There's a convenience store between my office and my home that I sometimes stop at on the way home from work. Recently, while paying for something (probably Yellow Tail or Purple Haze), I noticed that there was a jar on the counter near the cash register. The jar was full of ping-pong balls.
Yes, there among the lighters and other impulse purchase items was a jar full of ping-pong balls, being sold individually.
Is there really, I wondered, sufficient demand for ping-pong balls that you'd need a jar full of them near the register at a convenience store? I asked the clerk (a friendly fellow who may be Indian but I'm not sure and I've never asked), "You sell ping-pong balls?" He sort of shrugged and nodded, and responded that yes, they did, but I didn't pursue the matter any further.
A couple of weeks later, I was leaving the store one evening after buying something (probably Purple Haze or Yellow Tail), and I glanced down at the jar of ping-pong balls and noticed that affixed to the jar was a sticker, which read "Please Use Responsibly."
I had to ponder this development for a while. Please Use Responsibly. As if I weren't going to? Did ping-pong players, I wondered, need a reminder like that? Was there some loose cannon ping-ponger out there who might behave irresponsibly with a ball? It seemed unlikely somehow. I thought about the sticker for a long time.
I turned it over and over in my mind, until it hit me: there must be some way to get high off ping-pong balls. This store sits right up against a university campus. They sell a lot of beer, wine, cigars and such -- I imagined that some stoners out there had figured out some way to ingest some chemical component of the ping-pong ball... maybe you were supposed to cut it open and suck out the air inside, I didn't know. This was the best theory I could come up with for a while.
Then, yesterday, I mentioned it to Brent, who also lives in the vicinity, and he quickly responded, "It's probably for beer pong," meaning (of course) the party game where you try to bounce a ping-pong ball into a cup of beer.
Right. College campus, store that sells beer... beer pong. That made more sense. I felt kinda stupid for not figuring it out sooner.
I stopped at that store on the way home from work last night (Purple Haze) and I glanced down at the ping-pong ball jar. There was, in fact, another sticker on the jar, bearing a picture of a cup and the word "Pong." I imagine that this second sticker had been there all along, but I had never noticed it before.
That's how my mind works sometimes: I go straight into searching for complicated imaginary solutions to things when there's a simple explanation right in front of my face. It's a blessing and a curse, seriously.
