It Certainly Does
Today was a good day.
Thanks to a gracious invitation from my friend Emily, I made a pilgrimage to Louisville to watch the Cards beat the snot out of a bad Florida Atlantic team, 61-10. Em had originally asked me to attend the game with her (three of her family's four season tickets to the game were available) when our families were together in Toronto back in August. Sounded like fun and I told her I'd love to go, but wasn't sure anything would come of it. Then a week or so ago I got an e-mail informing me that not only did the invitation still stand, but that Em and I would be joined for the game by her Uncle Clint and her Grandmother Mary -- people I like.
To say that I've been friends with Emily's dad for a long time doesn't do justice to the relationship or its duration (relative to my thirty-three years), but it's also true that his brother, Emily's Uncle Clint, has long been one of my favorite people. He's older enough than I am that I never spent as much childhood-time with him as I did with Drew, but he's one of Those People... If you have Them in your Life too, I don't need to explain what I mean; if you don't, then I couldn't.
All that to say that I was eager to see Clint this afternoon. It's been very nearly ten years since we last ran into one another. There's been lots of water under the bridge since then and I was excited to do some catching up. But he couldn't make it. He's an actor with a gig tomorrow night (I think this is it) and hasn't been feeling well, so in the interest of staying healthy enough to work, he called and said that he couldn't make the game.
Disappointing to say the least; I was tempted to be bummed out over it. And here's where my current fascination with the relationship between suffering and desire comes in handy. The thing that I'd been tempted to mope about having lost, an afternoon with Clint Gill, never existed -- it wasn't Real, it had only existed in my anticipation -- and so rather than allowing myself to suffer over something that wasn't Real, I allowed myself to recognize and enjoy something that was. An incredibly beautiful October afternoon. A Saturday off work. A generous invitation from a friend. College football. A win by the good guys. A chance to see a new Favorite Running back in person. A visit with Buck & Mary. Hell, Billy Thompson was at the game. All Good stuff. All Real. Oh yeah, and the opportunity to listen to the dinguses behind me go blah, blah, blah for four hours.
Dinguses, ingnoramuses, whatever. The one dude didn't shut up the whole time, yet also managed not to say anything of value from opening kickoff to closing gun. Just blah, blah, blah. I got the impression that A) he's probably just intelligent enough to be a Big Fish in whatever backwoods Kentucky town he's from. He kept telling whomever was listening that he's a teacher -- it's terrifying, B) he listens to way too much sports talk radio and seems to think that
Real People talk that way. All four quarters were cliche after cliche -- not an original thought anywhere to be found, and yet he kept getting louder, which leads us to, C) Way Too Much Beer. 'Nuff said.
So anyway, at one point in the third quarter the U of L kicker had a PAT blocked and apparently it was his first missed extra point in a hundred years. Well Cletus behind me went kaka-cuckoo. It was the ref's fault, it was the O-line's fault, it was the rule's fault (intimating that the kicker shouldn't be blamed for a blocked attempt). Dude's ranting, screaming and desperate for his buddy to feel his pain. I can hear without turning around that he's standing now and I hear him say, sounding as Puffed Up as a person can, (Emily, this is what I wrote in my little book,) "That's a major NCAA streak that just ended!"
Now, it's true that Carmody had made 97 straight PATs (P'sAT?), but PAT's are only important because they help you win; this one -- which would have made the score 48-10 -- just didn't matter. The significance of streaks & records (and bear in mind that I'm a baseball guy saying this) is questionable at best. Cletus was all worked up and miserable about something that didn't really need to exist as a source of stress in his life, and as I've said, this is a phenomenon to which I'm sensitive lately.
"This is a major NCAA streak that just ended!" he repeated, fishing again for the commiseration of his buddy. But all he got from Yokel Number Two was the most Enlightened thing I heard all day,
"Well," Number Two said, "Shit happens."
Thanks to a gracious invitation from my friend Emily, I made a pilgrimage to Louisville to watch the Cards beat the snot out of a bad Florida Atlantic team, 61-10. Em had originally asked me to attend the game with her (three of her family's four season tickets to the game were available) when our families were together in Toronto back in August. Sounded like fun and I told her I'd love to go, but wasn't sure anything would come of it. Then a week or so ago I got an e-mail informing me that not only did the invitation still stand, but that Em and I would be joined for the game by her Uncle Clint and her Grandmother Mary -- people I like.
To say that I've been friends with Emily's dad for a long time doesn't do justice to the relationship or its duration (relative to my thirty-three years), but it's also true that his brother, Emily's Uncle Clint, has long been one of my favorite people. He's older enough than I am that I never spent as much childhood-time with him as I did with Drew, but he's one of Those People... If you have Them in your Life too, I don't need to explain what I mean; if you don't, then I couldn't.
All that to say that I was eager to see Clint this afternoon. It's been very nearly ten years since we last ran into one another. There's been lots of water under the bridge since then and I was excited to do some catching up. But he couldn't make it. He's an actor with a gig tomorrow night (I think this is it) and hasn't been feeling well, so in the interest of staying healthy enough to work, he called and said that he couldn't make the game.
Disappointing to say the least; I was tempted to be bummed out over it. And here's where my current fascination with the relationship between suffering and desire comes in handy. The thing that I'd been tempted to mope about having lost, an afternoon with Clint Gill, never existed -- it wasn't Real, it had only existed in my anticipation -- and so rather than allowing myself to suffer over something that wasn't Real, I allowed myself to recognize and enjoy something that was. An incredibly beautiful October afternoon. A Saturday off work. A generous invitation from a friend. College football. A win by the good guys. A chance to see a new Favorite Running back in person. A visit with Buck & Mary. Hell, Billy Thompson was at the game. All Good stuff. All Real. Oh yeah, and the opportunity to listen to the dinguses behind me go blah, blah, blah for four hours.
Dinguses, ingnoramuses, whatever. The one dude didn't shut up the whole time, yet also managed not to say anything of value from opening kickoff to closing gun. Just blah, blah, blah. I got the impression that A) he's probably just intelligent enough to be a Big Fish in whatever backwoods Kentucky town he's from. He kept telling whomever was listening that he's a teacher -- it's terrifying, B) he listens to way too much sports talk radio and seems to think that
Real People talk that way. All four quarters were cliche after cliche -- not an original thought anywhere to be found, and yet he kept getting louder, which leads us to, C) Way Too Much Beer. 'Nuff said.
So anyway, at one point in the third quarter the U of L kicker had a PAT blocked and apparently it was his first missed extra point in a hundred years. Well Cletus behind me went kaka-cuckoo. It was the ref's fault, it was the O-line's fault, it was the rule's fault (intimating that the kicker shouldn't be blamed for a blocked attempt). Dude's ranting, screaming and desperate for his buddy to feel his pain. I can hear without turning around that he's standing now and I hear him say, sounding as Puffed Up as a person can, (Emily, this is what I wrote in my little book,) "That's a major NCAA streak that just ended!"
Now, it's true that Carmody had made 97 straight PATs (P'sAT?), but PAT's are only important because they help you win; this one -- which would have made the score 48-10 -- just didn't matter. The significance of streaks & records (and bear in mind that I'm a baseball guy saying this) is questionable at best. Cletus was all worked up and miserable about something that didn't really need to exist as a source of stress in his life, and as I've said, this is a phenomenon to which I'm sensitive lately.
"This is a major NCAA streak that just ended!" he repeated, fishing again for the commiseration of his buddy. But all he got from Yokel Number Two was the most Enlightened thing I heard all day,
"Well," Number Two said, "Shit happens."
1 Comments:
yo...been offline for a while...thanks for going with emily. it meant a lot to her. isn't michael bush the stuff?
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