Pizza Pirate, video games, and their direct correlation to un-American activities. 2 workouts today. Recovery workouts and very slow. Overall, nothing worth writing about other than I felt like doo and didn't really want to run today. 1st run = 45 minutes 2nd run = 33 minutes. 300 crunches on the ground underneath my parent's pergola. 100 bells while watching my dad try to flush the radiator of his 1983 Toyota truck with a garden hose plugged into some mechanical device he installed from a kit. There was water coming out of all orifices and the car was painfully churning over pleading to be put out of its misery. Gorged myself on Pizza Pirate pizza tonight. Pizza Pirate is practically a historical landmark in Benicia. I volunteered to buy the pizza for the family and drove down to pick it up. I was surprised at how little this fine establishment has changed in 25 years as I opened its oaken, nautical door. You still have the 16-18 year old pimply-faced teenagers slaving away in the kitchen as well as the manditory big screen TV showing some sports event. Above the cash register are the numerous pictures of sponsored sports teams with faceless children sitting cross-legged in between bookends of parents. In the right corner of the restaurant you have the family of 4 with the baby chair waiting for their pizza drinking from the same, ubiquitous pitchers that one finds in any pizza joint. The dad is gingerly doling out pizza pirate tokens to the kids as they run to the 4 or 5 video games in the left corner of the restaurant. Pizza Pirate was one of the first places in Benicia to have video games after the Benicia city fathers, anachronistic curmudgeons that they were, reluctantly allowed only Pizza Pirate and the Benicia Skate Shop to place Pac-Man and Dig Dug on their premises - in the back room. Going to play a video game was like entering a speakeasy. You needed code words, go-betweens, bribes, and lots of quarters to get in on the action. Kids from all over town would enter these places, place quarters in a serpentine queue, and await their turn to plug and play the future. And so, it was in Pizza Pirate that I learned on Dig Dug that if you keep hitting the fire button, you actually blow up the animal things that you are trying to 'get.' It was also in Pizza Pirate that I learned how to steal a free game of Ms. Pac-Man by slamming your palm in a precise location on the machine. Free video games, good pizza, unchanged locales, and evil town fathers are good mental fodder on boring recovery runs. Tomorrow is my last full day in Benicia and on Friday, my daughter and I fly back to reality which for me entails driving, working, sleeping, running, and more driving. Vacations must come to an end. Salt mines need workers. Hamster wheels aren't entertaining without hamsters. Here I go.