It is weird: the way entertainment forms us. I always liked reading. I spent more time in the two libraries near my home than most kids. They were not big as libraries go, just a little bigger than the library in Hamiota, Manitoba. To me, however, those libraries were bigger than Pamela Anderson's tits.
As long as you brought your books back on time libraries were Free and as my Hockey family did not have the money to waste on library fines, my books were always returned on time. I forget how much the fines at the library were, two cents I think, enough money to buy a pack of Kool-Aid and get the whole family buzzed for a couple hours.
Mostly I read sports stories. A boy needs heroes. My favourite sports stories when I was little were about Satchel Paige, the great Anarchist Negro League, Major League and barnstorming pitcher. His most heroic quality was perseverence. Perseverence is at the heart of all things heroic. Anybody can be great but to be a hero is to keep on being great every day of your motherfucking life. That is why so many of our boys turn out to be such shitheads: there's no more heroes any more. Once people make it in this world they put their feet up and fuck the dog.
I guess I would have been about 13 0r 14 when I read Jim Bouton's "Ball Four." That was when I found out baseball players like Mickey Mantle liked looking up girl's dresses just as much as I did. Later I would learn that I liked taking pills and getting boozed up just as much as baseball players too.
That is what I learned about by reading sports books as a boy: there are very few truly one of a kind, bigger than life people like Paige in the world and the rest of us settle for being fucked up beyond all recognition. That's life, that's what it is and that is what makes FIFA's World Cup so great for England supporters like me. It is not about the heroes, they are all fucking each other's wives and whoring around like Tiger Woods, it is about getting loaded, waving flags and fighting in the streets.
1 comment:
Now that Maradonna is back on the team - on the benches, granted, with a huge fuck off cigar - I shall be watching Argentina closely. As an entrenched celt with an inferiority complex, there is only one thing I like better than to see England going out on penalties, or a Paul Gascoigne dribbling tears.
And that is to see them getting fist-fucked by the hand of God.
I still owe or public library the maximum fine. It escalated from a minor penalty to a full £10 in less than a month. I did not remember taking the book out. They no longer issue reminders.
My intellectual growth has suffered as a result.
You're right about the once great letting it slip as soon as they graduate from amphetamine sulphate to the finest cut cocaine.
Fortunately, Scotland does not pretend to even occasionally field a hero. We whip the aspiration out of our homegrown transgressors at birh.
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