Softball: Goodness Defied
Dear People,
In one of those magnificent yet admittedly disturbing paragons of the ethical disconnect between raw performance and final outcome, my team chewed up Chris Fure's before spitting them out like discarded stewing gristle, 19-18. The fact is that as an athletic whole, our road to final victory was unsightly from the get-go, starting right off with Joe P, who responded to Dave Snyder's 1st-inning blast over his shell-shocked little head by quickly chasing down the runaway orb in question, before-wait for it- pointlessly throwing it straight into the annoying oak tree that encroaches our sacred left. In and of itself, it was not calamitous or even that uncommon, but it set the tone, and it set it low, and for that, Joe would've had a lot of 'splanin to do had we not inexplicably gone on anyway to kick some mighty satisfying ass.
In any case, over the next several innings, the great Alan Shabel, Anthony, Byron and I all bungled entirely playable hits as if our gloves had been dipped in some kind of grotesquely misapplied passion lube. Moreover, with the score tied at 15, runners at 1st and 2nd and no outs in the 7th, I slammed a searing line drive to 3rd that nearly became a triple play after I initially declined to run to 1st on the mistaken belief that the double-play I just witnessed had ended the inning (this post-bat confuddlement is what clinical neurophysiologists refer to as Peri-synaptic Idiocy, or PI, or &Mac185;, or perhaps banana cream, or what we in the community simply call Pulling-a-Frank). Fortunately, my peeps all spazzed out in unison, and thus I awoke in time to still beat the throw from 2nd, if by "beat" one means to arrive at 1st just as the ball did, give or take a second. Whatever.
Alas, it gets worse. Just one inning later, Jim McGuire came to the plate and promptly smashed a sharp line drive straight into Brandon's left ankle, and this despite the fact he was our perfectly innocent go-ahead runner at 3rd. Curiously, Jimmy appeared to have an inscrutable bee in his bonnet, for on the very next pitch, he smashed an equally fearsome liner straight into the tender core of Brandon's right thigh. Now just to be clear, I certainly don't want to cast pre-conviction aspersions, yet I think we also all know that as a communal whole, this is our first case of multiple intra-contingent assault (or MICA, or phyllosilicate, or what certain neurophysiologists like to refer to as franking a banana cream pi. Of course I imagine that the poor Brandonator wouldn't see it in such deceptively innocent terms).
The point is that unlike us, Chris' team played clean, crisp and honorably throughout, with few real errors, little cheating and not a single hint of criminal behavior. And yet they still went down, and went down hard, and so naturally I began to feel tormented over the utter injustice of it all, and more specifically, over how competitive sport seems so totally replete with the unfathomable randomness of life's harsh pageant. Of course it's a couple days later and I now understand that such angst is rooted in nothing more than vacuous piffle, and therefore there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11, IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning….Raymond
PS: As you may know, Chris “Captain Loser” Fure, Steve La Porta and Kora Cypress are not just the moral backbones of our entire community, but as a musical trio, they are the incomparable Spoken Road. And lucky for you, they are playing in Oakland this Sunday afternoon, after the game. . .
http://concerts.roseavenue.com/spokenroad-uni.html
PPS: The Nastiest Black Swan of all . . .
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/09/higgs_boson_could_destroy_universe_stephen_hawking/
PPPS: Masters of the Cultural Reference. . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHH3brmhPyw
9/11/14
Softball: The Gamut
Dear People,
There will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11AM, and as of now, there are still two slots left.
Please bring $4 for the field, which for this week only includes a complimentary one-year subscription to the UCLA Quarterly Journal of Mindfulness, Bliss and Ceaseless Existential Despair . . . Raymond 845-7552
PS: We suck less! (at half the salaries) . . .
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152701209102451&fref=nf