In Injury Time

The loudest sound that has every emanated from my body, I'm happy to say, was entirely voluntary. Well, mostly voluntary. It was a response to events outside of my control, so it was more reflexive than considered, but it was an active reflexive and not a passive one. There are certain aspects of the weird oompah-band animal cacophony of the one-person human orchestra that burden us with their ineluctable inevitability, which we then pass along as a social burden to all those unfortunate enough to be sharing an elevator with us. This was not one of those type.

The loudest sound I've ever made was drawn from my poised, primed and ready throat by something that never was. It was a phantasm, a shade, the wavy heat-mirage glimmer just above a low-desert road promising water and life where you know, in both your mind and your heart, none could physically ever exist. It was hope shouted after hope, echoing after only itself in the bottom of a well that had run dry long before you were born.

You probably could have guessed by now that I'm talking about sports. What other subject can drive grown men to adopt the tiptoe posture of pastel-hued shit-poesy like the televised contests of other grown men they don't know contriving to deliver some ball or ball-like object across some arbitrary goal line while wearing matching costumes? It's the hetero dude's safe place for pageantry and flair, to celebrate things like grace and litheness, color and clothing and the beauty of the male form.* If the Oscars are the Super Bowl for ladies and gay men, the World Cup is our Tony Awards.

In the 2006 World Cup, in a game for the USA against Italy, perennial world soccer power and eventual champions, after being thrashed by the Czech Republic in the first game of the group stage, DaMarcus Beasley scored what was almost certainly the winning goal, impossibly, very late in the contest. I don't remember coming off the couch. I know no actual words happened. I remember running to nowhere in particular and I remember afterward how hard it was to talk as the non-words I managed to get out were loud enough to shred my vocal chords for a good day and a half afterward. Turned out the goal was disallowed on a pretty shitty technicality and we ended up with a tie for the only non-loss of the whole tournament for the U.S. team, but that's not really the point.** The point is that it's possible to take something so unnecessarily seriously that when it's over with, you have to coax the dog out from under the couch with cooked chicken.

That dog's long gone now and it's probably for the best, for her sake I mean. I watched the Monday USA vs. Ghana match in an empty house, by a total fluke of scheduling. There was ranting, pacing, abusive language, delusions of participatory influence, more pacing, fidgeting and yes, one or two voluntary/involuntary wordless howls straining the limits of what my larynx is capable of, but I don't think I quite rivaled what I (dubiously) achieved back in aught-six.

I'd like to say it's because I've evolved into a more reasonable, less excitable douche-nozzle in the intervening better-part-of-a-decade, but mostly I think it's just because I'm old and shit is starting to wear out.

One of my kids (I forget which) asked me if soccer was my favorite sport. I thought about it and said probably not. I don't pay that much attention to it on a daily basis. But World Cup is by leaps and bounds my favorite sporting event. More than Super Bowls or World Serieses or Olympics, even if they took out all the bullshit parts with horse jumping and rhythmic gymnastics. And I know I love it because I hate every goddamned second of it. If one of ours scores 30 seconds into the game, that means I know I have to sweat out 89:30 of game time worrying myself to nausea about the potential tying goal, telegraphing my laser brain waves across space and time to influence the flight of the ball thousands of miles away, which is TOTALLY EXHAUSTING AND ALSO HAS YET TO WORK EVEN ONCE. The whole experience is an imposition and a menace and the thing that pisses me off about it most is that I only get to do it once every four years.

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*No homo.

**See, because for a tie, you get one point.