Entries from June 2006 ↓

I admire soccer players. All that endless chasing after balls, kicking balls, hitting balls with your head, letting balls glance off your chest. Doing everything you can possibly do with a ball except the one thing you really want to do: pick the fucking thing up.

Seriously, I don’t know how they stand it. It’s unnatural. What if God had issued us all mouths and only let us eat through our noses? What if GM made cars with steering wheels but voided our warranty if we ever actually touched them? What if Prometheus told us that we could only use fire to singe off our eyebrows? We wouldn’t stand for it. And yet soccer players happily subject themselves to exactly this kind of frustration. It’s a global rash of masochism, played out day after day on soccer fields the world over.

Soccer was invented three hundred years ago in Tushanka, a rustic Russian village populated entirely by armless goatherds. For a long time, their lives consisted of little more than eating, sleeping, and teetering after ill-behaved flocks of emaciated goats. Then one day a young goatherd named Igor Radanadan fashioned a primitive ball out of tar and thornbushes, commissioned a couple of fat and lazy goats to act as goalposts, and started kicking the ball between them. Other boys joined him, setting up goat goals a little bit farther down the mountain. A primitive set of rules ensued. Soccer was born.

It stayed in Tushanka for many years, punching tiny thornholes into a whole generation of young Tushankans, until a passing troupe of ascetics, looking for some new way to bring their brand of agony-driven joy to the masses, adopted the sport and took it into Europe. It wasn’t just the thornball they liked — it was the inability to use your hands, exactly the kind of mental torment that made their twisted lives worth living.

The thornball itself fell out of favor, as did many of the original Tushankan rules (the ten minutes of goat-polo after half time, for example), but the central torment remained: no hands.

I think that’s why soccer hasn’t taken hold in America yet: we may be puritanical, but we’re not masochists. We like to pick up our balls. We like to touch them with our hands, like normal people. That’s one reason, anyway. The other reason is that the rest of the world insists on calling the sport “football”, despite the fact that we already have a sport called football. Sure, you’d be hard-pressed to call that pighide ellipse a ball, and, yeah, the vast majority of football players never actually touch the ball with their feet … but we’re America, god damn it! Stop using our names for your degenerate sports!

A third reason soccer hasn’t caught on is because it’s boring. If you go to a basketball game (where it’s illegal to touch the ball with your foot, God bless America) and the score is, say, 64-54, you’d be like, Jesus that game sucked. But then tune into any soccer sports show and watch those sportscasters gush like schoolgirls over a game that went 4-2. 4-2! Oh my god, that’s, like, six total points! In only ninety minutes! It’s like six soccer games all rolled up into one!

This would make sense if you got like a tenth of a point for every goal you score. Or if they subtract a point every time some whiney European “footballer” fakes an injury. But you don’t. You get a full point, and they can’t take it away from you. Even if you’re French.

So I’m forced to conclude that the problem here is that all soccer players suck. I mean, their goals are huge. Ten times wider and ten times higher than a hockey goal. Why can’t these guys score more points? Oh, that’s right: they can’t using their fucking hands.

Madness.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and, in close consultation with others, have come up with several suggestions for making soccer worth watching:

1. Exploding balls. Every ball is packed with explosives, set to go off after it’s been kicked a certain number of times. The kick count is random, of course. This won’t increase the number of points scored, but it’ll dramatically increase the number of players blowing up.

2. Fat Dwarven Goalies. No goalie can be taller than two feet, or lighter than two hundred pounds. This should help alleviate the scoring problem, somewhat, assuming that these incompetents ever manage to foot-hurl the ball in the general direction of their giant goals. The only alternative is to make the goal even bigger, but, come on, rest of the world: isn’t the size of this thing already embarrassing enough?

3. Wild Boars. After twenty minutes of desultory, scoreless play, a pack of angry, hungry, wild boars are released into the field. The players have been pre-smeared with goat-fat (in a nod to this sport’s humble Tushankan origins), rendering them both incompetent and yummy. Again, this will do nothing for the scoring problem, but it’ll be fun to see those guys scampering away from ravenous boars, instead of toward a little ball that they can’t fucking pick up.

I’ve written to FIFA, the organization responsible for perpetuating the tragedy of soccer, with my suggestions. Hopefully they implement them before the the World Cup is over. Because watching exploding boar-pursued athletes is a lot of fun, whether or not they’re using their hands.

The House rejected the Net Neutrality bill last week, a huge blow to the notion of a free internet and a major notch in the belt of the corporate/government megalith that wants desperately to consume the one true egalitarian institution in this country.

What makes this worse is that 58 Democrats voted against the bill … among them, my representative, Albert Wynn. This actually pissed me off enough to write a letter, the first time I’ve ever done that. My usual strategy of carping and spitting apoplectically from the sidelines seemed ill-suited to the occasion.

Anyway. Here’s what I wrote:

Dear Representative Wynn:

It came as a shock to see that you were among the 58 Democrats who voted against the recently rejected Net Neutrality bill … but not as very much of a shock, I’m afraid. I’ve watched in dismay as, over the past couple of years, you’ve voted repeatedly for legislation that favors the agenda of large corporations over the needs — and the rights — of your constituency.

In my mind, the internet embodies the principles on which America was founded: a free-flowing market of information, an egalitarian forum in which the lowliest blogger and the mightiest corporation have identical rights, identical privileges, and identical access to the resources the network makes available.

This kind of freedom is not just one aspect of the internet; it’s woven deeply into its fabric. In a very real sense, it is the internet. So this notion that our networks’ gatekeepers should be allowed to artificially throttle the bandwidth of those sites that cannot pay for the privilege of full access to this public resource — that they should be allowed to impose the same kind of class structure on the internet that plagues so many other aspects of our society — does not just change our world wide web; it destroys it, and replaces it with something else entirely.

Capitalism can be a wonderful thing. It spurs innovation, it imbues entrepreneurs with the kind of drive and ambition that benefits us all, it builds bridges across social classes and economic strata. But unchecked capitalism is a nightmare, because it inevitably allows the very rich to rise to the top of the economic ladder, while the rest of us huddle at the bottom. That’s why we have safeguards in our constitution: antitrust laws, estate taxes and their ilk prevent our country from degenerating into the same kind of aristocracy against which our founders rebelled. I believe that Net Neutrality must be one of those safeguards.

I realize this letter comes to you too late. I wish I’d written it a week ago. But you should know that many of your constituents expect better from their representatives. Your voting record in many other areas is impeccable, and I know that you’ve come down on the right side of issues involving the environment, taxation, and the war in Iraq. But the threat of de-facto hegemonic corporate rule embodied in the rejection of the Net Neutrality legislation — and in many other of Congress’s decisions in recent years — is, I believe, at least as important, and worrisome, as the other issues facing our country today.

I hope you will take this into consideration in your future votes. Thank you.

I suspect that this was a pointless exercise, though, because (a) the letter will arrive too late to make a difference, and (b) Wynn will almost certainly never read it, and (c) if he does read it, he’ll likely discard it as the ravings of one of the crackpot Montgomery County people that were foisted on him during the great gerrymandering of 2002.

But still. It kind of makes me feel better.

Here’s my problem: I can’t sit and read at the same time. There’s something about stillness that shreds my concentration, just completely shatters my ability to focus. It wasn’t always this way. When I was small, I could inhale books no matter what position my body happened to be in.

But then something strange and catastrophic happened. I remember it well. I remember the day, the minute it all ended. I was on the bus, on my way to school, reading an Elfquest comic book. And, though I was mostly engrossed in the story, there was something nagging at me. Some tiny, anonymous kernel of worry, a little pinprick of dark potentiality lurking on the borders of my subconscious. Whispering at me. Saying: “I’m going to stop up your brain, little man. I’m going to take this thing you treasure, that you don’t even know you treasure, and I’m going to coat it with burs and brambles, barbs and thorns. I’m going to dip it in tallow and roll it in tar. I’m going to wrap it in chains and drop it down a well.”

I’d been hearing this vague and inscrutable threat for weeks, but then, right then, it happened: the line of dialogue I was reading dissolved into an atomic, disassociated cloud of letters, an acrostic jumble of meaningless words. I read the sentence again, and again, and again, until finally it sunk in. The same thing happened to the next sentence. And the next. And the next. And to many, many sentences since then.

I don’t know why it happened. I don’t even know if it happened, but suddenly reading became a chore. Every paragraph seemed to burst out of the page like a clutch of startled quail, and getting it all back together was a herculean task, a small miracle of concentration.

It’s gotten a lot better over the years, as I’ve learned various ways around the chaos. But the only method that works consistently is motion. If I walk, or pace, or peddle, I have no problems at all. If I sit, or lie down, or even stand in one place for too long, my mind wanders, or rebels, or just puts me to sleep. It’s a strange little gypsy curse that sends me down sidewalks or twisted forest paths with a book in my hand, marching past the mental barriers that the curse throws up in front of me.

I get my share of ridicule for this, of course. There’s something irresistibly mockable about a guy walking around with his head in a book. I’ve gotten lots of grief from passing motorists: taunts hurled out of speeding cars, coming out of nowhere, stopping my heart, then dopplering away into silence. Harmless, I suppose, but weird. Shouldn’t these people feel some sympathy for my affliction? Why do I have suffer it and their scorn?

Today, some guy in an SUV screamed “Read that book!” as he sped by, a self-appointed literacy drill sergeant barking orders at his brigade of one. This was, sadly, one of the more creative taunts I’ve heard over the years. I usually get inchoate yells, or high-pitched screams, or mock ululations, laced here and there with obscenity.

It could be worse, I suppose. The curse could have made reading possible only if I was hanging upsidedown, or sitting in bathtub full of eels, or snorting carrot juice, or watching Fear Factor. At least I can read. That’s plenty to be thankful of right there. And, really, I’m not sure this whole “transformation” thing isn’t something my mind cooked up on its own, some lost paradise to strive after.