I'm Retired! Now what?

May 25, 2026

When a retired gentleman, like me, claims they are going to spend some time at a club, one might think they are headed off to the country club for a round of golf or perhaps down to the senior center for an exciting game of dominos!  However, when I headed off to the club this last Friday evening, I was going to a video arcade to take in a few of the local punk bands.   There might have been people playing dominos somewhere in the place though.  I never thought to look.

Glitches Arcade is a blast from the past for those who remember the 1980’s.  The place is located in a strip mall where a steak restaurant used to be.  These days there’s no rib eye or sirloin steaks being served up, but instead, there’s a collection of arcade games that makes someone who went to high school and college in the glam days of the 1980’s feel like a teenager again!  Within these walls you can bash barrels in DONKEY KONG, fly around on ostriches in JOUST, eat up little dots in MS PACMAN, jaywalk in FROGGER, and fight for your life in STREET FIGHTER, MORTAL COMBAT, and a few other battle to the death video games!  What I really found cool was the fact that I was able to find an old CENTIPDEDE game that actually worked decently!  I haven’t found a CENITPEDE game where the ball thing wasn’t screwed up since the Bangles were telling us how to Walk Like an Egyptian! 

For a cover of twelve bucks one can walk into the place and play pinball until their flipper fingers cramp up, and there’s quite the collection of pinball machines on hand.  A happy, retro gamer can also spend all day trying to save the world by playing SPACE INVADERS or any of the other multitude of relic, arcade game where we can either beat things up or blast them off the screen. However, if trying to get the high score of GALAGA isn’t your thing, the place occasionally has live music, and that’s when I generally show up.

I hadn’t met up with my work buddy Bill since our work place shut down at the end of March, but I got a message from him last week telling me that the Glitches Arcade had some bands playing Friday night.  Bill is probably one of the few people I know who can best me at classic rock trivia, although I can probably name more Olivia Newton-John and Helen Reddy songs than he can.  Keeping musically grounded in the present day, his grandson runs a local concert promotion business, and the dude tends to book local bands at local clubs from time to time.  To support his grandson’s business (especially since the grandson lives with him), Bill tries to get folks to show up to these musical events.  The guy also knows that I’m a sucker for live music of any kind, so I usually take in the local music scene if I’ve got nothing better to do.  More importantly, he also knows I’ll actually pay the cover and not sneak in like some folks tend to do.  Local punk bands aside, I was actually curious about how life was going for the guy since we had both been “retired” a couple of months earlier.

Fortunately, Bill had found a job at another local semiconductor wafer fab, and he was all excited about his new adventure.  So after we toasted his new job with a couple of Shiner Bocks and played a few games of pinball, the first band came on stage to rock the arcade!  I say stage, but there’s very little stage going on here.  It’s more of a spot than a stage, but a spot was all that was needed for the trio that started slamming out the tunes over the dings and blips of the video games and pinball machines.  Why the guitar player in the band felt the need to wear a mask I never quite figured out.  It wasn’t like a mask from the Slipknot band either.  His mask looked far more like something a professional wrestler might wear as if he was known as “The masked shredder from parts unknown.”  Maybe he just didn’t want anyone to know that his musical career had been reduced to playing video arcades.   Like most punk bands, there wasn’t much guitar shredding going on, but the band did have a unique sound, and a few of those on hand were able to pull themselves away from Frogger and Joust long enough to check out the band’s set. 

I don’t remember the first band’s name, but the second band was named Tonya & The Hardings, which was a memorable name if nothing else.  I didn’t get a chance to chat with the band’s lead singer, but I’m guessing her name was Tonya maybe?  She had quite the set of lungs and after belting out a few hard tunes she broke out into a pretty killer version of CCR’s Bad Moon on the Rising.  What really pulled me away from blowing up stuff in Galaga and Space Invaders though was when she belted out the classic Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, in a badass, rockin’ style that neither the Shirelles or Carole King would have ever dreamed of cranking out. 

I chatted with one of the band’s guitar players after their time in the spotlight, and I told him that I really liked their sound and would have bought a CD of their tunes if they would have had any for sale.  He merely gave me a go to hell look and informed me that they would have had CD’s if this was 1995.  So they had their music to sell on vinyl but not compact disk?  He should have just been happy that I thought enough about their music to ask.  It’s not like I was asking for a freaking 8 track tape or something.  Geez, what a prima donna!

The third band that took the spot was one that I had seen there before, but I’ll be darned if I remember their name.   I think the band’s name was Screwdriver or Pipe Fitter or Tap and Die Set or something like that.  They had an interesting sound and an awesome drummer, but the lead singer tended to go off on wild, political rants between every song.   What was her views on politics?  I’ll be darned if I remember.   I was too busy trying to get the high score on the Pokémon pinball machine.  We all have our priorities.