Braining cute boys with sunflower seeds: an evening of an American pastime.

[elsajeni]

So tonight? Alexandria Beetles game. This is a very, very minor baseball league-- the Northwoods League, I think-- featuring the Alexandria Beetles, the Duluth Huskies, and my favorite team of all, the St. Cloud River Bats. What is a River Bat? Anyway, it was good. Every time I go to a baseball game, I start out sort of annoyed-- man, why are you making me go to a baseball game, it's boring, it's stupid, it's-- ooh, that Duluth player is kinda cute. Aw, look at the little bat boy! He's so blond and Minnesotan-looking! And then the game gets going and I forget that I was ever bored and annoyed, because baseball is a good game for watching-- not so fast-paced that the watcher is often left bewildered, not so slow that the watcher falls asleep (unless the watcher is my cousin Alex, who threw a fit in the middle of the second inning when the batteries to his Gameboy ran out and had to be taken for a walk around the stadium to tire him out enough that he quit whining), not so simple that it gets boring, not so complicated that you get annoyed and start booing on general principles... it's a good game to be a spectator. And on top of the sheer pleasure of watching baseball, you get to sit next to Alex and his stuffed moose (named Moosie-- Alex sticks to a very simple naming system for stuffed animals: Moosie, Kitty, Piggy... with the one exception being Bob the Pig, and you'd better not mistake Bob for a boy's name, because Bob is a girl pig), and you get to buy a humongous bag of sunflower seeds to share with Andy, and you get to boo and hiss at the Duluth manager because he's out there hollering at the umpire just because a Beetles player made an ass out of his third baseman and the umpire accepted it as safe, and so forth.

Sunflower seeds might be the best thing about baseball. A game isn't complete without honing your spitting skills, and when the guy behind the counter at the concession stand smiles in a fatherly manner and offers you a cup to spit the shells into just because you're a girl, you smile back, but not very sincerely, and then spend some time later seeing if you can get a decent angle on his bald spot without anyone seeing you, and eventually someone accidentally spits a shell into an innocent bystander's soda and people's mothers get involved and take away the sunflower seeds, but eventually they give in and you get them back and can go back to the contest you were having, aiming at a specific hole in the fence that's there to protect you from foul balls, that was disrupted when that lady walked across with her soda when anyone could have seen that she was walking into a firing range and she's the one who should have been more careful, especially since it was Andy's turn and he, like time, stops for no man, and also for no lady with a soda, so it's really not your fault, and you get so distracted arguing about whose fault it was that you aim way to the right and somehow manage to hit that cute Duluth player in the ear and have to duck behind Andy until you can stop giggling.

As you can probably tell, a good time was had by all. Except possibly for the cute Duluth player I brained with a sunflower seed. Sorry, cute Duluth player. It was in the service of a good cause. I totally won the spitting contest.