Softball: The Tongue at its Best
Dear People,
Jim McGuire's team methodically brutalized my own, 18-13, which was a bit of a buzz-kill given that both sides were initially unified in their intrepid defiance of the merciless intermittent cloud-piss that ceaselessly threatened the field, the game and our battered little bodies. The fact is that it was both moist and bitter cold, and as the organizer, I knew that we all risked acute malaria, mud-lice and even cat-scratch fever. Yet all held fast and stout, and in the end, we played a full nine innings of some of the most courageously passionate bogball in the history of this league.
Alas, the rain wiped out my game notes on the score sheet, so I can't remember any particular passion on Jim's side (in retrospect, perhaps they were just Borg-like in their lethal precision), but I do remember the top of the 7th, when we rallied for six runs and came within one of the lead. Donny commenced with what appeared to be a stunning homer to the yaklands beyond deep left, but after it was called foul, he didn't crawl into a little fetal ball of despair. No, my friends, he walked right back to the plate, and then unleashed a staggering 2-RBI triple to that very same tundra! Yeah, pure pristine passion.
Just 30 seconds later, Spencer came to bat as an eerie fog now drifted into the park. The Spencemeister, who was making his glorious community debut, suddenly unleashed his own kick-ass line drive to deep center right, and as he rounded 2nd and headed toward 3rd, every fiber of my being thought I was watching a four-bagger in the making. Yet the infield was waterlogged and treacherous and the throw back to the infield was both fast and solid. Broheen sensed the danger and began to scream for Spence to stop at a triple, but the allure of a homer was a compelling one and it appeared that our gazelleUtante was eager to test his destiny. “Hold at 3!,” Broh yelled out two more times, and then, in perhaps the most compelling appeal to reason that a base-runner has ever had to process, he also shouted “Do not blow the groin out!!” Needless to say, Spence held at 3.
First of all, let me say that as a former student of applied linguistics, I've rarely if ever heard a finer use of the definite English article. Sure, it would've been safer to use the possessive pronoun ('your'), but Broh's point was that Spencer's dash for glory was symptomatic of a broader communal peril for every one of our athletes who's ever been in the throes of inertial fervor, and I think we all get that. Moreover, I found it a truly heuristic imploration, for if you must know, I've never understood what exactly constitutes a groin, and regardless, I had no idea that they're as tenderly vulnerable as the gaskets in your favorite Chevy.
Of course Broh is both an extraordinary physician's assistant and a mechanic extraordinaire, whereas I'm just squeamish and Jewish. So, no, I don't do “engines,” but I did happen to just discover that the great Wiki defines a gasket as “a mechanical seal which fills the space between two or more mating surfaces” [italics mine]. To be sure, perhaps the narrative arc here is straining under its own discursive weight, but I do think that in a world where even Tartars and Cossacks face the same richly varied panoply of things that blow out, there is still hope for empathy, grace and basic aerobic connection. And therefore there will be game at Codornices this Sunday at 11, IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning. . . Raymond
3/6/14
Softball: Spring Forward . . .
Dear People,
There will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11, and as of now there are still three slots left.
This week's field fee is just $5, and that includes a detoxifying facial seaweed wrap with optional herb-infused collagen…Raymond 845-7552
PS: Please note-Daylight Savings begins this weekend, which means you will need to set your clocks forward one hour before you go bed on Saturday night. If you forget to do so, you would likely arrive at the game an hour late, thereby exposing yourself as the game-destroying chrono-dufus that you really don't want to be.