Recently, I sat in a bar, stone cold sober, watching as a nearby table ordered bottle after bottle of wine. I think they were up to their seventh or eighth bottle when they started playing the age-old game of Bloody Knuckles.

Their form was a variation that I had never seen before. Each of the players made a fist, and as is the norm, they touched their fists together. But then, instead of raising his fist and bringing it down on his opponent's in a "knocking" motion, the Hitter drew his fist back and punched his opponent's fist head-on. The strike made a loud smack that was audible even above the jukebox.

In case you didn't realize it, it is mid-July, the beginning of Bloody Knuckle season. Around the country, kids everywhere are getting to that point of summer vacation where the boredom is really setting in. There are only three kinds of humans who play Bloody Knuckles: the seriously bored, the seriously stupid, and the seriously drunk. Life challenges and life experience usually eliminate the first two excuses from most people's lives. But anyone can get drunk. So don't worry, your Bloody Knuckle career isn't necessarily over. You might come out of retirement for a return match tonight!

Back in my Bloody Knuckles halcyon days as a kid, my favorite variant of the game required a table. Everything is the same as the standard version, except you play with your forearms flat on a tabletop. That way, if you miss, you rap your own knuckles on the table really, really hard. This variant of Bloody Knuckles usually doesn't last very long.

I like to think about how long ago, someone actually thought up the game of Bloody Knuckles, and it became so wildly popular that everyone has at least heard of it. Its popularity is due to its simplicity. Two people willingly engage in the exchange: "I will try to hit you. You try to avoid it. If you are successful, then you can try to hit me. We'll do this until both of us are hurt so badly that we can't even sign our own names."

Those are the rules.