I’ve warned about the dangers of nostalgia before.

It does something to the mind; turns the frontal lobe to goo and makes perfectly rational people lose all common sense.

One hit of the stuff and you’ve got your lawn chair down at Veterans Park at 6 in the morning the day Phil Dirt comes to town, or you’re stealing aluminum siding off of foreclosures to sell as scrap for a fix.

It’s all a very slippery slope.

But I haven’t been completely honest with you through the years.

I, too, have had my own demons to battle.

So can I speak from the heart here?

I’m addicted.

To power pellets.

And for too many years now, I’ve had a monkey on my back.

His name is Donkey Kong.

I still love the video games of my youth.

Almost exclusively.

In this day and age, there are games I would’ve gone absolutely berserk to play as a kid — first-person shooter games so intense, the only thing missing is the PTSD — yet I have almost no interest in playing them.

Maybe it’s because my brother-in-law has always made me feel my age the times we’ve played “Call of Duty” together.

“Wait! Don’t kill me yet! How do I throw a grenade?!”

Envision me frantically pressing the A, B, X and Y buttons all at the same time.

At the risk of sounding like some old fool, there are too many things to push.

Give me one little metal stick with a plastic red ball on top.

Give me dot matrix graphics.

And give me a soundtrack that might’ve been made with the same little Casio keyboard I got for Christmas in third grade.

Now, step aside kids.

This is how it’s done.

My frontal lobe is goo, but in the eternal words of Qbert, I don’t really #$%&@! care.

When I learned a while back that Saturday, May 22, is the 30th anniversary of “Pac-Man,” I saw it as an opportunity to write about this dark little obsession of mine (and to basically get paid to play “Donkey Kong”).

While Saturday marks a milestone for “Pac-Man,” it’s really a chance to celebrate all the games from that era — “Pac-Man” was the game from which the phenomenon flowed.

And so on a recent Friday, I loaded my pockets up with quarters and went looking for vintage arcade games around town. (See my findings in the Entertainment section.)

I actually broke a sweat playing “Ms. Pac-Man” at the Holiday Inn — in part because the machine is down by the hot tub.

Or maybe I’m just that out of shape.

Later on, my wife called.

“How’s your day going?” she asked.

“Oh, I just got done playing ‘Donkey Kong’ at the Holiday Inn.”

Silence.

“You’re at work, right?” she wondered.

“Yeah.”

“Do your bosses know where you are?” she inquired.

“Uh. No.”

Still, she’d probably rather me play the games there than at home.

We still laugh about the time, barely a year married and living at Red Coach Village, I wandered out to the Heart of Ohio Antique Center one weekend by myself while she was at work and saw it — a chance to own my very own arcade machine.

Shaking with excitement, I raced back to the apartment to call her.

“Honey! Can I buy a ‘Space Invaders’ machine?”

“Sure. Can I get my hair colored?”

“Sure!”

Off I went to spend $300 we so painfully didn’t have.

And the guys at Heart of Ohio even delivered.

I probably should’ve told them we lived on the second floor before they drove up.

Or maybe I should’ve better prepared my wife for what she was about to see when she eventually came home from work.

Those old arcade games never looked all that big inside the skating rink or the bowling alley — but inside a one-bedroom apartment?

It was like having a battleship mothballed in the living room.

She wasn’t impressed — and the old cigarette burns on the control panel didn’t help.

“But look,” I chirped, “it plays for free!”

Clearly, my frontal lobe was goo.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.