Ground Bogo

Banned in over nine thousand countries

I’ve often wonderer how kerosene tastes (no doubt due to the occasional rumor of some dumb Russian kids drinking kerosene after realizing vodka no longer does it for them), but to be honest with you, I’ve never been tempted to try engine oil. By now I am absolutely sure that this is what it is supposed to taste like. The fact that I am beginning to like it is, frankly, quite disturbing…

It was a month ago, but I still have those photos scattered around, so I figured I’d just share them here. Anyway, it was some unusually warm day, so I decided to go down to the Portobello beach in Edinburgh. It’s just sand and water, no more than any other beach out there in the world. I’d been there before, so I knew not to expect much. Well, I damn well did not expect to find this shit going on, but then again, if I said that I did, would you believe me?

For all of you Doubting Thomas peeps out there, those are actual slot machines laying on the sand. There’s no shooping, and there’s no magic, it’s just the way it was. The arcades were not functional since the buttons were glued, but the weird thing was that they were powered. All the lights were flashing and shit; no music though.

Well, my initial thought of some drunk-as-fuck idiots carrying those machines out on the beach was quickly renounced by the observation that the slots found themselves on heavy-duty concrete blocks. This in turn would mean that:

• (a) Arnold Schwarzenegger left California to govern itself, flew to Scotland, got piss-drunk one night, and in his alcoholic delirium carried 12 at-least-half-a-ton arcade machines on his back from the nearby casinos to the sand bank.
• (b) Jesus Christ descended from Heaven once again right onto the chav-infested beach of the capital of Scotland and brought with him 12 slot machines instead of 12 disciples this time but kind of overlook a little ground-mobility issue and decided to fuck this shit up and go for a beer. Then he went back home because obviously things were not working out that great, and his council tax was too high anyway.
• (c) The slot machines were deliberately positioned on the sand as part of some obscure and supposedly artistic unsupervised and suspiciously unannounced and unadvertised exhibition or simply a human experiment.

Now, I ain’t much of a gambler, but I’d put my money on (c). I still consider this one of the most unusual and surreal experiences I’ve had for some time now. In fact, the photographs that are provided in this post are a direct result of my sheer disbelief that what I saw that day was not a product of my imagination, resulting in me going back a couple of days later armed with a camera and a grip on reality tighter than the screws in a railway track sleepers.

Bottom line is, if I was dreaming, then so are you. Which is not necessarily a bad thing after all…