Away game

Field hockey. It’s an away game. But I fancy myself a bit of an indolent… and shirking ‘work’ to spectate my daughters games seems like it might be something I’d be into.

Its three towns over to the… eh… never-eat-silk-worms… south-east. An hour and twenty into the agricultural hinterlands. It’s quite a pretty sojourn with fields, orchards, vineyards, cows, sheep and even Zebra at one point.

My proclivity for aggressive overtaking means I arrive some time before the school bus and planting my bum on the bleachers I cast an appraising eye over the competition who are warming up.

‘These chicks are gonna fuck us up’, I text my wife. Not to be defeatist or anything but what are they feeding these seven year olds?

‘I don’t think they have internet out there, they probably spend the whole day playing outside’, she replies.

I laugh.

That is… probably it. I imagine they are on the carnivore diet as soon as they can chew, combined with all that radiation from our yellow dwarf. (that they absorb walking barefoot to school… over the mountain)

They’re also playing on grass, which when all you’ve ever known is Astro is gonna be quite the paleolithic experience for the guests… the behemoths straight out of the eighties notwithstanding, it will in the very least be… informative.

My iPad flicks between three and four G, as if to underscore our connectivity theory as plausible. I vacillate between reading or pretending to work to pass the time. The local dads are broad in dimension and very beardy, it makes me want to be less of a dork (I’m wearing my Dragon-sushi t-shirt and squinting through my Prada sunglasses… it probably doesn’t get more Ausländer than that… and likely nothing I can do in the near-term will make me seem more alpha). So I opt instead to ‘poke around’ with my apple-pencil. (doing stuff that hopefully looks like something high-end but is actually just moving screenshots and comic books around). Fake it till you make it right? Or words to that effect.

This ones cool, moving it into my books folder.

In Greek legend, there were two Titan brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus. Prometheus means “fore-thinker” while Epimetheus means “after-thinker”, equivalent to someone who falls for the retrospective distortion of fitting theories to past events in an ex post narrative manner. Prometheus gave us fire and represents the progress of civilization, while Epimetheus represents backward thinking, staleness and lack of intelligence. It was Epimetheus who accepted Pandora’s gift, the large jar, with irreversible consequences.

I must be honest I feel a deep sense of kinship with Epimetheus. I likely too would have been into Pandoras box. Har har. Although, I think it was a jar… in the original. Did the boxing thereof come later I wonder? (maybe so they could make that joke?)

‘You know Eve, of Genesis fame, was likely based entirely on Pandora’… is NOT the conversation icebreaker dialogue choice when dealing with the NPCs in this part of the world. We are playing in the shadow of a quite an impressive Protestant edifice. The entire town spreads out around this central gothic church, built more than a century ago, back when town planning still needed to orbit the prevailing theological schism.

Not that I mind. I think its quite a pretty church. I marvel at the effort that went into constructing this temple out here in the middle of nowhere. Whatever your thoughts on religion I don’t think you can deny that it was a fantastic motivator to get shit done.

On the flip side religion also gave us the La Sagrada Familia.. which is basically a crime against humanity. So there’s that.

We get murdered six one. Scoring the consolation goal in the dying minutes when the home team didn’t care anymore and was likely tired from constantly having to high-five one another.

I feel smug insofar as I called it though. Yay me.