The Bowling Alley

John Ohno
4 min readDec 8, 2020

A friend of mine visited the site of the bowling alley. THE Bowling Alley. It was February of 2020 — quarantine came down right after and he got stuck in California for two weeks between that and the business with the plane tickets — and I’m pretty sure it was The Bowling Alley for a couple reasons.

See, a few years ago, I met this guy in a bar. Kinda sketchy looking guy, but it was a sketchy kind of bar. Wrinkly, covered in faded tattoos, trucker hat over an uneven scrub of long gray hairs. He saw the five fingered hand of Eris tattooed on my arm, and came to talk to me.

“You one of them dis-cord-ians,” he said, in the manner of someone who had never heard the word “discordian” spoken aloud.

“After a fashion.”

“My college roommate was big into dis-cord-ya.” He looked like he was about eighty, but this was an experience so I let him talk. “Heard about it from an uncle, some acid casualty by that point.

“This uncle of his, you see, in about 1959, he was drinking in a bowling alley and he went outside to piss against the wall — seeing as how the head was in use by two assholes arguing loudly about philosophy or something — and he saw this globe of shining light. The light was silver at first, then green, then red, then gold, and then he didn’t know what color it was. And then it zipped off, like a UFO. I guess it WAS a UFO, seeing as how he never figured out what to call it.

“He was pretty drunk, but that’s no excuse, so the whole thing kept bothering…

--

--

John Ohno

Resident hypertext crank. Author of Big and Small Computing: Trajectories for the Future of Software. http://www.lord-enki.net