200 + people came into the restaurant tonight, the release of the pent-up public locked out of the neighborhood grill since the Friday before last weekends holidays. I stayed calm at the door combing my hair and chewing nicotine gum. “Get your head out of space!” my manager yelled at me.
At home afterwords the mashed potatos I’d eaten pulled with strong gravity my stomach down to bed and I napped until 1 AM. Layed in bed considering sleeping through the night versus playing quake 2. The bathroom visit my bladder demanded left me with no choice, so I entered the Last Resort, pretty much the best & only place left for the dwindling community of quake 2 capture the flag players.
Both SLY and $lasher were playing, two of the best. Although when I came onto the server $lasher was in the middle of telling SLY that he wasn’t ever going to be an exceptional player, (Q2CTF has been around for two thirds of a decade at this point…) at best a player who does well on public servers. A player like n1ght3mar3wa1k3r or alpha. Personally I don’t agree or disagree because while technically I’ve been playing q2ctf most of my life I no longer play 8 hours a day.
Matter of fact, I never play with sound, which means that I don’t time the quad-damage (which respawns every minute) and can’t hear people sneaking up on me or shooting at me. This can be a problem. But I don’t like the quake 2 sounds and my ears are very sensitive. So I listen to hip hop or tortoise and have adapted a style of play heavy on the grappling hook; I’m not going to be where most people are going to be.
So while I have respect for SLY I didn’t stick up for him. Instead, because $lasher was in such an analytical mood (SLY had never requested the appraisal), I asked the $oothsayer to deliberate on the question of the next jordan. (My grandma and I had just watched Jordan on Oprah earlier in the week and so the question lingered on my mind.) Also because $lasher may be the Jordan of quake 2 capture-the-flag. I asked, “$oothsayer, is lebron james the next jordan?” $lasher replied, “Yes.”
In the next railgun-only overtime round I watched Hellbringer (Red) kill Cindy Loo Who (Blue) and then tried to grapple away. I shot him once and he died flying up through the air from both the railgun shot and the grapple hook. Snuck around Red Base and followed $lasher as he grappled towards the middle ground to confront my teammates. As he strafed a wall I shot him and then backed off and he followed. In a firefight we ran down a set of stairs sideways facing each other. I railed him again but he missed me. $lasher then attempted to descend further stairs into Red Base but I grappled high into the air and shot down diagonally as he shot up hitting me…
& I felled the Jordan of q2ctf.