I’d Rather Watch A Game In Section 420 [Friday Thoughts With TeeCoZee]

Gourd Horning: The Art Of Making Horns Out Of Things You May Or May Not Find In Your Backyard. It’s Friday, April 4, Two Thousand And Fourteen. The weather in Brooklyn is 43˚ with light rain and somewhere, somebody is mistakenly opening and entering a car that is identical to the one they own, with the only differences being the crucifix hanging from the rear-view mirror and the unmistakable scent of huckleberries. For a second, he/she is tempted to see if their keys work in the ignition, but no, morality soon overtakes them. As for me, I have no morals, just a few things on my mind.

– April Fools Day is for chumps. In the age before the internet, it was probably a noble holiday that everyone looked forward to. Today, our great nation has been taken over by pranksters that are itching to create antics that could give them brief fame. When you have midgets dressed at Chucky leaping out of billboards and guys that are finding more creative ways to pull off the “Houdini” sex move, there’s no need to wait for April 1 to perform them. In fact, because it’s expected that people will act out on April Fools Day, nobody ends up doing anything, as they’re stuck in defense mode. Some people also leave the country for the 4th of July and stay sober for St Patricks Day. We don’t need holidays anymore. We have the internet. And each other.

– Because of my inflated ego, I think everyone is out to get me. In dicey situations, I always picture a giant target on my face, which works for/against me. I AM an easy target because they know how much I’m contemplating my targetness. Or maybe that’s my ego talking again. Regardless, I’ve had a couple of weird encounters recently:

* There was a guy walking really slow in front of me, hogging the whole sidewalk. Nothing new to report here. His pants sagged down to his ankles and he was clutching a bottle of Arizona Sugar Tea or some chemically engineered joy beverage. He kept goosenecking behind him to see what was going on, which is the calling card of a dicey individual. Another guy comes around the corner and starts walking towards us. He makes a hand signal against his shoulder. The man in front of me nods, immediately lets go of his bottle as it thuds against the pavement, indicating that it was full of fluid. At this moment, I’m convinced that he’s going to spin around and slug me in the jaw or steal my socks or something. Instead, he continues forward at lightning fast speed. Of course he was going to go mess somebody else up. I’m not important enough to get messed up. Or at least not yet.

* I rode the E train at rush hour because I’m an idiot. It was in sardine can-mode, where you don’t have to hold onto rails because the passengers are compacted against each other, making a sudden falling almost impossible. I was pressed shoulder to shoulder with these 2 shady looking dudes. I refused to make eye contact with them, but I studied from the reflection in the window. They were sizing me up, figuring out if I was worth it or not. They were quite interested in looking me up and down. My hands were jammed in my pockets, one clutching a lighter ready to go into “clobber mode” and the other with my keys in “wolverine” mode. There were several instances where one guy would make a sudden arm movement, but he would notice my tensing muscles, the fists in my pocket, my evil glare into the window. I wasn’t as unsuspecting as they were suspecting. Every movement would quickly shift into a fake stretch or yawn. I mentally coerced them into leaving at the next stop. Or maybe they were getting off there, really dug my style and needed a good stretch. If I keep my paranoia up, it’s gonna be a long summer…

– I started playing Grand Theft Auto 5 this week and my life is over. That’s no surprise, nor is it a story worth telling. But it reminded me of something else:

For my 16th birthday, my parents bought me a Playstation 2. Usually 16 was the age where kids look forward to receiving their first car and taking the driving test. Although I was privileged enough to have a 1991 Pontiac Sunbird in the driveway, I was much more excited to dig into GTA Vice City. It was all I needed in life. A few weeks after my birthday, it became apparent that I had no interest in taking a driving test, nor had I coaxed my parents into letting me practice in weeks. It was a gloomy Sunday afternoon in April. I was probably on my 8th or 9th consecutive hour of gameplay when my Dad forced me away from the TV to go out for a drive. I remember it being one of the most difficult experiences of my life. I already knew how to drive and I did it well, but all of that went out the window. My sense of physics was totally skewed. A similar circumstance would be the small, quiet kid with an affinity for Pro Wrestling trying to take on the school bully. Real life doesn’t work they way you want it to. Here was a list of my qualms with driving:

– In GTA, going forward and in reverse could be done with the switching of buttons. There’s no need to go to a complete stop and shift and look in your blind spots and all of that bullshit.
– In real life, it’s not appropriate to drive fast. Not that I liked driving fast, but in GTA, you could either drive fast or not move. There was no concept engrained in my mind to follow the flow of traffic.
– Although my Sunbird was attractive and sporty, I was quite sad when it dawned on me that I could’t just steal any car that I see.
– In real life, only one station played 80’s music and it was primarily a classic rock station.
– When parking, it needs to be within the lines and constraints. Real life has no yellow markers that automatically stops the car and progresses the story, regardless of the parking job. This was the hardest thing to get used to, as that was what we focused on the day of my GTA binge. I just spent the last month throwing away everything I knew about parking and now I’m being forced to master the craft. The craft was never totally mastered, just merely practiced enough to get the damned license.

And that’s the story of why I can’t parallel park or look a hooker in the eye.

– I’m dedicating the last part of today’s thoughts as a free preview of a new BFD Category, Baseball For Dinner. Soon, Joey Z and yours truly will be making daily posts/quips about baseball, because well, our nerdism needs to be funneled somewhere. So our readership that enjoys baseball are in for a treat and the rest of our readers will be completely alienated!

-I went and saw the Mets get buttraped yesterday. I fucking had to. Tickets were 11 bucks and I have a hard-on for Zack Wheeler. I don’t know why I have a hard-on for him. His performance was pretty damned flaccid, allowing 3 runs on 7 hits and 2 walks. He got 6 punch-outs, but those were all earned in the first 3 innings. He’s not the future of the Mets because the Mets don’t really have a future. Or maybe they do. The future is just hiding out in Las Vegas. By the end of the game, I was rooting for the Nationals. Not because I think Ian Desmond is sexy [which I do], but because the Mets had Papa Grande in the bullpen, and I just so happened to be sitting with a bunch of random Tigers fans. [To be fair, it probably wan’t much of a coincidence. It was a Mets game on a Thursday afternoon in section 420. Of course there would be Tiger fans. Transplants love punny cheap seats to Mets games.] He didn’t show up and we could only look at his fat ass from a distance. We were all sad.

– In speaking of Papa Grande, I threw myself into a random public Rotisserie League this year. During the draft, I was a little suspicious that the guys didn’t know what they were doing. Matt Harvey was drafted early[ish, but shouldn’t had been drafted at all] and Aroldis Chapman was the first closer to get drafted. My team is fucking stacked. I’m on statistical juice. But good lord, I needed me some Tony Cingrani. He just finished his 19th start, and has never allowed 5 hits. This breaks a 100 year-old record. And it’s the first 19 starts of his career. FUCKING PAY THE MAN! I considered joining another league just to have him this year. I considered trading my 1st round 2015 pick for him. But in my rotisserie league, some guy named NY State Of Mind was so overjoyed that the Mets picked up Jose Valverde that he dropped Cingrani for him. On top of that, Cingrani went through waivers without anyone noticing. Like finding a $100 bill on the ground, I sneakily picked him out of free agency. I’m suddenly really interested in this league full of idiot strangers.

Okay, so there’s going to be more to it, but you get the idea.

– My back hurts from sitting down too often. That can’t be good.

– Try the following trick over the weekend: Look out your window and hold your gaze for a good 6 or 7 hours. If your neighbors leave the house and come back with blinds, you know you’re doing it right.

Have a perverted weekend!

-TeeCoZee