Thursday, August 25, 2011

Found in a Basement

You won't find Ottawa, Ohio on a map. So of course it's not the county seat, or the largest town in Ottawa County. It is the westernmost and the smallest, however, and most people passing through mistake it for an especially large open-air museum when they're in the west end--that's the first five houses--and for a tornado-borne hunk of Xenia on the six houses of the east end. Sprouting off the middle is the only side street, Ottawa Drive, with three forgettable houses, and one basement. That's in the house that's cream instead of white. That's the first reason you might take a closer look; the second is when you discover the meekly-sized scissors-and-magic-marker "Barth Vader" sign glued by the front door.

Ottawa is a good place to get lost, but in Bartholomew Norse's basement you can find many things, even on a good day like this. Today it's Barth's fishy guest Joe Eawest; five sticks of formerly minty fresh chewing gum; a Ms. Pac-man cabinet, functional, but suffering severe burn-in and a limp joystick, a box full of coffee-stained sheets with printouts of Facebook posts on a 1990s dot-matrix printer; a confetti-gilded tinfoil statue of Ganesh; a laptop on the concrete floor running PuTTyTray dialed in to play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup; and a sawhorsed wargaming table set out with Klingon marine, Latvian Napoleonic-era pikeman, and Louisiana cannoneer miniatures mostly ready for playtesting of the latest Game of Joe ruleset. However, since five seconds ago it is in slight disarray after an assault from the behind of a now-impatient Katryn Norse.

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