13 May 2012

Smash It Up



No racetrack last night. Went out for food. Drank a lot of 1516. Slept in late, dreaming all the while.

The best dream, the one in my beery head when I woke momentarily to let the dog into the chirpy, chirpy morning, was a hockey dream. I was at a play-off game between the hometown Steepleton Cross-Checkers and our hated rivals from the Interior, the Vernon Mikes. The dream must have been set in the future because the hockey paths of Steepleton and Vernon do not presently cross.

There were a lot of fucking cops at the game. The fans of each team apparently hating one another every bit as much or more than their hockey heroes but not hating each other enough to put aside their differences to take on the cops, instead of each other, when they tried brutishly to intervene when the first fights in the stands broke out. It rarely happens, of course, but when the kids are united, look fucking out. One day, maybe, it will happen on Granville Street at four o'clock in the morning.

I watched it all from the bar of course. Funny how a writer's need for perspective follows him from reality to unreality. Also his love of beer. The executive team from the Vernon squad were there in the bar with me. Must have been the only safe place for them in the arena. For some reason they were all wearing green jackets like those assholes from the Masters golf tournament. They were big and fat and they did not even have a brain.

The dream married my experiences as a football supporter in England to a future where sports fans in my own country have set aside their savage politeness in favour of the sort of hooliganism that has not quite blossomed here. Strange it has not fully blossomed really. Airplane travel in North America, like the trains and coaches of England, has made it easy to to watch your home team many miles from home. When I see thousands of Canuck fans making asses of themselves in cities across our continent I have often asked myself, "Why doesn't somebody smash their fucking heads in?"

1 comment:

Danneau said...

There is a very old song by Georges Brassens (unfortunately for most of us out here on the Wet Coast, in French, no surprise as Brassens was born and lived most of his life in France, but for a stint in Nazi labour camps) about a couple of women who get into a scrap in the market in Brive-La-Gaillarde over a bunch of onions and who then unite in battling the local constabulary when that group chooses to intervene. The imagery is of the basest kind in keeping with Brassens' respect for the matrons of the market and his never-disguised contempt for "les forces de l'ordre", as contemporary politicians like to call the police. Your dream reminds me somewhat remotely of the Brassens song which, lest I be mistaken, is called "Hécatombe".