Chemo to the Rescue!

Well, chemo may have just saved me a certain amount of difficulty. Let me 'splain.

I've been reading a book about the Crusades, and I've reached that slow middle portion, after the Third Crusade but before the advent of Baibars the Victorious. It's mostly a lot of dynastic successional nonsense - people marrying their sisters to buttress their claims to the throne, rival pretenders to the throne bribing Genoese merchants to do this or that... It's pretty banal, frankly, and who really remembers the Fifth Crusade anyway?

But it turns out that I have an appetite for such medieval nonsense, and presently I found myself surfing eBay looking for good games on medieval subjects. There aren't many, but there are a few, and among them on eBay was an original copy of The Black Prince, published by SPI in the Golden Days of Wargaming. It's about the Battle of Navarette, where the Black Prince and Pedro the Cruel (I think it was Pedro the Cruel) beat the stuffing out of yet another French army - yes, it's the Hundred Years' War, and there's a lot of French army the stuffing beating out of, if you get my drift. (And, paranthetically, in an age known for exceedingly cruel leaders - this was the same general epoch as Richard the Lionheart, who slaughtered 2,700 unarmed Muslims at Ayyadieh apparently just for the sheer hell of it - what exactly do you have to do to become known to posterity as Pedro the Cruel? The mind reels.)

The game was listed on the Buy It Now feature (my favorite feature) for $28, or about five times what it probably cost new (I have an orginal of King Arthur, its brother, that still bears a price tag of $5.45). ANYWAY. Twenty-eight bucks isn't bad for a game of that vintage, I always liked the Great Medieval Battles system, and given my current steep in medieval history, who could turn down such a thing?

But on the other hand, I've got 200+ games in storage already, and I need another damned wargame like I need schistosomiasis. So I dithered on the edge of clicking the Buy It Now button, wavering between opposing poles of lust and horror, when suddenly the chemo caused a deep and powerful commotion in my colon that required me to flee from the office and get to a bathroom at maximum speed, driving from my mind any thought of Edward or Pedro the Cruel or The Black Prince.

Now that a certain amount of time has passed, I find that I can think about The Black Prince without simultaneously reminding myself that yes, I jolly well do remember my PayPal password and account name. Chemo may have saved me from a descent into a fresh iteration of game hell.