Thursday, January 05, 2006

Vince Young, mon amour

I saw the best football game I will ever see tonight. With rabid U.T. football fans, five babes and four year olds strewing toys all over the floor, and beer, which I wasn't planning on drinking this week (this was juice/purify the body week) in my belly and roaming the fretted paths of the consciousness.

U.T. -- Champions. A lovely, lovely game. And Vince Young owns this town.

ps

Last night, I finagled a spot watching the Rose Bowl game with two friends who were going to a third friends house. The house was down in Kyle, in a new, rather raw subdivision, one of those cruel exposures of wood and glass and brick to the pitiless Texas sky, the trees and other vegetation having been thoroughly routed by bulldozer and just creeping back into precarious existence via the aboriculture of some of the more green-thumby householders. There were approximately four infants scattered around the living room, three of them appropriately dressed in burnt orange, before the large screen tv that could do amazing things (my own tv can’t really get tv channels – rather I switch from one cloud of staticy unknowing to another, with figures vaguely looming out and disappearing - so I use it solely to watch dvds, and am rather out of the loop re tv technology – which is why I audibly wondered at the marvels available via remote – for instance, stopping a show and going backwards – like any yokel from the sticks with shit on his boots, and my friends explained to their friends that I was a bit retarded, but generally harmless). There were three male U.T. fans and two female U.T. fans. There were a variety of plastic blocks and toys fanned out across the rug. There was at any time four bottles of beer or two glasses of wine being drunk. There was much denunciation of the obvious media bias towards USC (led by yours truly, always keeping a nasty eye out for bias). And my friend’s friend was a fan of my type: bobbing up and down, yelling at the tv, and in general subject to mild epileptoid fits of appreciation or vituperation that rated well up on the calorie scale. My friend’s friend claimed that if U.T. won, he would celebrate with me by smashing all the car windows in the neighborhood (since I pointed out that the appropriate way to celebrate winning a championship is, traditionally, a riot). But we didn’t break any car windows or even burn any tires. We did race outside screaming at the top of our lungs. If we had been in Austin, ours would have simply been part of the chorus of voices – but Kyle is quieter, and I think we were the only people in the neighborhood making a ruckus. Then, going home, we got caught in the spontaneous parade down Guadalupe of college kids in pickup trucks (the most bizarre use of a pickup truck is that of transporting an eighteen year old from his apartment a half a mile from the campus to a university in which he invests a mile of driving time to looking for a parking space, as if it took an extra ton of metal to accomplish this noble deed), and watched a cop decide to let the four way stop on Guadalupe and 14th work its own knots and peculiarities out.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, this was just great. I hope you are going to use a lot of this kind of detail in your novel, as this sort of stuff really sings. Of course, I am like Miss Jean Brodie when it comes to knowing what is good, as when she said 'Giotto is the greatest painter. HE is my FAVOURITE!'

Anyway (regarding vegetable juice failures), you would of been a good man if it had been somebody to shoot you every minute of your life...(loose translation from the Milledgeville-ish)

Roger Gathmann said...

Ho ho ho, Patrick!
I got a little carried away this morning by the humble parenthesis, I notice. By the time I die, I am going to master that grammatical form -- it is one of my lifetime resolutions.

Anonymous said...

You're way more evolved than I am about controlling parenthesis addiction. I am so overloaded with them most of the time, I start using start-and-end dashes for the same thing. I like to keep a lot of things in the closet while showing them off at the same time, which parentheses and long dash enclosures are really good for.

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