Here's Another Reason to Hate the Angels
Two years ago the UrClown, his dad and The Captain took me to my first and only game at the Big A. I had a thumper of a hangover. Mercifully the Big A serves bloody mary's and so I settled into my seat under a warm SoCal sun with my medicine.
Matt and his old man are giving me the seated tour of the ballpark, we're talking baseball and then I notice that everyone around me has not one, but two of these inflated tubes adorned with Angels propagnda.
"What the fuck are those things," I asked.
A look of embarrassment crept across Matt's face as his father tried to pretend he didn't hear the question. "Oh, those are, uh, thunderstix. Instead of clapping, people bang them together and they make this horrible noise. I'm really sorry." It was the only time he had every expressed sincere remorse to me in the decade we'd known one another. I was terrified.
Sure enough, around the second, maybe third inning, Kinky Eckstein and the Anaheim Jew Boys start to get a little something going, and all of Anaheim starts to furiously pound these awful things together. You don't realize when you hear them on teevee, but they've an almost metallic "ping" to them. When you are in the midst of 40,000 pairs of them, your brain gasping for rehydration (or more booze), your soul stretched thin by fatigue and substance abuse, it is hell.
When I headed back to New York I told people that the x-factor in that year's play-offs would be the thunderstix. Nobody had heard of them, they all laughed and said I was crazy, as though I'd just come back from Canada with tales of Sasquatch. Well the laughter stopped pretty damn quick.
Matt and his old man are giving me the seated tour of the ballpark, we're talking baseball and then I notice that everyone around me has not one, but two of these inflated tubes adorned with Angels propagnda.
"What the fuck are those things," I asked.
A look of embarrassment crept across Matt's face as his father tried to pretend he didn't hear the question. "Oh, those are, uh, thunderstix. Instead of clapping, people bang them together and they make this horrible noise. I'm really sorry." It was the only time he had every expressed sincere remorse to me in the decade we'd known one another. I was terrified.
Sure enough, around the second, maybe third inning, Kinky Eckstein and the Anaheim Jew Boys start to get a little something going, and all of Anaheim starts to furiously pound these awful things together. You don't realize when you hear them on teevee, but they've an almost metallic "ping" to them. When you are in the midst of 40,000 pairs of them, your brain gasping for rehydration (or more booze), your soul stretched thin by fatigue and substance abuse, it is hell.
When I headed back to New York I told people that the x-factor in that year's play-offs would be the thunderstix. Nobody had heard of them, they all laughed and said I was crazy, as though I'd just come back from Canada with tales of Sasquatch. Well the laughter stopped pretty damn quick.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home