the occasional acid flashback

In another lifetime I was in a company bowling league and was responsible for reporting the scores and action. One day this just spilled out of me. I don't remember who said it (Robert Hunter | John Hiatt | Leonard Cohen?), "If I knew where the stories came from I would go there all the time."

BTW, the name of our team was Schrödinger’s Alley Cats, which just goes to show you that you should be careful what you name things lest they take on the characteristics of their appellation; throughout the season we were both alive and dead each time we played.

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Maude: What do you do for recreation?
The Dude: Oh, the usual. Bowl, drive around, the occasional acid flashback.

—The Big Lebowski

The tales that have been passed down about the ancient bowling heroes, Gorack the Fingerless, Lisbeth the Exsanguine, Ixnay the Inverse (don’t ask), and Baba Ganoush the Unremarkable have inspired countless generations to seek glory on the oiled boards of bowling battle. It is in their memory that each of us steps up to the approach, ball in hand, knot in stomach, and possessed only of the simple hope that we will be graced by the favors that can be granted by the Bowling Gods. The following is one such tale.

The final game between last place Lavender Menace and first place Rolling Thunder Revue was a riveting competition. After losing the first two games to the Lavender ladies, Rolling Thunder was struggling to regain control of their rolling while much of their thunder was coming from the gutters. As the game progressed a threadbare lead was traded back and forth with each roll.

Deciding the winner of the tight contest came down to the final ball in the final frame. With Rolling Thunder leading by 9 pins, Lavender needed a strike to win or a 9 to tie. The bowler stepped up to the approach. She paused to take a cleansing breath, to feel the weight of the ball, to acknowledge the import of what lay before her…and then she launched herself down the approach. One, two, three steps and she let loose a mighty throw which flew straight and true from her hand towards its destiny that lay at the other end of the lane.

Bowling dogma—which has been cast in mythology and honed by millennia of hooded Ninepin theologians—holds that any ball thrown by someone who is judged by the gods to be good of heart, pure of spirit, and noble of intent will find the sweet spot without fail and scatter those pins like a tornado let loose in a Kansan trailer park.

The ball was rolled but before its dénouement, in that thin moment as it hurtled down the lane, it suddenly did not matter to any of us where it hit or how many pins it took down. For in that slice of time we each stood transfixed, watching the ball, yet aware as a group that we were sharing a moment unlike any other; a moment never to have happened before and never to happen again, a moment of Zen perfection, a moment where there existed a single shared state of grace, a moment where two sets of champions concluded a spirited battle that had been played well, played with honor, played with joy.

A ball was rolled but it mattered not the exiguous result, it mattered only that we were there to witness its journey down the boards and to revel in the possibilities it represented—win, lose, tie—a manifestation of the quotidian scoreboard that marks each thing we do and which eventually tallies up a lifetime. A ball was rolled and the judgment of the gods was of no consequence. A ball was rolled and the whole universe was laid bare in a fleeting moment amid the rank lanes of a beer-stained bowling alley.