A few minutes in the park
Jul. 12th, 2005 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonI stopped at Pleasantdale Park on the way home today. Normally I'd cut through the side trail, but the torrentail rain of the last few days have reduced it to a tropical mudslide. Add to that it is now officialy Big-Ass-Spider season here in Doraville. This paticular breed of anthropod have a yellow tipped body and have a refined instinct to ambush their prey suspended between face level branches. Needless to say file under not to be fucked with. So the park it is, and there is a brief interval between subtropical depressions. Sunlight comes down from a bright blue sky, the sun seems to burn white draining the fringe of the horizon of any form, any discernible shape. I realize in the four years that i've lived here that i've yet to take a seat in the bleachers and watch the Game. Any game. Take your pick there's a different one every season. Why not? Tonight it's soccer and the game occupies all three fields. The baseball diamond has been hijacked. The symbols of the great American pastime have been rendered meaningless. A Coca-Cola endorsed score board is empty save the four angels invoked in each of its corner:Home. QTR. Visitor. Score. In the middle sits Time the arbatraitor. A magick square made impotent by an absence of numbers. Listen! The teams roar at each other, sun drunk lions kicking up dirt, defiant at the days end. I don't know one damn word they're saying and yet I understand them perfectly. My imagination is translating their shouts instantly off the echo of their emotions:
"Go.GO.Go! Hustle. Left. Watch it! Watch it! He's coming up on you! AHhhhh Bullshit! No! No! No! Get IT back-Get IT back-Get IT back!"
I lean back on the bleachers and let the brightness above blot me out. The bleachers are baby blue painted slabs of concrete stacked one untop the other. A pyramid built by teamsters. Five steps and "Fug it she's done!". The aluminum cans are painted to match. Chained to a railing I could lift up and run off with. There's an abandoned hot dog stand. Open strictly for the Anglo football & baseball. "Sorry Esse, these dawgs are for real games!"
I recall suddenly, being 11 years old in a bar in Birmingham, England. My Nan & Auntie Barbara would take me with them, not for the company of course, but more out of a fear of leaving an 11 year old American sugar junkie alone & loose at my Great Grandmothers apartment. Every night I took my seat with my cousins friends, all these older guys, and they'd be lined up the length of the bar, perched on their stools pecking out stories and jokes at each other. Nothing else to do. One night one of them, with a face made red from a constellation of burst arteries, leans in to confide in me good naturedly, an avuncular relationship established over the last five minutes.
His advice to me: The 'Yanks' were'nt all that bad all in all . It was just that our games were for pussys and our beer was brewed with piss. Oddly enough this was just one more experience in my life that attributed to my lack of interest in our national pastimes. Was'nt Joseph Heller in Catch 22 when he said: "Sports is the ability to excel at that which is of no use to anyone else".
The teams are marshalling at the ends of the fields. Slapping each other on the back. Some draw plays on the palms of their hands. Suddenly a child bursts through the middle of the field. A little guy in shorts and sneakers and his shirt in his hand. Behind him his Mother giving pursuit across the field shouting at him to no use. They cross the three fields. Each games stops. Each player laughs. The kid trips. The crowd sighs loudly for him. Mother catches him and lifts him by the neck. He follows her back down the length of each interupted game. A paraded enemey marched before the cheering mobs. She steps out the chain fence and towards the rickety bleacher with the tipped over cooler waiting for her. The game resumes. I get up and come home.
"Go.GO.Go! Hustle. Left. Watch it! Watch it! He's coming up on you! AHhhhh Bullshit! No! No! No! Get IT back-Get IT back-Get IT back!"
I lean back on the bleachers and let the brightness above blot me out. The bleachers are baby blue painted slabs of concrete stacked one untop the other. A pyramid built by teamsters. Five steps and "Fug it she's done!". The aluminum cans are painted to match. Chained to a railing I could lift up and run off with. There's an abandoned hot dog stand. Open strictly for the Anglo football & baseball. "Sorry Esse, these dawgs are for real games!"
I recall suddenly, being 11 years old in a bar in Birmingham, England. My Nan & Auntie Barbara would take me with them, not for the company of course, but more out of a fear of leaving an 11 year old American sugar junkie alone & loose at my Great Grandmothers apartment. Every night I took my seat with my cousins friends, all these older guys, and they'd be lined up the length of the bar, perched on their stools pecking out stories and jokes at each other. Nothing else to do. One night one of them, with a face made red from a constellation of burst arteries, leans in to confide in me good naturedly, an avuncular relationship established over the last five minutes.
His advice to me: The 'Yanks' were'nt all that bad all in all . It was just that our games were for pussys and our beer was brewed with piss. Oddly enough this was just one more experience in my life that attributed to my lack of interest in our national pastimes. Was'nt Joseph Heller in Catch 22 when he said: "Sports is the ability to excel at that which is of no use to anyone else".
The teams are marshalling at the ends of the fields. Slapping each other on the back. Some draw plays on the palms of their hands. Suddenly a child bursts through the middle of the field. A little guy in shorts and sneakers and his shirt in his hand. Behind him his Mother giving pursuit across the field shouting at him to no use. They cross the three fields. Each games stops. Each player laughs. The kid trips. The crowd sighs loudly for him. Mother catches him and lifts him by the neck. He follows her back down the length of each interupted game. A paraded enemey marched before the cheering mobs. She steps out the chain fence and towards the rickety bleacher with the tipped over cooler waiting for her. The game resumes. I get up and come home.
