Softball is over. We fucking lost. Badly. I struck out our last out of the last inning of the end of the season. The only thing different from now and junior high is I can afford the beer and I make the salary that makes me realize it doesn’t fucking matter.

You know that shit about your permanent record and the president’s fitness test and measurement and standardized and fitting in and all of that shit. Not true. Doesn’t fucking matter. At the end of the day a pitcher of fermented hops and barley is like $10, $20 tops. I have a significant multiple of that in the bank.

So, who the fuck cares, right? Still and all, would have loved not to strike out the final at bat, the final inning of the final game. Color me losing.

One of the dudes at work is all Mexican and shit. In fact, when I lose my job for being a racist Bostonian, it will be because of one of the dudes who teases me for being all Mexican and shit and knowing he can tease me. Only someone who doesn’t know will overhear us and I will be all unemployed.

Well, one of his brother’s he hangs out. Turns out, he may have, in fact, have witnessed my shame three years ago when I was the drunkest I have ever been in this state, the state of California. Seriously, tequila drunk. Tequila drunk, honey will you pick me up, I’m sorry that I can no longer form words drunk. He remembers, like three years ago, he might have met me.

Shame.

And we lost at softball.

But, on the bright side, here’s the major difference between Mass. and Cali. I’m at a bar, softball players are drinking pitchers of cheap beer. Yeah, that’s the same. Only then, folks are swapping stories about learning how to shoot guns. BB guns, air rifles, like Red Ryders. Skeet shooting with 12 gauge and 24 gauge rifles. Hand guns, pistols, rifles, weaponry in general. The difference between trap and skeet shooting (I think maybe up and down versus side to side). Shooting lizards, hunting partridge, dove, ducks (apparently the coldest and wettest), shooting cans and targets and seagulls.

Here’s my point of comparison, one among hundreds of kids growing up in my ‘hood might have had a BB gun. I know, but I can’t place the details, that at least one little boy in my childhood universe got buckshot or BBs embedded in a body part. And, that’s where it ends. Except for maybe boys, like my brothers, launching amphibians in space on bottle rockets and rocket kits or blowing them to kingdom come with M80s. Here they had lizards and fire power.

The suburbs here are suburbia written large and cliched. Think Brady Bunch, Partridge Family and Eight is Enough rolled into one with CHiPs patrolling everyone all safely. Only here, Marcia might have been taken hunting alongside Tracy and Adam Rich (or one of the other girl characters). Everyone here, it would seem, has shot guns.

And now, I’ve drunken beers with them and been scared. Maybe I should rethink Singapore.

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