Too soon old; too late smart.

I am going to set the background a little for you here so you can understand the time.  The time was the late 70’s; big hair and bell bottom pants were just coming into the scene.  This was a time when after one turned 18 years old he needed to go to the post office and register for the draft.  The Vietnam “conflict” had ended, but war was still on everyone’s mind.  I had just turned 18 two weeks before, and I had another couple of weeks to go before the deadline to register was up.

Reluctantly on a Friday afternoon I went to the post office, took my three by five card and filled out my name, date of birth and social security number.  I felt both relieved and terrified after filling out that damn form: I was happy it was filled out but now it meant that the government could draft me at any time.  How was I to plan for the future knowing that at any minute I could be shipped off?

I talked to “The Guys”; the four of us had all grown up in the country on the same road.  We were separated by no more than two miles and three years between us.  We decided that the best way to comfort FarmerDave was to go out to a country western bar.  We walked into the bar, and I am telling you that if you want to get the perfect visual on what it looked like, think of the movie; Saturday Night Fever with the only difference being was the guys were wearing cowboy hats and flannel shirts instead of leisure suits.  There was a raised dance floor and smoky haze that just seemed to hang in the air and over in the corner were a couple of videogames.

The four of us found a table and ordered a round of drinks.  To prove that we were men now and not just teenagers, we ordered beers and shots of 151 proof rum.  What no one told us was just what 151 rum actually tasted like.  We had heard all of the stories but we lit our shots, drank them, and settled back for a moment to relax and to wait for our taste buds to grow back.  Our relaxation was cut short when one of the guys jumped up from his chair and asked a woman to dance.  I mean come on, we were country boys and this is what we were good at, right?

After about 30 minutes we were all out on the dance floor gyrating and dancing the cotton knot Joe and having a good old time.  When the band finally stop playing to take a break we all headed back to our table to rest, or at least we thought.  The group of ladies that we had been dancing with decided to stop over and talk to us. We chatted about being “real” country boys and what we were doing there - that is was our first time in this bar, etc.  By this time the three beers had finally worked their way through me, I headed off for the bathroom.  When I was done I headed back for the table...almost.  On the way back I had to walk past the video games; their soft blue and white lights flickering were calling me to them like a moth to the flame.

I reached into my pocket and found two quarters, I pulled out a quarter and put in into the Atari: Asteroids machine and started to play. I had never played the game before and it looked like fun and the controls were pretty simple.  There was shoot, turn and accelerate how hard could it be?  I pressed the one credit button, and I just sat in one spot and spun and shot.  I thought to myself, “Hey, this is easy.”

I played for a bit until there was no way to kill all of the asteroids that were heading for me.  Ok, no big deal.  I will just hit the gas a little and get out of the way.  I accelerated and my ship moved out of harm's way.  Great!  But hey, it is still moving!  What do I do now?  So I turned the ship around and figured if I turned the ship around and hit the gas in the other direction, it would stop.  I performed the seemingly simple maneuver almost perfectly, the only thing that I did wrong was forget to let go of the accelerate button.  So now my ship is flying around on the screen and smashed into the side of an asteroid.  Wow, this is fun!

I went to the bar and got five dollars in quarters and was soon joined by two of my friends.  Within 20 minutes, my other friend joined us and all four of us were huddled around the videogame yelling and screaming at the asteroids.

When the "bar time" finally arrived, we were greeted by the same four ladies who seemed to make it a point to stop and say “Goodbye” to us as they left the bar - with four other guys.  We looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders.  We thought about what had just happened, and dropped another quarter into the game.

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