As an activity, bowling is as bare-bones as you can get. Ten semi-phallic white pins stand erect at the end of a long corridor, and your job is to use your big black ball to knock them down. Actually, I’m not sure if I’ve ever used a black ball; they’ve always come in a bewildering array of fruity, often iridescent colors that give me cravings for Jolly Ranchers. If this is a really subtle form of gay activism, bowl on, brotha’!

When you think about it, it’s almost a miracle that bowling has become so ubiquitous, with alleys in virtually every modern city in the world. The set-up never changes; it’s always you, a sphere, and some objects to destroy stationed 60 feet away. After you’ve played a few times and have faced every combination of pins remaining, you’ll never encounter a new situation again. But perhaps therein lies its greatest strength as a social event; you never actually have to pay attention to the damned game. Sure, when it’s your turn, you may get pulled away from that hair-fiddling fake-laughing flirt session with the gal that’s ambiguously into you, but on the plus side, she gets a guilt-free game-induced reason to escape your clutches. Bowling is a social metronome, shuffling interactions at a regular interval and making sure that clingers have to release their claws from time to time. It’s like speed dating, but everyone has a ball.

The best part is that if your group is particularly boring or sick of each other, the game itself picks up the slack. There is something strangely hypnotic about watching someone taking shuffling steps, going into a ritualistic wind-up, and unleashing with pure open-mouthed anticipation, at which point their body tenses, fists half-raised, body trembling and undulating as they use their telekinetic powers to assassinate that stubborn 9-pin. With the ball tumbling past it by inches comes no less than the realization that our hand is powerless against the cruel whims of fate. All we can do is throw our heart behind the blasted thing and the pins either fall or they don’t. Bowling is like life writ small, but with twenty chances instead of one. Even the most miserable and luckless among us has a decent shot of at least one instance of fleeting glory, which is probably why we’re so willing to pay for the privilege.

Obama gives hope to us all with his astonishing score of 37.

Oh, and let’s not forget those adorable, slip-and-slide bowling shoes and their magic dance-inducing powers. If Michael Jackson got a nickel for every bowling moonwalk we did, well, he’d still be a creepily ambiguous kiddy-diddler. But I suspect that all we need to do to turn those awkward 8th grade school dances into a night at the Roxbury is polish the wood floor, play sounds of smashed pins on the speakers, and give them all bowling shoes. Or hell, just take’em bowling. They’re 8th graders.