Why I Still Bowl

With my last post on tobogganning, I didn't add that one reason I stopped doing it was that, on the whole, sledding is not a high-skill sport.  It can be one, if you greatly reduce the size of the sled and place it in an remarkably tailored environment, but I had no access to luging as a boy or a young man so those options were closed to me.  When we ran out of cool new things that we could do on a traditional sledding hill, the sport lost much of its verve.

But today, I still bowl.  I fell in love with bowling very early, and it was my choice each year of what to do when my birthday rolled around.  I do it often enough now that it's no longer "special," so though my birthday was yesterday, we didn't go bowling.  Instead, we went out and bought some clothes for our trip to Montreal and some unusually expensive wine.

Why is it that I didn't quit bowling?  I've easily bowled hundreds of games, and yet if the reader showed up at my apartment today and said, "Hey, why don't we go bowling?" I'd probably answer, "Heck, sure."  And look forward to going.  So why is that?

Bowling, for all the bad press it gets as a boring activity to watch, requires tremendous control over various parts of one's body, to make them work together in synch in a way they're not really designed to do.  It's like tapping the top of one's head and rubbing one's belly, to the third power.  The approach, one's footing, the balance of one's hips, the delivery, the follow-through and what both hands and arms are doing, not just the one throwing the ball, all matter.  They all have their little adjustments to be made, and those adjustments have to be made in the space of seconds, because the tiniest misalignment or misstep or poor delivery will result in an unwanted ball.  And anything that isn't a strike is unwanted.

For a few months, about 20 years ago, I worked as a cook in a fitness centre that included a bowling alley ... and after my shift, I was free to use the facilities until closing.  This allowed me a hour or more of bowling five days a week ... which was heaven.  I worked out kinks in my game that had always been there ... and which are still, to some degree, there, and literally had the time to become absolutely obsessed with the game.  Without, I must explain, tiring of it.  Today, I have access to private bowling lanes for which I pay a modest fee, and I try to get out and play once every three weeks.  I've been doing this regularly since April.

I'm no where near the player I was.  There are things going on with my hips that are only going to get worse, and elements of my approach that frustrate, but I manage well enough.  I haven't given my scores yet ... I occasionally break 180.  I used to break 200 fairly regularly.

It is wonderful exercise.  Unlike a stretching routine, or walking, or swimming, every part of me feels completely loose when I'm finished, like getting a deep massage.  I'm not breathless or bent or sore-footed.  I sleep really good that night.

Thus, the effort of bowling is physically satisfying, mentally involved as I calculate each physical correction to make frame-to-frame, endorphin and dopamine rich and altogether, something I like doing.

You know, like D&D.

The reason why I'm still playing, designing and talking about D&D multiple decades after the fact is because the game is in no way repetitive for me.  I am not running different players through the same modules, I'm not on some routine where I have to go to a game store to buy modules, I'm not endlessly starting new campaigns because I can't maintain a single fluid narrative thread that's able to last years, I'm never out of material, I'm never in need of someone else's new designs ... and I'm not getting calls from players who want more character classes, more spells, more magic items and so on.  My players are getting all they want in GAME ADVENTURE and are not trying to augment their game experience with doodads and new character skins.

Over the years, this has made me a terrible person.  Not kidding.  It's the only way I can possibly describe myself.  I have practically no empathy for people who try to defend versions of games that smack of game campaigns I refused to play in 30 years ago, I despise people who claim to play 5th Edition because "It's alright," I have only contempt for people who buy modules or who attend league adventure groups.  As regards every word that was officially written in the years between 1974 and 2002, I have already made up my mind about ... and any argument that's put forward that maybe I should reconsider those decisions sounds like a 12-year-old standing next to me while I bowl, telling me I'm throwing my arm forward wrong.  Fuck.  Of course I am.  Every bowler, regardless of skill, is throwing his or her arm "wrong" — that's why we don't throw 300 with every game.  That's why bowlers have terrible, crippling elbow pain.  But what does a 12-y.o. know about it?

My game, the way I play it, the way that it works and the way that players in it praise me constantly, and go through pain in order to play, has much to do with my inexplicable, unreasonable, utter disrespect for so many people.  When someone makes a claim like, "I've been playing D&D for as long as you have," as an argument for why their opinion has as much merit as mine, my thinking goes to a place that asks, "If you've been playing for as long as I have, then what the fuck is wrong with you that you still have such stupid fucking opinions?"  I mean, seriously.  How can you have played for 40 years and NOT LEARNED ANYTHING?

I am a bad person.  This should be understood very clearly.  I am the Anton Ego of D&D.  The reader has to imagine that if I were playing in your game, you know, because you asked me, I wouldn't shut up and be polite if you did something idiotic or blatantly self-serving as a DM.  I'd call you out on that shit, right there, in plain English, because I love this fucking game.  I don't love you, I don't respect your ignorant position on 5th or 4th edition, I don't give a royal gawddamn about your personal grievances about finding players or keeping your campaign going ... because if you LOVED this game as much as I do, you'd break yourself to make your game better and the players would come running.  Your game isn't better because you won't BREAK yourself.  You won't change your mind about a lot of things you should have changed your mind about 20 years ago, and I have zero sympathy for you.

As you might guess, I'm a very serious bowler.

Making my body obey my mind is the hard part.  I can visualise what my body should be doing; and I can force parts of my body to obey, but then some other part slips my attention and fuck Alexis!  That should have been a fucking strike ... fuck.  Fuck fuck fuck.

It's all attacking and blaming myself, you understand.  I'm not the tiniest bit competitive.  I don't care about winning.  I care about making my body obey me.  And I will tear my body apart until it does.

I don't know why anybody would think I'm "nice."  Nor do I know, after 14 years of this blog, why anyone would think my being nice is something that matters to me.  I care about exactly two things:  making my game better, and making YOUR game better.

If any of you think that making your game better is done by convincing me that my game needs some garbage bit of mechanic that replaces some bit of my game that works perfectly, you've missed by a long shot what this blog is about.  The reason why I don't want to hear how YOU do something is that you're almost certainly doing it wrong.  Otherwise, you and I would already be doing it the same way.

Anton Ego.  Head the size of a planet.  Right here.

Deal with it.