Bowling
The main objective of bowling is to hurl a large ball into ten pins which reside 60 feet from the approach.You get two chances to knock down the pins each frame. There are ten frames. Hitting no pins is known as a gutterball. Hitting all the pins is known as a strike. I don't get those.
So. I was hanging out with Alex on Sunday night, watching Iron Chef on the Food Network. Christine called me and asked me if I wanted to go bowling with Brian and presumably other people. I debated in my head whether I would prefer Iron Chef to bowling with friends . . . for about half a second. She said to meet her there at 8:30 and hung up. I then told Alex we were going bowling.
Me and Alex got there at exactly at 8:30 to find that no one had shown up, which meant that either it had been called off and no one had told me, or that no one had any respect for promptness. After a few minutes me and Alex decided to hit the arcade thing in the back, which is a poor, poor excuse for entertainment. They have a crane game, some pinball and a few antiquated shooting games. All of this, I should mention, is right in front of the restrooms, which means that three-hundred pound scary guys are walking past you all the time.
After two quarters at Phantom of the Opera, Kenny and Travis showed up. Travis seemed very surprised to see me there and asked if I was, in fact going bowling with the same group of people he was going bowling with. Sometimes I wonder about him.
Christine showed up a little bit later, and after her came Brian, Kasey, and Lindsey. We got lanes 11 and 12. Lane twelve sucked. It gave us more pins down than we actually had, so every frame we had to adjust the score. It was red pin night, so if you got a strike when the pin was in a certain place, you would win something. Everytime it came around to my turn there would be a red pin in there somewhere, taunting me. I always seemed to get only nine pins down. Bowling is a cruel mistress.
It's fun to relate bowling style to personality, although it's rarely helpful. Me, I bowl different everytime. Sometimes I do a fifteen foot sprint at the lane and throw the ball as hard as I can. Other times I swing it down into the movement so that the ball doesn't drop onto the lane; it glides. Alex walk to the front of the approach and then chucks it down to the pins. Lindsey walks for the whole approach and then kind of drops the ball onto the lane. I laugh to myself when she does this.
About midway through the second game, I was still using green ball with too small of finger holes. I went at the lane and had intended to slide the bowling ball off my fingers, when next thing I knew I was in the upswing and the ball was still stuck to my fingers. The ball then sailed from my hand and after reaching it's apex of five feet off the ground, it came crashing down into the gutter. It was really cool. After that I stopped using the ball for fear of great bodily harm.
One of my favorite bowling rituals is giving myself a name at the beginning of the night. Usually I choose Sam Sterling. I love having an alias. Several, in fact, but I use Sam more than Alexander Wales. In reality it's easier to take over someone's identity than it is to create a whole new one, but it's the thought that counts.
I didn't end the night badly, by my standards, but I didn't end it terribly well either. My first game score was somewhere in the 60's, maybe in the 50's. I wasn't too proud of that game, but I still managed to beat several people. The second game I did about average for me, 82. This time I beat fewer people, which is odd, but I tied with Alex, which is cool. There's something I like about a tie game. It's the fact that no one can feel bad about losing, and no one can gloat. Sometimes I intentionally tie a game to keep the harmony of the universe in balance.