I am not as good at Bejeweled as my wife is.

No husband is. I’ve asked. Wives are universally better than their husbands at this game, and basically any other game on your smartphone. Stick a lady in front of Madden or Halo, she’s Simple Jack from Tropic Thunder. Give her your iPhone and some screen tapping game you paid a buck for, she turns into goddamn Seabiscuit. It’s mystifying.

I got super jazzed when I finally broke a million points on Diamond Mine (which took place on an airplane resulting in a slightly overzealous fist pump that earned me a look of haughty derision from the lady next to me – hey cram it, lady, this is a victory), until I saw Kristin’s high scores where it appears she passed a million points roughly three geologic epochs ago.

It was then I realized these games are not made for our entertainment, but only to serve as grim reminders of our ultimate mortality. There is no victory in this game – no goal line, no pot of gold, no mountaintop – only the promise of doing a little better than you did last time, which is pretty much life.

The most hilarious and poignant example of this is the sub-game Butterflies. Your goal is to frantically collect gems in order to prevent the butterflies from advancing up the screen and into the slobbery doom of a waiting black widow spider.

You cannot stop the butterflies from multiplying and steadfastly marching toward their demise, you can only hope to prolong the inevitable for as long as possible. But rest assured, the progress is relentless, and the result is inescapable. Someone is getting eaten today and you are unable to stop it.

It’s the inexorable progression of life where we all do a little better than we did last time on a ceaseless moving walkway where each and every one of us gets to face our very own proverbial black widow spider at the end of our journey. Bejeweled is tiny little dress rehearsals of death repeated over and over again to prepare us for our dance with the reaper. Only death is certain, and Bejeweled is its messenger.

Or maybe it’s just that this fucking conference call won’t end and fuck you, I hit the hypercube before time expired, 25 more seconds, you cruel motherfucker!