This weekend went to an Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Fort Collins, Colorado. We were almost all rookies--so was everyone else, at least they were supposed to be, but it turned out about half of them had played on national caliber Ultimate teams. So we got our butts kicked. Except for Wyoming, we beat Wyoming, woo.
We stayed at an ex-UNL player's house in nearby small town Wellington. From there it was a walk of about 5 blocks down to the T-Bar Inn. A local bar peopled with rustics and farm implements on the wall and a jukebox with nothing more recent than 1980 in it. I decided to hit on this punk-looking chick named Rachel--just for practice, you know--and she got so into it that I started to get scared. She was 23 (she said), had already been married 3 years and then divorced (aah!), came to the T-Bar every weekend (uh-oh), and when she drug me out to the dance floor to the mellow twangs of modern country pop she started booty-dancing, badly. It was ridiculous; I didn't know what to do. So I just kinda stood there and hoped she would get the message and stop.
I don't remember how but I eventually escaped that situation...in the end she forced me to take her phone number. Definite parallels between the whole thing and that scene in Swingers where Vince Vaughan walks up to that cigar-smoking girl. Only I couldn't tear my cellphone in half afterwards.
Ultimate people constitute a strange subculture. It is a sport which virtually no one watches except those who play it. Most people confuse it with disc golf, and take us for a bunch of stoners, but in fact it is intense and extremely competitive at these tournaments. But among ultimate players there's a lot of cameraderie off the field. We went to a big party thrown by one of the CSU guys, there were about 150 people there, doing boat races in the back yard and making such a commotion that of course the cops came and busted it.
At these parties there are many strange rituals, most of which I have yet to witness. They chug an Ultimate disc sometimes, that's about 40-60 oz, or about 4 beers. There's also this thing called the landshark. Someone strips naked, pinches an disc upright between their butt cheeks, and then they get carried around by teammates like a coffin and its pallbearers.
Well, it was a cool weekend, even though my face got sunburned so bad it is now peeling off in brown strips, and it set me back on homework. We got back to Lincoln at 1:30 am Monday morning. I had an English paper due that morning as well as a test in the next class. So as things turned out I went through the day on 1 hr of sleep. Yeah that sucked. But Monday night I got--get this--16 hours of sleep. Have recovered now but honestly I dunno if I can keep this sorta stuff up.
Posted by Alan at October 2, 2003 01:32 AM