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I'm wearing one black shoe and one brown.
Somebody, please, shoot me. Now.
Somebody, please, shoot me. Now.
Dec. 23rd, 2003
how ABOUT them Red Wings?
Dec. 23rd, 2003 10:15 amSo, last night I did for the first time something I really ought to have done earlier in life: I went to a Red Wings game. And not just any game; they were playing the Blues, division rivals (math indicates that unless something really horrendous happens to the Blues, they'll take the division title from us when they've played all their games) and team of our former goalie, Chris Osgood.
( A word about Ozzie )
Er. Right. Anyway. The thing I really wanted to talk about wasn't actually the game, although that was cool - there's no commentary at the arena, so there was something oddly like reverent silence through the game. It wasn't silence, of course. People were talking, telling each other what had just happened, yelling at various players or telling them what to do. But the crowd, as a whole, was as close to silent as crowds get, much of the time, just. Watching. Listening to the shuss of skates on ice and the slap of the puck - sharp against the boards, muffled against a goalies pads - waiting for the crunch and rattle of a solid hit against the glass.
But before that, before the game, while the PA was still tossing out random pop tunes interspersed with Christmas carols, while people were still filing into their seats with their Little Caesars pizzas and seven dollar beers, there was the warm-up skate.
You catch a glimpse of it on TV sometimes, the guys skating in circles while one or two outliers stretch out on the ice, but the real thing was... wow. Twenty-two red jerseys on the ice, wheeling and circling in a familiar pattern, taking leisurely-looking shots at their buddy in the goal, and you realize: this is a team. Not a collection of five-man squads, three-man offensive lines and two-man defensive pairings, not a line of guys sitting on the bench waiting to be tapped, intent on the action. A team. Lining up for one drill, crashing the net together for another, playing a game together, all of them. This must be what hockey is, for them, most of the time. Games are what we see, but for the team, there's much more time spent drilling and training and practicing, and they do it like this, together, as a team, and that is so unutterably cool.
I'm so glad I could see it.
( A word about Ozzie )
Er. Right. Anyway. The thing I really wanted to talk about wasn't actually the game, although that was cool - there's no commentary at the arena, so there was something oddly like reverent silence through the game. It wasn't silence, of course. People were talking, telling each other what had just happened, yelling at various players or telling them what to do. But the crowd, as a whole, was as close to silent as crowds get, much of the time, just. Watching. Listening to the shuss of skates on ice and the slap of the puck - sharp against the boards, muffled against a goalies pads - waiting for the crunch and rattle of a solid hit against the glass.
But before that, before the game, while the PA was still tossing out random pop tunes interspersed with Christmas carols, while people were still filing into their seats with their Little Caesars pizzas and seven dollar beers, there was the warm-up skate.
You catch a glimpse of it on TV sometimes, the guys skating in circles while one or two outliers stretch out on the ice, but the real thing was... wow. Twenty-two red jerseys on the ice, wheeling and circling in a familiar pattern, taking leisurely-looking shots at their buddy in the goal, and you realize: this is a team. Not a collection of five-man squads, three-man offensive lines and two-man defensive pairings, not a line of guys sitting on the bench waiting to be tapped, intent on the action. A team. Lining up for one drill, crashing the net together for another, playing a game together, all of them. This must be what hockey is, for them, most of the time. Games are what we see, but for the team, there's much more time spent drilling and training and practicing, and they do it like this, together, as a team, and that is so unutterably cool.
I'm so glad I could see it.
(no subject)
Dec. 23rd, 2003 01:44 pmDunno if this happened where you were, but last year, late at night on Christmas Eve, the ground was brown and bare, and we were looking at your basic Dirty Grayish Christmas. And then I went to midnight Mass with my family, and when I came out, like a soppy Christmas miracle, the ground was blanketed in snow, and the air was full of snowflakes like somebody had very gently shaken up the snowglobe while we weren't paying attention.
This morning it was pouring rain, but the forecast called for it to turn to snow by midafternoon. I was hungry this morning, and thought about going somewhere on my lunch break, and imagined that I would leave in the pouring rain, clutching my umbrella and trying not to drag the hems of my pants through any major puddles, and that the rain would turn to snow while I ate my sandwich and read my book, and I would walk back to work in a snowglobe world.
Then I remembered that I'm wearing mismatched shoes and don't really want to walk anywhere in the rain, even one way, and one of those stealth-attack headaches showed up with sufficient intensity to be really distracting, so I stuck with the original plan of underdiluted Campbell's soup and a zine in the breakroom. I looked out the big windows in there while my soup was in the microwave. It was spitting rain--probably sleet--and people were moving quickly under umbrellas where they were visible at all, but the break room was warm and quiet and cozily dim, and I sat down with my soup and my zine and did not noticeably worsen my headache by turning on Strong Bad Sings (track one: TROGDOR!) at volume 9.
And then one of my coworkers happened in, and then another, and we sat and talked cheerfully, companionably, and the rain turned into snow, big flakes, like a snowglobe, like I'd imagined, except that instead of being chilly and solitary I was warm and gregarious. And immediately inspired to spam my livejournal.
This morning it was pouring rain, but the forecast called for it to turn to snow by midafternoon. I was hungry this morning, and thought about going somewhere on my lunch break, and imagined that I would leave in the pouring rain, clutching my umbrella and trying not to drag the hems of my pants through any major puddles, and that the rain would turn to snow while I ate my sandwich and read my book, and I would walk back to work in a snowglobe world.
Then I remembered that I'm wearing mismatched shoes and don't really want to walk anywhere in the rain, even one way, and one of those stealth-attack headaches showed up with sufficient intensity to be really distracting, so I stuck with the original plan of underdiluted Campbell's soup and a zine in the breakroom. I looked out the big windows in there while my soup was in the microwave. It was spitting rain--probably sleet--and people were moving quickly under umbrellas where they were visible at all, but the break room was warm and quiet and cozily dim, and I sat down with my soup and my zine and did not noticeably worsen my headache by turning on Strong Bad Sings (track one: TROGDOR!) at volume 9.
And then one of my coworkers happened in, and then another, and we sat and talked cheerfully, companionably, and the rain turned into snow, big flakes, like a snowglobe, like I'd imagined, except that instead of being chilly and solitary I was warm and gregarious. And immediately inspired to spam my livejournal.