The trouble with lying

My nephew is desperately into Pokémon. If you have ever had a conversation with a six-year-old who is desperately into Pokémon, you understand that there are ways of torture that don't involve physical harm. I do not understand Pokémon, I have never understood Pokémon and, despite being subjected to what feels like days of being told about Pokémon by my nephew, I feel like I understand it less than I ever had. I am told that Bulbasaur is the first Pokémon in the Pokedex. I am told that Marill can change its gender while evolving. I am told that Zubat has no eyes. I am told that Wobbuffet's body is not its body. I do not know what any of this means. I am told that Drifloon kills children. Though I do not know what Drifloon is, I've never felt closer to it.

"Pokémon is short for pocket monsters," I tell my nephew, exhausting the only bit of trivia I know about this subject. He does not care about this. He explains to me that you can tell a Pikachu's gender by its tail. If the end of its tail is long and flat, it's a male. The tail of the female Pikachu is shaped like a heart at its tip. However, one should be advised, when they evolve into Raichu, their tails look more similar to each other. Reader, I can be accused of giving you in these newsletters a certain amount of useless information. Nothing will top that.

"Say," I implore. "Since you enjoy learning the names and attributes of things that come in long lists, would you be interested in learning who your congresspeople are?"

He is not.

I have no one to blame but myself. When my nephew's interest in Pokémon was a young thing, blinking its fragile eyes against the sun of a new world, I encouraged it, bragging that I knew everything there is to know about Pokémon in an effort to impress him. I should have smothered the nascent interest with a pillow but, alas, my lies, which heretofore have been so amusing in regards to my nephews, backfired on me spectacularly. Now, whenever I see him, all he wants to talk about is Pokémon. The first thing out of his mouth is "Do you have any new cards to trade?" I've never had cards to trade. In grade school, my brother and I bought a starter pack for a Star Wars card game, a forerunner of Pokémon, I suppose, and we played it for awhile and decided that even for us, and we were pretty big nerds, this was pushing it. I never played jacks, I had a pitiable amount of POGs and that about sums up my relationship with tradable games that have been a staple of childhood for generations. Interestingly, I find out that POGs originated in the 1920s in Hawaii (though there true origins may go all the way back to the 17th century in—where else?—Japan). Children would throw a heavy object called a slammer onto a surface hoping to flip over milk caps, keeping the ones they flipped. The name POG stands for passionfruit, orange and guava, after the juice company that branded the game with its caps. I had a set of Jurassic Park POGs but I wish I had the O.J. Simpson Trial set, with POGs of Judge Lance Ito, Johnnie Cochran and the rest including a piece with a picture of the accused labeled "O.J. in the Slammer."

The problem is that I told my nephew I had an Ancient Mew card, after having ti explained to me that Ancient Mew is the finest of all the pocket monsters despite looking like an untalented child's attempt in drawing a cat. At first, I thought he'd forget about my claim. I have told this child that there are alligators in his grandparent's basement, that there are all manner of haints in the top floor of my house and that I cannot read, why in thunder would he believe that I own a valuable children's object. When he brought it up again the next time I saw him, I figured that I would make an Ancient Mew card, crudely drawing the figure and telling him I was conned by the Poketrainer I got it from, imagining the hilariously disappointed look on his face. However, after his impassioned pitches for what he would trade to obtain my card it became clear that anything less than a genuine Ancient Mew card would be next to cruelty and not the fun kind. Navigating the marketplace for items you barely understand is a harrowing thing, the different versions of this silly card can make your head spin and its nearly impossible to know which ones are the "real" ones, which is ironic because they are cards presenting fake animals. I have come to learn that Ancient Mew is not really that powerful of a Pokémon and was created as a promotion for a movie that came out 15 years before my nephew was born. Still, the prices for this thing can vary in mind-boggling ways. The one I bought was $10 which is still ridiculous for made up thing but I could have paid $750 or $2000. It's hard to imagine an adult laying down two grand for a playing card but, I guess, when you have a condom budget of $0 you can free your money up for other things.

So my nephew got his card but not before I paid him back a little by loudly negotiating with his younger brother that I might trade with him instead, pretending to prefer the younger nephew's obviously terrible cards. I entertained the idea of trading my card straight up for a Pokémon whose seemingly only skill is to fart while my nephew squirmed in the corner at the unfairness of it all. "His cards are TERRIBLE fighters," my nephew seethed. "Yes," I replied "but I'm looking for friends here and this little guy that looks like a penguin does a move called 'Sweet Kisses,' which sounds nice." This went on for a little while until I finally released him from his misery and gave him the card, which had the lovely effect of releasing me from my misery too because, having gotten what he wanted, he sees no reason to further discuss Pokémon with a person who would prefer Piplup to Ancient Mew. I can live with that.