Sports

I feel like I’m always in the penalty box for something.

It’s not like I don’t understand why, for the most part, but I still don’t like it. It sometimes seems like there are social rules to which I have not been made aware, and there are a lot of refs out there not wearing stripes; sometimes it seem like that’s all anyone is, including me. Everyone is in the penalty box for something, everyone is being punished and isolated. Everyone is flinching, and shrinking, they’re just trying to keep their skates on and get some ice time, but there’s no game being played.

I’m currently serving a double major for cross-checking, a double minor for unsportsmanlike conduct, and I’m out for the season for getting on the ice when I was already out for the season. I just thought it would be safe to come to practice. I guess everyone else thought that too. I wanted to put everything behind us and play like we used to when I was Captain, but there’s old injuries and new rules, and I guess I don’t understand the game anymore. Still got my skates on though, and I’m still the grizzled veteran. I can be on the ice in seconds.

I’m not even allowed to even heckle.

Strider used to heckle. He wasn’t the most artful heckler, sticking mostly to the staples of, “YOU SUUUUCK!”, and, “GET A HAIRCUT, HIPPEE!”, or, “MY CAT CAN PLAY BETTER THAN YOU! BOOOOOOOOO!” There were more, and actually, now that I think about it (because I don’t PLAN what to write), he did have a few more. It’s not so much about the content of the heckle either, not if you’ve got excellent timing and your delivery is enthusiastic. Reliability is important, too. Sometimes it was more entertaining to watch Strider than the band, or whatever else was going on. You’d hear a break in the action, and Boom! “GO BACK TO NANAIMO! YOU SUCK!” Nobody likes being told to go back to Nanaimo, especially if they’re FROM Nanaimo, but Strider would buy appreciatory beers, and maybe we’d all go party till late, getting drunk and high, and playing fooseball until dawn by the light of candles and headlamps because the hurricane had knocked out the power.

I fucking loved Strider. He taught me how to cook, you know. Not by actually teaching me how to cook, but by how much he enjoyed cooking. I could cook pretty good, and that was a skill that my kids appreciated very much, but Strider LOVED to cook, and, I swear, everything he made was somehow the best. If you could eat it, that is. Strider had a lot of fun torturing people, and one of the ways he’d do this was by making amazing food so fucking spicy that it was unbearable, even for him, but you couldn’t stop eating it, and there was nothing to drink but beer, and it was torment, and we’d all be gasping and laughing, and Strider would, when he was able, call us all lightweights, and we’d all be sweating and swearing and laughing and eating and watching the Canucks and the Simpsons at the same time, and playing fooseball during intermissions, and we’d all get drunk and high and have a blast. I was often the one who’d stay the latest, and me and Strider would grab our boards and go night skating or ‘playfight’. I’d often make my way home, or to work just savaged by road rash, or with a busted lip or black eye......man. What a character. He loved metal too. He’d leave death metal messages on my answering machine saying that he was going to come over and chop me up and stuff me in a box, and then finish up by inviting us all over salmon dinner and that he’d also make stuff that the kids could eat.

I was playing a show with my band Wretch one night at the Army&Navy, and in between songs he came up to me and said he wanted to talk to me. It was weird because I was expecting something like, “YOU CALL THIS A BAND? YOUR AMP IS UGLY.”, and it caught me off guard because he was so obviously serious. We bounced around at the show for a while, and I took a picture of him getting kissed by Tick, but later on, I couldn’t find him. I didn’t live in town anymore; I’d just come in to do the show, so after that, I just heard news through the grapevine. Strider moved out of town. Strider came out for a surf. Strider was dead.

I try to keep him alive as well as I can. I swear at people in death growl, I call people shitnut, and when I enter competitions like the Keg run, or the firefighter games, and win shit, they have to call Quai Chang Lopez so I can get my fucking prize.

I can’t heckle though. I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.

I dreamed about Strider the other night for the first time that I can remember. He was wearing cargo shorts and gumboots and his inexplicable Clark Foam t-shirt. The lettering was orange on the shirt, not blue. His hair was the same; his hair was always the same. I often wondered how, and when, he cut it. Of all my friends, he was the only one that didn’t get a mohawk for all the mohawkey we played after Troy died. We all believed that he was serious with his death threats, and so we left his hair alone. He and I were standing on second bridge, laughing about some stupid fucking thing, or nothing, I don’t know. It was just a dream, after all. We were just laughing because we were alive and for once, with Strider in my mind, I wasn’t wondering what it was that he wanted to talk to me about.

So I woke with a smile on my face that lasted until the boot of his death, and the crushing guilt of missing him that night came down on my face, and then I remembered that I was also off the team. Off my team.

I considered some extreme measures that I thought might bring the team together, but discarded those in favour of coercing some advocacy on my behalf, which failed miserably on account of me being on an indeterminate number of seasons penalty, and unquestionably out of the line up. My day continued to unravel until, thankfully, the whistle was blown, and I stopped.fucking.trying.to fix.things.that.weren’t.broken. At least, things that weren’t me.

I don’t know why other people do things; half the time I don’t know why I do things. That’s ok. It doesn’t seem ok, and it sure doesn’t feel ok sometimes, but it probably is, even when it’s not. That doesn’t make sense, but it does, and that’s what I get for reading the Tao Te Ching. Anyway, yesterday morning I missed something.

I missed the fact that I was in a comfortable bed with a wonderful sleepy woman, and that she loves me, and I return that love. There’s a glass of water beside the bed next to the medication that I have the money to pay for because my brother has invested in my retraining because he loves me and he trusts me, and I came downstairs to write on my laptop because I have the time and skill to do that, and then I had to go back up two floors in the house I get to live in to actually take the medication that I have the money to pay for, and that helps me by mitigating the effects of the distractedness and irritability that has birthed so much of the chaos in my life and makes me miss cues like when to shut up, and how to shut up.
I spent some time yesterday wondering how I got here, how I got to where I am right now. I got here by being honest, by being brutally honest. So let’s be honest. I struggle with my mental health. I struggle every day, and sometimes I struggle all day. I am a challenging individual to spend a lot of time around, but some people still do because I am interesting, and useful, and loving. I survived an addiction that less that 5% of people do because I don’t shy away from the truth, and I am resilient and relentless if you stretch the time line far enough. I’m trying to pump myself up for this next part; there may be more, but you probably get the point; that’s how I got here. How I also got here is that I’m intransigent, reactive, temperamental, and I miss cues, cues like, when your boss asks you what you think, and to please be honest because he really wants to know so he can make things better, and you know he really doesn’t, and won’t, you probably should take the hit and act stupid so you don’t set yourself up to get fired, or, you shouldn’t agree with a parent who says their kid is intolerable if it’s not also your kid, or, when your entire rookie coaching career was conducted loosely under the philosophy that you should train your team to do well when you’re not around or are occasionally intolerable, and they kick you off the team for unsportsmanlike conduct, and want to make a go of it on their own, without you, and you fight them for that spot because all you ever wanted was to be on that team, with them, and you fight too hard, well, when you do that, you’re wrong, even if other things are wrong too, even if things are really fucked up, and all you want to do is play.

Or so I’ve heard.

I’ve never played hockey.

Sports, amiright?