Another club story.

Last night I was doing a tennis drill with a woman instructor and only one other player, also a woman.

Everytime I tried to run I was farting uncontrollably.

There was a haze hanging in the bubble by the time we were done.

I understand that you can’t bring cameras into the locker room. I see some great shots. Like tonight. In the whirlpool. I’m in the prime location, wall side corner opposite the stairs. You get the best view for people watching and the best double crossover water jets so you can work on a knee and a neck the same time. Or just enjoy getting blasted by hot water from two directions.

I’m looking down the length of the pool. The walls inside the pool are a dark smallish red tile. A pale thin man in his early thirties is standing up, bending over in attempt to get a knee or ankle or something exposed to the jets. He’s pretty much bald except for long stringy hair on the sides. Across from him on my right against the wall a man, maybe forty, well built with bronze skin and a large tatoo of praying hands on his chest. Jet black hair. Peaking around the arch formed by the pale man’s back is the head of his five year old son. The son has a strong resemblance to the father. But has a bristling crew cut. A trick of the palid florescent lighting and the reflection of the red bricks turns the part of his face in shadows an eerie gray-green. The top left (my left) of his forehead catches the light and is pink.

What a picture.

I have a theory that if you don’t flinch, don’t hunch your shoulders and face the cold like it doesn’t even faze you, it’s easier to put up with. Don’t let it beat you, don’t show weakness. I was operating on that theory a couple of nights ago when I was coming out of the club after a workout. It’s easier when you’ve worked up some body heat and have a good dose of endorphins going for you. Yes, I told myself, I’m a hardy Minnesotan and this -35 windchill doesn’t bother me.

I’m also a Minnesotan who’s eyesight is not what it used to be. I scanned the parking lot for my aging accord and thought I’d spotted it. I strode toward it feeling like Lief Erickson exploring Greenland. It didn’t take me long to figure out that it wasn’t my car. You know what that means. That means I’d, as usual, forgotten just where it was that I parked my car. I stood in the middle of the parking lot in that crystaline air slowly turning to scan the lot.

“Shit, it’s really cold.” No sign of it. I started walking down the row. Which SUV or giant pickup was it hiding behind. “Wow, burned a lot of calories in that workout. I’m not generating much body heat now.”
Have you ever gotten an ice cream headache from just standing outside. I’d been out for about three minutes now. “Dang, I think my eyeballs are going to freeze.”

“What if I slip and fall? I could die out here.

Shit it’s going to be embarrassing to go back into the club. I hope I don’t have to get the kid at the desk to go look for it!

Wait what’s that, that stubby tail end of an early nineties Accord Wagon. Thank you Lord.

The keys…where did I put the keys. Got to find the keys before my hands stop functioning.”

My breath was starting to form icicles on my facial hair. I was shivering.

“Shit, that’s the wrong key. Please let it start. Thatababy!!” The little four popper starts right up. A smart guy would have waited for the defrosters to clear the front and back windows, but there was a couple of inches that I could see through in front and hell, I had mirrors. Let’s get out of here.

Highway 100 looks like it could be on the dark side of the moon in weather like this.

It’s -4 in Minneapolis today. Fortunately my boss is out in Denver so I’m parking in her indoor spot. I used to have my own space in the garage, but suddenly you can’t swing a dead cat around here without hitting a director, so I’m back to parking outdoors. Oh, well, I’m a man of the people.

As I sat at El Loro eating enchiladas poblano at lunch I was horrified, well amused, to see a young woman walking into the place wearing sandals. And I’m not talking Birkenstocks with wool socks here, I’m talking high rise platform flip flops and no socks!

I think Darwin will be stepping in soon.

Another gray day. Ice and snow and sleet coming in for the day and then tomorrow the temp is supposed to fall through the floor. I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when.
Made the drive tolerable this morning by listening to Tito Puentes on the iPod. Nothing like a little Afro-Cuban six eight time to spice up a cold damp January morning.

Someone in another office was looking for a piece of art that didn’t arrive the way it was supposed to. I checked into it and pointed him to where he could find it, with a brief explanation of the glitch in the system that caused the problem.

The little pissant sends back an email telling me all the ways that we violated procedure, implying that they would never violate procedure (they’re the worst) and that my explanation of how it happened was impossible. Like I’m not the one whose discovered this glitch and fixed about a hundred times.

I feel like getting on a plane and kicking some ass.

It’s not too bad today, but it’s supposed to get hellishly cold (oxymoron?) later this week. Like ICBM’s of Cold War nightmares, a Siberian cold front has come over the pole and is headed right for us. Thursday’s high is predicted as 0. That’s F. Come Thursday when exposed skin freezes almost instantly and your breath ices up on your lower lips, your eyeballs start to hurt because they’re starting to freeze, you will see many men walking around without hats. Probably, I’ll be one of them. I have a black felt Bavarian mountaineers hat that I picked up in Germany. It’s very warm. I had it on as I was walking out the door this morning. My wife snickered, “Tell me your not really wearing that.”

“I am.”

“Well, goodbye, Geekboy.”

I took it off. I’m a slave to fashion.

Understand me, I’m no Randy Moss apologist. But you should know this. It’s a tradition amung those ever so classy Packer fans to moon the opposing team bus as it’s pulling away from Lambeau after the game. So tit for tat I say. If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out.

And you have to love the fact that he burned their best pass defender with his ankle so badly sprained I could have probably out run him.

DEFENSE! DEFENSE!

This afternoon most of the people in the Twin Cities will be watching the Vikings take on their eternal rivals, the Packers in storied Lambeau field. I, along with Quinn, will be at the Barn, watching the Gopher Women take on 23rd ranked New Mexico. There was a time when nothing would take precedence to a Vikes playoff game. Remember, I’m old enough to remember Fran Tarkington and the Purple People Eaters. Which has a lot to do with the fact that I couldn’t give a shit about today’s game. In fact I’d probably be rooting for the Pack. They certainly deserve it more. I just can’t give my heart to a team that can’t make a big defensive stop and never makes the big play on defense. I remember games where the defense outscored the offense.

The Gopherettes on the other hand can bring some ‘D’. When they turn up the half court trap pressure, they must be terrifying. Shannon Schoenrock actally does a demented staccato scream that resembles a warcry from the natives of her hometown in Southwestern Minnesota. Maybe something her German ancestors learned in 1863. Certainly disconcerting. And then you have April, laying in the weeds waiting for that telegraphed pass, for the oppotunity to come flying out of nowhere to make the interception and start the break. And behind that you’ve got Janelle McCarville ready to not only block your shot, but tip it to herself ala Bill Russell and fire an outlet pass to a breaking guard. Or to Jaimie Broback a 6’3″ power forward who can run the floor like a guard.

I like this team. They were picked for third in the Big10, but OSU has already lost a game, so that might put them in the fight for the title. It’s different not having Lindsay on the floor, but it does give other talented players the chance to step up once in awhile. I love the coach. Pam Borton. She doesn’t bullshit and you can just see the way she used the pre-season as a teaching tool. I think she’s close to getting them where she wants them to be, but you can bet they will be improving all season. And you can bet a big part of their identiy will be defense.

EDIT: Well eat my words, the Vike’s defense played great, and they actually beat the Packers. Which will be nice tomorrow at work. Not having to put up with gloating CheeseHeads.

And the Gopherette’s. Held New Mexico to 35 points.

I know that I sell myself here as a jock. It’s kind of a “the older I get the better I was” deal. But I did hold my own around most of the hoops venues of the twin towns. And I can play tennis slightly above the level of embarrassment. My self image is that of a hardnosed jock. And I love athletic competition.

It hasn’t always been that way though. Through high school..actually more like through the Forest Service days, I was the whimp’s whimp. I was so skinny that at one point my sister’s first husband (a former all stater and gopher hoopster) could get his hands all the way around any part of my body except my head. I got my bird like frame from my mother who in her youth was cast as a “Starving Armenian” in a church drive to help the Amenians. I could have been the model for the before in Charles Atlas ads.

I think that for some reason my coming as this late life baby, out of nowhere or as a result of my Father’s new found sobriety, made Mom feel like I was some fragile gift from God. I was babied and spoiled and over protected and so by the time kindergarten rolled around I was a physical coward. I was so terrified of getting hurt that I really shied away from the boy’s rough-housing. Susan Egge beat me up for cripes sake.

In northwestern Minnesota March is an iffy month. You’d have a big snow storm followed by a couple of days of sunny weather in the high forties and then a dive into the single figures above zero. This would have the effect of turning the playgound at Thomas Edison elementary school into a jagged, frozen desert, a sheet of ice with frozen clumps of dirt and grass and jagged shards of ice protruding from it’s surface.

Thomas Edison was one of those fifties style schools, brick, one story and spead out. Two of it’s wings formed a rectangle open at one end that bordered the playground. When we arrived at school in the mornings and after lunch (it was a nieghborhood school and most of us walked home for lunch), even in the coldest weather, they made us wait outside in that rectangle until it was time to open the doors.

The rougher boys occupied their time playing PumpPumpPoleAway. That’s what we called it. I couldn’t find a reference to it on the net, but I think it’s called Bulldog now. It’s a form of tag that starts with on person being “it,” and the rest lined up on one side of the yard. On a signal. “PumpPumpPoleAway” in our case, everyone runs to the opposite end of the field and “it” tries to tag them. If you are tagged you stay in the middle and join the bulldogs. The process is repeated until the last person is left.

Mike Fitzgerald, Norm Robbinson and Mike Young came up with a variation. The called it simply, “Tackle Pump.” As the name implies it wasn’t good enough to just tag the victim, you had to tackle them. So in the freezing cold, with jackets off and no protective padding, they would crash into each other, driving their targets into the frozen ground, swearing and laughing like maniacs.

I stayed on the sidewalk, ashamed of my weakness and fear.