casual ultimate » 2009 » July

I posted this on my personal blog and got such a huge response from frisbee players, I figured I’d better put it up on Casual Ultimate with a much better picture courtesy of Whit. Enjoy:

I went to a Frisbee tournament called Potlatch in Redmond, WA this weekend. I camped at the tournament site, I drank Friday and Saturday night with a bunch of Frisbee players (not to the point of being drunk either time), and I felt an incredible loneliness. It is not a new feeling.

Do you ever feel alone in a crowd?

I felt exactly like that many times before, particularly growing up, but the one time that I remember vividly and which I think was even worse was at another tournament in Ohio called Poultry Days in ’07. I was on a great team with a lot of people that I really like, and I had a pretty bad time there. I flew a red eye in Thursday night, drank beers most of the day Friday, and then was exhausted all weekend, again camping at the site. When I’m exhausted several things happen. I play a little worse; I still say some really funny and exceedingly deadpan things; I am there in body doing things with people I like; and I feel half-dead. I am a little like a zombie walking around in slow-motion and feeling nothing. I can hear you and respond to you. I can laugh and interact even. I am not fully alive though. It’s like in Fight Club when he says everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. Yeah, Potlatch this year was a little bit of a copy of a copy of Potlatch.

I relearned the lesson that I need to have really good self-care to enjoy a tournament. I need to not try to be someone else. I need to acknowledge my needs and get them met. If I’m tired, I need to rest and not pretend like I don’t need rest. If I’m hungry, I need to eat and not pretend I’m not hungry. If I’m lonely, I need to find connection with someone in person or on the phone. If I need time alone, I need to make time for myself to recharge and not just proceed from one event to the next as my friends tell me what we are doing and I continue to run on fumes.

I regret not showing up fully for my team. I don’t regret it for them because I think they were all very happy to have me around as I was. I regret it for myself. I wish I could do it again, get more rest, be fully present for all the wonderful, beautiful, magical, hysterical things that were happening around me. I might have really enjoyed them, and I might not have had a knot in my stomach all weekend knowing that I was just in crisis-management mode. I was supposed to be there having fun, but I was acting as if I were in a war-zone trying to escape with my life.

Do you find that sometimes the best way get your needs met is not to have any?

Contrast that with playing Huck it Long Beach, another tournament down in SoCal, last weekend in which I had my own place to stay and got ample rest and alone time and didn’t drink a drop of alcohol. I played like a warrior poet on Sunday, celebrated my team-mates, the game, the music, this life. I was there, living my life to its fullest. It was absolutely wonderful, and the quality of my opponents, the tournament, and my closeness to my team-mates were all much less. Regardless, I was the man and the player that I want to be at that tournament. I love that. I love it when I take good care of myself. It’s the only way I can have fun anymore.

I played Potlatch with a bunch of people that played on the two teams that ended my seasons in ’06 and ’07 on Brass Monkey, those teams being Shazam and Slow White. I had a story in my head that we were good enough to beat those teams or that we were better than those teams. Maybe we weren’t though. They beat us in semis, both of them. Teddy and Hammer I just thought were sort of fortunate players. They were good, but their big plays were just sort of fortunate outcomes for them. Maybe fortunate is the wrong word for what I thought of Hammer as an opponent (but I’ll keep it clean for the kids). I played with them both this weekend though, and they are really good. Really good. Schwind and Charlie from Shazam are both really good too. I had a story that they were a step below us. I don’t think that was actually the case. That was probably just me lashing out below the surface at two teams that hurt a team I love very much, Brass.

I’ve seen my mom do that many times before. When people have wronged my dad or my family, my mom is basically done with those people forever. They are awful people who are never to be trusted again. It’s a little black-and-white, but I get it in that case. If people really are mean and intentionally hurt you in some way, they probably had best not be trusted. Whether or not I harbor a resentment towards them is another issue.

In the case of Slow and Shazam (dumbest name ever), these are just fantastic people and players who happen to play on a different team from me, and in my head I occasionally allow them to be cast as enemies of me and the people I love. It doesn’t really hold up in this case. It’s just a slip into an old pattern of thinking. It was good to be reminded once again that my enemies on the field and even people who hold different views and philosophies than mine are not my enemies in life. They are people, and all people when I get down to it are good. All of them. Even me. Even Jam.