I really do enjoy me some bowling though. I have no form, I have no real skill and if I hit pins it’s usually fairly accidental. But still, there’s something about heaving a weight down a slick floor and trying to knock things down that really sings to my five-year old self.
I was totally awash in memories of my folks hauling my brother and I down to some godforsaken bowling alley in Federal Way for their bowling team nights. We would ingest greasy, deep fried “food” and we would try to find our way through the haze of second hand smoke to the basement arcade to put that dollar worth of quarters to good use on Tempest and Frogger.
I remember thinking to myself even then, looking through my yet non-jaundiced eyes, that the bowling alley people were a little sad. They were pale, sort of grey, and had eyes that belied some soul crushing defeat in their past that had landed them here at the Sea-Tac Bowl-a-Rama. I imagined them as creatures that lived in that bowling alley, ate the miserable fried food, drank the Budweiser as advertised by neon, occasionally looked sadly out the side door at the empty, trash filled lot next door that eventually faded away to darkness out of the reach of the mercury light.
Bowling has always seemed to speak to the middle class, you don’t see a lot of debutantes throwing rocks. It is a sport that seems to have spoken a little more loudly to the hipsters of late; the bowling crowd is a little better looking, a little better dressed than the one that I remember as a child.
I had a good time though, even though the team shot that night was some sickeningly sweet bitch-pop called a “Buttery Nipple”. Yikes. I ended my last game with a 117. Shut up, it’s a good score for me.
Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: Or one that I’m really digging right now anyway – Murder for the Money by Morphine
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