High school sports, sweat, boys and girls, the beginning of sex, and beverages [2/2]

The girls who play soccer are always playing soccer, and they are always drinking Gatorade. Fall into winter, winter into spring, in sports bras, in spandex and in my memory that Gatorade is always bright blue yellow red or purple, some nearly synesthetic sweet fluorescence that everyone accepts as natural although it’s anything but. 

Funny how much effort it takes to acquire the veneer of effortlessness.

The girls who play soccer are beautiful, and they take it for granted, even though for most of them, this is the closest to fluorescence they will ever get. And the most fit too.

I was never great at sports, I was never even good, but because this was the suburbs, and because my father was the man that he is, I was on the team for many years. Soccer was Monday and Wednesday afternoons and dance was Tuesdays and Thursdays. I wasn’t much good at dance either, I didn’t even like it. But I always loved and I always will love watching. Only by watching was I able to access the feeling that my longer, leaner friends talked about when they talked about d-a-n-c-e, the breathy mystery I could never quite enter when I was actually dancing.

David Foster Wallace on tennis: “it may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones truly able to see, articulate and animate the experience of the gift we are denied.” Of course DFW chronically relies on the one-two punch of prickishness and paternalism when trying to describe anyone with greater talent than him. But I do think it’s true that a great athletic/artistic performance is “a concrete, transient instantiation of a grace that for most of us remains abstract and immanent.”

Grace is difficult to evoke, and it is even more difficult to describe. One attempt at a definition: grace is intention aligned with action and consequence. People in ballet talk a lot about “alignment”, about “lines.” “Lines” refers to the shape of the body (positive space) outlined by the space around it (negative space). In arabesque a line runs clear from the dancer’s lifted foot, through the hips and arms, unbroken through the fingers. The foot points towards infinity in one direction, the fingers towards infinity in the other.

But the final “line” is in the dancer’s eyes. She must be looking at that infinity. If she sees it so will we. If she shows us where it is then the dance goes on forever.¹

Consider everyone in the stands of a high school sporting event. Fat uncles and unkind mothers. Boys with their newly minted baritones bellowing DIDJA SEE THAT? DIDJA SEE THAT? Yes. The big draw of sports and of art for those of us in the audience is that we are invited not only to spectate but also to share.

My father was in the audience at every one of my dinky games & recitals & scrimmages & concerts, so it’s no wonder that he is what I think about when I think about sports, about effort. No wonder that I continually find myself wanting to cheer for him the way he cheered for me. Not just to listen when he talks, or compliment him gently. I wanna - GOOOO! GO DAD GO! YES! THATS MY DAD! THAT'S HIM

I have this fantasy of traveling through time to find my father in childhood. A boy like every other boy on a B-flight soccer team. I want to have been there, I want to always have been there. I want to watch him run across some impossibly verdant field and score a goal or even just touch the ball a little with his sweet hesitant instep and then I begin to shout from some place in my heart that I didn't know existed DIDJA SEE THAT? DIDJA SEE THAT BOY

The first time-travel books were about traveling forward in time, into the cloudy pensive future. I don't understand this at all. What do I care about flying cars? When I think about time travel, what I want is to go back, to see my dad young, before the [REDACTED], before the [REDACTED], the petty humiliations of every day, life larger than life, never dying. 

In social dances like tango and swing the advanced dancers will often teach the beginners. Often for free. Often the beginner in question is a hesitant attractive local idiot teetering in a pair of too-high heels through the dance floor in a pair of black tights too sheer for even the venue’s dim lighting. You get the effect of an animal that doesn’t quite know its own body. If I sound harsh it’s because women are harshest on themselves. I know this woman², I have been her, her vulnerability is stunning, she is almost naked. I am not referring only to her outfit but also to her heart. She takes no precautions. She has no concept of why one might take precautions. How could she help but fall hopelessly, catastrophically in love with the first person who teaches her how to dance, how to access a feeling and a world and a way of moving through that world of which she had no prior knowledge?

I was never great at soccer, I was never even good, and perhaps this is why it took me many years to realize that the girls on the high school soccer team were not great either; they were barely even good. Similarly it took me a long time to realize that the “advanced” dancers at those venues were really not “advanced” at all - they just knew more than me at the time and place we happened to meet.³

Seconds - hours - days - months - fly away like pages blown by the wind in old movies. I haven’t kept in touch with either the athletes or artists from that time; I haven’t wanted to. I know what they’re doing, even if I don’t know what they’re doing - the last X years spent running from one goalpost to another, playing this sex or status game or that one, searching for a way to win that might not exist, might never have existed. But I still think about them. I think about all of them all the time.

In my mind the girls from high school have blended into one archetypical girl. This girl is faster than me, goes farther, smarter⁴, sharper, more ambitious, uninterested in the drugs and the alcohol and the petty clubs because the Life she wants can’t happen there. She’s chugging water, chugging Gatorade, passing me the ball from all the way across some impossibly verdant field, shouting let's go, [YOUR NAME], let's go, let’s GO

I am willing to work, I am willing to wait, to produce great art, great work, to be great. I work. I will wait. But every so often I can feel my body and mind slushing into something sloppy and heavy and cold, disintegrating into little pulpy bits like a sheet of paper in a filthy parking lot puddle, and when that happens, when I need to catch a wind, to be lifted, it’s not the image of some boy I summon, and neither is it the image of my father. It’s my dream girl from high school, [YOUR NAME], center field, soccer star, 5'10", wind in hair, dark wing of hair, cheering for me, me, cheering for you.

1. This paragraph is a paraphrase of the ineffable @Anjuli-Bai on Ballet Forum. Anjuli’s last post was in 2014, and her last visit to BalletCoForum.com was in 2017. A little digging reveals that the name “Anjuli Bai” is a pseudonym for “Sheila Orysiek”. Ms. Orysiek’s intellectual interests are varied; her writing has been published not only in Ballet.com, but also in Tinnitus Today and JewishSightSeeing.com. She doesn’t seem to do much dance commentary nowadays; her Facebook bio reads “I am very old and very married.”

2. well, girl-woman-creature

3. i've come to think of adulthood as the process of realizing that things that once seemed magical are in fact quite rational

4. smarter than me is when knows more physics