Tag Archives: playing pinball

Playing the Silver Ball

PinballIn the late 1970s during my last couple years in my hometown of Ann Arbor, inspired by that song from the Who’s rock opera “Tommy”, I became a pinball wannabe wizard, making time each day I was on campus for my college classes to drop a few dollars worth of quarters in the slot and transcend my muggle life into the world of metal spheres, plastic flippers, bumpers, targets, spinners and those accursed ball-eating gutters. Inspired by reading Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine some years earlier, it was a time in my life where I was experimenting with living in the moment, at times aided by smoking marijuana, and beginning to wrestle with life at a more metaphysical level.

It was a profoundly simple and dazzling universe of exotic noises and lights highlighting the spectacular laws of kinetic physics guiding that iconic silver ball on its course (whoa… way too many adjectives!), a compelling game of skill that required a calm mind, hyper focus, extreme sensitivity and the ability to meld with the machine and bring it alive. Continue reading →