Left in Front

My Friday nights have gone a little differently than they did the past year in Chicago, where I bounced around bars and clubs till the early morning, lying to girls along the way about my fabulous apartment.  The apartment itself was real and incredible, minutes from the gold coast and the lakefront in an old building with the friendliest doormen in the world.

Of course it was owned by my parents, not me, but past 3 AM, details are irrelevant.

Anyway, living in my town of 4,000 has changed my social opportunities.  I have embraced the newness though, and been richly rewarded.  Last night was no exception.

It was the first time I’d hung out socially with a group of teachers from one of my schools, and it went really well.  The gentlemen whose home we visited had been bragging to me in school about how, “I [he] am Bomberman,”

"Bomberman" is the gentlemen on the left looking at my bad cellphone camera.

I ignored his boasts as ignorant bragging, but following around 50 games of Super Bomberman 4 - if you want more info on the game, visit this excellent fansite - and he won at least 43 of them, I acknowledged his god-like status.  He had a handy device handy device that turned the 2 player Super Famicom into a 5 player party.

We then moved up ten years and two generations in time to play a Japanese game for PS2, also with a controller multitap so four could play at the same time.  It was kind of like Mario Party, but weirder and more Japanese.  I didn’t particularly like it, especially when we played the Kanji recognition game.

The night ended back to the future in a sense as we flashed forward eight years to the present, playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo Wii.

Mario Kart with the Wii Wheels.

The best of Mario Kart was the 4 of us using the Wii Wheel to steer.  The thing responds frighteningly similarly to a real car wheel.

Evening’s pinnacle highlight came over breakfast this morning eating my toast and then grabbing a grass of clear liquid I thought was water, which instead was my unfinished nightcap of shochu.

Écrit près Charles Jeffrey Danoff | Homepage | danoff dot charles at gmail dot com

EDITOR’S NOTE:

• I’d like all of my readers to observe a moment of silence in memoriam of Uncle and Grandmother’s amazing cat Sammy who passed away yesterday.  Cat was nearly as old as I am, and made them very happy.