Last night I saw my Slowpoke, the one that I need to capture to make a Slowbro. It was in Glenlake Park where I went to stock up on Poke Balls and get enough candy for a power up party for Harriet. He was there, hiding in the reeds and rushes, but a Cubone (my umpteenth Cubone -- Hello Marrowrack. Sorry, Pokemon Go is just that predicctable) and I had an ammo fight and I had sixty-nine percent battery, one Poke Ball, and corn meal that needed to be made into polenta for a shabbos casserole, and twenty ounces of fresh lima beans (the last of the season, as in it's about time) that needed shucking so I could include them in the shabbos casserole.
Tomorrow night there will be polenta pie and Ithaca style zucchini and rutabaga, and tonight if GPS is at all functional, I will level while walking the Masjid route into downtown Clarkston. It has been an angry day for me. I couldn't work for several hours due to a stupid computer glitch, and yesterday my flash drive by which I lived and died, bit the dust with a spectacular flame out. Usually failing flash drives give warning. They get full. They don't always load. They lose their covers. This one did none of the above. It just died and died spectacularly. I Iost ten months worth of mostly Second Life related graphics. A lot of other stuff is backed up all over the cloud and needs downloading. That is going to take time. When the computer refused to find its way to the internet at work this morning, the rope whose end I clung to, snapped.
And in the middle of this I have 49,550 experience points. Pokemon Go is nothing if not predictable. GPS and technology and human error are another story. Of course I have no Poke Balls but if I make a few stops that will change. If I walk about four kilometers I'll hatch another egg. Do the math.
Making level will solve my ammo woes for a day or so. Remember, I am a terrible shot. My sole talents are being able to walk around, observe, forage, and plan while doing third grade math.
Pokemon Go rewards this kind of plodding patience, but I am going to need what even for me is an extraordinary amount of it in the days ahead. I have set a date for hatching one of my Lucky Eggs. I have something important going on at work on November 1. There is a big meeting on November 11. After the meeting in the late afternoon, somewhere in or near downtown Decatur, I will hatch the egg. It will be under the stars because we will be on Standard Time (Yay!) by then. The question is: can I hold out that long.
The answer is that I need to think big picture. Right now I am thinking about the people I have met while on Poke runs. There was the run in the Toby Grant area some weeks ago. I found one church after another. Churches usually mean Poke Stops. Churches are also territory and I had to explain about Pokemon Go to some church members doing repairs on their building. Even though a church is public, I felt like an intruder. I have to get the time and courage to return to that neighborhood.
There was the man I met Tuesday evening as I was walking back into downtown Decatur from Agnes Scott College. He said he was lost. He was from California. He needed to find the MARTA station. I walked him there.
Then there was the man I met at the Clarkston Community Center (yes this is on the Masjid run.). He came up to me and asked "Is there life in that thing?" He meant my phone. It was at seventy-nine percent battery, but I really thought this was a presumptuous way of asking to make a call. I replied "Yes, but I'm using it." "I think they should throw those things (smart phones) in the bottom of the ocean," the man told me. I replied that I loved my toys. Ironically my cell phone is a Blu that cost me less than ninty dollars on Amazon.
Then there was the man I met on the road from Avondale Station back into my neighborhood. It was a hot day one of many too many too late in the fall. He came up to me in obvious distress. I was hot and tired too. "Can I have a drink of water?" he asked. I had no water. I really didn't. I told him so and told him to sit in the shade to recover his strength. It wasn't until I had gone a few blocks and had to adjust something that I saw my laundry soap bottle protruding from my bags of clean clothes (I had gone to do laundry at Belvedere Park shopping center). The laundry soap bottle is a repurposed seltzer bottle. The laundry soap I use is clear. You can figure out the rest. I wished now I had remembered the laundry detergent and pulled the bottle from the cart. On the side the man could not see is a piece of paper that I taped to the bottle. On the paper are the words: "laundry detergent" and a skull and cross bones. No I did not have any water. No I did not have any patience. Yes, I can do better... sometimes.
When I helped the man find the train station Tuesday night, I felt like I was making amends. When I lost the flash drive yesterday I felt like it was a sacrifice toward something better. That something is NOT Pokemon Go related. When my GPS craps out, I want to scream. When I run out of ammo (Poke Balls) it serves me right. When I go through all the mass evolutions on November 10, it will be a disappointment and anticlimax, and yes I would trade them all for a chance to have done better with the man asking for a drink of water.