A weekend of ultimate in Arkansas and now I'm exhausted, and sick. We drove the vanagon all the way down there and got lost in the backwoods of Oklahoma. We weren't even supposed to be in Oklahoma, what happened is that I missed an exit and ended up heading onto the turnpike, which as you know only lets you off at 20 mile or so intervals. I was going to retrace our steps until my navigator (a non-American) thought it would be more exciting to try to get there via thin red lines instead of the thick blue ones. Well coming from Missouri I should have known better.
Anyway it rained torrentially, one of my wipers broke and then both when Dave & I stopped to try to fix them. I jimmied them together with hair band ties but from then on they did nothing. I could hardly see ten feet ahead half the time. Sheets of rain rendered everything blurry, and I hunched over the wheel to get as close to the sight of the white line as I could. Darkness swallowed us, fog attacked from outside and inside, collecting on the inside of the windshield. Defroster could not keep up and I resorted to sleeving it periodically. There was a terrible feeling of approximation in the way I was driving--an ambiguity about whether or not I was on the road that I almost couldn't bear. And it hit me, this is it, this is your life right now.
We passed through one small town after another and sometimes had to turn in random places to keep on the same road. Once we discovered we had been going south for thirty miles when we thought we were going east. Something I can't even mention here happened in a small Arkansas town ten miles from Fayetteville--hilarious story now actually--I can tell you in person if you remember to ask. Finally we got there at 4:00 in the morning, 3 hours later than we should have, and had to get up at 7:00 for the tournament.
It was a Halloween tournament and most teams played in costume. We went as Braveheart i.e. kilts and blue facepaint which Mommer sent me, ran downfield on the pulls yelling "Freedom!" at the top of our voices and a lot of other silly stuff. We went 3-1 on the day. The third game was super intense like nothing I've ever been a part of before, a couple moments were just pure animal.
That night of course there was the customary enormous house party. Saw some wild costumes: a girl in a full-size Mr. Potato Head with big velcro face parts, a super drunk guy dressed as a present with the label "To: Women, From: God," and a dude whose upper torso was an extended rectangular box over which a plaid shirt was stretched. I'm not sure how he could see in that. For some reason I laughed until I almost cried every time I saw this, it just made no sense.
We saved this party twice. The first time, they ran out of keg cups, and we had snagged some earlier and brought them along. Later when things were dying down we replaced the crummy angry rap which no one was into with the Blue Album--a sure bet with any group of geeks, and ultimate players are mostly geeks. Immediately people started coming in, singing along. By track 5 the first people were dancing but then angry rap was demanded again. Angry rap which no one there really enjoyed as music, but Americans continue to think is the only kind of music you can dance to. Well they got their booty pretense in after that and chicks were dancing on tables. Whatever. How come you weren't dancing to it before hmmm?
The second day I was sicker and we lost to a team of Oompah-loompahs, but oh well, that's the best UNL has ever done at that tourney. Got back to Lincoln at 1:00 in the morning and then the fun continued, I had to hit the books for a history test that same morning. Ug. Test went okay, but riding to campus in a cold rain was awful, like breathing in flames of pneumonia.
Posted by Alan at November 3, 2003 09:52 PM