"Alright. Alright, but if we get out of this alive, I'm gonna kill you. Let's go. Come on." -- M. Douglas
I USUALLY JUST start with how I feel. When I don’t really know, I tend to not do anything. Uhhg. That feels terrible. And there we go! That’s something to work with. Let’s get out of this place and do something. Let’s find an arcade. They exist. It might not be in this city but there are some. In Philly, there’s Barcade. In Chicago, there’s Emporium. Let’s go there and sink ten dollars into Tapper or Rampage or both.
Tapper’s a great one on one game. High score rules. It’s got patterns like all of those old stand up cabinets, but it’s lesser known or lesser played than a Donkey Kong or Ms. Pac Man. If you can find a Tapper machine, you can usually play it for 30 mins and figure enough out to reach High Score status. Try Donkey Kong and then look at the high score. It’s virtually unreachable. Shit man, you’re better off drinking ten dollars worth of beer. Or. . .that would be two beers if you’re lucky. Tapper though. . .it’s a video game about beer.
Rampage is a good collabo game. Sit around with one or two friends and destroy shit, eat people, collect points. Yeah, there’s a point system in that game too. You don’t tend to notice it until the game finishes and then you’re seeing if you beat the other players or not. Funny how it starts collaborative and then becomes a competition before you even recognize it. But, now we know that. Let’s go play that and pick one or the other. Do you want to fight for points or fight for all out, city wide destruction?
So here we go. We’re hitting the road. Something I’ve been doing a lot these days. Just moving. The main thing I always realize first off is that I need better recording devices. So I can capture shit when I need to. Or when I want to. You gotta have access to what you truly desire right at your fingertips at any moment’s notice. This is something I’ve never been good at. I’m the type that would think of something, then recognize that I can’t exactly do it at that moment, and then say something along the lines of ‘Ope, well, I guess it wasn’t meant to be.’ Stop that bullshit! If that’s not “meant” to be than nothing is so do what you want to do. And right now I’m rolling to Philly with my woman and it’s going to be a good time. It’s gonna take us a while to get there. Even though overall I feel like I’m in a hurry, I’m not in a hurry to get there. . .specifically.
For some reason though, I’m in a huge hurry. I’m pushing 90 on I-95 or maybe 95 on I-80. I’m heading west in PA towards Ohio. I’m in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. I realize another one of those universal things like truths. Everywhere is the middle of nowhere. I’m lost. My wife is sleeping in the passenger seat or on her phone. I can’t talk to her and this is no fun. I can’t stop either. Where could I? There’s no W Hotel, no courtyard Marriott, there’s not even a Best Western, a Super 8, or a Red Roof Inn. Back in the day we would have just stopped on the side of the road to catch a couple hours of sleep. But, now adays, the minute I pull over it’s like, “What are we doing? What’s the plan? Where are we? Where are we going?” I say we stopped just to sleep a couple of minutes and she’s back on the phone looking for the fuckin’ Dub or any of those places that aren’t there.
But, I do have a plan. And this one’ll be a good one. I just have to crank up the music a little bit and pull off an interstate U-Turn. That’s taking two of the four cloverleaf turns and heading back in the other direction. Scranton’s only an hour and a half away and I know some people there. Somebody possibly hooked up with the mob or something. Yeah, this’ll be a good plan.