My crazy friend and occasional phoneblog reader S-dogg had obtained a quantity of very expensive and very high quality mota that he wanted me to sample ere I purchased some for a party Singular & I are having later this month. His sister dates an options trader, and one surprising thing I've learned since moving to this city is that anyone who works on the trading floor is an insane mota fiend. Remember the Scion, who I once waited for outside an alley across the street from the Sears Tower, in an upscale Chicago commercial district, so he could get his mota on with a damn coke can? I mean, he smoked keif, for chrissakes, and you can't get much more fiendish than that. Well, maybe you can if you're my friend Hummer, who once bought what he thought was mota from a bum under an overpass in Cleveland but it turned out to be some sort of plant mixed with wood glue to make it look like nugs... and he smoked it anyway. Called it "unknown loads".

I digress. S-dogg knows an options trader which means he can get the shiznit. We went to the apartment of a guy on his floor who had Jamaican flags hanging on the walls and had just blown himself a big glass 3-footer. You gotta understand- S-dogg has a neurological condition that's actually aided by "vitamin J", and he consumes it at a rate that would make Woody Harrelson hang his head in shame. This means that he associates with other freaky drug addicts- the dominatrix/subway graffitist/spiritual medium Christina, who won't hesitate to discuss loudly in a restaurant her shit-on-someone's-face gig that morning, and Stoned to the Bone, who is apparently too blitzed to realize that he's a white 708 stoner, not the ghettoest thug that ever thugged in a ghetto (he and his roommate call themselves "Gold V" and "D-Money" but look like they belong in the front row of a Guided By Voices concert). So I'm a lightweight compared to this crowd, and usually lag far behind in hits and still end up leaving that place not knowing where the hell I am. Fortunately, yesterday, we were heading to Dave & Buster's, which is caddy-corner to S-dogg's building in Chicago's Gold Coast. If you've never been to D & B, it's simply a Wal-Mart-sized bar, with a restaurant, theater, virtual reality, billiards, shuffleboard, skee-ball, and all the latest video games. Basically a Chuck E. Cheese's for adults, where the animatronic bears have been replaced by bartenders and the ball-pit is now an (electronic) shooting range. The one in Cinci has a bowling alley. This one has a Battletech station that's actually been around for 11 years.

You shut yourself in these pods that contain six monitors and 120 controls and battle it out with giant robots. "The battletech Master must be both pilot and engineer," said the guy who's been paid to play VR games for a decade. You have your main screen, your radar, various smaller monitors displaying weapons systems and heat sinks, a joystick, and a throttle. Fortunately, they can adjust the complexity for Rookies. We're "Standards" (5-25 missions) and the guys working there will give you any variable you want- you just have to know how to ask for it. Fog, different levels, advanced steering (torso twisting, done with foot pedals), if you know about it, you can have it. What usually happens to us is that three or four of us will sign up and end up playing with four super-geeks who are there all the time. The super-geeks derive twisted pleasure in blowing up rookies, usually played by the drunken jocks that are just at D & B for the pop-a-shot and golf simulators, and rarely expect to encounter people like us, who have played before but yet look like we dressed ourselves that morning. We like to team up on the nerds and show them who's all that.

Let's see... what else. I asked for a martini with olives and the waitress brought me three olives on a plate with my drink. Singular and I both won 100 tickets on our first try at one of the gambling games (they have prizes ranging from stickers to jukeboxes... I think 100 tickets would get us a shot glass). S-dogg was extremely entertaining, as usual. At one point he used the phrase, "She had fewer teeth than the front row of a Willie Nelson concert." That's all I can remember. I was rip-roarin. I'm surprised I could tell those games from reality. My decision? I'll buy it!