Last week you might recall that I was disappointed with the number of people that were turning up for the events. It seems as though growth is going to be slow because many factors including that a great deal of the people that were involved the last time Dumbo was active in April of 2020 are no longer in the country. Most of them wish they still were and may come back at some point but as it stands now there simply aren't very many people here.
The championship belt has not been at my house in quite some time
This week we had slightly better numbers but I decided to not play photographer and instead focus on not bowling like hell. I did manage to get a few shots in before the whole crew turned up though and this is kind of humorous to me because the lanes were insisting that we have to wear a mask while we bowl, which we complied with until the manager walked back to his perch and then took them off again. It is completely ridiculous that they would expect a group of people, all of which came to the lanes together, to wear a dumb cloth mask while they are bowling.
I present to you exhibit 1. The lanes are filthy. I don't think they ever clean them. Basically all of the seats have some level of filth on them and there was litter and even butted out cigarettes on the floors. They put zero effort into sanitation but we have to wear masks? Fuck that.
Exhibit 2. The bowling balls are never cleaned or sanitized. I remember Jim Gaffigan said in a comedy stand up special "how dirty are those holes?" Well the ones at these lanes have probably never been cleaned. In the west someone would go around and periodically spray some sort of disinfectant into the holes every now and then. At these lanes the bowling balls aren't even re-racked by the staff.... ever. This was true even when they were forced shut because of lockdowns. So since the number one way that any sort of illness can be spread is by touch, it would probably make at least a little bit of sense to sanitize the bowling balls at least a little bit. But nah, wear a mask that has already been shown to be near completely ineffective at stopping the spread of anything.
Anyway, this wasn't meant to be a Covid rant or a pro-mask or anti-mask thing. Nobody in our group of 14 people did what the manager asked and he didn't ask us again.
Now let's talk about something that I briefly discussed with a few people last time I wrote about bowling, and that is how damn difficult it is to break 200. I've only done it a couple of times in my life and the best score I have ever achieved was a 235. This was when I was around 20 years old and it was a freak day where I just seemed to be incapable of doing anything wrong.
Yesterday, I was damn near perfect with my performance as well and it is the best I have done in quite a while.
The bottom score there is mine. I have only 3 open frames. I ended up getting a spare and an 8 in the 10th frame making my total score for game one a 178. I marked in every frame but 3 and got 4 strikes and was still well away from 200. The only reason why I took the photo before the game was over is because the software this place has will erase all of your game immediately after the last ball is rolled. It's a stupid feature but that is just how it is.
Let's look at game two
I had a pretty damn fantastic second game as well and in the final frame I ended up getting two more additional strikes in a row and knew that if I got just 7 pins on the last ball I would finally break 200 for the first time in over a year. Of course I bowled one of the only shit rolls of the entire day and ended up knocking down only 6. My final score was 199... dammit!
So it was a pretty crazy and awesome day for me and no, I do NOT normally bowl this well. I am more of a "happy to break 120" type of guy and this was just some sort of crazy in the zone day for me. I just couldn't seem to miss and even though I bowl with a right to left curve, i even managed to pick up a 6/10 spare (the pins that are at the far right of the lane) and this is the most difficult thing for me to do. My friend said it perfectly when he said "you really had to flirt with the gutter to pick that spare up!"
At then end of the day I had the two highest scores of the day by far but since I was not playing in the championship lane, I am still not the champion of the league....yet. However, we also have to keep in mind that there is a really good chance that this was a one off for me and next week I will return to my former non-glory and get around 120 per game. That's just the way bowling works for me. I will try to replicate my Wednesday routine exactly to see if I can recapture that magic that made me bowl the way I did yesterday though, because it felt pretty damn good to do as nicely as I did.