Cole, BP, Ian P, Aaron, Griesy, Trantstamp, Jim, Skunk, Dheintime, Tim, Vince, Dixon, Paul
Ian N, J-Ro, Studer, Joe, Nyet, EBay, Rob, Cisco, Josh
The pinnacle of Sprawl's season, the 2010 Southwest Regional Tournament in Oxnard Santa Barbara, CA, came and went this last weekend. Sprawl came up well short of its Nationals goal and, sadly, will probably spend a significant portion of the offseason pondering what might have been.
The party started for the Nyetverse on Friday at noon. Griesy, Paul and Ebay were scheduled to appear at la casa de floras at high time, and somehow, somehow, somehow, we all collectively convinced Cole to appear as well and make the trip to Cali with us*. We were taking Griesy's parents' minivan, and after some fun times hanging around the living room and discussing the desert tortoise Sigma that was hanging out in Beck's and my bath tub - yeah, Beck strikes again! - we headed out at roughly 12:30 for the 7+ hour drive to friggin' Oxnard, CA, the location of our hotel**.
* - Don't get me started.
** - The Southwest Regional Coordinator royally screwed up the weekend. He waited until about four weeks before the tourney to actually confirm that SoCal would be hosting regionals (there was a brief time in which we thought Tim might have to take over and host things in Scottsdale - too bad), and then told everyone he had reserved fields for all divisions (open, women's, mixed and masters'). Only he had only reserved said fields for only Saturday, which doesn't work so well for a two day tournament. About two weeks before we got a message that the national coordinator would step in to fix the mess and organize things in Santa Babara ... but we never heard where. Aaron H. had already found hotels in Oxnard, and everything in SB at that late date was $200 per night plus, with it being Columbus Day weekend and all. So we had to keep our Oxnard hotels, and eventually found out that we would be playing at four different locations over the two days, meaning we had to drive around SB between games. More on that later, but suffice it to say that we had a less than ideal housing / traveling situation for the weekend.
I packed a book for school and two books for possible pleasure reading, but of course nary a one was cracked - too much fun conversation. The trip passed relatively painlessly as we killed the time discussing innovative Ultimate strategies*, how all the Florida college Ulty player must be great athletes because "they're built just like me,**" how the Venn diagram of those who had never seen Mary Poppins and didn't know what the phrase "T and A" meant landed squarely on EBay, and how no one had a very good explanation for why country music is so popular if it really is so "obviously" stupid***. In other words, the typical meandering tales of road trip. We hit up religion and Cole's favorite cancer - skin, ftr - to round things out. Oh, and Ebay reiterated our mission to transcribe Jay-Z's "99 Problems" into some kind of formal-ish English:
If thou hast difficulties with the fairer sex, I have an announcement for thee, my male offspring
I hast four score and nineteen difficulties, but a wench does not count amongst them.
Strike me!
* - Not to give away too much, but it seems the fine people at USA U neglected to prohibit jetpacks in the 11th edition rules. We will be exploiting that loophole shortly.
** - spoken by Cole.
*** - I recently read David Lipsky's quasi-biographical account of David Foster Wallace - he had been hired by Rolling Stone to interview DFW during the latter's book tour for Infinite Jest. It's a pretty sporadic account, tracing the conversations verbatim as it does, but it gives a lot of insight into the experience of writing / delivering that book. One thing that DFW harps on a bit is how he had repeatedly noticed a tendency within himself to underestimate the intelligence of the reader / average American or what have you, which is why I bring this up now. Country - that is, modern, glossy, insipid, poppy country - clearly resonates with a lot of people. One explanation is, natch, that they and it are dumb. That's the one Cole gave, that we are educated and therefore we don't like country. Dubious at best. But in the spirit of DFW, I want to try to understand rather than just condemn. There's a passage in the book in which he tries to equate the tropes of country music with a general metaphor of regret, longing, nostalgia, etc., all surrounding the experience of loneliness. Meaning that the tales of breakup and loss and good times are not meant to be literal summer night accounts, but really stand-ins for advice for how to cope in a bitter, cold world. I don't know if I can give country-listeners that sort of second level credit, but insofar as the choice to enjoy that type of music represents in anyway an active decision to forego the analytical in seeking pure, pseudo-Buddhist be-the-moment relief ... well, it makes me a tad more tolerant. I mean, I still don't understand the phenomenon of modern country's popularity, and I don't *really* believe that sort of meta-awareness activity is really taking place. But the fact that the angle exists makes me more willing to open my mind, even to a genre which I pretty much hate with all my being. This was all on my mind when i asked why we all so casually agreed, against popular opinion, that country music sucked. I didn't really get a satisfactory answer.
Everything car-ride-wise went smoothly until we hit L.A. at 5 o'clock ... oops. Unlike Art Brut, there's no chance I'm going to live there anytime soon, lest I murder someone.We *finally* pulled into the hotel parking lot at about 7:30 and ran into Aaron, Ian, J-Ro, Monika, etc. immediately. They were headed to Chili's, so we didn't even bother to unpack the car, just hopped back in and headed to the warm familiarity of a franchise. We had to wait a bit, but the time was easily filled with Ian and Aaron picking my brain for how we would strategically handle the tourney. I got a half rack of baby back ribs for some pre-tourney saltiness (supplemented by a serving of carby rice), and ... they sucked. I mean, what was there was tasty, but what was there was minimal, skimpy meat, and I left the restaurant hungry. Grrrr. We headed to a grocery store to stock up for the following day, and I had to get some yogurt and a Zone bar to keep from going to bed hungry. On the plus side, Ebay pretty much made my day at the grocery store - when the cashier asked him, "Would you like to donate a dollar to breast cancer?," Ebay correctly replied, "No! I hate breast cancer! Why the hell would I give it money?" HA! We got our supplies and headed back to the hotel to quickly go to bed.
Why quickly? Well, in all the idiotic field reservation confusion, the coordinators failed to get fields with lights. So with five rounds to play on a day past the autumnal equinox, we had to start at 8 in the friggin' morning. In Santa Barbara, mind you, and yeah, we were 45 minutes away in Oxnard. All of which meant a 6 am departure time, which meant a 5:30-at-the-latest wake-up time, which meant get to bed pronto. I nabbed a room with Vince, Paul and Cole.We caught a little of the baseball game, but got to bed at a pretty reasonable 10 pm time. I was awoken by a screaming sleep-talking Vince at one point in the night, and otherwise slept terribly, my usual in-a-strange-bed routine. After waking up probably 15 times at various short intervals over the night, I snapped-to at 4:30 Am and got up for good - it was game day, so I got up and got ready.
4:45 AM is quite a time be putting on suntan lotion in a hotel bathroom... to be continued.
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