Forever in pursuit of an extra life

poking into the comments of this post –

took me on a gentle visit to the times past when I walked/biked up to Vista Lanes and dropped quarters into Battlezone – yay vector game-play.
Pretty sure first ‘home video game’ play I did was at Duane’s, who had a Pong machine; some intrepid tinkerer from the Class of ’86 disassembled an Atari 2600 shortly after the Christmas break – maybe one of the Rossi boys? – and most certainly proto-pirates of the 325 / GE engineers had zippered cases with bare eproms that fit into a hacked 2600 cartridge; again, maybe Rossi’s, but guess when a new cartridge cost $25(?) you did what you had to; also yay for local GE engineers, I guess.
Can’t recall if my visit to Pam & Lisa’s on Long Island, where we played Coleco vision as MTv played the same Twisted Sister video over and over; happened before or after my personal home gaming machine exclamation point of Mom suffering from Astroids Thumb (if I recall correctly) – man the 80s were something else.
So I guess the point is – go play games, make sure your kids play games. Could do worse.

How are you today?

Good soul John spun a track yesterday, in celebration of R.E.M. front-man Michael Stipe’s birthday, from the compilation Ciao My Shining Star that struck me as a wonderful theme song for these recent years – “Everything’s Come Undone”, which has the chorus “I know that I would be alright” [um, ok. wow. just popped over to read the lyrics, knowing that it would be … somber. uh – well … let’s go with music matters. music heals. find the meaning you need in art. but also … whoa.]

Put together the kiddo’s new loft bed yesterday – surprisingly smooth going; is it even home improvement when I don’t bleed? Declan would say ‘No’ – but the boy was kinda sooo sooooooo happy.

Be good to yourselves – find something to laugh about.
Ciao, Scott

Your “green hair” is beautiful, and you are enough

Mark Neppo – ‘The Book of Awakenings’