Tilt!

ARTISTIC DRIVER'S LICENCE: I just learned that the
waitress looked a lot like pinball-machine artist Paul Faris' real
girlfriend and that that's Faris himself leaning out the truck window.

So my friend Macbeth Swackhammer and I were sitting in the bar side of  the Anchor Inn in Little Current, Ont., on a Tuesday afternoon, when two guys came in to remove the pinball machine. 

They told us they were bringing it to the shop in Sudbury. I asked how much it'd cost to buy. I forget the amount but said "sold." 

The pair trucked it to my apartment, and my life hasn't been the same since. 

That was more than 40 years ago. 

What's important now is that the pinball machine--Night Rider, by the Bally company, of Chicago--has followed me through the years and sits in my basement in Toronto.

I just came upstairs after investing 45 minutes trying to win a game. (I can use the same quarter over and over again.)

Hadn't played in years but this morning, I watched a documentary called Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game, about a tall skinny brownhaired wannabe writer with a porn-star moustache who wrote the definitive history of pinball, and the movie inspired me to fire up Night Rider and doing so bro 

Sorry. 

I haven't a clue what was supposed to come after that ''bro."

My sister Norma phoned. 

While she and I were talking, I cracked a can of Sleeman's Premium Original Draft, the conversation took me away from writing, and that was five days ago. I'm only getting back to this now.

It just occured to me that this is the second blog entry since June that opens with me in the bar at the Anchor Inn.  

The "bro" could have been the first part of "brought," as in "brought back memories" or it might have had something with how my life hasn't been the same since the pinball machine. (One way it's the same? Beer in the afternoon can still yield surprising outcomes.)

But really. 

The person I'd like to meet is the person whose life hasn't changed after 40 years. That'd be a blog worth wasting your time on!

Where was I?