Friday we saw The Rum Diary. It’s an adaptation of a Hunter S Thompson novel. Every time I read or hear his prose I want to try to write like that. It’s a fun exercise. Here’s the original:
Tuesday we were invited to help The Concert Pub in the finals of the Sandbaggers Wetware Showdown Tournament.
They invited us because SRO OT had won Showdown two weeks in a row earlier.
This was the first time I had taken Lefty any where except OT. I was more nervous about driving home. Monday night we went to OT to play QB1 with Monday Night Football. I drove for the very first time in 15 months on the way home. We were pulled over and given a ticket because I wasn’t wearing a seat belt.
Back to the trivia tournament, the important Tuesday trivia lineup consists of Glory Daze (50s – 80s), Brainbusters (super hard questions and hints), Showdown, Speed(questions come faster and faster), and then Countdown (normal 15 questions). I showed our mettle with a perfect score (15000) in Glory Daze. Brooke won Showdown with a 60000 out of 63750. Concert Pub won the tournament by 284 points.
Now for the Thompson version:
Last Tuesday the cabal at the Concert Pub realized the possibility of impending and embarassing slaughter by the bible-thumping, Long Island Ice Tea-guzzling and possible erotic-quilting miscreants at the opium den cum sports and trivia bar going under the odious guise of Stringz & Wingz in the Communist stronghold of Streetsboro, OH. At the acquisition of this epiphany they sent a clarion call on the electronic version of kneepads and sparkly-glossed lips to me, an under-achieving divinely-inspired veteran of the long trivia wars and my wife, a lapsed Ivy League lawyer that academics pay to exert her discipline over their prose.
I was paranoid about going into that part of town known for its’ lack of old cars held together with a combination of Bondo and rust. That area between the freeways was also notorious for its’ surplus non-Volkswagen German cars. I was breaking in my newly hatched with a gestation period of 7 months prosthetic. The artificial limb with the mysterious and mystical moniker of Lefty had been only to the friendly confines of the bar where my fingerprints were burned into the pitcher handles.
Government regulations loomed in my isolationist miasma. The night before I had beendriving home from enjoying a satisfying surreal televised football in which the victors had refused to score a touchdown. The local constabulary must have used Patriot Act funds to purchase night-vision glasses because they pulled me over for not wearing a seat belt.
Tuesday came and I girded my loins to cross the threshold of an establishment that didn’t have my buttprint worn into any of the furniture. We walked in to an atmosphere of a dysfunctional family reunion. They knew we were invited but surprised and shocked that we had the cojones to show. Brooke and I ensconced ourselves at a freakishly tall table, grabbed fully-powered trivia boxes, tuned my iPad to the bar’s Wi-Fi, and we were ready to pull the ConcertPub into the rarified air of championship.
An old chestnut of a contest called Glory Daze was the first game we deigned to show our talent. I showed what going through an amputation and three hospitals does to a man’s mind with a perfect score, 15 right answers worth 1000 points each. After another half-hour prelim game the raison d’etre started: Showdown. Over 8000 bars filled with the best beer and whiskey soaked masters of minutia hovering their tobacco-stained fingers over numbered bumps of plastic muted the jukebox in anticipation of this 45-minute mass in the religion of trivia.
We were all in goose-step through most of the questions. Early on I was distracted by the lack of clothing by one of the non-trivia players. The reason couldn’t have been ignorance since my divine inspiration radar was on full gain. There was insubordination by some and confusion by the rest on one question and Brooke jumped to the lead. After that there was no catching her and she was on top of the crew with a score of 60000. Our average made the Ohio unfortunates mail the trophy to Texas.
