Last night I played the Friday darts tourney at a new (to me) bar called Off the Rail.  The owner’s name is Jim, but that’s where any similarity with Dolce Vita Pub begins and ends.  The bar sits across the railroad tracks from the Sandhills shopping center.  You might say it sits on the wrong side of the tracks as it’s a bit of a dive.  The clientele last night consisted of a handful of darters, some bikers, and various other working class types.  Nothing wrong with that of course, and we all got along.

The bar is within spitting distance of the tracks and as I was preparing to make a dart throw a passing freight train blew it’s horn at a road crossing.  I nearly jumped out of my shoes but managed to hold on to the dart and recompose myself.  This is certainly not the place to play if you are easily distracted.

The match itself went alright I suppose.  I got teamed up with owner Jim and we made it to the finals.  He claims to have thrown before and truth be told he wasn’t a bad shot.  But he had no real concept on how to play the game.  For example, when we were playing single in/double out 501 Jim would ask before EVERY throw “what do you want me to do here”.  Now, this is a basic game–you start at 501 and subtract the score of your three dart throw until you get to zero (you have to finish on a double; for example, if you have 32 left you’d throw a double 16).  There is no real strategy at the beginning of the game other than to get the highest score you can on your darts (the best possible throw is 180–three triple 20s).  I admit I’m not the most patient person you’re likely to meet, but it was pretty frustrating to continuously repeat throughout the night “just throw your darts at the 20 and subtract whatever you hit”.

Actually, I don’t mind helping inexperienced players improve their game.  My problem with Jim was he kept disappearing on me.  It would be his turn to throw and we’d have to drag him away from the bar where he was chatting up customers.  He didn’t seem to have any real interest in the match we were playing and he had zero appreciation for how rude it is to keep people waiting during a game.  I was so disgusted that by the time we made it to the finals I suggested to the other team that we just call it a tie and split 1st and 2nd place money 50-50.  They agreed I think because they could see I was in agony.

As I was fixing to leave I noticed a van had parked in such a way as to block my car access to the only exit I was aware of.  Rather than try and track down the errant van driver I went looking for another path of egress.  First I walked along the tracks behind Off the Rail only to encounter a dead end.  So then I walked a bit in the other direction and found a driveway alongside another business.  It took some maneuvering but I managed to make it out of the parking lot and safely home.

So that was my Off the Rails experience last night.  Sad to say it was one of the better nights I’ve had recently.  C’est la vie.