The thrill of victory, and the agony of a commercial break

Joel is not a patient man.
He is a good man, but he is not patient.
I don't know how old he is--maybe forty,
maybe sixty-five--but so far in life
he has never walked anywhere.
He runs, somewhat under control.

Television commercials drive him crazy, or crazier,
but he has a solution: he has a TiVo.
He records everything,
and equipped with the quickest thumb in the west,
he fast-forwards through commercials,
time-outs, trivial stuff such as slow-rising floods,
and sumo wrestling. He says he has perfected
the timing of commercials, able to jump
precisely to the real stuff, again.

He has found the perfect sport
for a man of his impatience:
he loves curling.

In itself, curling is a bit slow,
with granite rocks sliding like molasses
toward a slight depression,
but with the fastest finger flick in the west,
Joel can catch a rock at three frozen moments
in its majestic move toward the bullseye,
and skip all the sweeping, measuring,
lining up, debating, and screaming.

Joel says that the rocks do not listen
to the instructions shouted at them, anyway,
so what is the point of watching it?

As a contractor, Joel is wondering
how he can get his hands on
imperfect, rejected curling rocks.
He wants to use them as deck footings.

He says he can concentrate
a whole curling match
down to a minute and forty-three seconds.
He won't say how.
The details don't interest him.

Figure skating, Joel says, is not a sport:
it is a judged exhibition.
Finger flicking a TiVo is a sport:
someone comes in first, faster.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

SmokeSound

Search This Blog