A Game of Pinball

Over the weekend, my girlfriend and I visited CP Pinball in Roxana, Illinois. It was our second time there in three months and the deal is simply amazing. For $20 you get UNLIMITED PLAY for FOUR HOURS! Where was this when I was age 10? 

Pinball used to be something I excelled at. Like, watching me play was described as “art” by my first girlfriend. I could set a high score on almost any machine, call my shots as I was playing, and it had been a long time since I felt that level of “one with the machine” that I used to feel so often in person. Simulated pinball is nice, but it’s just not the same. 

One of the machines that I really wanted to do well at was the Indianapolis 500 pinball table. It makes sense, right? Anyway, my girlfriend and I went to it after the man that had been there an hour and seemed to have some good score scoring around 300-500million. Replay, not that it was needed, was 200million. 

The first game my girlfriend won! I don’t think she’s played extensively, but they’re certainly a foundation of skills and reflexes there. The second game I started getting my timing down, and by game three my girlfriend wanted to move on but I was starting to feel a connection, a zen-like experience where there is no thought on what’s about to happen. Timing becomes perfect, and it becomes easy to hit every target at will. Call it the zone, call it anything, for me it’s sheer bliss and as my girlfriend played the machine beside me I said, “I think I can set the high score.” It was at 1.3billion and I had yet to score half of that. I knew this feeling, and that record was going down. 

I don’t think I’ve conveyed in all my writings just how competitive I am. It’s tapered down a little bit as I used to have to win at everything, but now I only expect myself to do as good as my skills allow. This means that, if I know I’m capable of the best, I expect it. All the previous hours at CP Pinball had been leisure, but now the competitive juices were flowing and nothing but that high score would be satisfactory.

The first ball of the game lasted 20 minutes. It was a journey to the top and while the points were coming in bunches and I played in an autopilot state that is impossible to explain, I had thoughts of all the pinball games I’ve had before. I thought back to the fact it was pinball in a news article that my dad read that helped him realize I was on the autism spectrum, and I laughed as I trapped a ball with the flipper to slow the game down. My dad used to always tell me to do that but of course I knew better… for some reason I got better when j listened… only took a decade from the first time he told me. 

Ball two came, and the by the end of that ball’s bonus I had eclipsed the high score. There would be no sweating it out on needing one shot to get a multiball while having no safety net. I had done it. High score at a place that a lot of professionals play at. 

I had forgotten the feel of having a goal and crushing it. I forgot about the clarity that comes within achieving subconscious awesomeness. This is something quite simply is a “if you know you know” because how can I explain time slowing down, and the noise of the environment ceasing, and that all the sensory challenges I have turning I to an unfair advantage as the ball becomes a tool of my brain to move at its will?

I’m sure Kristen and I will be back. In a way I hope someone out there beats my record because I know I have more left. 1.6billion was my final score, but 3 billion? That’ll be easy!