Thoughts on a Giants Game

Since I was a kid, baseball games have honestly filled me up with horror. The idea that you are supposed to sit still for nine innings and watch someone else play seemed quite boring. Being in the game, sure, that was where the action was. I can't play to save my life, but it is fun to hit things with sticks and run like a crazed kitten after a ball.

Apparently, though, one does not sit for long at a pro game. One arrives, one eats, one shops, one wanders about through a stadium that would have made visitors to the hippodrome feel right at home. And even after you locate your seats there are several reasons to get up. Beer. Food. Fly balls. The Wave. Staring at those hipsters from Google in the impossibly tight jeans and speculate on their survival...or perhaps just their remaining circulatory systems.

Okay that last one is probably limited to Giants games, but the rest seemed universal. Jim dragged me along to a Loral event for his group, and did my best to make a good impression and not look behind me. We were in the very top row so that all that sat between me and my achrophobic self was the chain link fence and a sturdy stadium seat. Wheee.

Jim felt the same way so we were two grimly happy folks not looking behind us for several minutes. Then the Giants made a good showing of beating the Dodgers silly and the razzing of the Los Angeles members of his group began. It was all in good fun and not at all likely to get us arrested by any plain clothes police. However, we were reminded every 15 minutes or so that we could text FOUL to a local hotline if any sort of bad behavior were occurring.

All in all my first MLB game was fun it was what came afterwards that cracked the evening.

And the third accident

This would be Jim's third accident in the CR-V. This is not to say that I am an especially good driver, just that I tend to drive less, in less hellish conditions and when I do drive I tend to do it with the grim Germanic conviction that everyone is in fact out to get me.

We were headed home from the Giant's Game. We left after an ice cream and hot chocolate in the 7th inning in the hopes of escaping traffic. Unfortunately we were parked along the pier in what Jim generically termed as GRIM. I was more flippant after a night out of death defying heights and asked him politely if he thought we'd run into Thomas and Sarah Wayne on our way home.

Fortunately his parents let him out enough that he gets that joke. Now and then I get tripped by the differences in our upbringing.

We headed home through what can only be described as the usual sort of San Francisco joke on tourists. Street signs that promised a freeway for several blocks, yet failed to exactly deliver. We cut over using our knowledge of the area and headed back to Loral, where I'd left the van.

Several things went wrong at first. 101 at that stretch lacks a shoulder. The Jersey barriers come right up to the lane line. A gentleman for no apparent reason was stopped in the slow lane. A kid who had just learned how to drive was stopping to deal with the situation. We were right behind him.

Anyone who's been in an accident says that it happened so fast. I guess we are expected to say this. The truth is that time seems to slow down if you can anticipate the outcome. And you're stuck with your brain having completed calculations that your body will simply have to wait to live out.

We walked away. I guess that is something.