1982
I went to college (1979-1983) in a town with about 30,000 people. We had three large arcades, and every convenience store had 2-4 machines.
My friends and I preferred one arcade, in particular, where we would spend every Friday and Saturday night. For hours.
One of my friends was an arcade savant. He could put a single quarter into almost any game and play forever. Later, he'd enter the 7-11 national Pac-Man contest, made it to the state finals, and was one fruit away from making it to nationals. He was also the best pinball player I've ever seen. No ball was ever certain to drain unless you stopped him from bumping the machine. More likely, it became a resurrection ball, and he'd play for another five minutes.
He was also a scratch golfer. He was as good on a golf course as he was with a pinball machine.
Did I mention he was one of the funniest people around?
Incredibly smart, too. Way too smart to keep failing organic chemistry. He failed it three different times, the last when he was a senior (spring semester), and instead of admitting he wasn't going to graduate to his parents, he disappeared one night.
No one knew where he was. Not until he contacted his parents weeks later and told them he was selling leather bags out of a parking lot in a Dallas suburb.
I never understood that. Later, I never understood how nothing ever seemed to work out for him. The only commonality was that his decision-making was uniformly bad. Every decision he made always focused on the most convenient or satisfying thing in the short-term, but never in the long-term.
I didn't wind up that way, but I often wondered how close I was. I was sort of the lite version of him, making convenient short-term decisions, but always in a marginally more responsible way. I didn't change, really, until after Eli 23.9 was born
I was lucky.
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