starter blog/busted pinball machine

So I moved from My Space to Facebook to here, and for all 4.5 of you that read my blogs in those previous places, things won't change too much. Sometimes, they'll be funny; sometimes, they'll be serious. Sometimes, they'll be complete gibberish, I won't lie to you. That being said, I welcome any and all comments.

BUSTED PINBALL MACHINE

The one thing that sticks with me from my parents' divorce is not any kind of animosity or resentment or anything like that. It's a busted pinball machine. 

In the drastic life change of my father's move into a singles' apartment in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, he decided somewhere in the process that he needed a Fireball pinball machine in his living room. I'm not sure whether he got the pinball machine for his twin sons or for himself. I lean toward it being for himself, because he also had a waterbed and Playboy centerfolds hanging on the walls of his bedroom.

In regard to Fireball, he said that "the motor didn't work", but that he was looking to fix it, so whenever my brother and I would go over to his apartment to spend the night, we'd get to pretend that the pinball machine worked. A large, Satanic creature appeared front and center, throwing three fireballs at the player, highlighting the "multi-ball" feature on the game, and probably becoming a source for nightmares since we slept in the same room as the fire-spewing demon. Since my dad lived in one of those large apartment complexes with dimly-lit hallway following dimly-lit hallway, there wasn't much of a chance to go explore, except to go shoot on a 10-foot basketball court where I wasn't getting the ball higher than eight. Therefore, we were pretty much confined to the apartment, and the waterbed, and the busted pinball machine. 

At my grandmother's house, where my mom lived while she was going through nursing school, we had a large backyard where we played baseball and rode our bikes and, frankly, just used to walk the neighborhood (kids, for better or worse, weren't on the same leash they are now). But at my dad's place, we were pretty much locked in. It's probably the reason we didn't stay there too often, and, considering the decor, it's pretty clear that we were probably cutting into our dad's action.

My dad soon got remarried, which meant that the pinball machine was soon to leave the estate. But my dad made up for it by buying me and my brother a minibike - in which the motor didn't work. We never got to ride that minibike. 

I guess there's a large metaphor here about my dad, but to simply put it, he was 22 when he got married and thrown into fatherhood, and in his mid-twenties when he was already divorced. He still was a kid, in effect, and his bachelor pad screamed of a kid's first place of his own. I'm shocked he didn't have a black leather couch, a staple of the bachelor's first home, to be honest.

Maybe when I see him next, we'll have to get into the car and knock down a few mailboxes, just to give him a chance to give him some of his youth back that was taken away. Either that, or just play some pinball.