Snoopycember 2.2: Let’s Play (Pin)Ball

Here we are. Thursday again. Can you believe it? I can’t. I’m losing my grip on reality, and every day is a recursive jumble of letters and numbers that don’t make sense, the world is a snake eating its own tail, etc. etc. Flying Ace, where are you? There are masked criminals in our streets who should someday soon be tried at the Hague, but monsters have built a world that enables monsters to enact their monstrosity on the rest of us without consequence. I have hope that things can get better—there is enough brick to go around.

Which is all to say, I have been playing a staggering amount of Snoopy Pinball on my Nintendo Switch lately. I’m not very good at it, and I don’t seem to be getting any better, but I’m going to keep trying.

To give a quick review of the game itself, the Snoopy table on Pinball FX, a free to download game with in-game purchases of different tables (Snoopy cost me $4.99), is basically fine. It’s got all the nice shiny lights a pinball table should have. There’s plenty of Snoopy and Charlie Brown and fun little mini-challenges, including one where Woodstock becomes the ball and you whack him around until the Peanuts Gang does a PSA on CTE. The cons for me would be that I lose my sight on the ball quite a bit, it’s a little glitchy, I think there’s too much space between the flippers, and above all else, I am bad at pinball and video games, both of which are heavily represented in this pinball video game. 3.5 stars out of 5.

I also, though, really love both pinball and video games. I like bright colors and flashing lights. I like having something to do with my hands. I kinda think a good pinball table can be just a big public art installation with everything it’s got going on, and video games have the capacity to tell stories and build worlds in ways not as easily replicable in other art forms. There’s so much work and talent and care that’s also often pitted very directly against gaudy commercialism, and somewhere in there, there is some joy.

And also anger when the gd dang ball sails past my little digital flippers, or in a video game when I can’t keep straight the keyboard equivalents of the PS1 controls for the Digimon: Rumble Arena emulator I play sometimes. I suck at pinball! I play really dumb video games and then also really suck at them too.

But you’ve got to start somewhere, and that’s where Peanuts Pinball comes in. Charlie Brown, noted depressed child, is not good at much, or doesn’t think he’s good at much. He’s always losing the big baseball game for his team; he can’t kick the football; he procrastinates his schoolwork; he’s lonely. His “Good Grief” refrain becomes a nagging echo of failure after failure.

But Charlie Brown persists. Sometimes to improvement and success, sometimes not so much. But regardless of the results, regardless of Charlie’s frequent distress, he avoids the trap of cynicism. Because as Snoopy said, “Keep looking up. That’s the secret to life.”

I think I could very easily be perceived as a cynical person, and I think in some ways, I can be very cynical. But, nevertheless unsurprisingly, I agree with Snoopy. Because things are really really bad and hard right now, for a lot of people. A lot of things could also be better or easier for me, personally, right now, pinball-related and non-pinball-related, but all things considered, I am Fine. And as someone who is Fine (not like that), looking up isn’t just something to do for my own sanity, though I think that is also important. I do think on some level, when you are afforded the privilege to, it is just kind of your job to keep looking up.

I don’t plan to have children, but I am of the age now where a lot of my family and friends have or are having young kids. And as you do, when you are not a sociopath, I often spend time thinking of the ways the present moment will shape their lives, in the immediate and in the long term. And it’s hard to be optimistic about the largely yet-unknown impact of this day’s evil. But it’s easier to be optimistic when I think about the people in their lives who will be there to guide them through it all. It’s easier to remember that the good will also always exist along the bad, just as the bad exists along the good. I don’t know that things will get better, but I believe I just kind of have to think they will. I have to labor with the expectation of eventual fruit. If you want the next generations to remember all that, it’s your job right now to keep looking up if you can.

Like pinball, like video games, I’m probably never going to get really really good at most of the things I do in life. Sometimes I might do alright though, and that gets to live along side all of the ways I continue to fail. I think I am probably stuck at #470 in my region’s Pinball FX Peanuts Table rankings, but I‘m (mostly) okay with that. Whether I get good or not, I’ll still always love pinball. I’m looking up anyway.

Here’s a poem:

i have nowhere to go but up, Snoopy 

but they never tell you how scary that is

you can’t feel the sky the way you feel the ground

and when you don’t feel it anymore that ground

doesn’t look how you pictured it, i guess what i am

asking you Snoopy is why do you sleep 

on top of your home. Snoopy what can home be

if your dreams rest above it