#5 - You Can’t See Sh*t

Beneath the pixelated hazy residue of last night’s marathon gaming session and the fact that blinding sunlight is piercing through your front windshield, operating a moving vehicle is hazardous and dangerous to the motivated, non gaming members of society surrounding you. They’re wearing suits and careening sleepily towards monuments of a collective progressive society. You’re just driving directly into the sun and gambling away the lives of both you and your ‘88 Chevy Cavalier.

#4 - You Can’t Buy Pizza Or Liquor

Yeah, you can indulge in the meager offerings of pizza and liquor’s pathetic cousins, Ellio’s frozen slabs and beer (depending on your neighborhood’s propensity to favor bodega cuisine.) But the real deal, actual pizza and legitimate liquor (i.e. vodka) are hours out of reach. These slices of indulgence and frosty fuel were systematically placed outside of your exhausted grips for a reason: you need to sleep in late enough to purchase them. Congrats, you woke up early enough to earn the rights to eat a granola bar and drink an iced coffee. Nice score. Hit the pillows and attack this quest later.

#3 - Nobody Is Online

Your Xbox Live buddy list is peacefully tucked away in bed. After all, you just said goodnight to them 3 hours ago. Every one else online is European (a varied set of cultures who either hates you for your failure of a president or is worse than you at gaming since the game you’ve been playing since November only got localized for them yesterday) or Japanese (who can historically beat your ass up and down the polygonal park.) The only plus is the quiet bliss of knowing that most of racist America is too busy being passed out in a pile of barn animals and Natty Light cans to scream hateful diatribes into your headset.

#2 -Your Hand-Eye Coordination Is F*cked

Your hands are shaky, your eyes forcibly drift into closure - your most valuable marriage of mental and physical gaming weaponry is completely debilitated. What were you thinking? They don’t put wheelchair ramps in video games for your stupid, sleepless ass. Even senior citizens have the sensibility to not boot up a round of Wii Bowling until after the Metamucil bruncheon when the meds kick in and Blanche starts looking attractive.

#1 - You Can’t Buy Video Games

Businessmen wake up at 5 A.M. to affix their sock suspenders and pretend the stock exchange isn’t a giant cartoon. Doctors leap up to the sound of their pagers calling them in to save the lives of the people who couldn’t see sh*t on the road a few minutes earlier. You? Can’t even buy a video game until 10 or so. The vague exception to this rule is camping out for a new release, which, if you had any sense of dedication, should’ve begun the night before in a defiant act of selfishness and consumerism fueled by your passion for video games and - you guessed it - pizza and liquor. Go back to bed.

*Written from experience by an actual gamer at 6:07 A.M. *