ah, this takes me back. not only to a time when an atari flashback was my only consistent source of video games, but also back to those suffocatingly quiet nighttime drives out to the pier with my father. my strange, probably-depressed father taking a stressful drive with a stressful kid after stressfully preparing for the trip out to where he could fish and just detense for once in his stressful busybody life. i don't think i understood then that trips like those were as important to him as they were to me, the kid eagerly running back and forth between where our poles were posted and the little snack shop a few hundred feet away. i can still feel the cold wind trying to fight its way into my windbreaker (pockets full of shoplifted oreos, of course). in-between the crunchy beeps and boops of night driver, i can hear the sounds of fishing lines endlessly reeling and casting, reeling and casting. maybe our drives involved a bit less violent car crashing and flashing lights? not sure. what i am sure of is that i will remember those drives and that pier and the nights we spent sleeping in the truck bed tent for the rest of my life. also, that i really like the vibes of atari 2600 games.
