Pinball machines are some of the most psychedelic encounters we can have as children. I think that’s why it’s so easy for your mind to spin out and create this whole scene (it sounds fake to me but I don't think you're lying more like you had a kind of casual hallucination). There is something about pinball machines that is just so chaotic, sometimes I think they are a bit mystical even like Stargate that we don't know how to use so we just pull the little thing and tap the little buttons. Because they are so powerful there's no way that they are just games. You can really notice this if you ever go into an arcade without pinball machines, it just feels like sad like a video poker room at a truck stop.
I know this is off-topic but I was thinking about this last night. Just related to everything I wrote above and how powerful they are…I think that is why the little flippers at the bottom are so pathetic. They are the only thing we are able to control and they are so worthless. But because everything else is so hyper stimulating we just anchor ourselves there, and for that reason they sort of have to be worthless and pathetic? I don't know, but I do feel like the moment that the pinball went right between the flippers for the first time for me, at a distance such that no matter what I did I could not stop the pinball from passing me by… I felt like that was the moment I realized that life was going to have a lot of disappointments, and most of those disappointments would be from unfairness. But the desire to blame – or tilt – is so strong that we spend so much energy raging against this unfairness that we can't just admit that our flippers were never long enough to have a chance.
Lol sorry that prob wasn’t helpful but yeah I never saw this one, are you able to remember any thing to the left or right of the machine? Sometimes when I look to the peripheral of a hazy memory I'm able to pick up more.
Oh man, my mom would tell this story about me sobbing after I played the '95 Sega Frankenstein cabinet at a laundromat when I was four or five. She thought I was scared of the monster (which is a pretty good guess, those stitches could be pretty visceral for a kid!) but eventually she pieced together though my sniffles that I was upset about "not actually being able to control the ball." She tried to soothe me about it for ages but I just refused to calm down or agree with anything she was saying. Baby's first existential crisis lol. I'd completely forgotten about it until I got a job at an arcade as a teen & started to get really into pinball & she was like... are you sure you're ok with this? Like, no mom, I'm freaking out about the inconsequential nature of humanity at all times at my part time after school job!!! Lol. Anyway, just really loved how you put that. Totally agree it's powerful stuff especially for a developing mind