Life for me has always been a struggle with poor health and depression, ill fortune and difficult circumstances. I have always been a “make lemonade” sort of life-gives-you-lemons problem-solver, but the more I make lemonade, the more my sorry old puss gets puckered. I am having chest pains and breathing problems again. I don’t have money for doctor’s visit co-pays and medication. My car is in the shop with more than $6,000 dollars worth of damages, hit by a passing motorist going too fast while it was parked outside my house. Insurance is probably not going to pay that much to fix a five-year-old car. My family in Iowa have recently been buried under huge snowdrifts. And the grim reaper has been knocking on my bedroom door asking if I want to play a game of chess.
But I will tag this post as humor. Because, ironically, humor is not always funny. Sometimes it has the sour puckering effect of lemonade with too little sugar in the mix. When you have worked hard all your life for very little reward, it’s hard to appreciate the tiny amounts of sugar you have been allotted. I see myself ending much the way Mother Mendocino ended, except the community will not even hear about my passing.
The more I sing songs, and rattle the boards, and try to make my puppets dance, the more arthritis crabs up my fingers and makes me ache. Sometimes happy simply comes hard. But self-pity is easy. And I am a pratfall clown most of the time. I use my injuries to make others laugh. And there is still magic to be found here and there in my art. Today’s paffoonies were all culled from my Postable Paffooney file. They are all old artworks of which I am pathetically proud.
Pathos is a part of humor too, you know. You tell a story about someone whose been on a lonely journey, and he finally gets to come home to the ones he loves, and you smile at the end of that. If you laughed at the clown for falling down, you smiled too when he got up again. After all, he wasn’t hurt. In many ways we are all made of spoof and rubber, and while the bullets don’t bounce off, we are more like Superman than we think. There is definitely wisdom buried somewhere in this pile of old quilts I am calling an essay today. I just wish I had the words to make it clearer than I do in this poor excuse for a paragraph.
My sister reads posts like this and tells me they are too depressing, that I need to write happier stuff. But don’t worry the way she does. I do spend a lot of time writing about the low spots. But I would like to point out that most of the time I am climbing out of holes. So I may start the essay in a very low place, but the direction I am going is always up.
Now I have said my 500 words for today, and while I still need bed-rest… there is no doubt the sun will come up again.
Consolation Hockey Night
Sunday was a bad, bad day for me. My football team, the Arizona Cardinals, were in the National Football Conference championship. One game away from their second trip to a Superbowl. But they not only lost, they were crushed 49 to 15. Not one morsel of goodness was left to a poor humiliated die-hard fan who has been waiting for the team to succeed his entire life. So, how do you recover from that? My wife decided to take me to a hockey game. Surely that would make me feel better. Of course, I was dying at the time of virus-related lung-mangling coughing fits and total lack of will to live. My novel that I have worked so hard on and was so proud of is in jeopardy of never being published. My sky no longer has sunshine. It is only natural that the Dallas Stars hockey team would help. Hockey is my real favorite sport, and I have loved the Stars as my second-favorite team since the 1960’s when they were the Minnesota North Stars.
It should be explained at this point that I love hockey in the same way that I love Mark Twain and the basic concepts of comedy and humor. It all stems from the same basic seed… ridiculous behavior lampooned by its own awareness of itself. Look at how it all started. The hockey gods, Dave and Rick, sat down together beside a frozen lake in Saskatchewan some time in the cold winter in the late 1800’s and decided to invent a national sport for Canada.
“Canada deserves a pretty cool national sport, eh,” said Dave.
“We gotta frozen lake right here, hoser,” answered Rick. “We can take some other sport and do it on ice, eh?”
“You got it, hoser,” said Dave. “What could be cooler than that lacrosse game the Iroquois and the Hurons play? With the whacking sticks and junk! Wouldn’t that look cool on ice, hoser?”
“They’ll never get a good hit in on anybody else’s head if they are slip sliding all around the ice… Let’s put ’em on skates. And we gotta make sure the game ball ain’t too big so they can whip it around with the sticks really, really fast.”
“Yeah, let’s increase the difficulty by taking the net-thingies off the sticks, and let’s make the ball into a little hard rubber disc. We’ll call it a puck. And people will die all the time in this high-speed multiple-projectile game with lots of whacking sticks!”
“Truly excellent idea, hoser. You are one really great hockey god!”
“You too, hoser… you too.”
So you can see by this carefully researched and verified origin story that hockey is not a sport to be taken lightly. Grown men with skates and sticks going around in circles really, really fast, trying to whip a puck past the goaltender into a net and at the same time trying to avoid all manner of collisions… though not trying very hard.
So my wife drags me to the American Airlines Center, the arena the Stars share with the NBA Dallas Mavericks. We get in easy enough, and then march all the way up to the three hundreds’ sections where all the cheap seats are. To get there, you must go up and up and up on multiple escalators, get to the arena roof, and take the stairs up higher still. This we do with Filipino friends in tow… who know absolutely nothing about this whacky sport, but they like big spectacles and the arena food. And I have the added benefit that they will believe absolutely anything I tell them about the game. Oh, it turns out it could be really fun after all! And I wouldn’t even have to lie to make their eyes pop out of their heads.
Of course, from the rafters with the bats, the game looks like a bunch of colorful ants scrabbling all over a big white postage stamp, but the new highlights screen makes it kinda like watching TV at home, except with lots of expensive snacks that you have to go mountain-climbing for and drunk guys that have had too much of the beer that vendors actually carry up into the stands. (One fight actually almost broke out in the crowd near us, three rows down, but the young guy got scared of the really loud and old fat guy who was yelling obscenities at him and scurried away faster than a drunk fat guy can follow.)
Of course, my wife never lets me bring binoculars to these things because I might lose them… and also because the Ice Girls who scrape the ice during time-outs wear skates and very little else. I have to look at the big hanging TV very closely during those times. Especially when those times occur while wifey is down the mountainside searching for affordable snacks.
And, of course, it is always a very welcome thing when the Stars win. As you have probably guessed, I don’t get to see my favorite teams win in front of me very often, and we have to savor those things when they occur.
1 Comment
Filed under commentary, hockey, humor, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized
Tagged as consolation for losing, Dallas Stars, enjoying hockey, goofiness, hockey, hockey fights, hosers, humor