God. He told me that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing and insisted that I follow along with my genetic program he had set up for me. I refused and he told me that I was going to burn in the fires of hell for all eternity, I told him we all end up burning like that, like toast, it wouldn’t matter if he or something else burned me, I just wasn’t afraid anymore.
I took my meds for schizophrenia and started jacking off on the couch. Then I remembered there was a game I was supposed to be playing. I called for my dog, Fido, but then realized he didn’t exist, and a strange man in green suspenders brought me my shoes. His name was Luigi and he was our Italian gardener/plumber/pizza preparer. I asked him to make me a pizza but he didn’t wash his hands after using the toilet and there was shit all over the pizza. I threw it, and him in the garbage, when he told me that I couldn’t do this to a man and he abruptly quit, throwing his suspenders in the garbage and walking naked down the street.
Look I don’t want to be an asshole but if you don’t want to get your dick sucked, fucked and chucked man up and stop being a fucking pussy. I picked up that cart and put it into the SNES before realizing that it was just a loaf of bread that someone had drawn on with a crayon and attached two controllers to. This will probably sound racist but that Dennis Hopper-looking guy was at my window and he said “I trolled you, you fucking asshole” and he gave me the middle finger. He had just been standing out there for three days. Strange.
I was beginning to think that there was something evil about this existence. I put the game in and pressed “Power” to start it up. I put on the power glove and began to jack off with it. It’s so bad. Oh my god. I was horrified to see that instead of an Italian plumber, it was a Hispanic plumber. It was a subtle change to the pixels, but quite obvious. Mario’s skin was slightly more Hispanic-tinged, they had used cornrow orange instead of baby harvest melanin (I’m a game programmer also) instead of fireballs, he shot tiny tacos and delicious ranch dressing. While ranch dressing is not a Hispanic food by nature, you may have heard of Tex Mex which takes advantage of the beauty of ranch dressing in an American-South-of-the-Border mixture of tactile and festive dining sensations.
It was also strange that instead of his usual catch phrase, which was nothing, I heard the phrase “Gotta get all da tacos!” blare out of the eight bit musical apparatus. Except this was 16 bit and super Mario, so I thought. I immediately jumped forward and landed on a turtle shell. Normally, you’d hit the turtle shell and slide along on your merry way, with lots of power ups and lulz to ensue.
But not this time, not at all. Instead, the turtle screamed “Ow, you’ve broken my spine” and tiny tears dripped down the screen. There was gore all over the place. As Mario threw down a Mexican dinner and began to dance around, the cart glitched and I shut it off. What the fuck was that. That wasn’t the Mario I knew. It was something else, maybe from somewhere else. Maybe something supernatural, something beyond us, something we don’t understand. Something that keeps us going through the pain and hardship of our uncertain and terrifying existence.
Just then there was a knock at my door. A family of Spanish immigrants, dressed in turtle costumes, stared angrily at me, crying. “YOU KILLED, YOU KILLED OUR SON!” they cried and pointed through me, at the tv, as though I wasn’t even there. “I didn’t kill them.” I said. “He.” I said. “It was just a violent video game. This is all just a deep metaphor for violence in video games.” “And NEXT I’M GOING TO PLAY YOU! DAVE THE USELESS!” the story screamed, but I silenced it, mouth agape. I couldn’t kill their son I mean it’s not like the video game world is a real place, a simulated existence where things are happening because they’re made to happen, and we’re living out thousands of simulations. Who knows maybe there are universes where marios are playing the marios, and hell, my name is Mario also, though not Mario from the video games, no, my name is Mario Sans the Man Hernandez.
I went into the kitchen and examined the blood on my feet. I got out all the usual supplies. I meticulously cleaned the blood and turtle pieces of bone off of my shoes, used some high tech cleaning supplies to remove the blood that had gunked up around the floor where the murder was committed and slowly, slowly cut up the pieces of the remaining turtle and fed them into the garbage disposal before the Koopa Police could arrive. They examined my house and found nothing but twenty six kilograms of Mexican gold marijuana and some “magic” mushrooms. As I ate some of them and began jumping around the police opened fire. These must have been defective because I wasn’t growing at all.
I ran into the bathroom and decided to do the warp jump through the pipes. Well, needless to say it didn’t work. That’s where they found me. Dead, slumped over, with my head in the toilet. My corpse smelled horrible, my red overalls were frayed and I had shit my own pants during the sixteen hours it took the police to find me.
As I hovered toward a light of infinite love, the creator of the universe spoke to me, in his native language. My eyes grew teary, wept and wide as saucers. “Hey super Mario, why don’t you fuck off!” Now look this story has been going on for a long time with little rhyme or reason, and by that I don’t mean the haunted Mario cart story, but the story of our existence. But also the haunted Mario cart story. You see, each time you start up your favorite game, a tiny, trapped man is brought into existence. Or it could be a woman, or even a “Pac-Man” if you will. Maybe even a little known blue headhog named Sornic. And you are his “god” in a sense, guiding him, helping him jump over the goombas, hit the “p” blocks and level up. Disheveled. And the moment you unplug the game, neglect it, refuse to finish it or leave it to the dust of time and decay, you’ve effectively killed him. If you don’t go back to those games and finish them, Mario will never find peach in the castle. The evil dr. robotnik will kill the animals. For the love of god, someone had an idea and you started it. Please help me find the game that you started but never finished and finish it. Maybe you bought it by saving up your lunch money. Or maybe your mom spent her last few dollars in her bank account giving it to you because she’s a single mom and she knows it’s the only thing that makes you happy. But for whatever reason, if it’s in a pawn shop somewhere, or sitting in your attic, it was an idea. Your idea. A machine mechanism that you made in your mind. And it won’t matter how many of those games you’ve finished, and there are thousands, because there will always be one more that you haven’t.
I woke up, then, in the toilet. I opened my eyes and brushed the urine out of my eyes and looked out at the world. I was sad, so I could only see the world through a sad lens, but I could see the world. And though I had only been in the toilet for about sixty seconds, it had felt as though aeons had passed. Like a dream.