friday, may 23
there's a deep itching in my knee where
i scraped a chunk of skin off saturday
night playing kickball badly with a beer
in my hand. so help me i felt like jr.
high all over again despite all the ways
i would assure you i know better now
the truth is i've always hated playing
base-running stick-and-ball games, even
the ones that don't involve a stick, even
the bullshit ones designed to keep little
kids from feeling bad about themselves
like tee ball, where i played some position i
didn't understand and caught a ball right
in the teeth
and felt bad
about myself
i haven't got the rhythm, that's what it
is: i have got no sense that anything i'm
doing is furthering the purpose of the
conversation people are having by running
bases and preventing others from running
bases and all the rest. i don't even know
how you would further the purpose
of that particular conversation although it
always seems clear enough from the outside, it
always seems like a real conversation
and sometimes it's even one filled with
implicature for all manner of things in
life, at least when you see it in the movies
when it is robert redford or those kids
in the sandlot or that documentary
on PBS where it's good but you keep forgetting
it isn't still the civil war because ken burns is
such a goddamned one-trick pony.