I Would've Bowled Better if I Had A Mullet

Carolyn invited me bowling last night, and I was more than a little reluctant to go. The last time I was bowling, more or less around seventh grade, I believe I achieved a final score of nine, which I don't think is very good. What's the highest score you can get in bowling? Fifteen? Twenty? In the meantime, I've honed my skills on that arcade game with the ball in the middle of the table and Yahoo! Bowling, and while I guess there's a chance that in the past ten years, bowling has transcended balls and alleys and evolved to bits and bytes, I didn't have very high hopes. But I wasn't doing anything else on Friday night and I don't get to see Carolyn very often, and I was eighty to ninety percent sure she wouldn't laugh if I accidentally threw the ball across three lanes, so I went.

I guess back in seventh grade, I wasn't really noticing this sort of thing, but bowling is really, really a stupid white person activity. I'm out waiting for Carolyn and company to show up, and the parking lot is full of groups of white kids hitting each other. It's like an infection of idiot, and clearly bowling was invented by some fat guy thinking, "You know what being drunk is really missing? The opportunity to throw something heavy at some other things and knock them down." Thus a "sport" that will hopefully never become an Olympic event was born. A week later, the same fat dude thought it would be fun for kids to hurl sharp objects at each other and lawn darts were introduced to the world. Within an hour, eight kids lost an eye. Good times.
I expected to find some dumb white kid hurling himself down the lane, slip-and-slide style, and posting the video on Youtube. Oh, wait... someone did.

Here's another dumb bowling video I found on Youtube, and I know it was an accident but I'm sorry, it's funny.

But everyone in our party had that commodity in such short supply in America today. Not oil; shame, and the worst you could say about us is that some tall, handsome guy who looked like all the other tall, handsome guys there (and nothing like me) bowled with his right hand and a beer in his left hand. He didn't spill.

It's not really about the bowling, so I'll just tell you that the ball went approximately where I wanted about half the time and directly into the gutter the other half. It was just about as exciting as wearing slippy shoes and rolling a fifteen-pound ball across a wooden floor could be. The downtime, though, was a lot better, and I'm sort of left wondering where the hell all these people were when I was in high school. I'm seriously frustrated that my opinion of the human race, while I don't think it's unjustified, is based on the assumption that normal, friendly people like Carolyn's buddies either didn't exist or just were never going to be normal and friendly to me.