So What's Your High Score?

So Ava turned 8 recently. When it came time to choose her birthday we came up with a few scenarios…none of which looked demented at the time but became increasingly so the closer we got to the actual event.

We asked Ava, as responsible, nurturing (read: stupid) parents are wont to do…"What would you like to do for your birthday, here are some choices"…

A Pottery Party, in which young children start with soft and malleable clay and after smashing and pounding it into submission then paint it in garish colors after which it is baked until it is a stone-like density capable of holding a tasty beverage or perhaps inflicting permanent brain trauma on the child next to you.

A Bowling Party, in which young children are assembled in poorly fitted shoes in a room where the lights are dimmed to a level normally associated with where bats congregate and then given dementedly dense spheres of polyurethane which often cause parents to reach for a tasty alcoholic beverage or perhaps inflicting permanent brain trauma on the child next to you.

An Arcade Party, in which 15 random children are dropped off by parents looking for two hours without their "Little Darlings" (read: Homemade Terrorists) in a two-story building packed with screaming kids, flashing lights and high pitched sirens that it makes the firebombing of Dresden look like the time when you accidentally used an extra squirt of lighter fluid on your BBQ grill.

As you may have guessed…Ava chose option 3.

Now I haven't been in an arcade since back before The Goths sacked Rome but I do remember that it used to be about playing the games.

If you still think that, then you my friend are El Wrongo.*

Anyhoo, the point of arcades nowadays is to provide a centralized location in which to disburse cold pizza, flat soda…and to provide a free-range, open environment in which thousands of children hopped up on so much sugar that it is literally eating their brains from the inside-out can shriek at upwards of 145 decibels every single second of the 2 hours that you are there.

It is truly epic in the real sense of that word…it's loud and there are glowing flashing things exploding every few seconds, while random children, faces plastered with cold pizza grease and clutching handfuls of cake run around in circles making horrible wretched squealing sounds that would be completely at home in Satan's living room.

It's like if you had the power to take a half dozen ferris wheels, light them on fire and have them spin at a hundred miles an hour while crazed children hang on for dear life and all the while a volcano is erupting alongside a rockslide of christmas lights and assorted car parts that scrape across your skin and somehow, I'm not sure how, inside this insane terrifying din, you can still hear them playing Justin Bieber over the PA system.

Let me try once last time…

It's as if you're tied down in the middle of the desert at high noon during Burning Man, there are filthy hippies dancing with zero coordination while a million drumbeats lash at your eardrums and somehow, again you dont know how…you are covered in gravy and just this minute a crazy mad scientist has found a way to make piranhas airborne and they haven't eaten in a few days. And he just let them loose.

Well, maybe its not that bad, but lord it ain't good.

* El Wrongo is the star of a new Cuban American superhero show I am writing. In it there are many amazing episodes such as "When El Wrongo has One Cortadito Too Many", El Wrongo Ditches The Wife to Go to All Star Wrestling and of course the tear jerker in the making…" El Wrongo Loses His First CockFight to a Little Girl with a Parakeet Named Teeny".

What is going on here?

Can someone…anyone please explain it?

You can't…can you?

And they said romance was dead...

Cause I'm classy like that...