Pinball

To my loyal reader(s), I am sorry for the delay in posts. I have been bedridden for the past few days, and unfortunately the sickness depleted most of my creativity and wit. On the good side, with each ginger ale that I ingest I am slowly gaining some of my energy and humor back. So though this post isn’t written while I am at peak performance I hope you (my one reader) enjoy it. So with no further ado lets begin.

Bars. What is not to love? A bar is one of the few places where one can retreat to drop out of polite society. Confessions, lies, and dirty laughs fill these drinking holes and sometimes, just sometimes, they have the ingredients for an epiphany.

Now when I say epiphany, I am not referring to moments when you suddenly realize that whatever song is playing on the jukebox “is the best song EVAH” or that the girl or boy to your right or left “has the most banging body and will make for an excellent spouse.” No, these aforementioned moments are not epiphanies. Rather they are fleeting and misguided insights that are only relevant as long as you are in that bar and drowning in booze. As soon as the booze wear off you realize that it is only while submerged under an ocean of spirits that you LOVE that song or that boy/girl (You see, most people you meet in bars are like things you see in a knick knack shop–fun and cute to look at but nothing worth buying).

I am talking about moments and realizations that mean as much in the morning in the comfort of your dark sobering sleep chamber as they did the previous night at the bar. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to have one of these life altering moments this past weekend while catching up with an old friend.

There are a few dive bars in Chicago that are havens for people like me not just because of their modestly priced draft beer selection and jukebox selection which is soused with the stooges, Bowie, and Cash (perhaps my blurb about not really loving that song is void), but also because they feature games (pool and pinball) that either cannot fit in your apartment or your starving artist/student income cannot afford.

Usually, the pool tables at these bars are guarded by a crew of bike messengers who dress like the lovechild of Mad Max and the cast of 24 Hour Party People. However, on this fateful night this reliably loudmouthed and territorial bunch were no where to be found. Spotting an open pool table we proceeded over, but to our dismay the thing was out of order. Typical.

With the pool table not working we turned to the next best thing, Pinball, and it was while playing alternating games that I realized that pinball is a metaphor for life. Don’t believe me? Here check this:

One, it is a game that adheres to the principles of capitalism, and like economic systems it is a machine. The more money you have the longer you can play and the more opportunities you have to score big. We pooled our money and with two dollars got five games on the thing, which is something like 15 balls.
Two, like life, skill and timing are crucial to pinball. You have to coordinate your flippers and understand particular geometric and cause and effect principles to complete the litany of objectives and score big.
Three, like life there are moments in a pinball game when everything comes together and everything makes sense. Everyone has a moment in a pinball game when the ball keeps bouncing in their favor and when they seem to have a uncanny understanding of the workings and physical properties of the machine. This pinball synergy makes you feel high–like the baddest mother (shut your mouth) in the place–like you can conquer anything.
Four, like life, this moment of pinball-chi and finesse is followed by a string of moments that completely dismantle your confidence as a pinball player. Like life, there are moments in a pinball game where despite having done everything right the ball goes straight down the middle and there is nothing you can do to save it. In these moments you watch yourself lose and the frustration can break even the strongest of men. You ask, “why me (insert name omnipotent person in the sky that you believe in when bad shit happens)?” and you buy another round.

Kids are like Rx pills

Today marked the celebration of my father’s 60th birthday. A day filled with family photos, gifts that made him feel loved, copious amounts of moments to wax nostalgic, and sing-alongs to the Temptations. All in all it was a good day, but not just because of the fun times had with family over an open grill.
August 25th was also good because it was a very informative and life changing day. You see the date also marked the day that I concluded I do not want children. Now this is not some half-thought out conclusion that I will regret at the age of 30. Rather, this is a judgment that I am well prepared to stand by for the rest of my life cause the tax breaks that little ones get you aint enough. Tattoo it on my butt cheek, I am not producing offspring.
So why on this day did I arrive at this conclusion? Well, my father’s 60th birthday, which in itself is a day of rapture, was accompanied by a party, and not just any ordinary party. Rather a festival of proof that the next Nobel peace prize will be awarded to someone who releases a sterilization serum into the water supply.
In fact, I don’t even think party is the correct word to describe what was going on in some portions of my family’s home. Sure, the adults were partying it up like it was the last year they were going to dole out social security. But the little tots were actually not partying. I think a more appropriate description of what they were doing is: leading workshops listing the reasons why a condom is always a good idea.
There is no question that some will read this (wait do people read this) and undoubtedly think that I am a bitter, surly, cruel twenty-something and perhaps you are right. Perhaps I am scrooge. But either way I am the scrooge that is going to save loads on cleaning supplies. I am the scrooge that is going to retain the freedom that kids strip from you the moment their little eyes open, and I am the scrooge that will be spared the agony of worrying if my decision to not give my kid another popsicle is going to send them to see a therapist for the next ten years.
In my humble and overtly arrogant opinion kids are like Rx (prescription) pills. They are good for some people, but not everyone. And they are ONLY good in small doses because like a room full of drunk friends, they are hard to handle, easily endangered, and though they are good for a good laugh every once and a while they ultimately result in trouble.
Dad, I have no idea how you made it 22 years with me you are truly incredible.

Field of Wackos

For the past week there has been at least one thunderstorm in Chicago every day. The Midwest is flooded, which means several things.
1.)all of the kids with pants four inches too short are in style. Yes yes, Revenge of the Nerds has come true to life.
2.)It is now the day after tomorrow. This is kind of like day light savings time.
3.) Rhianna’s song Umbrella is now the soundtrack to the Midwest segment of the Weather channel
4.) I have not had to water any of our plants for the past week.
Now, while each of these flood affects is important in its own way I am going to focus on number four because, well, it makes for an excellent segue to the real subject of this post.

So when the canyon size bulk of free time fell in my lap after the whole flood thing I did what every American would have done. No, i did not stay in my house and guard it against “looters” (wink wink Katrina reference). Rather, I stayed at home an watched my body begin to coalesce with the couch in our basement while I stared at the idiot box.

It was during this exercise in American lethargy that I came to realize that a whole bunch of the protagonists in movies are flipping crazy. As in crazy on the side of entrance way to the expressway holding a cardboard sign explaining how Jesus is his drinking buddy crazy.
Don’t believe me? Here are some examples:
Field of dreams-Kevin Costner talks to baseball ghosts
6th Sense-Kid sees dead people
Mulholland drive-need i say more
12 monkeys-Brad pitt AKA Brangelina talks funny and Bruce Willis is from the “future”
Fight Club-Eddie Nor is schizophrenic
Memento- Picture guy has constant black out
I know who killed me-Lohoe thinks this was a good career move

The list could go on but I am not getting paid to do this so I am going leave it up to you to compile a list of movies that have crazy protagonists. Anyway, the point is there are a lot of flicks that feature crazy protagonists or protagonists behaving in a manner that is psychotic. Now before I go any further I would like to state that I am aware of the concept known as “willing suspension of disbelief.” Yes, these are movies, good movies in fact, and they are not real. But lets just imagine that these characters are real for a moment.

Ok, so now that were are doing that, don’t you think it is a little weird, funny, interesting, (insert incredibly vague and cryptic could mean anything I dont want to tell you how I really feel adjective here) that Hollywood flicks repeatedly feature people who in the real world (not the MTV real world, but the realreal world) eventually end up asking for money under viaducts as the protagonist? Isn’t it kinda strange that Hollywood turns these whack job characters into all-knowing, righteous, and at the very least likable people? More importantly, isn’t odd that as viewers we connect with these people and feel for them and then proceed to leave the couch or movie theater and ignore the people on the street who talk about how the world is going to end, or how they need money?

What if life were like the movies or vice versa? Well, if it were Kevin costner never would have built the baseball diamond. Instead he would have been committed. The kid in the 6th sense would have been doped up on drugs. And the world would end because no one would believe the crazy guy on the corner talking about Soviets and their plans to kill us.

Hmm, maybe this is why bad shit happens all the time. Maybe, it is because we ignore the crazy people on the street. Or maybe we enjoy movies like this because like to delude ourselves into thinking that the people we ignore when we walk down Michigan Avenue are actually not crazy or homeless but rather sent back in time to complete some kind of secret mission that is really important, but does not require our involvement.

However, we probably enjoy movies like this and they probably keep making them because we like how these fantasy and fictions movies distract us from the pain of living so we don’t all go crazy.

The first time is always awkward

This could be a decision I regret, or it could be the beginning of a beautiful, yet awfully pretentious, habit. I don’t know. All I know is that unisom is not kicking in, I have a book full of random thoughts after three months of summer, and internet for the moment. So here I am E-world, and I am blogging like the rest of the millions of people who think that what they have to say is remotely important. Ok, enough of the self-aware slightly self-conscious introduction and onto tonight’s pontification…
So the other day I am driving in my car and in a moment of upper-middle class misfortune my ipod runs out of battery. Unwilling to go a moment without some kind of sound other than the AC and the cacophony of honking horns that are the soundtrack of Chicago rush hour I turned to the radio.
It has been a while since I have listened to the radio but like riding a bike I fell right back into it. In a matter of minutes I was surfing channels and perfecting my commercial avoidance techniques like a seasoned pro, and rather unexpectedly I found myself actually enjoying the radio experience.
So there I am, tapping my thumbs and bobbing my head to the latest and greatest top 40 when it hits me like a ton of platinum stunnah shades: the choruses in top 40 rap are made up of all the things I heard from various adult figures growing up.
The radio plays “walk it out” “party like a rock star” from UNK and the Shop boys but what I really hear is my little league coach telling me to walk it out after I just got nailed in the leg by a ball hit by some steroid junky kid or my ridiculous friend from middle school telling me we are going to party like rock stars at his b-day bash at laser quest.
Now, perhaps my overweight coach and oily faced friend of mine were ahead of their time. Maybe. Or maybe we are stuck in some kind of alternate universe where that which is uncool is so excessively unhip that it becomes cool again. Perhaps the lyrics in these songs are the grapes of life in that they can be left out the “cool” cellar for long periods of time, undergo fermentation, and then once again be valuable.
I do not know for sure. All I know is that we are living in some kind of paradox when UNK is spouting the same line as a little league coach, the paragon of uncool.
So hey what to do about this?
Excellent question. As I see it you have two options. Option 1.) listen closely to the things your mom tells you to do and then write a song using a phrase of hers as the chorus. For example: “Can’t go out To’nite.” and make a million bucks
Option 2.) Stop buying, or even stealing this music, and send these guys the message that you the listener will not tolerate this level of plagiarism and utter disregard for standards of cool.

Remember, everything that is shiny ain’t platinum.