Hoping to even things out after the emo bloodchug of my previous post, I'd now like to take a few moments to narrate one of the great small moments of my life—I'm trying to rollercoaster myself to even. In sum, it's a fairly insignificant moment, and yet it's something I cherish in a way that's almost sacred.
I am a huge fan of the athleticism of the human animal, and as a Throwist I consider myself somewhat of a maven in the field of human athletics, and it is because of those two things that I fundamentally love to play a good game of catch. It is athleticism and concentration and communication all at once, and it is because of that love that I went up to this dude I didn't know at a lawn-darts tournament in Denver three years ago and asked him for a hit from the joint he was smoking (when in Rome, eh?) as a way of breaking the ice, in order to ask him about the football I'd seen him tossing around before.
I was at the Jarts tournament as the guest of some friends who live in Denver—I was spending a few days there on one of my moves across the country—and the dude was there with his wife or girlfriend and some other friends on a road trip. I could tell they were from Kansas City because nearly all of them had at least one piece of KC Royals apparel on.
And I'm not even sure if I said anything, actually, about the football itself—it was more like hooking up with a chick at a party. I nodded in the direction of a wide-open part of the park, away from where the tournament was being held, and he smirked and started heading in that direction with the football.
The friends I'd gone there with were talking to people they knew—girls who'd already given me the wordless rejection of subtle indifference, which had caused me to look around in search of the weed smell in the first place—so I followed the dude into the field, away from the trees, and started playing catch with this guy whose name I didn't know.
Most of the time when I try to play catch with someone, it actually kind of sucks, because I have a rocket laser moon cannon for a right arm, and most people have little dinky pop guns (it's no coincidence that my best friend growing up also had a rocket laser moon cannon for a right arm), so oftentimes when I get to play catch it's just an awful lot of me holding back and merely challenging myself with intentionally off-balance throws.
But this dude could chuck it!
Pretty soon there was this wordless communication between us, like a wavelength recognized and cherished, and after a few minutes we were both firing piss missiles (to quote one of my college roommates) to each other over exhilarating distances.
He appeared to be around my age—late twenties, early thirties, our bodies rounded by desk jobs—and consequently we were both winded fairly quickly, and we also had upcoming games in the tournament, so we started winding down our transcontinental chucking, but as always before a game of catch is over I started backing up to see just how much chucking we both brought to the table, so I fired him the ball over a pretty fun distance, but only about an 80% throw, giving myself some room to start jogging in such a way that would let the dude put everything he had into his throw, so I started jogging away from him, and he wound up and fired, and I followed the ball's trajectory into the air and saw that indeed this dude was a fellow Throwist, and I started booking as absolutely fast as I could run.
I was in a full sprint, and while I was watching the flight of the ball I was also thinking to myself that I was reaching the far end of the open field, where there were lots of trees, and it occurred to me that I might've been unknowingly running straight towards a big tree while looking over my shoulder for ball.
I did not care—for some reason, I would've rather died than not catch that throw.
So I kept dashing on the grass—knees, trees, health be damned!—and yet sadly I soon recognized that my sprinting looked like it was going to be all for naught: There was just no way that I would be able to bring my hands up to a pragmatic, far-enough angle to catch this insanely well-thrown ball.
But it's like they say: You're only defeated when you admit it.
I decided to go for it, so I reached out with my right hand and batted the ball back up into the air, at which point my sprinting form fell apart, and I immediately started falling to the ground, but at the very last moment I was able to pull the now-floating ball to my chest and roll out all my momentum on the summer grass.
I caught it! So I stood up, excitedly held the ball up to show the guy, and we both jumped up and down in the air, on two separate sides of a big field, like children.
There was no topping that moment, so we started heading back to the tournament, and when we reached the tree where we'd first smoked the joint, the dude's wife or girlfriend said to me, "Hey, nice throwin', Brett Favre!" The dude's beloved must have been a Packers fan, because he said to her, "Did you not see that catch? Babe, not only is he Brett Favre; he's also Donald Driver!"
I laughed and wished them all well and rejoined my friends for the start of our match. I never got the dude's name or anything, but that Royals gear has made me think about something over the years:
When I was 16, I played in the USA Junior Olympics, and I pitched against a team called the KC Cats, who ended up finishing third overall. I lost to them, but it was a great game—something like 4 to 3—and anyway I like to think that that dude was on that team, and that maybe we'll see each other again in the future, on yet another field, where we'll once again chuck piss missiles all over the place like the little kids we are sometimes.
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