my last trip to the lanes for a couple of weeks, and I bowl like crap

There was a lot on the line this week for other competitors including me. I went into yesterday holding the highest score for the month of November at 192 and I was also a tag-team champion between me and a Russian tag team partner and we had defended this championship for 2 weeks in a row which is not easy to do when you are normally competing against 8-10 other randomly selected teams.

This was not my week and I think it could have been for a wide variety of reasons the main being that I took an Ambien to get to sleep the night before and those normally keep me in zombie mode for a few hours after I wake up. I'm not making any excuses though because I have been on some sort of sedative most of my life.

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There is a reason why I have chosen the above stock image. That my friends, is the 5 pin and it has been the bane of my bowling existence for the past 3-5 games I have played. I bowl with relatively good accuracy but for some reason and a reason that I cannot figure out, I will leave the 5 pin standing at the end of my first ball. I am one of the few people in our group that is capable of bowling with a curve so it makes less sense to me that this would be the pin left standing at the end of a first roll. You can hear me at the lanes shouting "STUPID 5 PIN!" over and over because a roll that looks like it is an all but guaranteed strike will be a 9. Thankfully, i am pretty good at picking up single pins if they are in the middle of the lane. The ones that throw me off are the ones on the right side, since I bowl with a right-to-left curve.

The guy in the image above is our current champion and he successfully defended his title for the 4th week in a row. He has a very bizarre style of bowling where he does this Matrix-like thing where he comes almost all the way down to the ground after each roll. I have never seen anyone bowl like this in person or on TV. If a professional were to review his style they would probably say it is all wrong but hey! If it works for you it can't be wrong. He ended up winning quite handily and also getting a 193 in one of his games, which would have been the new high score for the month had it not been for this next guy.

Now those last 3 frames (I'm not sure why it deletes all the other information immediately after you bowl your last ball) don't look so impressive but what was impressive is what happened before that. This guy, who is from Russia, bowled 5 strikes in a row prior to the 8th and he also bowled a strike in the first frame. This means that he had only 2 open frames the entire game. This just kind of goes to show how damned difficult it is to break 200 points in this game. In the entire time that DUMBO has been around, 200 has been broken only 6 times... one of them was by me. We have a group called the "200 club" and there are only 4 members in it.

Later on me and that guy who got the 208, which is now the highest score of November, was on my tag team for the tag-team championship. We had already defended it successfully once, and were hoping to do it again this week. Things were looking good because not many of the other teams, which are decided randomly, seemed to be much competition. But unfortunately for me (previous high score holder) and my partner (new high score holder) things were just not in the cards for us as we ALMOST did well in just about every frame. However, as they say, "close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades" and we nearly got all of our spares picked up. It didn't help matter very much that in the first frame my partner left me with a 4/7/10 split, which is almost impossible to pick up, even for professional bowlers.

Things did not get better for us 4 lanes down from us, the only married couple who are both decent bowlers and randomly ended up on the same team, bowled 3 strikes in a row in the first 3 frames. By the time me and my teammate had managed only a single strike and 2 spares by frame 7, it was basically guaranteed that we were not going to be able to defend our championship. The married couple emerged victorious with a 168 total score. Me and my partner managed a paltry 124, which is very disappointing considering that both of us are better bowlers than this.

I suppose it doesn't really matter though because next week I am not going to be here anyway because I am off to Saigon to get hair-transplant surgery and that is going to take me out of the bowling action for at least 2 weeks. The way it works in the tag-team championship, if one of the members is not there, they must forfeit the championship. The reason for them not being there doesn't matter. If there are extreme circumstances such as non-elective hospitalization, the team is allowed to be on the same team again when the other returns. My hospitalization is for elective vanity purposes, and therefore doesn't count.

The next few weeks of DUMBO should be interesting because when I asked a couple of prominent members if they would handle the pre and post game speeches, nobody wanted to do it because they were afraid. I am one of those people that doesn't mind public speaking so it is always surprising to me when someone else is afraid to do so. This is especially true because all of the people that they would be speaking to are friends of theirs to some extent. I do recall reading somewhere that public speaking is one of the things that people fear the most and maybe I just got lucky that it doesn't bother me at all.