Yesterday was a Day of Shit
First, the weather went bad … literally raining on mine and my bandmate’s plans to get shot for promotional purposes. So I stayed in all day, whiling away the time until my 11:30 hockey game. I spent the bulk of the time working on our band’s webpage. It’s more or less ready, now. We could probably move forward if we had the photos. But we don’t.
I walked to the train at 10 p.m. last night, huge bag of hockey equipment over my shoulder, it’s cold and raining out … but not until I get to the station, three blocks away, and DOWN the STAIRS, do I realize I don’t have my fucking wallet. Yeah.
So, I walked home with all my equipment, got my damned wallet and walked back to the station. When I got to 23rd Street, there were no buses in sight, so I then had to walk the four avenue blocks to Chelsea Piers and then the rest of the way into the complex to the end of the pier, which comprises about another city avenue block.
I’m fit. I’m in good shape. It wasn’t a problem, but it did start to nag at me as the game wore on. My knee isn’t quite back to 100%, though it’s pretty damned close. My team played like shit. I couldn’t score despite a bevvy of great chances … I even got stoned on a sliding two-pad stack save. That was some old school goaltending … but, fuck, did I feel snake bitten; I got great wood on the shot, lifted it too, but all it hit were the pillows. Fuck my life.
We lost. 2-0. One of the goals came off the stick of a guy way too good to play at our shitty ass level. No one in our league should be able to crank a rising slapper from the blueline that is in the net before the goalie even thinks to react.
I planned on staying for the scrimmage afterward, but my knee wasn’t up to it. Some guy on the other team had actually raked his skate blade across the back of my bad knee — I’ve got a nice bloody patch to show for it — and I had thrown everything I had into the game and simply had nothing else left.
So, me and my lady — who came from a bourgeois gathering on the Upper East Side to watch the game — headed back to my place. We waited forever for the train, the MTA purports to run 24/7 but at 1:30, it’s pretty poor. When the train did finally come, it was nearly empty and we sat down across from a homeless couple. Yeah, you read that right. If I had an ounce of humanity left to spare anyone, I might have been moved by their sad, drunken / retarded, dirty coupling.
And maybe it’s my perception of the pitifulness of their station instead of the touching parts of it that caused their lice to crawl across the train car and up onto my hockey bag to say hello.
Fuck my life.
Two lice were crawling on my bag that we could see. We found a third one too and then we moved. Skeeved out, neither me nor my girl could sit at ease and I obsessively checked my bag for more of the crawling, tiny, translucent little crabs. I didn’t see any, but I still didn’t feel at ease … so I lifted up my forearm, which was resting against my thigh and, lo, there’s another one. Or maybe it was one of the others I’d already divested of my bag … either way, disgusting. Fucking hell, we were besieged by fucking lice.
I’ve heard horror stories about how people have brought home bedbugs, unbeknowst to them until the bastards are entrenched in their mattress, but now I really understand how easily that could happen. Thank goodness for our eagle eyes and our obsessive compulsion to check and recheck and check again for the tiny bloodsucking pieces of shit … I’ve had the creeps all day today because of that experience last night. Thank god I’ve got a shaved head.
Today was marginally better, but it was no great shakes. Just another hash mark on the wall of the prison of mediocrity.