Keeping Two Hands On My Stick

This is not, I assure you, a post about my attendance at a local lab for the Freeze. I am still recovering from that one... the nasty smut offered by the proprietor as inspiration. Does the title make any comment as to the stature of this correspondent's phallus? I wish.

No. After three bitter years of regular-season ineptitude and job action it is once again playoff time in Vancouver. Hope springs eternal as innumerable Vancouverites join the bridge and tunnel crowd on the Canucks bandwagon. Count me in. I am presently viewing the Canucks celebrating victory in the 4th overtime period of Game 1. I have tickets to Friday's game. With any luck Friday will be date night at chez Wo. I think the last time Mo and I went to a game together someone got his neck broken. We hurried out of the arena while half of the audience stood in shock and the other half cheered wildly as a corona of blood fanned out on the ice around the broken player's head.* Of course I swore I would never return. But return I did, pathetic hockey whore that I am.

It helped that my partners customarily purchase seasons tickets so I could pretend I was entitled to share in the expense and the benefit of attending some games. You learn a lot about the people you sit nearby because you see them repeatedly. I have concluded that seasons ticket holders may be, in some cases, at the games to be observed rather than to observe the proceedings.

For example: the middle aged guy next seat over who gets loaded at each game, disappears for a good stretch of each game for refreshment, and spends the entire match in conversation with his seatmate and fucking with his PDA. He wears his $300 Trevor Linden jersey with pride. You don't fool me buddy - you're not Trevor Linden!

Another: the four Kerrisdale ladies behind us who spend each game in some kind of conversational rapture. It is the aural equivalent of being awakened by crows.

And finally: the two young men in the centre of our row (but just on our side of centre) who decamp from our row two times per period to purchase two beers apiece. At $8 per beer that is a very expensive diversion. Assuming the two beers per 20 minute window is consistent throughout the course of the game there are four more beers each once you include the intermissions. When you add together the cost of the beers ($80), the seat ($100) and the natty Markus Naslund jersey ($300) the cost of these evenings out (45 in total) is outrageous. Of course, you need to amortize the cost of the Markus Naslund jersey over the course of the season, in which case you are probably saving money by going to all these games. Yeah. I wonder how these kids subsidize their hockey games...

All that aside I am looking forward to an evening out with Mo. It has been a while since we could take the benefit of a hedonistic adventure of this sort. I hope the Canucks win. I hope there's a fight. I hope no-one loses an eye (or intervertebral disc).

P-man out.

* I like this image but am suspect that it is a memory of a fact. It is equally likely to be an imagined detail. As Buddy said: That's when the acid kicked in.**

** Ok, we left in a hurry. There was no acid. please don't call my sponsor.