Tiki no mo

Farewell and adieu to you fair Greenwood tikis
Farewell and adieu, you tikis and lanes
For they're received orders for to raze you for condos
And soon never more will we bowl you again.

The phrase “end of an era” gets thrown around pretty liberally these days, but in the case of the destruction of Seattle's Leilani Lanes, its not much of an exaggeration. It's one of the few remaining haunts from my mid-20s (Orpheum Records on Broadway: gone; Harvard Espresso on Roy: gone; Nikola's on 45th: gone; Shop-n-Save on Market: gone) and possibly the one unchanged detail throughout my 12 years in Seattle (bad redecorations and smoking bans notwithstanding).

I bowled what I expect to be my last game there last night (ugh — two of the worst games of life, too). Appropriately, as I rolled the last ball of my last frame, the song blaring over the speakers was “It's The End Of The World As We Know It” — how perfect. And I didn't pick up that last spare — how typical.