The Unexplainable

To set the scene, it’s Thursday night and I’m at Knox City AMF with three friends; Daniel, Simon and Matt. Not long beforehand I’d miraculously eaten a whole Meatosaurus pizza from Dominos by myself, and consumed an incredibly unhealthy amount of Coca Cola. My bowling shoes are on, my bowling ball is at the ready, and I’m staring down the lane thinking about how miserably I’m going to do (the other guys take part in competition for bowling during the week). I look up at the screen and see the name they’d assigned me, “Macca” - because I work at McDonalds – staring back at me.

I trundle down the lane and bowl the ball. To my astonishment I get a strike, and think “Woah… that was pretty cool.” My second turn comes around, I trundle down the lane again, get a second strike and think “Holy cow I did it again.” I look back at the others and like them assume that it was purely a fluke. Third bowl, still not thinking too much about my last two bowls, I get a third strike and think “Okay, this is just plain freaky”. My friends were slightly gobsmacked too, as I was clearly in the lead, and that was not supposed to happen!

I sit down and wait for my next turn. I look up at the screen as LJ, Hero and Pyro have their bowls and aren’t all that successful, and stare in amazement at my three strikes in a row. I rubbed my eyes and looked again to make sure I wasn’t seeing things wrong, but no, “Macca” still showed three strikes in a row, which I later learned is called a ‘Turkey’. :)

I felt that surely I would completely suck for the rest of the game, because that’s just how things generally turn out for me, but no, my success did not end there. I got a spare, then my fourth strike, then my fifth strike, then two more spares, and an 8 and a 7. (Five strikes and three spares in one game!!) It gave me a total of 185. If my last two bowls had been a bit better I would have made 200. Now THAT would have been something.

Dan, Simon and Matt were tempted to abandon the next two games of bowling and take me to the casino. :) But that didn’t happen, and it was probably for the best too, because in the next two games I didn’t do anywhere near as well (105 and 126).

So one is forced to ponder: How did Dale get 185?

Did all that practice at Wii Sports Bowling really pay off? Is a whole pizza and a small bucketful of coke some sort of bowling wondermeal? Were the planets and stars aligned in such a way that I bizarrely obtained some kind of bowling superpowers?

I guess it’s just one of those things that you can’t explain, and that if you did find a reason for, it would probably cause your head to explode to know such a thing. :)

Dale.