Rather mixed bag day of Ultimate yesterday.
Beck pulled out around 10:30, so I hung out with the dogs until 11:45 or so. Headed down to Waltham to find Josh Weinstock's team short on players, so I donned last year's pink jersey and joined them for a bit - tried to play real fade-into-the-background style, and ended up getting a couple of layout D's despite myself. But a real good time, just fun playing with some new people and hanging out and joking. Great. Right? Ummm...
Our game rolls around at 2, and on one of the first points of the game some big dude on their team tries to plow through me, and when I hold my ground and don't bounce off him, he accuses me of grabbing him. I instantly start jawing back, because he was essentially accusing me of cheating when I know I hadn't done anything. And I was overzealous about it, because I'm a raging pinko-commie asshole bastard, and set everything off on a great tone.
Later, I juke my guy, make a hard cut up the line and one of their captains who had been poaching a bit in the lane sees that there's no way he can possibly stop me legitimately, so he jumps into my path, knees jutting out and elbows up in my neck. Again, the bad mood already set (not to mention the fact that I'm not a big fan of cheating attempts to hurt me instead of legitimately defending, and the fact that this was an experienced player who knew better), combined with the fact that I could see it coming... Well, I basically gave him a nice little Ronnie Lott style shot, complete with forearm shiver follow through to keep his elbows out of my face. He flew about five yards backwards and proceeded to scream bloody murder, then got up and yelled foul in my face. I said, "right back at you guy; you know what you just tried to do there. And that's gonna happen every time you try that crap. Fair warning." Said as icily, "if he dies, he dies" style as I could muster. And I called a foul on him, completely legitimately, as he had just essentially attempted to intentionally slam into me to stop me from heading up the line. The big train, natch, won, so you can imagine how enthused their team was about my call.
The game just degenerated from there, and I was just out of my head pissed - I don't know if I just got scared at the prospect of having coming so close to having my knees taken out, or whether it was just that Beck was out of town was on her way out of town and I'm non-plussed about the next three weeks alone. But I was in a foul, foul mood, so I cranked it up on all fronts and played some rather psychotically good defense. Of course, this only got people angrier, as they didn't like it when I laid out on their womenfolk and less-good men. I got a D and was being guarded by a gigantor chump, so I smoked him - Deb made a bad throw which I laid out for and made a nice grab, subsequently rolling over the disc but holding on. Said chump, who is now 20 yards away, says that it's down because he saw it hit the ground. Nevermind the fact that my body was entirely between him and the disc, nevermind that he was 20 F'ing yards away and had no business claiming best perspective anyways - and so, tired of it, I let him have it a little bit, ultimately stooping to insulting his lack of ability to play defense with a barrage of quips to which he had no comeback other than to give me a blank look and say things such as "come on, man, respect my call." So I said fine, threw it back to the thrower and said "is that respect enough?" and he started bitching and moaning again, so I schooled him again, caught the score and punted the disc out the back of the endzone in frustration.
It kept going like this - arguments, heckles, everything, and really all that went down was that I to some extent single handedly kicked their ass. Like I said, fairly virtuoso performance, imho, featuring 5 or so handblocks and 6 or 7 layout D's and another 3 or 4 catches. But all the while I was intensely furious, and I unfortunately griped at some of the young guys on my team after the sixth time they couldn't appropriately position the stack. Which pissed them off (I felt horrible and apologized to them afterwards, all is good), and just made for an all-in-all horrible experience.
I just felt like crap for the rest of the day - in part because of the usual ridiculous nature of BUDA games, calls, attempts to injure me, lack of knowledge of the rules, inability to play competitively and not whine like a bitch every time something remotely intense happens. But really I felt terrible because, I 100% admit it, I totally lost it - I went from nicest guy on planet earth in the game with Josh to criminal mastermind out to kill and insult everyone in a 100 yard radius guy for our game. I fed off it well - like I said, I was a pretty demonic defender, for what it's worth - but I just had no interest in playing any more after about the 4thpoint of the game. I felt like an asshole, was an asshole, and I knew I was pissing off everyone, their team and mine, but I just couldn't get myself to let it go. It was depressing, and what's worse, when i think back about it - I mean, one guy falsely accused me of cheating, another tried to hurt me, and another made a rat's ass bogus call. I get angry when those things happen, and with the exception of just turning into an insult machine vs. the third guy, I really don't think it's illegitimate of me to defend myself, whether in speech or physically. So i just feel terrible, because I've got an obvious penchant for monsterhood, one that has gone from the self-hatred of my youth to wanton hatred for my opponents and teammates when i don't feel people are seeing things correctly. And like I said, what makes it worse is that in many of these instances, I feel completely justified - I'm not going to play sports and let people take cheap shots to my throat; I'm just not. I'll still feel terrible about it afterwards, and it will always make me wonder whether I should even be playing anything at all, but really, regardless of how big the dude is, does he really expect me to just let him do that to me?
So I'm clearly writing to attempt to cleanse myself. I think next week I will try pretending like I am playing as a guest like I did for the game with Josh, and hopefully that will help towards chilling me out. All I can do is get back on the course.
Oh, and lest I forget, I made one of the more ridiculous trailing edge layout catches I've ever had on a Julliette huck yesterday. Sweet times.
On the much, much brighter side - we followed up the 2.5 hour melee with a 2 hour Polaroid practice that went AWESOME. Just good stuff all around - Ben playing intense D, Q burning it up, Flor breaking the mark - all kinds of greatness going down. I am trying not to get hope overly up, but it looks like a special season in the making...
So yeah, I'm Nyet, and I still can't control my emotions on the athletic field. It's rearing its head these days as some outright hatred and rather demeaning heckles in the direction of the other team. I will try to be better, and I will in all likelihood fail at some point in the future, but them's the breaks. I've beaten myself up about yesterday more than that team can realize - though that's not any kind of excuse (for the things I did that I believe were actually unwarranted) - and so hopefully I can drop BUDA May 7, 2006 out of my brain and move on with a better "attitude" next time.
But seriously, dude? Don't ever try that cutting me off crap again. Seriously serious; it'll end the same way every time.
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