Last weekend, rather than absorb my typical diet of basketball from my couch or baseball atop a barstool (where I would have almost certainly found myself engaged in an argument with a stranger over the obvious benefits of the designated hitter), I went to a music festival for four entire days of rock and/or roll music, but absolutely zero sports.
You're probably thinking to yourself right now, "Jeez, this damn guy gets to go to the internationally known Sasquatch Festival and now he's bitching about having missed out on sports? Puh-leese."
First of all, that's not how you spell "please" and secondly, I'm not exactly bitching about having to go to the festival, but rather publicly realizing that my addiction to professional and amateur sports has grown at a rate that's far more rapid than that of my own technological evolution. You see, I don't have one of those computer machine telephones that you merely pull out of your pocket and are given e-mails, Facebook pokes, sexts (actually, I can get sexts but my scratched display screen pretty much takes the fun out of it) and, most importantly, provides up-to-the-second sports scores. My telephone mostly just tells me the time and vibrates when people call me... mostly to return my calls asking for an update on a sports score.
And that's exactly what I had to do this weekend when I realized very late Saturday night that the Seattle Mariners (far and away my most masochistic sports obsession... they've broken my heart many a time, but I keep coming back) were taking on the godforsaken New York Yankees as I was standing there bobbing my head to some Death Cab for Cutie song I didn't even particularly like. I couldn't just ask people to pull out their phones and look up a score they probably didn't care about. It wasn't until the next morning that I learned the M's downed the Yankees in 12 innings.
Then I got to thinking about all the other sporting events I was missing. What the hell is going on with the NBA Finals? Did they already start? Did Dirk Nowitzki already score a million points and maybe finally admit, as I proposed in last week's column, that he actually is Thor, the god of thunder and hammers and stuff like that? Also, why does this substantially Canadian festival crowd keep breaking into chants about the Vancouver Canucks? Is it Stanley Cup Finals time? And the Canucks are still a hockey team? I mean, I don't care about hockey, but shouldn't I know this? I'm losing my damn mind and thanks to my non-futuristic cellular telephone, I'll never be a real sports columnist.
Maybe I should get one of those phones. The sports connectivity would be better, as would, I suppose, the sexting... once someone finally explains to me what "sexting" is.
