Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-10-18 - 5:53 p.m.

Geek Bowling Tips

It was Geek Bowling night last night. I am so hot. I scored OVER 100 on all three games. Over 100, people. Do you know how many time you have to roll that ball RIGHT DOWN THE MIDDLE to score over 100? Yay me. I'm a bowling fool.

This is a dangerous sport. People are getting hurt. They fall down, and stuff. BF hurt his knee again. You have to be in shape for this; you can't just go waltzing in thinking, "Hey, I can bowl 100 if I feel like it." No, no.

We have some very serious bowlers, here. They get mad when they don't knock down all the pins. They're muscular and stuff. I don't know how heavy their balls are (I'm going to ignore the obvious here, about how personal that question would be) but they're not the same color as ours and they don't say "House Ball" on them. They come in special Ball Bags. These people are so good they wear THEIR OWN SHOES to bowl in. It's true.

I don't. But my feet sweat when I bowl over 100, and that makes me nervous because if MY feet sweat then someone else's probably did too, and I am standing in someone else's feet sweat, and that makes me bowl faster so I can take them off sooner. You know, it goes a lot faster if you just knock down all the stupid pins on the first roll.

I didn't get any coaching. I had to figure this all out on my own, about knocking them all down so you can go home. Also the thing about rolling the ball right down the middle. Another tip: if you're not going to knock them all down on the first roll, then try to leave most of them up so you have more to aim at, because they give you a second chance.

If everybody else is drinking, sometimes you get a third chance. That wiper thingy doesn't come down and wipe the pins away, it just sits there, and you have to press a button to say. "Yeah, I'm done, really, that was ALL I could knock down." But if you're smart, you can just roll another ball right on down there instead and knock down some more and that will fire up the wiper and you can maybe score over 100 like I do.

You don't have to feel bad about getting a third chance, because I found out something else: they score stupid. They really do. See, even if you knock down all the pins in one roll, you don't get any extra for that. You have to bowl good on the NEXT roll, too. So it's like it didn't even COUNT that you knocked them all down, because nobody could do that twice. So if you get to bowl a couple extra times when nobody's looking, that could almost make up for the stupid scoring.

There's one other thing I can tell you about Geek Bowling: don't knock down all the pins too many times. Some people do that all the time. If you do it all the time or even most of the time, nobody will cheer for you. In fact, people will be disappointed if you leave even one or two standing up. You don't want to disappoint the rest of your team like that. It's not good for morale. If you bowl like me, your team will be happy and satisfied when you knock any pins down at all. They'll say, "Look! You GOT one!" And if you knock them all down one time, they will all stand up and slap your hand and stuff. The camaraderie is much better that way.

I took weeks to figure all this out. Nobody helped me. I'm a self-taught Geek Bowler. But these tips are yours, for free. Go out and roll that ball because you, too, can get Nothing But Air.

�

previous - next

�