My Junior High School Years weren't easy. I was one of the biggest nerds in school and got in my only fight at Cabrillo Junior High School. Until I grew tall between eighth and ninth grade, lots of people picked on me because I was quiet, shy and polite...not traits valued by teenagers in general.
My sister was often coerced to take Billy and my awkward self to the Wagon Wheel skating rink not far from our house. Mom would drop us off in the parking lot, and she would have instant baby sitting for more than a few hours as we went around and around the wooden rink. I actually got pretty good at skating and at times won my age group race...usually the prize was a free ticket for a large fountain drink.
One of my favorite things at the skating rink was the one pinball machine in the place...Pinball Wizard. Yes, this was patterned after the song by the Who. I was often begging quarters off of everyone to play the game. I soon learned that my sister was always good for a few quarters because if there was something illicit going on she would be involved and I would hear about it. This always provided the perfect opportunity to extort a dollar or two from her.
There was something addictive about the game, I think I deposited a year's worth of college tuition into the little slot over the course of a few summers. Video Games are just fine but for me, the visceral component of pinball can't be beat. The bells, clicks, and clacks of a machine rattling off no more joy than a few tens of thousands of points is worth the quarter.
Last week, we went to the Pacific Coast Pinball Museum in Alameda. A fascinating look at pinball through the ages. For the low, low price of $15, one can easily spend three hours trying out each of the multitude of games.
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| Pacific Coast Pinball Museum in Alameda |
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| A mid 1940's Scantily Clad Cinderella Pinball Game. Scandalous! |
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| Rusty reacquainting himself with the flippers. |
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| Awesome that the score to beat is 1,000. As the games became more sophisticated, the scores became higher. Now with electronic scoring, a free play doesn't happen until 7 million points are accrued. |
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| Little silver cigarette trays on these early games...ah, times have changed. |
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| The graphics on this mid 1960's game is excellent...Not the Beatles rather the Bootles...lovin' it. |
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| Five rooms of row upon row of pinball games. |
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| And...here it is...Pinball Wizard...talk about a blast from the past, I was trying to figure out a way to get this in the back of my car! |
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| A look of sheer joy as I master Pinball Wizard once again! (I'm hoping the score is blurred out of this picture...not so good.). |
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| Yosiell and Rusty wasting away a perfectly good afternoon on pinball! we finally surfaced three hours later with bleary eyes and smiles on our faces. |
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| The Comet...an 80's game with Nancy and Ronald in the front car...I've seen this game lots but never realized who the front passengers were... |
If in the area, just give a call and I'm happy to hit the arcade with you! Good times, people, good times!
Speaking of nostalgia, recently we took a ride to Cafe Gratitude for Vegan lunch, and on the way back stopped off in Berkeley to do a little bit of vinyl shopping. Yes, some people still sell vinyl albums...and even more foolish people like us buy vinyl albums.
Like pinball, vinyl is attractive to me not just for the sound quality, but because playing an album was a process...and involved a degree of intentionality. iTunes is a wonderful thing, but when we are buying individual songs instead of whole albums, the whole artistry of compiling an album is lost. Listening to an album should be a journey that the artist and the producer want to take one on. So, that is the end of my crotchety old man rant for the day.
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| Cafe Gratitude |
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| Feeling the Peace, Contentment, and Sanctimony of eating a cruelty free lunch. |
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| Yosiell not convinced that actually was lunch... |
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| Rasputin Records..nothing like pawing through a bunch of bins for some favorites. |
By the way, although I did lose all of my photos, music and documents with the loss of my hard drive, my music is pretty much returned through the magic of "The Cloud" and many of the lost photos were downloaded from Rusty's computer to mine. Your smiling faces are once again on my hard drive...and the documents? Well, cest la vie.
Coming up? Spring and Summer adventures galore, I hope!
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