Indians Game

Base­ball is near the pin­na­cle of bore­dom but I’ve gone to two games in five days and not had a ter­ri­ble time.

Sat­ur­day I went to the mati­nee game against the Roy­als which was a blowoutish win for the Indi­ans. The weath­er was nice and I though I did not have mon­ey to buy ball­park cui­sine, the tick­et was free and the com­pa­ny good. The top of my head got mild­ly roast­ed because my short hair did not pro­vide much cov­er­age. I had an aisle seat in left field which let me stretch out my gimp leg once it start­ed to hurt [which nev­er real­ly hap­pened, but I stretched my leg out any­way]. A bunch of late 20s ear­ly 30s frat guys were in the row in front of us, play­ing some sort of bet­ting game that had extreme­ly intri­cate rules based on bat­ters and num­bers of pitch­es per inning and stuff. Below them sat some dirty old man who kept hug­ging the woman to our far right who had an ‘I’m 30, Hug Me’ shirt on her tor­so.

To our left and a lit­tle below us was a pret­ty girl and her almost as pret­ty girl friend, who were at the game man­less [which is a rather strange thing in my book, all of the cute girls I had seen apart from those two [and there are quite a few at Indi­ans games appar­ent­ly] were with dudes]. After the old dude made friends with the frat­ties [even to the point of bum­ming beer off of them] he went over and con­vinced the girls to come sit with him. So all the drunk­en frat guys hugged all of those girls [because they’d been hug­ging every girl ever since they saw the 30th birth­day woman] and ceased pay­ing atten­tion to the game in order to all simul­ta­ne­ous­ly hit on the cuter of the two [who inci­den­tal­ly was around my age and kept look­ing over all of their shoul­ders at me, i swear]. The old man sat between the girls, a wedge effec­tive­ly pre­vent­ing them from talk­ing to each oth­er instead of all the guys while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly allow­ing the dirty old man to put his arms around them both.

Last evening, instead of writ­ing a poem like I was sup­posed to, I went to anoth­er game against the Detroit Tigers and we tail­gat­ed a bit before. The Indi­ans won again, anoth­er home run was hit into our stands, our sec­tion got free hot dogs, there were still cute girls in abun­dance [all with dudes this time] and I sat exact­ly next to the guy who beats the drum. He was quite nice, but I can’t hear so well out of my right ear now.

–‡–

I for­got to men­tion, there were born-again street preach­ers spread­ing the word near us. I took their lit­tle pam­phlet and glanced through it. A lot of peo­ple [some in my group] were a bit affront­ed at being preached to. They even went up to the folks preach­ing and voiced their dis­ap­proval. Which I’m also fine with. I think I feel a lit­tle strange though, because both seem to be speak­ing past the peo­ple they are address­ing. I think street evan­ge­lism serves to build per­son­al faith bet­ter than it is effec­tive in mak­ing folks born again. I don’t see the point of non born-agains mak­ing fun of them after­ward though. Its just a form of oppres­sion.

I sort of won­der what those born-again in my fam­i­ly feel in this regard. Espe­cial­ly my uncle Col­lier. We nev­er real­ly talked about any­thing along these lines in Cana­da, but I was think­ing along them any­way.