Chess With A Kick To It

Tonight, Daniel challenged me to a game of chess.  In itself, that phenomenon sounds the "Something-Is-Off" alarm, since Ian is our Chess-Meister, and Daniel is our all-purpose Recreational Wreaker of Havoc. But I was reassured that some surreal playwright hadn't rewritten our evening when I saw that Daniel was setting up the chess pieces on the red table-cloth in the dining room, without the decadent  bourgeois luxury of a chess board.  Needless to say, Ian was Daniel's consultant in the placement of the chess pieces, fervent and flawlessly accurate as usual.  But with the absence of a checkered grid, our chess board was being set up with the constitutional incorrectness only Daniel could have masterminded.  So without knowing precisely what this game was, I knew that things were already back to normal.

In short order, Daniel introduced the very basic, easy-to-master rules of Danielian chess.:

"You try to kick me three times before I kick you."

Now I knew we were back on familiar turf.  Daniel had survived the genetic mutation I had worried about.

And kick we did.  Each of us picked up a pawn and, in mid-air, tried to "kick" the other player's pawn three times per battle, with the base of our own, almost like drunkards ferociously trying to clink shot glasses, in miniature.  Since Daniel was both the creator and the arbiter of the game, it turned out that his pieces were trouncing mine much, much faster than I would have assumed based on my novice-level perception as to which pawn was "kicking" the other.  Each of us "counted" our kicks out loud, with Daniel sounding "1-2-3" like a postmodern waltz,  much faster than I could perceive his pawns touching mine.  Within a minute or two, all of my pawns were lying in a brutal funerary pile Daniel's regal rear-guard - definitely part of the ritual fun, for Daniel, and I was shamefully cycling through each of the nobility, clergy, and finally the monarchs themselves, in the last sequence of foot-to-foot combat battles, now with my elite class pitted against Daniel's ruthless pawn proletariat.

For the first time ever, Daniel beat me in chess, without any effort on my part.  And he taught me a new game that brought together a timeless Persian game of wit and his own appreciation for kicking, taking the "bored" out of the world's greatest board-game, along with the board itself.

[Daniel's Chess, June 20, 2013]