Posts from June, 2010(3)
The quick brown fox jumped over the good, but lazy Parker family.
the traffic is awful, it’s a long way away, and if you don’t get there like an hour and a half before the show starts you are virtually guaranteed to be sitting at the back of the venue behind a post.
today, for some crazy reason, we got there barely 45 minutes before the show, and the parking lot was so abandoned that we thought the show was canceled.
we sailed through the lobby unmolested — except for the bouncer asking if he could check my “purse” — and sat down about 8 feet off the front of the stage.
crazy.
a couple months ago, around the time we were buying tickets to the show, we tripped across a tift merritt album we didn’t own (“another country”) and downloaded it from itunes. we figured we’d be okay at the concert anyway, since we knew her first two albums.
turns out we were actually TWO albums behind, so knew just three of the 18 songs.
we *still* did okay, which probably says something about tift and her band … i’m not sure i’ve ever been to a concert where i knew so few of the songs, yet still had such a great time.
the show was actually stolen by her husband (the drummer) of all people, who during the encore did a solo / ukulele number called “Evel Knievel for My Girl”, which really has to be seen to be fully appreciated.
SET LIST: The Things That Everybody Does · All The Reasons We Don’t Have To Fight · Engine To Turn · Six More Days Of Rain · Mixtape · I Know What I’m Looking For Now · After Today · Something To Me · Never Talk About It · Stray Paper · Papercut · Broken · Feel Of The World · See You On The Moon · Ain’t Looking Closely · Evel Knievel · Bramble Rose · Danny’s Song · Another Country
in the interest of full disclosure, while i sucked every last drop of enjoyment out of the celtic’s championship run in 2008, i didn’t give them much chance to win *any* of their playoffs series this year (vs. miami, cleveland and orlando) and am still not sure they’ve got an advantage in the finals (even though they only need to win one of their next two in L.A. to claim their 18th championship banner).
And so, I’ve tacked on 6 hours of daily world cup coverage to my after hours NBA responsibillities, not to mention I’ve still got tape of the winter olympics left on my tivo from February.
somebody’s gotta win something, because i need my life back.
as the dutiful, soccer-educated elite in the relationship, i jumped to the world cup’s defense.
“they only call it the beautiful game if certain teams are playing it,” I said. “And France is decidedly not on that list.”
but, then i watched the rest of the weekend, and you know what? she was right. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
i watched most or all of seven matches this weekend (missed Ghana’s 1-0 win over Serbia) and while there was some great moments, by and large the matches were all ugly babies that only their mothers would love — with the possible exception of Argentina’s 1-0 win over Nigeria, whose scoreline sounded more boring than it actually was.
the world cup. less than perfect. suddenly, my life was without meaning.
i played soccer for most of two decades (keeper for all but a couple years in central defense) and have clear recollections of watching the last 6 or 7 world cups.
if the world cup isn’t the greatest sporting event ever, how could i have invested so much effort learning the game? what am i going to talk about on monday with the rest of my over-educated urban elite friends? how am i going to demonstrate my complete personal superiority over the great unwashed masses in the fly-over-states?
and so, in a vain attempt to deal with this loss of identity, i’ve come up with a couple theories about (a) why the opening weekend wasn’t the paragon of sport it could/should have been, and (b) why we all will have forgotten this crisis even happened by the time the cup is raised in four weeks time:
hollow excuses? maybe. complete and total bunk? probably.
am i going to bury my head in my pillow and pray for better games this week? most definitely.