Anybody got a Quarter?

Tempest Chronicles Day 21

For reasons that will be revealed later, Ed decided that he did NOT want to go over the rusty rainbow this morning, so we traversed the neighborhood instead. Late June is the season of the daily almost clock setting thunderstorm and yesterday was no exception.

Around 2PM the sun will generally go behind a dark thick wet cement colored cloud and everything outside turns into a silhouette. The trees in front of the house in some trick of the eye, start to look like drawings of animated pixels.

Don’t be fooled by my hip use of the word animated, I have never watched any sort of anime or played any sort of video game with the exception of one.

Bear with me………..

In the late 80’s there was a bar on Market Street in San Francisco called Cafe San Marcos. (I think they just call it The Cafe now) It had very dark very expansive plate glass windows overlooking the traffic headed to the Castro. The clientele were generally the coiffed 20 something caucasian gays that liked to have their pastel colored sweater wrapped around pastel shirted shoulders in congruence with Gap khakis and a neatly tucked in broadcloth button down. Shoes were generally loafers, maybe the occasional wing tip if aforementioned gay was going out after work at some financial powerhouse mailroom.

Being gay was still new enough to feel “edgy” even if we were dressing like the Nordstrom mannequins.

Inside Cafe San Marcos was the general set up, mirrored back bar, every liquor possible, but of course the vodka was the most accessible and in highest demand. Brass and chrome based cocktail tables with some lucite chairs strategically placed about the room.

Alongside the rightmost wall as you turn from the staircase, (Did I mention it was on the second floor over the now forgotten boutique that sold stylish alternatives to the Castro clone ?) were two squat boxes topped with thick round glass discs.

At first it was unclear what purpose they served. I had just moved up from LA where all our bars had the latest, latest, latest, cool technology of music videos. I could sit for absolute hours watching little films of alternative, new wave, punk, pop, glam rock offerings from artists like Grace Jones or Nina Hagen doing avant guard things like pulling a giant rat out of the oven or ice skating on orange jello.

The lack of video outlets forced me to look around the room. I noticed 2 young fellows approaching the unspecified device. They plopped down on the short, cross based naugahyde padded stool and one began putting coins in the left side of the box.

An eerie kinda stale yellow, white, mauve, tan, illumination bathed their already sallow, slight chinned faces to the point of making their matte foundation lines glaringly obvious.

Both boys bent over the now apparent screen, right hands on a bonbon sized knob. They eagerly watched as a dot traveled across from one side of the table to the other. The more nelly one let out a whimpery little squeal when his dot made contact with his horizontal dash that was controlled by his knob.

THEY WERE PLAYING PONG!!!!

I nonchalantly sauntered over, cocktail in one hand, agape mouth covered in the other.

Was this was the future?

Had we entered the galaxy far far away?

After about 10 minutes of back and forth, I started to have questions. Questions like…..

“How does it end? or……

“Is there a point?” and….

“Am I the only one bored?”

“I have definitely been more entertained watching 2 men at a table.” I said aloud hoping to get an AMEN. Instead I got sneered at and austracized from the “gaming” area.

Blondes in guyliner and dabs of Aramis behind each ear looked at me with raised eyebrows as they sipped through their cocktail straws. Once again I had blown the opportunity to fit in, I had sabotaged myself and was destined to finish out the evening alone.

“This is brutally stupid.” I thought, “Who’s gonna stare zombie eyed into some screen for hours? These milquetoast lemmings are just throwing themselves off the latest cliff. In a year there won’t be any screens that don’t play The Golden Girls to be found.” I whispered to my inner wiseacre.

As quickly as it ignited, the flame of pong was doused for me. I can destroy a trend quicker than the life of an ice cube at Satan’s 4th of July picnic.

And the thing about it is….I was COMPLETELY right in my belief that nobody was going to be interested in any of this kind of stuff in the future. I mean who looks at a screen these days????

I was discussing the state of video games with a millennial the other day and I could not for the life of me follow along. She was saying things like RPG and FPS and some weird sort of thing called MMO where people “build” societies and other people ask to join the society and then tell them what they’re going to wear and eat and do for a job in that society. It’s like being a Stepford Wife without the plot.

Is it any wonder that the robots are winning? Maybe the gamers can figure out how to turn us all into residents of the Emerald City with King Pong at the throne?

Sorry…Sunday Digression…….

Ok, so where was I? Oh yeah, when we got to the turn to make the block over to the rusty rainbow , Ed pulled me in the opposite direction and took me in a bee line towards a flattened, squashed, go box of discarded chicken wings so hard that I almost spilled my mug.

When I saw what was happening, I threw on my foot brakes and abruptly ended his gastric trajectory.

I’m pretty sure that had I come of age in the MMO era, my reflexes would have been atrophied to the point of me laying in the street, right foot perpendicular to my ankle wondering why my self made utopia had turned itself against me. You can’t plan for chicken wing detritus in some RPG dystopian landscape.

Vitals: 87 degrees overcast skies with 72% humidity makes if feel like you just found out your favorite grandma has been putting Benedryl in your homemade ice cream to get everyone to take a nap at the family reunion so she can go through your purse.

20 days down

163 to go……..