the great bop-it debacle of 2013

summer is always a cleansing and beautiful time of the year for me. 

particularly summer evenings and nights. 

we skated/ unicycled to the closet park with our friend wil the other night and enjoyed some twilight swinging. i watched stars appear through the waining light. it was great. 

summer nights always give you renewed hope that great adventures are coming. 

at the beginning of what promised to be a productive and memorable summer the lovely miss rachel and i were getting ready for a wonderful night of beers and dancing when she spotted my original bop-it sitting on a shelf.

i loved my bop-it. 

i had kept it in good shape since '96. 

minimal throwing of the bop-it occurred due to my rad bop-it skills. 

rachel pulled the dusty toy from it's designated place and began to finagle it back to life. 

i hadn't used it in a little over a month or so, and it was a popular item at cook outs. 

but this time things went HORRIBLY WRONG. 

after playing a solid game or two the bop-it began to malfunction by failing to sense the toggles when pressed, pulled, or twisted. 

it then proceeded to have what i can only call a technological seizure. 

rachel handed me the toy and we both stared sadly at the dying relic of childhood. it was a painful reminder that time, and new generations, have been erasing the simplicity of toys over the decades; and this is one battle we will never reclaim. just like betty spaghetti and the skip-it (pour one out for your homies). 

we spent a good minute or so staring at the poor thing when i let out a plaintiff "nnoooo. it can't die!" when the thing started to let out other sounds. 

for those who aren't familiar with the preset recordings of the bop-it i will tell you now that most of what is to follow isn't one of those recorded automatic responses.

the damn thing recorded my voice and started playing it back to me in the form of a dying screeching electronic. 

rachel and i FLIPPED OUR SHIT. we began to legitimately believe that my bop-it had been possessed by something far beyond our understanding and we were literally playing with forces beyond our control. the bop-it began wailing wildly while playing the preset drum crashes in a continual loop. 

at this point we were late to meet everyone and our sheer panic had rendered our reasoning abilities completely useless, so we asked my housemate jo to watch it while i was out. jo set the toy (which at this point had become inexplicably quiet) on his kitchen table and turned out the light as he left the kitchen. rachel and i started out the door when suddenly the bop-it screeched back to life and wailed into the darkness; presumably wanting the souls of orphans. 

jo caught us and asked if i was playing a joke on him. i explained that i believed the bop-it to be haunted and couldn't deal with such a daunting task as i had beer and punk music throw downs taking up my roster. 

so jo isolated the bop-it to a chair on the deck. 

it screamed into the night until i came home hours later and took the batteries out. 

it remains in it's place on my shelf without batteries. 

i'm still too afraid to replace them.