Bowling Diarrhea

Classic Lanes is about to close. It’s almost midnight and things are getting weird. 

A woman is screaming. Repeating the phrase:

“I work hard for my motherfuckin’ money.” 

“I work hard for my motherfuckin’ money.” 

It’s a patron, and something in her has snapped. A critical connection now unhinged. A live wire. Slithering, whipping, crackling and shocking her way across the black outer space carpet. There is a white hot fire inside her and she wants the blaze to be seen and felt by everyone. Her purse at her elbow, her hand beating her own chest. It’s a full-blown public melt down at the shoe rental. 

I can see the indifferent look on the worker’s face behind the counter. The screaming woman must be a regular. Something is painfully clear: the staff at Classic Lanes work hard for their motherfuckin’ money too. 

The worker ignores her and performs his final duties behind the counter. Surrounded by a giant tan panel of vintage switches and levers, He looks like a commander of some strange, outdated, and forgotten spaceship. Drifting in the dangerous outer orbits of the American empire, surrounded by space junk, aliens, and buckets of Molson Canadian. 

Classic lanes may be an old starliner, but her software is fully updated. She is a beautiful blinking and sputtering neon light still open for business in a floating scrapyard which is slowly and imperceptibly drifting towards oblivion. 

Tonight was league play and the hundreds of patrons have just vanished. For the remaining staff, the mission is over and the jets have cooled. All there is left to do is watch video transmissions on their private screens, eat the freeze dried chow, and wait for the stragglers to finish their games. 

“I work… HARD… for my motherfuckin’ money”

The boys and I watch the pathetic scene, we don’t have a choice, it has spilled over to the lane beside us. It is a family and they are dizzy with some sort of soul-tiredness that I can’t articulate. I’m certain that they are younger than me, but their sunken eyes look aged. A lack of love has dug a bottomless pit and they are pouring bottom shelf gin into it, hoping for the best. 

The pain of my neighbors has made me acutely aware of my own. I look at my friends. They are uneasy too. We’re all out here, strapped to a cruel wheel of fortune, waiting for the arrow to hit us in the dick with the words, BANKRUPT, CANCER, or HEMORRHOIDS. 

The universe is a dangerous place and nobody makes it out alive. That being said, please have some tact and grace. If you go bankrupt or have hemorrhoids, don’t drink so much that you end up screaming about it and showing the entire bowling alley . It’s abnormal.