Non-Sequitur Title

I've recently been in the market for a new sport to play. It's not that I'm tired of the sports I grew up playing; it's just that in this new age of jobs, girlfriends, and increasingly rampant pansyism, getting a game of football, baseball, or even basketball going is a logistical nightmare that pisses me off to even think about. I've always been an instant-gratification type of guy. If you told me I could have three thousand dollars today or fifty thousand dollars in one year, then I'd laugh at you because I know you can barely pay your car insurance, much less play assholish games with your money. But then if you were like, "I won the lottery, and I'm giving you a choice, man", then I'd ask to see the ticket. And after you showed it to me, I'd be all "Holy shit, dude! Holy shit! You lucky bastard!". Then after shit settled down I'd think for like five seconds, and a week later I'd be zipping around on a Dervish-blue Vespa with a little decal of that cartoon guy who loves to pee on things like Chevy and Jeff Gordon, peeing on the words "Your Mom". Because a year is too long to wait to drive an awesome scooter whilst simultaneously informing my fellow drivers of their mothers' disgusting sexual habits.

Unfortunately, I happen to suck badly at all of the sports that are easy to play with a few people on a whim. So my lack of patience (for setting things up) has driven me to seek out sports which my lack of patience (for sucking at things) has historically caused me to hate. Such are the vicissitudes of being an impatient asshole, I guess.

Anyway, the way I see it there were two sports that fit my criteria (outdoors, easy to set up games, potentially fun after initial infuriating sucking period): golf and tennis. Seven years ago I would have openly disparaged both as "lame" and "stupid" (I've since learned bigger words), because by 16 I had tried and profoundly blown at both sports, and I subsequently shied away and mocked them from afar as a defense mechanism, like the high school jock who gets shot down by the smart, shy girl and overcompensates for his failure by telling his friends that she has a fivehead and she's borderline autistic and he wouldn't touch her vagina even if he cornered a goddamn leprechaun inside it. But he would. Everyone knows he would.

I like to think that I'm a little more mature now, and that as an adult I've learned to better cope with humiliation and pain. But even if that were true, we all know that a man can only take so much before he cries and sulks underneath a tree. So golf was never really an option. And it's nothing against the sport - I would honestly love to get good at golf. It seems like it'd be a lot of fun, and you never get too old to do it. You can play golf until the day your heart explodes at the 10th tee box just seconds after creepily flirting with the Drink Cart Girl even though she went to school with your granddaughter. I like that. But golf also has the steepest learning curve, and I just don't think I could handle climbing it. The last time I went golfing, I got so frustrated with my inconsistent ball-striking that I stopped using clubs halfway through the round, opting instead to pick up the ball and heave it as far as I could at every hole, laughing the deranged laugh of a broken man with no more respect for society's arbitrary rules and mores. It was probably embarrassing for my friends (I also may have verbally abused a goose), but it definitely made my round better and neutralized my slice. More recently, my friend Tim and I spent like two hours in his backyard attempting to chip a golf ball into a planter. Though we were both tired of trying after ten minutes, neither of us would admit it because we are idiots. We hit hundreds of unsuccessful shots until eventually it got dark outside and we gave up, having sent the planter on an epic, rollercoaster journey from "planter" to "prospective golf hole" to "very broken planter", which just goes to show you that even planters can never truly go home again.

So it's probably safe to say that I lack the temperament/natural ability to ever excel at golf. My memories of tennis are much more tame. When I was a kid every attempt to play tennis started with poor play and arguments over the rules, and quickly devolved into a competition to see who could hit the ball the farthest out of the court. Good times. And since tennis courts are almost always adjacent to basketball courts, I remember many times feeling superior as I walked past all the 40-year-old knee-braced tennis players on my way to play a real sport. But I've come to realize recently that tennis really is a beautiful, fluid sport, alternately requiring power and agility, offense and defense, a gameplan and the ability to improvise. I'm speaking generally, of course. Like when I watched Wimbledon last week. That was cool. The tennis I play requires only tennis equipment, the ability to hop a fence, and a lack of shame.

But I've definitely gotten better. I play whenever I have free time, and though I've thrown the occasional temper tantrum - complete with strings of expletives and violent swings resulting in the loss of tennis balls - I feel like I've on the whole been very patient. And now I can hit angles sometimes; and I occasionally play some long, crazy rallies; and I've even messed around with slices and drop shots and other cutesy things. It's been encouraging.

But it's a tenuous happiness that's easily shattered. A few weeks ago I was playing with some friends when someone in a car driving by yelled out "You suck!". There is no way he could have seen us playing long enough to make that determination, but it still stung. I'd imagine if someone who was clearly blind walked into a mall and just yelled out, "You're fat!", it would still shake the confidence of every person in the mall who considered himself fat, even though everyone knows the blind guy clearly couldn't have known what the hell he was talking about. It's just the kind of incident that only matters because it exposes our own deep-rooted insecurities. So even though I outwardly yelled back "Come get your ass kicked, pussy!", deep down inside I felt the withering glare of 16-year-old me, and he totally agreed with the assessment.