My Name Is Steve C.

You may have noticed that I haven't written much lately. There's a reason for that, and I figure I may as well come right out and tell you what it is. It's not pretty. It's not something I'm proud of. But, it's the cold hard facts.
I've been in rehab, fighting an addiction...Tetris.
It started so innocently. I bought a new cell phone about a year ago and was allowed by the marvelously generous folks at Sprint to download a free game. I chose Tetris. If you're not familiar with it, Tetris is a Russian game where you try to fit various shaped pieces together. When you get a whole line completed you score points. Sounds like fun, eh? Well it was...at first. But, you know those Russians (hope I don't sound like Michael Richards here). They're devious. Even their president goes around poisoning ex-spies.
And they poisoned my mind. Really, they did. I started playing Tetris a few minutes here...a few minutes there, and before I realized what was happening, I was playing six to twelve hours a day.
I stayed up all night playing. I started taking sick days at work in order to stay home and play. I kept telling myself I could stop anytime I wanted to. And, I did, on many occasions, but each time that demon Tetris came back with a vengeance.
Recently I began to realize I'd hit rock bottom. I looked for some sort of twelve step program to help me stop. I went to a TA meeting. Unfortunately, this group had nothing to do with Tetris addiction.
Finally, when I was at wit's end, I saw an ad for a rehab clinic in Tampa, Florida...Sister Mary Krushchev's Tetris De-Tox and Cellulite Removal Ranch. Kill two birds with one stone, I thought.
So, away I went. It was a grueling four months. We were up at six every morning, eating a breakfast of seaweed and kelp. Then there were the group sessions. We'd introduce ourselves. And we'd have to confess to our addictions. Not everyone there suffered from Tetris addiction. There were Ms Pac Man addicts, and Super Mario addicts. Of course, there must have been a couple dozen Solitaire addicts. There was even a poor old man, probably in his eighties, who had been addicted to Pong for over forty years. That was very sad.
After a lunch of bean sprouts and ice cube sandwiches, we'd spend the afternoon weaving baskets or building submarines out of popcycle sticks. Then we'd have more meetings. Those of us who were addicted to Tetris would compare how many lines we had been doing each day.
Finally, after a dinner of oxygen and toothpicks, we'd turn in at about 7:30 PM. The first few nights, I'd sneak back up, get some construction paper and cut out little squares and rectangles and other shapes and then piece them together. After one of the ex-nuns who runs the place caught me and beat me mercilessly, I figured it was time to cut that out (no pun intended).
Well, the bottom line is I've been Tetris-free for over a week. Sure, I wake up at night in a sweat, thinking about the hopelessness of making a square fit when there was no space for it, but aside from that, I'm pretty clean. I feel great. I feel like a new man. I think I'm going to really enjoy life again.
Before I go, just one thing. Can any one out there loan me a cell phone?