I drove my poor sad car to the next town and took my family bowling the other day. You have to understand though that Davis is a cow town and Woodland is where all the migrant workers for this cow town used to live.

Woodland is a dive town. Most people would rather live in a trailer park than live in Woodland. In fact, there are several trailer parks in Woodland, you could live in, if you were so inclined.

Due to the City Plan in Davis, we have no malls, no bowling allies, and just a couple of movie theaters, which are actually recent additions over the past 10 years. We also have trailer parks, but one of them is kind of a high-end trailer park where all the yards are well-manicured and you never see someone changing the oil on their rusty Dodge in the driveway.

Woodland may be the town Davisites look down upon, but it's also where they shop, as it contains one of the only malls in the whole county. Where people shop is often where they seek entertainment, and while there is a bowling alley at the University, it's a bitch to park there. No parking is not entertaining, so we didn't go bowl there.

In search of entertainment, I saddled up my family into my poor sad icky-looking car with the questionable alternater and we went bowling in Woodland, also known as "There's your boyfriend" paradise.

There's your boyfriend is a game that Sue and a bunch of girlfriends used to play in college. We would pick the most unattractive man we could find, usually some sad human being pushing a shopping cart full of his belongings and declare,"There's your boyfriend!" (TYB)

I'm a little embarrassed that I played that game at all; it's mean and at the same time, it appeals to an evil side of me. I can't explain it, I just know that's how it is.

On the other hand, Woodland is a town laden with "there's your boyfriend" kind of guys. You don't usually see a lot of homeless people there, but rather you see a lot of public drunks. Public drunks make for excellent TYB "dates". I can't tell you how many times I've had strange men drunk off their butts approach me in Woodland. (I know,you're thinking "but she's so mighty wide", but just think "beer goggles" and you figure it out.)

We went to the bowling alley and I fully expected to see a lot of TYB material. I was pleasantly surprised to find families -- lots of little kids out with Mom and Dad bowling in bumper lanes. Apparently, Sunday is bowl in the dark day and has black lights and a sad semblance of disco lights on the lanes, but it was cheap.

And we had a ball...
with three little holes that we had to roll down this lane to hit the pins and we were all perfectly awful at it.

Russell is such a perfectly awful and incapable athlete. He does his mother proud. I was that awkward and that dreadful, myself. I got better. As the games progressed, we all got better. I was proud of all of us. Mike has never aspired or ever thought of himself as an athlete, so he fit right in. Genny's too young to make any kind of athletic determination about, but I'm betting she'll be a klutz like the rest of us.

Russell was kind of bummed that Mike or I won the games, but we did everything we could to help him some. He couldn't bowl hard enough to make the machine check for pins, so as long as he didn't have any pins laying down, we let him bowl over and over again because the machine didn't register unless he hit the wall behind the pins. We finally figured out that you could hit a button up by where the balls come back up and clear the pins, so if he'd had 5 tries, we'd clear the pins and let the next person go.

No one broke even broke 90.

I drive a shitty unpainted car and I like to bowl.