Back in the mid-90’s I played way too much Minesweep. So I wrote a program to play it, without cheating, for me. (If you can’t beat Minesweeper in “expert” mode in under 7 seconds, you ain’t nuttin’!) That solved the problem of playing too much Minesweep. Made the game boring.

The good part was that I thought of adding a twist:

There was a guy at work who was really good at the game. Really good. Faster than I’d ever be (speaking as one who had to literally pry his fingers from their aching mouse grip).

The twisted idea was to hide the player program and trigger each move with *any* mouse click. So, then, I’d tell the guy (henceforth called “the mark”) that I had gotten real good at the game. Wanna watch, Mark?

Up comes Minesweeper. I start. And whiz the mouse around the minefield, madly clicking while the program steals the clicks and substitutes the nearest correct click. Viola! Minesweep played as fast as you can click.

Looking good enough to win a bet.

It had to happen sometime.

363k miles and a new timing belt, rubber and radio didn’t help.

At a corner a few blocks from volleyball in Redmond, the engine wheezed its last.

It was a box to get from here to there.

Quick calculation: $4000 to buy. Let’s say a max of $8k in repairs and maintenance. Another 6 grand for insurance. And 10 thou for gas. 10 years. 15 cents a mile – $233 a month for the whole shooting match excepting parking and garage.

Not bad for a car that I only liked in its last couple months.

And three kids learned to drive in it. So farewell old Honda.

Someone at Synapse drummed up a tennis tournament. Enough people volunteered that we’re playing doubles. I’m paired with a likely-best player, a new college grad named Kate, who played on her high school team. I’m paired that way, maybe, so that she can compensate for me. I told the guy organizing the thing that I hadn’t played in 30 years.

Oh, so true.

Yesterday, Saturday, I scrounged around trying to find the newer racquet we got to ping with the kids when they were under 10. But it’s gone somewhere. So, it was the old Wilson T2000 for me. Stacked against new racquets, it looks like a badminton racquet. A really heavy badminton racquet. Heck, this thing was called the “steelie”!

GI Joe’s. 3 balls for $2.50. Should I get 4 cans for $8.50? Nah. I’ll never use these things again. And, anyway, I’ve never had more than 3 balls. Heck, the only people with a bucket of balls back in the day were rich, old, serious tennis guys and schools and clubs! What enormous changes there have been with prices of small manufactured goods over the last 30 or 40 years! I suspect that three balls wasn’t much cheaper than $2.50 in 1970. If so, minimum-wage-equivalent pricing would be 10 bucks. Sounds about right.

Anyway, I find out where there are some courts and go there.

4 of ’em at Tibbet’s Park in Issaquah.

The end court has a big, green plywood wall with a white, net-stripe. The wall is stuck up on the high fence that’s around all the courts. A woman and her daughter are using the court with the wall. They take a look at me and say,

“You can use this one if you want.”

“Thanks,” I say.

Well, since the wall is on the far side of the court, I figure I’ll just whack 3 serves to get there.

Toss the ball. Nice toss. Swing. Nice swing. Feeling good.

Whiffff.

Huh?

Toss the ball. Nice toss. Swing. Nice swing. Feeling good.

Whiffff.

Ah…

Toss the ball. Nice toss. Swing. Nice swing. Feeling good.

Whiffff.

Oh, oh. This is not going precisely according to plan.

Whiffff.

Whiffff.

Whiffff.

Oh gosh.

Time for plan B.

The two are looking at me, probably wondering whether I’ll ever hit the ball. I’m wondering that, too.

I explain that it’s been rather a while since I’ve played. Like it’s not obvious, with my whiffed serves and antique racquet.

Up against the wall, Rob.

Whack, whack. The balls going every which way. I’m hitting about half the time on the shaft. Wheee. A ball sails over the fence. Sheesh.

Whack, chase, whack. Whack-chase-whack-chase-whack, weeee. Another homer.

Whack, chase, whack, chase backward, trip. Over on my tail. It’s so pathetic that it’s funny. Hilarious. The only reaction possible. This is slapstick comedy at its broadest.

Whack, whack. Weeee. All balls are outa here, sports fans.

… And, that was the first 3 minutes of my return to the tennis world.

Time and a lot of Gatorade helped. By the end of the afternoon, I was actually getting a few serves in and keeping the ball under control against the wall.

The serves were slow-mo, as expected. No arm strength. No wrist strength. Oh well. Nothing much can be done about that.

So, today, Sunday, I went back for more punishment. Oooo. My arm felt like lead. Oh, to have one of those new, ultra-light racquets. Of course, I can’t borrow one without using a glove. There is no reason to suspect that my weird hand sweat chemistry has changed from the days when a few minutes of grip would deposit a permanent layer of sticky glue. Pity the poor person who tries out the T2000. (It lays in devious wait. Heh, heh.)

But, hey. I did try “playing” an imaginary player who could not return any serve. I lost the second game against him, but creamed him otherwise. So, with a little warm-up, it appears that I can get the serve over, if not accurately to some particular point on the court, and if not particularly fast. That’s good. I’m pleased.

The kicker: Some people were leaving the courts today. “Hey,” says I, “You have some balls here.” (Four balls on the bench.) “Keep ’em,” they say. Apparently, they weren’t worth walking across two courts to get.

I wonder why few people seem to notice this fantastic thing that’s happened. People are worth, now, so much more than things. But, if you “consume” American (European?) media, you’ll learn over and over and over that this is a bad thing. Odd, that.

Read an article, Why can’t I remember my own birth?, at The Register.

So, it’s time to put this rather fun thing down somewhere.

From a very young age I occasionally had a particular nightmare. Sometimes I had a form of it while awake – often when I was feverish with some childhood ill. I called it a “daymare”.

At around 10 or 11 I “got control” of it. I was awake (skipping school and not feeling well and laying in bed) when I had some of the daymare. That day, perhaps because I was old enough or experienced enough with the thing, I found that I could turn it on and off and even play a bit with its intensity. That was quite an experience for me, as it had been very scary for as many years as I could remember (and I had a very good memory of being young – back to 2, at least).

What’s that all got to do with birth memories?

Here is how I described the main part of the daymare at the time: “I’m going through square rollers.”

So, what are “square rollers”?

Well, first, by the age of 10 (and younger), I knew that these nightmare rollers were physically impossible. But “square rollers” was the best I could do for a word. “Square rollers” are like kitchen dough rollers, but not like them.

First, imagine you are lying on a Roller Conveyor. Now, imagine that the rollers are powered. They are moving you along. Head first. Not fast. Now, imagine that you are not simply lying on them, they are above and below you and on your sides. Rolling you along. You have no sense of gravity.

Got that?

Now, imagine that the round rollers don’t seem to individually move continuously down your body. Instead, they press almost like the corner of a square in to you, pushing you along. As you move relative to them, the corners become the flat sides of the square. That is, you are not pressed by an edge, but instead by a flat surface. Same pressure. Just not as sharp. Then, lower on your body, you feel the corner again. But the flat parts overlap with the corners in some strange way. And the corners are not sharp, like they must be. That part is hard to put in to words. They are sharp, but in a different way than a sharp corner of a square. Duller, but not duller. It’s sort of like when you misinterpret something out of the corner of your eye. That is, if you don’t pay too close attention to a particular corner, it feels sharp. But, if you really take notice of that corner, it just isn’t quite as sharp feeling.

Got that?

Well, again, at 10 and younger, the only rollers I knew about were kitchen dough rollers. They were the right relative size, but they had some problems:

1) They did not conform to the shape of a body. The nightmare rollers did. For example, I could feel the same pressure from the “corner” of a square roller all across my body, high points and low, and around on the sides.

2) A kitchen roller is too round.

3) If they were square, they would not be able to turn. They were close enough that they would knock against each other. They would need to mesh like gears. But, I knew that such gears would counter-rotate in pairs. These rollers did not.

The rollers were not painful. But there’s no question they were doing some serious squeezing.

By the way, the rollers covered the whole body, head to toe. I could not help wondering how I could breath. But I had no sense of lack of breath.

The daymare had an extra component not in the nightmare: If I had my eyes open, the corner of the room would recede, like I was moving closer to the floor or shrinking or the room was expanding. That was the part I could adjust on that day at year 10 or so. I could move the corner of the room toward me and away. And, I could put the rollers on and take them off, so to speak.

From that day, the nightmares were no longer scary. I had them, but they just didn’t have the power they had had. In fact, they were kind of fun. For several years I’d play with them when I was not feeling well, or when I just felt like it. I could pretty easily do the room-corner thing while feeling the square rollers through my 20’s. After that time, I had kids and could not be sick any more. Now, all of this is a memory of a memory to me.

So, back to the subject of birth memories.

Sometime in my early 20’s I realized that the whole thing was a birth memory. Muscles can feel like the square rollers. And, it’s hard to imagine that one-way trip down the vagina as feeling anything but exactly what the nightmare felt like.

I’d need to search through a lot of old private writings to find out exactly when that realization came to me. I think it was a couple years before (and this is related to some of the text of the Register article), at age 24, I realized that people exist who think in words.

But that’s another story.