if only it could all be like Candyland

When my sister M was a kid, she made up this board game called Getting Jabbed. It was sort of like chutes and ladders, in that it had a variety of encounters that led you either up or down the game board. However, you could never really make any progress in this game. The end result of the game was always death. Your first roll of the dice might lead you to a man wielding a knife (a bloody knife, mind you). This, of course, would send you to a lower level of the gameboard where you might fall into a boiling cauldron. This would mean that your game was over. You might also fall down to a blank square, but this would only mean that you were delaying your eventual end. Anytime you made some progress upwards, there would be another menacing figure with a knife or a hatchet or some other sharp object. We were laughing about the game today and I was thinking how my day (and recent days) felt just like this (not necessarily the boiling cauldrons and the knives).

By the way, M, despite her childhood morbidness grew up to be an extremely well-adjusted adult.