The Tilting Point

Carnival Game - Cheap Trick (mp3)
Trying to Put Your Heart Back Together - Slow Runner (mp3)

When I was five, my older step-brothers got a used pinball machine for Christmas. It was a pure 1978 super-simple arcade-style machine. Nothing fancy. Bumpers. Two sets of drop targets. The classic set of a spinner and three rollover lanes at the top. No slingshots, ramps or sinkholes. Just old-timey classic stuff.

Due to a healthy dose of voyeuristic tendencies from birth, I could sit on a stool next to the backbox for hours watching my stoned step-brothers and their friends play. They’d play albums like Frampton Comes Alive and News of the World on the stereo as the beautiful cacophony of bells and bumps flowed from that pinball machine. In the rare times my brothers weren’t hogging the machine, I would sneak in and play.

Because I was more a child of the 80s than the 70s, my arcade fetishes evolved over time. I moved on to the more popular confines of Pac-Man and Tron and on up the ranks of Dragon’s Lair, etc. And once my friends and I all owned various home gaming systems, my pinball days faded into the attic.

As a freshman at UNC, I rediscovered my original love. The student union on campus had one called CYCLONE, with wicked cool ramps. Because I was too socially clueless to actually talk to girls in the dining hall and too procrastinatory to study during daylight hours, I would disappear into the corner of the union and play CYCLONE, where a single quarter could provide 10-15 solid minutes of entertainment.

CYCLONE was replaced by Terminator 2 in the summer of 1991. On many occasions, I made the foolish declaration that no pinball machine could ever surpass Terminator 2 for entertainment quality or the demands it placed on pinball skills.

Then, in 1992, The Addams Family machine arrived. This, my friends, was the greatest pinball machine of the modern era. And don’t just take my word for it. Take the Internet Pinball Database’s word when they claim that was “the Best-Selling Flipper Game of All Time.” It’s the Muhammed Ali of pinball. All other flipper games, when they go to church on Sundays, bow down and worship The Addams Family as the second-coming of HUMPTY DUMPTY, the first-ever machine with mechanized flippers.

The Addams Family was so mind-boggling, so full of holes and ramps and passages, so tricked-out with flippers and magnets, that one had to play a good dozen times to truly grasp even a fraction of the possibilities. And, unlike most machines, the more you played The Addams Family, the more addictive it was. I can’t recall ever tiring of that machine. Ever.

As any legitimate pinball aficionado will tell you, the true art of pinball wizardry is figuring out the Tilting Point of a machine. Because, much like the way Maverick flies fighter planes, mastering a pinball machine requires living on the edge of tilt. If you tilt the machine, you lose everything, but without the nudges, bumps, and hip checks, timed perfectly with the rolling of that perfect metal orb, you simply cannot control a pinball machine like it was born to be controlled.

Again, in the TILT realm, The Addams Family went above and beyond mere quality and into perfection. Everytime you crept near the TILT line, you’d hear Raul Julia’s Gomez say, “Caareful... Caaaaareful...” with that smooth silky voice. If you didn’t hear that voice at least two or three times on each ball you played, you probably weren’t a very good pinball player.

So for me, even as I type this, I can hear that voice in my head. After particularly stressful times in my life, when I’m reflecting on being in a tight spot, I can hear that voice in my head. “Caareful... Caaaaareful...”

When I watch what’s happening in Wisconsin and in state after state, where teachers and teachers’ unions are becoming the primary scapegoats for fiscal irresponsibility while at the same time having greater levels of accountability placed on them, I hear Gomez’s cautionary words.

When I see the riots in the Middle East and North Africa, where something akin to “democracy” is taking hold of one country after another yet might create more problems for the U.S. down the road than we could possibly fathom, I hear Gomez.

When I see high school students barreling down a road at speeds that would make Road Runner wet himself, or when I hear them talking about drinking parties, I worry that they haven't yet learned the Tilting Point.

Interacting with other people isn’t all that different than relating to a pinball machine. It involves careful touch, a keen eye, an appreciation for the complexity of how that machine works, the well-timed and careful use of one’s physical presence. And, perhaps most importantly, an appreciation that if one pushes too hard or too intensely, the entire machine can shut down and end your game.

Even a deaf dumb and blind kid knows that.

The Delicious Illusion of Honey

In These Arms - The Swell Season (mp3)

Well, when I first moved out here from Tucson, I wanted a guy with looks, security, caring. Someone with their own place. Someone who said "bless you" or "gesundheit" when I sneezed. Someone who liked the same things as me, but not exactly. And someone who loves me.

Tall order.

Yeah, I scaled it down a little.

What is it now?

Someone who says "Gesundheit." Although I prefer "bless you." It's nicer.

-- From the Cameron Crowe movie Singles

Here's just about the only thing I know for certain about going out somewhere to eat: I know my waitress or bartender is going to be good if she calls me "Sweetie" or "Honey."

And, if they call me "Sweetie" or "Honey," and if they're smiling when they say it, then I know I'm going to like them.

If the proverbial Two Kinds of People rule holds true, then there are those who abhor cutesy or pseudo-friendly nicknames and those who love 'em. I fall quite snugly into the latter category and am guilty of abusing them myself. Smiling when you use them, especially in an introductory setting, is vital.

Here's why.

Do you know me? Do you like me? Do I make you smile? Does your day get better when you see me?

Most of us ask these questions when we see someone for the first time in a day. We don't know we ask these questions, because we've been asking them so frequently since we were barely out of diapers (maybe even before that), that by the time we're all grownsed up and professional-like, the questions are instantaneous and subconscious. We don't know we're asking them anymore, kind of like those people who can dream in foreign languages.

And here's the next why: Most of us don't mind if you lie about it.

I don't mean we want to be out-and-out deceived, but what we crave from the world around us is a sense that we mean something, that our aura is positive, that our presence is a good thing. And if you have to fudge it a little to give us that feeling? Trust me, we'll just love you that much more for it.

In movies, there are the people like The Last Rider of the Apocalypse in Raising Arizona who kills every living plant he passes as storm clouds brood and envelop the terrain in his wake, and then there are the Snow Whites, around whom all animals of the forest feel secure and loved, as the sun pushes its way through thick foliage for the mere chance of witnessing such a presence.

Most of us want to be Snow White. We know damn well we're not. We're not stupid. The world has beaten it into us that we're not Snow White. But the more people can give us even just that fleeting feeling of significance, of decency, of value... the happier our day.

Our culture and our environment can often enforce its will on our mood, and it can be either a vicious cycle or a beautiful contagion. The more people seem happy, even if it's kinda forced a little, the happier everyone else tends to get. The more we lie to ourselves a little about it, the more we believe it. The more it becomes true.

When a waitress sees me sitting at her table, and when she walks up to me with a smile and says, "What can I get you to drink, sweetie?" the meal will taste better. The drink will go down smoother. The people around me will talk more. The Cubs will win the ballgame. Evil will be kept in its cage one more day. Everything will be alright.

FREE HUGS are better, but "Honey" ain't a bad place to start.

Slippery Slope Park

String of Pearls - Soul Asylum (mp3)

This is the way a park ends
This is the way a park ends
This is the way a park ends
Not with a bang, but the convergence of nine police officers on two alleged drug dealers selling shit from the trunk of their car.

I took my family to Coolidge Park on Monday evening. We hadn't been down there in a couple of years, due to the complications of a newborn son and our daughters outgrowing bikes we could fit into our minivan. It's no longer the park I remember.

Four years ago, Coolidge Park in daylight hours was home to hippies and romantics and studious Christian college kids. You had drum circles, young kids playing guitars poorly, circles of girls and young women wearing those funky multi-color hippy dresses, families pushing strollers and singing songs from The Sound of Music. On the other side of the bridge, you had young kids and teenagers throwing frisbees and footballs and frolicking.

When we were there last night, I saw:

• a woman who was clearly either in the midst of or recovering from a serious meth problem. She was white and looked like a mix between Karen Carpenter and Skeletor, and she was walking with a black dude with dreds.
  
  
• a couple watching their young son run around the place and invite himself to ride our son's pushcar. They were nice enough. They weren't a day over 22. They were unmarried.
  
  
• a phalanx of police officers -- some of them in goofy bicycle shorts like Ponch -- descend on two black dudes who were "allegedly" selling drugs out of the trunk of their car. Only a few minutes after the cops arrived, a small crowd of young African-American guys and gals circled the scene at a safe 40-foot perimeter to witness it. We overheard one of the young guys say, "Damn, ***** just got out last week an' he's already goin' back."
  
  
• a group of about eight Latino teenagers walking around the carousel area, then sitting and talking.
  
  
• a baby about the same age as my son (1-2 years) playing around the fountains. This very young child was already eyeball-poppingly fat. And yes, "fat" is the correct word here. And yes, the parents were also fat. And no, I won't buy that this child was fat solely because of a genetic disorder, unless the genetic disorder in question is known as "parents who eat too much and feed their child too much every damn time he cries."
  
  
• two goth teenagers snuggling on a blanket and having their pasty flesh scorched slowly by the merciless if slowly setting sun.

Yes, I fully realize that my descriptions are teeming with the kind of judgmental bile that makes people hate snooty middle class honkies like myself. I have done this with some intentional exaggeration, but I can't deny that these are descriptions my uncensored self would offer. I also can't deny that everywhere I looked in Coolidge Park on Monday night, I couldn't help but conclude that the place had deteriorated. It was no longer drawing the same people to do the same things.

Four years ago, the park's population was appropriately diverse. I wouldn't say it perfectly mirrored Chattanooga's population breakdown, but it had to be close, both ethnically and economically. On Monday evening at 7 p.m., the population was very skewed. Poor. Minority. Sketchy.

It's gone from being Target to sliding right past Wal-Mart on the way down to the Brainerd Road Bi-Lo.

Such is probably the natural evolution of the city park. When it's a baby, everyone in town wants to come over and visit. Hold it. Sing to it. Watch it eat and coo and cry and poo. Then, when it's a toddler, people continue to stop by, but with less regularity and less balls-to-the-wall enthusiasm. By the time it's hit the middle school years, most folks are making excuses why they just couldn't quite find the time to visit... and they're also secretly talking bad about the little brat behind closed doors. Then, when it's a full-on teenager, it gets all sullen and starts smoking and drinking and hanging out with the wrong crowd and beating up weak nerds and scaring the little old ladies.

If Monday evening was any indication -- and maybe I just hit it on a totally bad night? -- Coolidge Park is fast approaching the zit-infested voice-changing 10th grade and doing so in full juvenile offender style. Already most concerned parents and schools have banned or strongly discouraged going there after dusk, even though the whole place is wide open.

And when a place spends its teenage years pushing all the right people away, it will get lonelier and increasingly dominated by a crowd less likely to attract Mr. Roger's Neighborhood than Mr. Robinson's. Maybe it's the inevitable and cyclical nature of parks: They're born. They plateau. They fade. They rot. They die. They revitalize with new money and new design and new attraction, or they die and are replaced by condos.

(My apologies to non-Chattanooga readers for such a town-specific write-up.)

What'd You Say? Sorry, I Was Texting.

Haunted (When the Minutes Drag) - Love and Rockets (mp3)

Please do me and yourself a favor and take the 3:22 seconds necessary to watch this guy from TED.com:



Sometimes -- and when you're an egotistical attention freak like me, it's very rare -- you feel it's more important that someone else's brilliant observations be viewed in the stead of your own.

"It's the shared narratives that make us a culture."

Everything about his brief talk gives me pause. His brief talk, complete with damning pictures, is likely to have a more significant long-term impact on how I use and interact with my phone versus my surroundings in a more substantial way than Fast Food Nation managed to alter my dietary choices. At the very least I'm gonna think before I respond to those hip vibrations. (Yes, insert your own fun Michael Scott jokes here.)

None of this is intended to point fingers at anyone reading this. We're all the captains of our own ship -- well, us and fate/God/Stephen Hawking -- and how you steer yours is yo biznass. But something about the picture of that girl taking a picture of her getting a very awkward kiss leaves me really cold. Something about 2,000 cell phones being raised during the Obama Moment leaves me really sad. Something about that dude texting when his child is staring up at him, hungry for his attention, leaves me achingly guilty and horrified.

More and more often, I'm in meetings where the person who called the damn meeting gets a call and excuses himself or herself from the damn meeting they called. They gather people into a room and then leave these people to talk to other people, leaving us serfs to sit around and stare at one another, realizing how friggin' low on the totem we must be.

And teenagers -- I'm not one of those bitter adults, I swear -- they seem to be living half their life, often more, staring at tiny screens while the beauty of life swirls around them. But because they're attuned to that screen, what's around them gets labeled "boring." I don't mention this to damn them, but to wonder what kind of effect this will have -- for better or worse -- on their adulthood, after they've spent years, literally, communicating more with people via satellite and DSL than via actual speaking to actual people.

We are increasingly living meta-existences, lives based more on what kind of reality we can "share" with others who aren't physically with us at the moment than on what kind of reality we can share with those around us IN the moment. It might not be all bad -- and there's more than plenty good about it -- but it's still a little frightening, and I feel better for sensing a real need to be at least a little more conscientious about it.

If I'm texting someone in the middle of something else, there are one of two reasons: (1) I'm less interested in what's happening in reality than what could or should happen by communicating with someone via cyber-reality; (2) I'm so intrigued by my environment that I feel this intrigue and fascination can be increased by sharing it with someone who's not present.

In the instance of (1), it seems shameful but understandable. With (2), I'm not sure why it can't wait until later, until being involved in (2) doesn't risk superceding the very reason for roping them in to begin with.

But mostly I'm still trying to figure it all out...

"Haunted..." comes from one of the greatest soundtracks of all time, She's Having a Baby. You should leave work now, watch the movie, buy the soundtrack, and offer to have John Hughes' baby. Just sayin'.

"There Are Two Kinds of People In the World"

Two Points for Honesty - Guster (mp3)
Not That Funny - Fleetwood Mac (mp3)

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who lump all of humanity into two kinds of people, and those who don't. (Nope. I didn't make that up. It's entirely unoriginal, but I don't know who originated it.) I'm more the latter than the former, but I figured I'd waste a day drumming together some good ones just for the hell of it. Seemed like a good light-hearted option after all that education mumbo jumbo.

There are Two Kinds of People in the World:

• Those who tear out all magazine inserts before reading a single page, and those who don't
• Those who crumple their TP and those who fold it
• Those who use straws in nice restaurants and those who don't
  
• Those who prefer stick and those who like it automatic
• Those who like Hanson and those who wish they'd die bathing in hydrochloric acid
  
• Those who like a Bon Jovi song and those who deny it
• Those who eat sushi and those who call it "soochee"
• Those who believe the hype, and those who don't
• Those who Tom, and those who Jerry
  

And finally, the coup de grace: Those who drive away from the gas station with the pump still in their tank, and those who haven't. Yet.

Yes, as of December 31, 2008, at roughly 4:45 p.m., while stopping off of I-40 outside of Knoxville to get gas, I joined the Dumbass Drives Off With Pump In Tank Club.

I put the pump in. I went in and got some mints and Mountain Dew Code Red. I paid. The dude wished me a Happy New Year. I made some silly remark about how I hope I have so much fun I can't remember it. I walked back to the car. I put the soda in its lovely holder and the mints in the passenger seat, started the car and started to drive away to the sounds of Kelly Willis. Then... CHKKKUNNK!

I knew what I'd done instantly. I said a bad word. The world moved in slow motion. I looked around at the various witnesses. One studly male in his late 20s driving a Land Rover, trying not to chuckle. A completely unattractive mother with strawberry blonde hair, working to put her infant back into the carseat, looking up in panic to make sure terrorists hadn't attacked. And the attendant inside, looking out the window, just beginning to shake his head in that "Oh shit here we go again" kind of way.

When I got out of the car, Land Rover Dude chuckled and said, "Would you believe you're not the first person I've ever seen do that?"

I think he was trying to comfort me... in the same kind of way one of the super-attractive stud brothers at the Sigma Chi house might have tried comforting me after some really hot Alpha Chi sophomore threw beer on my freshman face after I tried dancing with her. (Not that the latter actually happened. I don't think.)

The attendant, the same genial greasy-lookin' fella who had wished me a Happy New Year! mere minutes before, now looked at me as if I were the bastard son of Joan Rivers and Gomer Pyle, but he was doing it in as kind a way as he could muster. He was already on the phone with the manager. "I don't usually work at this one. I'm just fillin' in for the dude who's sick."

I left my name and contact information. No, I left my real name, and my real contact information. He said they'd be in touch if the repair went beyond the simple fix or wasn't covered by whatever insurance they had. Considering I hadn't done any Jack Bauer-esque destruction of the entire friggin' pump, and considering that Land Rover Dude has a penchant for witnessing these moronic moments, I figured the odds were pretty good that gas stations are prepared for this.

It's been a week. No one has called. I might be in the clear.

But there's two kinds of people in the world: those who get the bad calls when they least expect it, and those who keep waiting for the bad calls that never come. In this situation, I'll go for option #2.

Please feel free to pass along your favorites -- or make up some new ones -- in the comment section.

Charts stolen from the amusing GraphJam.com. Guster's song is from their album Lost and Gone Forever. "Not That Funny" is from Tusk. Both can be found at iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site.