During college, I spent a year in Edinburgh, Scotland, a city with immense beauty masked by consistently miserable weather. The weather helps explain the unhealthy level of drinking; the pubs give everyone cozy places to be that are not out in the gray and the rain and the endless misery.

The game of darts, common in British pubs, gives you something to do when you’re not taking another sip of beer. You take a drink, you throw a round, you retrieve the darts, and you take another drink while you wait for your opponent to do the same. It’s the only game (apart from Quarters) that’s as much about the drinking as the game itself. Watch it on television sometime (if you have enough time to watch a game of darts on TV; it’s not exactly riveting entertainment). You’ll see what I mean. The beer is featured nearly as much as the players. In fact, I’ve found (through very thorough experimentation) that drinking helps the game. My play consistently improved up through the third beer (and then got considerably worse after that). The problem is that by the time the third beer has kicked in and your nerves are steady, there’s already more rocketing around in your system, so that peak opportunity is gone within minutes and you’ll spend the rest of the evening trying to get back there.

The fact that darts is televised (at least in the United Kingdom) elevates it to the status of a “sport”, although it’s not clear what kind of athletes it breeds, other than professional drinkers and those who can competently walk the 7'9 1/4" to the board and back after every round. It’s more like a breathalyzer test. It’s a sport for people that find bowling exhausting. At least in bowling the players have to hold objects heavier than 20 grams and thrown them further than 8 feet.

In any case, darts is a great game that gives you something to do while you’re hanging out with your friends. Or with complete strangers. There are several different games you can play and it’s easy to entertain yourself in a solo game if all of your friends and new acquaintances have passed out. You can hone your skills with practice, yet it’s still possible to enjoy playing with people of varying skills due to the influence on the score of random dumb luck (and too much beer).

I played throughout that year in Scotland and picked up a fine bristle board when I came back to the U.S, continuing to play in my dorm room the next year. After I graduated, I would spend weekends with a friend in Madison, Wisconsin, hitting the bars and playing darts (and maybe having a drink or three, just to continue my research on the efficacy of beer on dart accuracy).

Then real life kicked in as I got married and headed off to grad school. Sharing a space that we could afford on a student budget meant that there was no room for my toys. And so it was that, with heavy heart, I stored my dart board. I sadly put it in my aunt’s basement, along with a host of other terribly important things, like my vinyl record collection. I looked forward to the day when I would once again have that board on my wall and enjoy the game that kept me company through the last few years.

Time passed and my evolving living arrangements continued to thwart my efforts to decorate a place in my own style. We eventually moved the pile out of my aunt’s basement. The record collection was donated, but the dart board traveled to our new place… and lived in a closet somewhere. And then a storage space. And then shed. And then a garage. Over the years, we moved around from apartment to apartment, and finally to a house. But somehow there was never enough room to install the old dart board. (Damn these children and their needy, needy ways).

Finally, last week, I was able to clear some space and resurrect my old drinking buddy. I bought some new darts, put up the board in the garage, started practicing again and realized that my beloved dart board was old and… not quite as excellent as I remembered.

The wires defining the scoring areas were more like iron gates trying to keep the darts out. The bullseye had more area devoted to metal staples than bristles that the darts could hope to penetrate. And the overall surface of my beloved board was encrusted with so many years’ worth of dust from countless storage areas that it was difficult to tell the yellow areas from the black ones. The joy of playing with it once again was marred slightly by the sheer number of darts that would bounce right back out, whether from hitting guardian rebar pieces, or failing to stick in desiccated bristles, or simply trying to get the hell out of that filthy old thing.

Fifty dollars and one online excursion later and I’d bought a brand new dart board and the old board returned to lie, once again, in disuse upon a shelf, its future uncertain but not much brighter than its dingy bristles.

I want to go back to the old me and tell myself not to keep so much stuff — it’s just not worth it. The awesome things we put aside aren’t quite as amazing when we finally get back to them years later.

Store memories, not things.