Apparently my friends and I are not gluttonous enough to
play trivia at the local watering hole.
Who knew? Surely we did not.
We have been going to trivia at Uno's many Sundays for a
couple of years now, and we used to do pretty well. Admittedly we have some stinker weeks, like
last week where the most important piece of information to come out of our
wooden booth was that my friend's daughter has a "thing" for former
(and long-dead) president Rutherford B. Hayes.
But tonight we kick butt.
We totally trash the half-time and picture rounds and get many of the
regular questions right. So how is it
that our score, even though it is reasonably high, puts us in LAST place?
We look around. Our
little group of four is merrily drinking beer, soda, water, and coffee. We are eating salads and chicken wings. We even answer a question so obscure that we
earn five extra Mulligan points. And
this is the problem. We are not drinking
enough and we are eating things that are not ridiculously bad for us.
We are also the smallest group there. Every other team has five, six, even more
people working with the questions. It's
not that this makes them collectively more intelligent than we are, although
there may be some truth in that. It's
because bonus points are awarded for certain beers and for desserts. Every team but ours is sucking down the brews
and buttercream faster and in greater quantities than any sane human might ever
deem sensible. Six people at a table
drinking four beers each and having desserts could easily garner a team thirty
additional points.
It seems that our trivia night out has turned into less of
what we know and more of how far we can stretch our kidneys, livers, and
stomachs. It's not that we don't have
fun -- We are like cats; we could have fun in paper bags and empty boxes
because we're just that kind of people.
It's just … not about knowledge anymore.
It's less about fun rivalries and competing minutiae and dueling brain
cells, and more about bellying up to the bar faster and with greater gusto than
the others.
I half-jokingly suggested that we should just meet at
someone's house and play Trivial Pursuit because the whole concept of TRIVIA
has evolved into an elaborate game of Caps.
But the truth of it is that I enjoy the friends I see at trivia along
with the questions and answers part of it.
Friendly competition is great!
Friendly drinking it great!
Friendly dessert-eating is great!
Mixing them all together so the only way to win is to be drunk and in
sugar-shock? Maybe not such a wise idea.
I guess it's okay to be too un-gluttonous to win at
trivia. At least we all know that we're
intelligent enough in a random kind of way to earn some honest game points, and
that we won't be drunk-driving to get home after the game… while holding up the
"L is for Loser" sign on our own foreheads.
