When I headed to the bowling alley with my friends last Thursday, I was expecting a night of lighthearted fun and maybe a bit of good-natured competition. What I wasn’t expecting was for the bowling alley animation to show an overtly threatening, highly specific, and vaguely 80s-themed depiction of my own death.
What kind of sick joke is that?
The animation was up-to-date, factually accurate to my real life, and depicted almost photo-realistic cartoons of my house, car, and family. Sure, the way the animation showed Billy Joel rolling up to my house clad in acid-wash jeans and smothering me in a mountain of his own records would be unnerving by itself, but the fact that it only included records that I actually own? That was chilling.
It felt kind of like a coded threat. Yeah, I was quite literally being squashed by a pile of classic 80s records, but why did the animation leave out The Bridge and Storm Front? Was it trying to tell me something? Should I purchase those two, objectively mediocre Joel albums before something bad happens? Is Billy Joel….evil?
In short: I’m very, very scared.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, those bowling alley animations are usually pretty weird, but I was expecting “two bunnies wearing Ray Bans drive a limo off the edge of the space-time continuum” weird, not “me literally being crushed to death” weird.
Now what am I supposed to think?
My friends even tried to convince me that this was normal. They watched the screen at the bowling alley play a graphic video of me suffocating to death while a bunch of anthropomorphized bowling pins danced on top of my body with a text bubble that read, “Yay, she’s finally dead!” and insisted “That’s just what they’re like” and “Relax, it’s camp.”
Not only was I clearly being blackmailed by somebody at Rock N’ Roll Lanes, but I was also being gaslighted by my friends into thinking it was all in my head!
To top it all off, the animation shook me up so badly that I didn’t bowl anything better than a spare all night, and I had to watch my nemesis-friend Jeff take home the win, which is a fate even worse than dying by the hand of Billy Joel.
For now, I’m not taking any chances: I’m adding the final two Billy Joel albums to my collection and listening to them on repeat until my ears bleed. And, Billy, if you’re reading this, please stand down – I need to beat Jeff the next time we go bowling and I can’t do that if I’m up all night waiting for you to saunter up my driveway to the eerie opening notes of “Piano Man” and drown me in a sea of your greatest hits.
