PWAAB and the Magic of City Billiards
City Billiards had shirts that said “Shoot Pool Not People”. You could smoke in their cause it was the 90s and the 2000s. It was downtown right by First Avenue and 4th Street. It was an amazing hang. When I was in high school me, my dad and Steve would go down there. My dad’s default activity with kids was to play pool. I played so much pool as an elementary school kid. As a junior high kid. As a high school kid. I suck at pool but I love it. If you have a pool table, I want to play it. I’m friends with a neighbor who has a pool table and he has never really invited me over to play pool with him and it breaks my soul.
The last months of City Billiards existence were probably in 2003/2004 something around there. Grant Cutler, who is now quite the musician and composer was the fuck-this-job and fuck-this-place all star because he knew the place was closing and he knew his checks were gonna bounce so he was just giving away mountains of drinks. I’d get six drinks, the bill would be $7. It was that stuff every time he worked. And between ten and thirty of us would show up for every shift and drink. Pool wasn’t the preferred game. The preferred game was darts. Me and Kevin played a lot of darts. I suck at darts. If you play darts you mostly play cricket. “It’s a game that rewards you for hitting certain parts of the dart board.” - Captain Obvious
Cricket is wild because you are competing both to finish hitting all the assigned spots but you are also accruing points by hitting spots you have completed and your competitor hasn’t. Kevin is good at darts. He would get all his stuff covered well before me, and then he’d just try to hit that bullseye. That bullseye was elusive. But as Kevin aimed for the bullseye, he made tons of points just by hitting the stuff I hadn’t yet. He called it PWAAB. Points while aiming at bullseye.
I think about PWAAB all the time in indie music. You ever met someone who has no business knowing how to fix a car but they had to learn to fix the van when they were touring on a shoestring budget. They were aiming at bullseye but they became an amateur mechanic. The only bullseyes I’ve really aimed at are being a musician, being a trivia business man and being a radio personality. I’ve hit some bullseyes but holy shit, have I scored a lot of points while aiming at those bullseyes. If you need to make something happen you work hard to cover what you need to. I learned how to book gigs. I learned how to set up and fix little shitty PAs. I learned how to edit audio. Interpersonal management. Trying to persuade people vastly more talented than you to follow your lead for a brief minute cause you have the vision. Aiming at that bullseye but learning stuff that helps me inside and outside of the dart game.
Sometimes when I come into regular job situations I feel so ahead of the game because of how ambitious the bullseye I’ve been aiming at has been. If you don’t want magical, spectacular, unimaginably cool shit it is harder to justify tolerating exhausting, futile, dangerous experiences. But if you are really about getting to some spot you want to find, you make a way, you work towards it. And I’ve worked towards it. I’m thankful. I’m exhausted, I’m happy. I could go for six drinks for $7 and a game of 9-ball.