Cousin! Let's Go Bowling!

Last night, someone on the local Discord had organised a get together at Roxy Ball Room for bowling. Since our usual Monday gym class was cancelled, me and cosmolinguist went along. Despite being exhausted from a late night and poor sleep, I managed to drag myself out.

We went masked of course, but the venue is well ventilated and fairly quiet on a Monday. The CO2 meter showed relatively low risk, so we were able to unmask and have food and drink in the venue, which was great. My hot dog and E's pizza were very tasty, and we indulged in several pints and a few cocktails.

It was weird meeting people I mostly know online and trying to correlate real names to Discord handles but everyone was lovely. Even the guy who got staggeringly drunk, whom I was keeping an eye on, remained polite and well behaved.

We were all pretty bad at the games. I did surprisingly well for me at the bowling, while E and others picked the bisexual option of hitting both gutters in a frame. They set up a club for it and talked about a secret handshake. Nobody was a dick about doing well or doing badly.

After the bowling we hung around chatting and drinking for a while and considered the other games on offer. For some reason we ended up playing shuffleboard. None of us knew how to play. It involves a very well polished long narrow wooden table, and some very well polished metal pucks which you slide down the board. It is incredibly easy to yeet the puck right off the end and only the gentlest nudge is required to reach a scoring position.

Players are divided into two teams and take turns sliding pucks. You score more points the closer your puck gets to the end of the board, and you can knock other pucks - either off the board entirely or into better scoring positions. We played for what felt like hours, and it was good fun. We cheered good shots from teammates and opponents alike. Again I don't think anyone was seriously keeping score.

Around 9:30 when we'd run out of shuffleboard, most of the group headed off to karaoke but me and E headed home with a Discord friend who lives near us. We walked them home from the bus stop then came home ourselves.

All in all it was a lovely night out. I stretched social muscles instead of exercise ones, and got to relax and chill out.