Flickage.

I have learned that being away from home for almost 9 months and then returning creates a very big TO DO list. There are still piles of "stuff" all over and my Twilight Zone pinball machine is 1/2 way through a repair. There are 6 other items on my current TO DO list, and they seem to get added faster than they disappear. I finally got all my tax data ready for Twila, and that was really a PITA. Today I sent a 3-page letter to the CEO and chairman of UPS complaining about broken boxes. Tomorrow I have to write a letter to the company that worked on our driveway the last couple of years, threatening to sue them in Small Claims Court. So I need to unwind and relax, when I can. Thus, flickage.

Readers of our NYC blog might recall that flickage refers to the game of Skee-Ball on my iPhone. Yes, I'm still doing it, but in moderation, and it has a very useful purpose. I use it for meditation. Yep, I no longer have to think about strategy or how to shoot, I just turn it on and zone out, my finger flicking Skee-Balls into a 100-point hole. My mind goes completely blank, which is the essence of meditation (I used to meditate in meetings a lot). Often I sit in my special chair, which massages my calves or feet, and wear a device that massages and buzzes my head.

The chair could also massage my back, but that bumps me around too much and I miss shots.

In a way, the game has become more interesting. At the very beginning I was ranked 18,000th or something. It took weeks to accumulate 50,000 tickets and move up in the rankings. Now I'm ranked 124th, and the air is rarified. I can't see the names of other players, but I can tell who they are. Instead of being separated by a few tickets, the places are now several thousand apart. At the moment I have almost 2 million tickets. I'm 20,000 tickets behind the person in front of me, and 55,000 tickets ahead of the person behind me. We are the pros of iPhone Skee-Ball, but 55,000 should intimidate the weaker among us.

Sometimes I play a few games and then notice that the score of the player ahead of me or behind me is changing. Then the race is on, because I know he or she can see my score changing, too. So far I've won these head-to-head competitions, but I can't really compete with people who play all day. It doesn't matter, though - I play to mediate and relax, and it works.