casual ultimate » out of town playas

In big points, I‘m good enough to be out there, so all I have to do is play. It seems like in big points, particularly in coed, it’s a possession game. The team that can control the disc when they get it will win. The problem never seems to be getting the disc: coed teams love to cough it up. The problem is always controlling the disc. Controlling doesn’t mean anything more than trusting that the right opportunity is coming and being patient with the disc. That means resetting early and often, taking what they give you, and only striking deep when the point is demanding it.

I feel like as players, we are simply trying to demonstrate our skill at responding to the game, that’s all. We don’t make the game. The game is the way it is, and at our best we are able to dance with it. We never actually control it. It feels like double-dutch; we can either jump in at the right time and keep pace and not disrupt it and wow the crowd, or we can try to force it and mess it all up. Of course, that’s just what works for me. I see players like Seth and Beau who can just step into a game at times and completely change it. (That would be pretty cool if you were at a party and Seth and Beau were able to change the music by the way they danced…)

At this point in my Ultimate career, I feel like suddenly I have this voice that is good. I have things to say suddenly. I swear I never thought I had much to say to club players. Now I realize, after inflating my ego for a couple of years with the uber-supportive Revolver and uber-young BCBC, that I know some stuff. What’s more important is that I know stuff that most people don’t. My observations, in case you haven’t read this blog, are pretty much all about how it feels and the spiritual side of things. That goes largely unaddressed by most teams, so I feel like I can just walk around blessing teams and leaving them better than when I greeted them. That’s kinda cool, even if my knee is pretty jacked up.

I played Sandblast last weekend, and I only spoke in the huddle a couple of times, but when I did, I usually just said that we are a positive team, we look for opportunities to support our team-mates, and we try our hardest, trusting that our team-mates will do the same for us. All really simple stuff, but it was surprising how well-received it was. Of course, it was the worst result I’ve ever had at Sandblast, having never lost a game on Saturday before and never losing before Finals. Becky is officially better than Bjorn and I because as soon as she was gone, we suddenly were bad at Sandblast.

Who DID win Sandblast was Hector’s posse of young players. I’ve always been impressed with him and have never had more than basic conversations with him. I get the sense that he stresses discipline and buy-in. Whatever he stresses, he seems to be a great player and teacher. I imagine that his philosophy would fit well with Revolver’s values of intensity, humility, and discipline.

I’ve been listening to Miley Cyrus - Party in the USA a lot since Natties. I think I’m slowly letting myself out of the box, and it feels really good. I remember in high school all I listened to was Floyd, Zeppelin, and usually darker stuff. I liked old Black Sabbath. I liked Rush. I hadn’t discovered a lot of the Hip-Hop and electronic music that would take a hold in the college years. Anyway, I think the music that resonates with me has a lot to do with what state I find myself in. If I’m unhappy, I will probably want to listen to The Wall on repeat for weeks while I read 1984 Junior year in HS for example. At Natties, and this season in general, I think I learned very little about how to play Ultimate, but I learned a lot about how to have fun and how to play in general. Sometimes there’s no crisis, and I can let myself just “Go play.”

I was fortunate enough to play on Brown Chicken Brown Cow. I wrote the team about why I think BCBC is an important team in the Ultimate landscape. Here’s what I said:

BCBC is a team that treats each one of its players as an important and integral part of the team. Even more than that, BCBC takes it upon itself to make each one of its players feel loved. That’s totally exceptional and hard to do. I think it was for the most part successful this season. We also play fair Ultimate. Always. We don’t cheat to win ever that I’ve seen. We love each other and the sport, and we show it. Bravo, BCBC.

I also want to say that I really respect and learned a lot from Marie, Bree, Finney, and Emily from the Skirts, Adam, Jake, and Bacon from SLO, and the rest of the crew. I feel like the really young folks on our team somehow were exactly what I needed personally. I needed to reconnect with fun and love of the game and each other. It got complicated for me. Ultimate is beautiful and simple. Keep it simple.

One thing I need to own is that this year I really didn’t want to compete. I had a hard time in all of the big moments with this team, particularly as the season progressed and we got deeper into the series. I’ve never particularly loved competition. I think I have too much anxiety in my body as it is, and competition brings up more. It feels like it will take me down at times. I guess that one day that will be lifted from me, and I’ll be happy, joyous, and free.

About being happy, joyous, and free, I feel pretty lucky to have been able to party with “the cougars”, a group of some of the coolest women on zG (and Allen from Jam). I forget how to let go or why it’s even important until I’m around people like that who just show me. No answers. No analysis. The spirit of Homebrood lives on.

I’ll be an uncle in a couple weeks I think, and it’s gonna be cool. This kid is gonna be a baller. I can’t wait to meet him. The age of Wolf is about to begin. Get ready to be wowed.

This weekend is SW Regionals in Phoenix (which is also called “Scottsdale” and “Tempe” and “a bad place to live”). I’m heading down with BCBC, a team that has grown to mean a lot to me. Not as much as Revolver or Brass, but certainly more than Machine (HOOOOOOO zing!) I’m not getting much better as a player, although being in somewhat of a leadership role without being a huge dickhead is a new one. On Briefcase, I was definitely a bit of a dickhead, and on Northwestern I was completely gone off the deep end. I may owe an amends to those teams at some point, but we’ll see…

We have a shot at Nationals out of the Southwest Region which seems silly coming from the Northwest where teams like CTR never go and where Furious, the World Champs just months earlier, did not qualify last year. We’re a non-practicing team with lots of college kids (who are pretty good, by the way) and a few savvy vets. Something I’m noticing is my continued desire to demonize my rivals/opponents. I hated Michigan in college, even in the face of some blossoming friendships. I tried to hate CLX back in the Central Region, but good luck with that; they are just good. I try to hate Jam unsuccessfully, and I really try to hate Mischief. These are all my past rivals that come to mind, and I have great friends on many of them. This season I really want to hate Metro, the other LA coed team with Nationals potential, but again, they’re good folks. It’s a game; some of the stuff they do is great; some isn’t, but the same could be said of most teams made up of 20+ competitive individuals.

I am proud of the way BCBC plays. I am proud of these kids for playing with so much heart. It’s very inspiring.

I think the thing that I am REALLY getting in spades from BCBC is an invitation to have fun. Party, goof around, get back to that attitude we all had back in college of “why not?” There’s no need to be cautious all the time. Laughter and dancing are medicine. Love is something that can be freely given and received. There is no shortage. We all need to give it and receive it. A loss of control is progress. I belly laugh that topples me over is the right outcome.

What do I want out of this weekend?

I want to play great Ultimate this weekend. I want to beat good teams. I want my fiddle to change the game. I want to take great care of myself. I want to show up in an honest way with a powerfully compassionate heart. I want to remember that I’m not in control. I want to let go of worry, fear, and control the same way I let go of the disc.

I told a friend of mine (on Metro of all teams) that I think I was meant to play Ultimate and that when I am playing the way I feel I was meant to play, it’s unique to me. That’s not particularly important: that my style be unique. However, my style is unique, and I can best serve my purpose by letting go and playing the way I was meant to play, with no fear and no hesitation, with no anger and no malice. I love playing. I love my teammates. I love my opponents. The sport is glorified along with my higher power when I play that way. “My style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable…”

Good luck, Revolver, zG, Fury,…………………………….Mischief, and Jam.

SF Peeps, come see me play the bottom of the hill next Thursday 10/8 at 9:30, $8

I’m playing for a coed team out of LA. It’s a really special team with a great spirit and a commitment to using our women. My kind of coed team.

So I started thinking about what I want to get out of this season with this team. I want to bring a generous, heartfelt approach to this team, much the way I did with Revolver and Brass. It’s a little different with this team for me because I’m a big fish on this team whereas on Revolver and Brass I was not.

The challenge for me is to stay humble and not sour during the course of competition. We played a tournament called Revolution down at Stanford a couple of weeks ago, and the team did really well as did I. I noticed that I definitely was arrogant and contentious at times. I was also a prima donna, showing up late both days and taking certain other liberties. I don’t think there is anything that I need to apologize for, but I didn’t like it. It’s not how I want to be anymore. The standard is higher.

It reminds me a great deal of the challenge I had with Northwestern when I was there. I was a big fish there too, and I very easily got into an “I know best” attitude about everything, and I was able to manipulate folks to get my way pretty much all the time. I had nothing keeping me in check. No superior to tell me to just shut up and play. To work hard. To let my play do the talking.

So what are my intentions for this team and this season?

1) To remember that it is an honor to be on the field.
2) To remember that my biggest asset is the team-mate that I am.
3) To respect my opponent and always try to play fair.
4) To learn from all of my team-mates, particularly the ones I am inclined to overlook.
5) To trust my team-mates and let them know that I trust them.
6) To play with Intensity, Humility, and Discipline.
7) To do what the disc wants, including high-release flicks.

Sidenote: It was great to see my Northwestern brothers at Sandblast. I wish I were closer to Chicago so that I could be a part of that program.

As I think back, this is a big opportunity for me. I don’t know that I’ve ever played on a team where I was one of the best players and stayed gracious and grateful all the way through. I’m on board for that.

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.

Maybe my biggest gift as an Ultimate player is not what I do between the lines. Hector wrote a blog post called “Invisible Fence” a few weeks ago criticizing teammates that don’t move up and down the sideline to follow the team and help their teammates from the sideline during a point. I think that’s a fantastic point that is often overlooked. Last year on Revolver, that got emphasized plenty by Jit, the human megaphone, an awesome sideline voice and an enforcer for the rest of us to be sideline voices too. (Side Question: How loud is pillow talk with Jit? Any current or former girlfriends care to comment?)

I was thinking about what I do well in Ultimate this week and over the past many months really. I think I have some skill with the disc, good hands, good size, and some quickness downfield that makes me tough to handle. I think I also see offensive space in a unique way and know how to attack it in a non-traditional way at times. Anyway, I started to really get a handle on where I add the most value last year while playing with Revolver. I had arthroscopic surgery and never really hit my stride at any point of the season, so it was sort of natural to look closely at sideline presence, etc. I’m not particularly loud, but I can be very positive. I can celebrate with my team, bring a smile to a teammate’s face, and point out the value that is at stake in a given moment for our team and its players. For example, when things are going badly, I can remind a teammate that these are the most important times to practice “contrary action” by celebrating a good effort and consoling someone on a missed opportunity or blunder.

That’s all really interesting, and one thing I said at Nationals in a team meeting that I really believe is that on a team of 20+ players, the greatest chance that most of us have to impact the result of the game is by being a good teammate. It’s not usually by being a good player. When I’m a good player, I affect the game only when I’m on the field and maybe only during certain points that I’m on the field. When I am being a good teammate, I can literally bring up anywhere from 1 to all 25 other guys with me. I can make everyone else slightly better, and if the entire roster gets a little better by something I’m doing, then my impact could be 5-6 points through the course of a game, whereas realistically if I have the game of my life at Nationals, I can probably only change the score by 2-3 points when it’s all said and done (and that’s harder to measure anyway since guys like T Mac, Kobe, and A.I. can score 40 in a loss just about every night).

What else do I contribute to a team?

I’m just stepping into maybe my biggest and most important contribution to a team. It’s really not about the game. It’s really more spiritual and mental. I have some ability to reach my teammates on a deep and personal level, speak to the values that we all hold in common, and inspire them to live that value and do it for the whole team and not just themselves. I can contribute to the vision that makes a team like Revolver truly special and great. We literally don’t want individual accolades. We literally don’t care what people think of us. Robbie Cahill literally does have a square head. (Ok, sorry that just sort of slipped in there.)

I pulled my name off the roster for Revolver this week. It’s disappointing. It’s the right decision. I know this, but it’s disappointing. It’s exciting though in the sense that I get to define my contribution to Revolver this season (or another team), and it could be as much or as little as I want it to be. I can go coach a coed team, I can be a spiritual advisor to several teams, I can do workshops and visualization stuff for teams, I can continue on as “Social Chaplain” of Revolver ’09, or I can do nothing at all and just be a fan.

Whatever it is, I proved to myself last year that I can play Open, and that I can reach all kinds of people on a deep level, even if they went to Stanford. That’s what makes it really special….Stanford.

A few months ago, my mom and I talked about an issue that has been tough for me my whole life. Isn’t it arrogant to be a really out there, expressed, loud, flashy star with your talents? Do you need to be quiet to be humble? Is being quiet actually the opposite of what you’re supposed to do with your talents? Am I confusing being repressed with being humble?

When I was younger, and still today at times, I felt like being exceptional was arrogant (look at Jay-Z, using his God-given talent but also calling himself “hov” as in jehovah; what an idiot….and also I listen to everything he makes). I am learning, with my mom’s help, that being exceptional is not arrogant and that we all have talents that give us the potential to be exceptional. Here’s what my mom had to say on it, reproduced with her consent.

There are two different factors we face in relationship to others. One is humility and assuming we are all equal. That is a spiritual truth, and on that level we are all created equal. The second is being aware of the many different talents and gifts that we each bring to the game and there we are definitely NOT equal. These are the luck of the draw so to speak and we need not, or actually MUST not be ashamed or boastful about these things. We did nothing to “deserve” them. They are simply given to us by God. But it is our responsibility to use our gifts to the best of our ability and that is not a small thing. It takes awhile to realize all that we have to offer and who we really are. I think lots of people never look at that in depth and just struggle or stumble through life aimlessly and with little or no sense of what they’re all about. When we are especially blessed there is even more need for us to use what we’ve been given. You are a man with many gifts and the burden on you is great to do good things and you are well on your way as is obvious to many. You are much loved and admired and your mark on your world will only get greater, especially as you continue to realize who you are and what you have to give. This is not a negative thing at all because God wants us to be happy and gives us what we need to do His work. So long as you live with that as your goal, to do what you were intended to do, your life will be worthwhile. Your awareness of your Higher Power in your life says you are living that way already. Emmett Fox wrote: “I am part of the self-expression of God; I am the Presence of God at the point where I am”. [one of] my favorite affirmations. Enjoy being you: God is loving it!

Sorry, this didn’t get posted last week when I wrote it, so it’s a little out of order. Still worth a read. -Chuckles

I thought a post would be a good thing, so here goes. It’s a beautiful day in San Francisco. It’s been a little chilly and windy but sunny these past few days, and I just love it. Great weather to be out exercising. You barely sweat and the air feels great. There’s not too much to report.

This weekend is Fools Fest, and I’ll be playing with the Bruisers for our second campaign. Fools West seems to break along demographics for some reason. The teams that come to mind are Matza Balls (Jews), Downtown Brown (not white), and a couple of years ago it was Catholic School Girls and Public School Girls or something like that on the women’s side. In any event, McManus felt that our demographic (bruisers) was not being represented, and so the team was born last year. We talk a lot about our BMI’s (mine is around 28), never contest fouls, and never call fouls, and we wear black and blue. We do allow some purple and yellow as well, obviously. Oh, I left out another important demographic: Condors. While every other club team branches out and plays with new people and creates something interesting, the Condors simply show up and talk to just themselves. Nice job, guys.

What else is going on? Not a whole lot I guess. I am working 3 days a week, giving my time and energy to causes that seem worthwhile, and I’m really enjoying it. I haven’t been playing much music, but I do have a show this Friday with Erin Brazill who I played my sister’s wedding with. It should be good fun. She’s a fantastic performer and person. We’ll be at Dolores Park Cafe (18th St and Dolores) at 7:30 PM sharp if you’re in SF (nevermind, this already happened, and we’ll be back at DPC on June 5th).

In other news, Revolver is getting underway. We were supposed to have our first closed tryout/practice a couple of weekends ago, but it got rained out (thank you, rain). It looks to be a pretty exciting year for Revolver. Lots of good folks on board, great captains and debuting a coach. Our coach is actually just a cardboard cutout of Shooter McGavin saying “Choke on that one, baby!” Has it been too long to quote Happy Gilmore anymore?

I’ve been coming to grips with getting older lately, and it has not so much to do with the body slowing down as it has with the pop culture references sliding away. The kids today wonder why I talk about “laying by the bay and making things out of clay” and what a “32-belly option” is. Luckily there is an Arrested Development movie supposedly coming out which will put me back on top. Long live Arrested.

On a spiritual tip, I’m working towards acceptance of my defects of character. One of these defects is my propensity to numb out, not necessarily with the aid of any outside body (like drink or smoke or food or video game or music). It’s just a defense mechanism that kicks in sometimes without my choosing and occasionally one that I go to by choice. I can simply stop feeling anything. I can unplug and in doing so, I avoid being vulnerable. It looks like “I don’t care” about whatever is going on around me, but I do care. I just have chosen to bury it, and I feel dead inside as a result when I do that. In my experience, I can turn off one uncomfortable feeling, but in so doing, I turn off all the other feelings as well. In other words, if I ignore my sadness, I lose my happiness as well.

Why do I do it? You can’t lose what you don’t put in the middle of the table. That goes for pride and my heart as well as poker chips. So the task is then to decide whether I want to continue to protect myself from heartache, loss, and ego hits and keep my world small - or - be vulnerable, be huge, put my heart into the things that I am doing and the relationships that I am pursuing - into my work, my romantic interests, my music, my family - and risk massive emotional pain, hurt, and sadness in the name of becoming who I really am. Self-actualization Maslow calls it, I think. I get to become fully expressed. I get to go anywhere and do anything and be myself while I’m doing it. It sounds pretty good. The pros outweigh the cons. Green light.

I am at work at midnight. It’s awesome. I think a lot of my creativity gets stifled by the daytime and the expectations that I put on myself and that society seems to have for people between the hours of 9 and 5.

I played Fools West this past weekend, and I got the distinct pleasure of being beat by Hensley and Vijay. God, those guys can ball. I remember when Vijay was just sort of popping onto the scene in Chicago as Bill Finn’s right-hand man at CUSL. He was obnoxiously good and just had nonstop energy. For a guy like me who has an inertia that I like to exert on the entire field while I’m out there, it was very impressive to see a guy moving at a completely different speed, with a tireless spirit, and really sharp facial features. Does Vijay look like he was drawn by an artist or something? It doesn’t make sense that his face would belong to a real human.

Anyway.

Downtown Brown played so great in Semis and Finals. They made play after play and deserved to win and assuredly did. I played on the Bruisers which is a bunch of big guys who know how to use their size or just tackle people. The team is founded on a few principles: 1) no fouls called, 2) no fouls contested, 3) no strategy. Unfortunately Seth was on our team, so 1) suffered at times, but on the whole, the philosophy prevailed. It was a pretty great group of guys, and I looked off Beau while he in turn hucked a goal to me. In other words 3) was in full force.

The 2009 Season: Hmmmmmm. Revolver looks awesome this year. The table is set as far as I’m concerned; we’ve got everybody back except for handler (who was really dead weight), and we’ve got the perfect combo of captains and coach. I feel great. I feel so ready to have a great year. However, my knee keeps steadily reminding me that I’m playing on borrowed time. I saw my grandma at my sister’s wedding last fall, and unlike most everyone else, she is at an age where she doesn’t pull punches. She said, “You’re gonna stop playing.” She may well be right. I have cartilage damage in my right knee, and it doesn’t feel good on Monday and Tuesday after I play on it. I don’t want to bury my head and pretend it’s not happening. That’s not good enough anymore. I want to live in reality. Some reality is that I have played for 8 years now out of shape. I’m still a little out of shape. I’m getting closer to a good playing shape, but to be honest, I’m not there. I’ve been the heaviest guy on every single team I’ve been on, I think (except One Degrees of course). I’ve always been able to play well despite my size, but that’s not good enough anymore either.

You may well see me play the season this year and live in denial. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d done that. It wouldn’t be the first time an Ultimate player pretended that feeling like a late-career NFL quarterback on Monday morning is ok. Dudes icing their knees, taking ibuprofen like it’s a vitamin, drinking before/during/after, holding their bodies together with braces and tape so that they can chase the disc for another year, another day, another point.

I’ve got a buddy at work who teases me because I say I’m playing the best Ultimate of my life and that I’m in the prime of my career, and here I am icing my knee at work and taking Ibu. “I’m in my prime,” he says with a big shit-eating grin on his face, mimicking an old man who can barely get up to go to bed after he finishes his crossword puzzles. Foreshadowing?

Gratitude is not just a concept; it’s a tool. It can change my attitude towards the world and my life. I’ve got some friends that swear by gratitude as a tool – particularly gratitude lists. What is that? Well, it’s a list of things you’re grateful for and why. A list of 5 things I’m grateful for are:

1) Jessica, my sister, because she is very generous and loves me more than anyone in the world. I love her.
2) High-release flicks because they fly so pretty, make me feel so good, and the disc wants it sometimes.
3) CarBomb (the beach ulty team) because they remind me of the idea that unapologetically having as much fun as possible is an option.
4) Sunshine because something about feeling it on my skin makes me feel calm.
5) Kix/Maddy because they are adorable and warm.
6) Humor because I’m flicking you off in this picture.

I woke up this morning with lots of worrying on my mind - about my career/school, about dating, about money. I couldn’t fall back asleep, so I made an alphabetical gratitude list which is a gratitude list with something beginning with each letter of the alphabet in it. I felt better. It relieved me of the “bondage of self.” Sometimes my world can get so small and focused on just me and my wants. The world is bigger. Gratitude is bigger. I can’t stay small when I have gratitude. It’s like the Kool-Aid man breaking through the wall. OOOHHH YEAAAH!

I was chatting with a couple folks the other day about gratitude lists, and they offered their 5 things they’re grateful for:

Frosty’s 5:

1) My left brake light has been busted for
2 weeks and I haven’t been pulled over yet.
2) I get to play winter league tonight under the lights
3) I’m surrounded by hot LA girls pretty much wherever I go
4) I’m going to tahoe next week with new discounted pata snowboard gear
5) I have the dopest friends I could have ever hoped for

Kirch’s 5:

1) My parents, for encouraging me to go to college wherever I want and study whatever I like, regardless of practical implications.
2) My sister, for her unwavering support.
3) My friends, who’ve seen me at my worst, but still stand by me.
4) My company, for taking a chance on me as a post-grad with no practical skills but a desire to succeed.
5) All the truly talented musicians who have taken the time to play with me as I learn.

Now I’m going to go play some beach ultimate in sunny, 60-degree weather. Life is good.

I’m watching “Riding Giants” which is this great documentary of big wave surfing that came out a few years ago (Thanks, Henrik). I’m not a surfer, but I’m really feeling something they’re talking about in this video a lot. Gratitude. Life was really simple and really good back in the day. These guys, in the 50’s, in Hawaii, were just living their dream. They didn’t have any money, anything to do, any dates. They just were surfing every day and really enjoying each other’s company and the beautiful waves.

I really feel that way about Ultimate. Particularly beach ultimate. God, I just love being on the sand and playing and joking around and laughing and feeling that sand under my feet and getting it all in my hair and my ears and everywhere. I just feel good.

How lucky am I too that I go down to Santa Monica for the weekend, and I get to act like some celebrity? I played in the final, and I actually had fans. Who am I? I don’t deserve this. It’s so good though. It’s such a treat, and the community that I get to be a part of just because I love this sport so much is amazing. I get to not just go get exercise, but I get to play my fiddle, I get to meet dozens of people every tournament, I get to laugh really hard, I get to share the trials of competition with a bunch of different people, I get to learn how to lose with dignity (except for this weekend), I get to give and receive probably 50 hugs over a weekend, and I get to just feel loved by the land, the people, the sport. Life is so good. I mee t a lot of folks that are not Ultimate players, and they have good lives, but in many cases their lives are SOO small in comparison. There’s so much joy and abundance in our community. Thank God for that.

I didn’t have much abundance in my life 4 years ago. I didn’t give myself very much joy. I also didn’t allow myself to get close to people or let people get close to me. I think I owe a lot of who I am becoming to the example of people in the Frisbee community. Thank you.

Thanks for the photos, Shaun.

It’s New Year’s Eve, 2008. I just watched the men’s final from 2007 between Bravo and Sockeye. It was good. Made me want to keep playing Ultimate. Nice final for Hector. It was fun watching Seth on another team too. I *think* Seth fouled Chicken on the mark on game point which caused him to throw a lazy high release backhand which didn’t get to the receiver and led to a quick transition goal for the win. Maybe I’m just projecting what I know about Seth onto that point though

Revolver had our end of year party a couple of weeks ago, and it was sooooo Revolver. It was somewhere between a Coed and an Ivy league College party. Lots of board games, poker, and awkward interactions. (Someone on Jam is reading this and smiling.) It’s funny to compare that to my experience with Monkey over the past few years. I always felt like such a TOTAL fit with Monkey as far as personality, and I think a pretty good fit on the field as well. Now that I think of it, Monkey was better in both regards than Revolver for me. I think the mix of dirty humor tempered by the feminine presence in coed was just right for me. I remember hearing a story that Pat H liked coed better than Open because of “the way he was” in the Coed division as opposed to “the way he was” in the open division. Makes sense to me. I need women to keep me in line sometimes, but I will say that having the presence of Stanford culture was similar with such wholesome, smiling folks as Handler, Wiseman, TJ, and Herbert. Actually, let’s leave Herbert off that list. He’s a little more Hole-some than he is wholesome.

Shout out to Jonny Rem who apparently had a really good final this year for Jam. I can’t wait to see footage because this guy is one of my favorite players on the planet. Mikey Z pointed him out to me when I first moved to town, and it’s been fun to watch a guy without a chip on his shoulder or a swollen ego just consistently win his match-ups. He’s really fun to watch downfield: unbelievable timing, sure hands, nice throws, and those pearly whites.

In other news, I went home for Xmas two weeks before Xmas actually happened because that’s how we do it in my family. It was a pretty good trip. Not an easy trip for me: not having my own room, having to face the past with the present, having to try to pry open a heart that was absolutely hammered shut for a few years there. It’s hard work but fruitful.

It’s interesting because at my sister’s wedding, it was a lot easier for me. The focus was squarely on her which somehow made it easier for me. Also, I love her to bits and was really honored to get to show up as big as I could for that event. I think the fact that it didn’t have the hype of the holidays and that the spotlight was away from me made it a lot more manageable. That being said, what a difference a year makes. I felt much more at ease this year than last, and Jess and I are back to wearing matching Sweatshirts again! Check out the evolution of Northwestern Ultimate Team sweatshirts over the past 3 seasons or so.

Now that I’m back in SF after being home, I’m kind of blue like Miles Davis. I get that sadness: that good, reflective, restorative, purifying sadness every year after I go home. That may be coloring it too positive because sometimes it’s downright torture. This year though, it feels ok. Some of my friends call it the emotional hangover of the holidays. Makes sense to me. So much hype both from our culture and from our families that when it’s over, there’s a natural recoil to get back to equilibrium.

I had a great conversation with Henrik yesterday about what friendship is. We recalled our lives’ lessons in that department. I got my introduction to what “friends” were from two places: Sarah and Machine. When I got cut from Machine, I found out quickly who my friends were on that team. There weren’t nearly as many as I thought. The ones that were my friends are still with me today, and I’m really glad to have them in my life. Bjorn and Mercedog come to mind. Love you guys. The Titcombs come to mind too. Here’s X on the way back from Solstice/Potlatch in ‘05.

Sweet, sweet, sweet. Sarah’s contribution was a little different. I took a look at Sarah’s friends, and I was amazed. She just straight up didn’t talk to people who tried to manipulate her or who weren’t nice to her. Even if it was just one time, she turned away from that person. She didn’t do it in a mean way; it was just a matter of fact - she didn’t hang out with people who weren’t nice. As a result, her friends were sweet and committed to her. They were also, every one of them, just great people. Holy cow; they were amazing! The first people I met when I moved out here were Arlie and Matty, Sarah’s good friends who put me up until I could find a place. Talk about two of the sweetest people out there; it’s an honor just to know them. Congrats to both of them on bringing their style and grace to U S Women’s Ultimate.

One last note, I mentioned to a couple captains on Revolver the idea of being a “team chaplain” or “spiritual/musical advisor” for the team next year. For some reason, that is really calling to me as something I want to do. My contribution just has to include that aspect in order for me to really be doing my higher power’s work. We’ll see what that looks like. More will be revealed.

Happy Healthy New Year’s to All y’all.

Chuck
“Best Hair” award winner on Revolver 2008

I think Saturday night at Natties has been one of my favorite nights each of the past two years. Both years, my team ended it’s quest for the title that day, and the team dinner, toasts, and partying ensued. It’s kind of sad that both years I got really drunk. I didn’t get as drunk last year as I did this year though. I don’t know if Ultimate is committed to the idea that drinking is good and that binge drinking is great. It seems like it at times though. In any event, I get caught up in the idea that one drink = fun and so two drinks = more fun and so on. I was having an awesome time with my team, even though we were the last game to finish on Saturday after being knocked out of quarters by like 10:30 (that sucked so much to play two more long tedious games and never get to hang out with anyone on Saturday).

Anyway, we went to dinner at this little family-owned italian restaurant named after a woman named _______ (I don’t remember her name, but James seemed to know her, and she gave a good hug.) During dinner there was a series of toasts that were funny and touching, and we were a table of 28 in the middle of a not particularly large restaurant, so Darryl (who is rich from investing one dollar on his 18th birthday) paid for all the other people’s dinners in the restaurant, and if that weren’t enough, I serenaded each table with the fiddle with any song that they wanted to hear. I laughed more at that dinner than I remember laughing before. It was so fun. It was sooo fun. Holy shit, things were funny at that dinner. I toasted Josh and Margo’s baby on the way (which does not exist), Martin told some fantastic stories from his college days, Sherwood’s parents were reeeeaaallly chill about the off-color jokes that were just flying from my mouth like so much vomit would later.

The point is that this was a night that was a ton of fun. I was where I wanted to be with the people I wanted to be there with, and I felt absolutely fantastic. There’s no feeling quite like completing your season with a team you love, where you play your best, and your team fights to the end. It feels soooo goood. So filling. Like a catharsis with a twist of straight up magnanimity. It’s a cathardinimity. So why did I feel the need to drink so much? I thought about that. I had a copy of “the big book” with me (Alcoholics Anonymous, the text, pictured above). I’m not in AA, but it’s the basis for all twelve-step recovery, and it’s an absolutely amazing book. So good. Seeing that book on my bedside table the morning after was pretty cool. A message from my higher power. Message received. One explanation is that I’m an alcoholic. Another explanation is that I get caught up in the moment sometimes. Another is that I seem to think that I need alcohol to have fun when I’m out and it’s beer-thirty.

It’s been cool this past month since nationals, during which I haven’t had anything to drink, to see that sobriety is really nice. It makes my body feel good. It makes my mind feel good. I have a lot of fun, and I really enjoy the people I’m with. It turns out that I love people and that when I am hanging out with people I like, I really don’t need a drink to have fun.

I think a big piece of the puzzle is: I get anxious when I am trying to meet other people’s expectations and ignore my own needs and drinking helps me to get over that. The solution is very simple. I take care of my own needs, always. Here are two tools that work:

1) when I take care of myself, everyone else gets taken care of automatically, everytime.
2) what other people think of me is none of my business.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

I was riding back from Nationals on a couple of planes next to a couple of strangers, and I had an amazing post swimming around in my head. All I needed was a laptop, and it would’ve been epic. I didn’t have a laptop though, so here’s what I remember of that amazing post.

Natties was good. Revolver played very well. We had our least spirited game, 1st game against Machine, but it was a good game. We came back and beat those pansies on double-game-point, but let’s be clear: the play of the game goes to Hensley who appeared to make a ridiculous lay-out callahan on an up the line dump cut by our best player. Robbie insisted he had possession and that Hensley stripped it, but even if he’s right, that shit was insane.

That was the first of three come-from-behind double-game-point wins on the weekend. We stung Truck Stop later that day after Stout bitched us for the first three quarters. 11-14 to 15-14 on the backs of some Last of the Mohican fiddle and the spirit of Revolver. What an amazing spirit.

Sidenote: Nate M from Brass was playing with Truck Stop, and he played well. It was good to see him out there and to be in a game with the two people that I think I respect the most in the game: Nate M (Truckstop) and Nick H (Revolver). They each have a way of carrying themselves with self-respect and imposing that on the team. The players respect themselves, each other, and the team. Everyone is heard. Everyone is an equal. I think it starts with rigorous honesty and looking people in the eye. After that, I’m not sure what sets these guys apart, but ask anyone who’s played with them.

On a personal note, I was not 100% after knee surgery and felt I played great. As well as I could’ve played although I wish I had come up with a couple improbable high discs during the course of the weekend. Our team carried 28 guys at Nationals and everyone was healthy and there, so that was pretty impressive. I also played on an O line that relied heavily on Stanford chemistry to carry us through, so I knew from the get-go that I needed to play high-percentage disc and just sort of do what I could do be a net-positive for the team.

The fiddle. My God, what a tool. I never really discovered what a powerful force it can be in Ultimate. We rallied behind music several times during the weekend and made comebacks that I thought were impossible. They were ridiculous. The comeback against Bravo on Friday was totally stupid. We ran off the last 3 or 4 to win after being down the whole game, and I don’t think it’s vain to say the fiddle had a tangible impact on play and the general energy of our team.

We had team meetings each night of Nationals, and I said during one of those meetings some things that were really on my heart about Revolver, so I’ll try to reproduce some of it. I think Revolver is an important team. Not because we throw or cut differently or have better playmakers than any other elite team. This team is humble. We have guys who can hang with anyone, but I think the fact that those guys in particular (Robbie, Handler, Wiseman) are all incredibly humble and want the team to succeed before themselves gives the team a character that I really appreciate. It’s like being on a coed team except I’m not very good.

Anyway, I thought I’d check in with you all. I’ll be in Chicago from December 7th to December 10th. 1-800-HOLLER

I’ve been listening to Dre’s Chronic again at work this week, and it’s so good. Sidenote: got a part-time job doing data work. It’s actually really good. Flexible. Mindless. Listening to a lot of really good music and speakers. Feeding my manic obsession with Alt-Tab and Alt-Shift-Tab. Oh yeah, and making money while wearing sandals and occasionally being mistaken for the Geico Caveman.

The Wayside State, pictured at the Make-Out Room in SF, is getting treacherously close to getting our first album done, and Continuum (for those who remember the hip-hop project I was a part of in Chicago) is about to release our second album finally after 3 years of life happening to all of us. Fittingly, that album will be called Goosechase.

Hey, do me a favor and friend my band on Myspace (www.myspace.com/thewaysidestate). We don’t send out announcements, and we need to hit 1000 fans to get booked at a few clubs out here. Thanks in advance.

To get current, Tracy and I broke up a few months ago, I had arthroscopic surgery on my right knee for some cartilege damage, I’m planning to start school this winter to get a master’s in counseling psychology (big shout out to Curry G for some help with that), and I think I’m building up an army of some of the coolest ex-girlfriends in history. Pretty respectable pick-ups for any Poultry Team as well (T-Riles, Dr. Rah, and Canned Ass). Mine against yours, any day of the week.

Labor Day Champies are this weekend down in Santa Cruz, and the men’s division is totally obscene. It’s Nationals, and I’m bringing my bike and a fiddle I think because that’s how it is these days. I just realized that at the last two tournaments I played at the UCSC fields, my team was in the finals (Bruisers at Fools with Bjorn and Revolver at Cal States). Those fields are a little slice of heaven, and I haven’t checked but Subzero’s Andrew B might be playing too. What could be better than watching him break marks at those fields? Nothing.

I’ll be around next Thursday (9/4) if there’s any beach ulty to be played, and my bandmate Erin will be coming out to play the wedding with me, so you all can hit on her if you like. I’ll also be chilling Thursday and Monday during the days I believe, so let’s get coffee or go to a 12-step meeting or something.

It’s Thursday afternoon, and I am two days out of arthroscopic surgery on my right knee. You know what they say about arthroscopic surgery…so I won’t bother to repeat it.

I was in Colorado this past weekend for Colorado Cup in Boulder, CO. It was a pretty good time although I was not playing. Revolver took 14 healthy guys to the 100-degree heat and altitude of Pleasant View Soccer Complex this weekend and played great. I couldn’t believe how hard those guys were pushing despite the less-than-ideal conditions. We had 4 double-game-points out of 7 games. In all 4, we were coming from behind (10-12), and in all four we were pulling at 12-12. We won 3 of the 4 which is just amazing. Besides the one that we did lose was to Jam, and that’s no big deal since they’re just our rivals and since many of us have been cut by Jam. Nope, no big deal that I can see.

Anyway, the altitude disc was kind of cool. I was trying to see what the difference was, and I think that it’s similar to playing indoors. A lot of throws that normally wouldn’t work, do work. Also, all of your throws tend to tail off to the I/O side instead of the O/I side. If you don’t know what that means, you are too casual, even for this blog, or you are old and are still talking about putting more “heiser” on your “sidearm”. The pulls tended to hurry up at the end of their flight instead of slowing down, and it was very difficult to make a big O/I pull that didn’t fall off at the end to the I/O side or just blade into the ground. The folks that figured that one out on the weekend were able to put their pulls on the back line with a lot of air under them very easily. Pretty exciting to watch.

I’d say that the surprise of the tourney in the Elite division was Truckstop. After our double-game-point loss to Jam, we were thinking we would take out our frustrations on Truckstop, and not only did we not do that, we got humiliated by them something like 6-13. It was sort of an ugly game at times with 40 mile-per-hour gusts and sawdust from the local construction sites occasionally blinding players, but still, these guys punished us and did the same to several of the other teams this weekend. I think they finished 4-3 like everyone else in the tournament except Voodoo and Bravo, but in my opinion, they deserved to be in the final against Bravo and proved that with a 1 point loss to the home team.

God, I hate reporting about Ultimate.

So I spent Thursday in Denver, and I had a really good time. It was scorching hot and dry, and I walked up to a coffee shop, met some folks, one of whom was named Benjie and reminded me a LOT of Becky. It was spooky to listen to her talk. Anyway, she and her mom gave me a ride over to this swanky neighborhood called the Highlands where I had a good burger (which is nice coming from San Francisco where there is no such thing) and read for a little while.

Friday was Boulder time, and I took the fiddle out to Pearl St., bought a Scottish Highlands Fiddle book and learned some new songs. I sort of chickened out on playing in the street, but I did play in a parking lot and for a bunch of Zeitgeist girls and children on Saturday during the showcase game. There’s something magical about playing. It took me from a sort of “standing on the sideline” mentality to a “participating” mentality. It was nice. The day finished with me meeting my two best-looking teammates, Eric and Nick, in Boulder and then getting dinner randomly with some familiar faces: Sally, Candice, and Ness at Mountain Sun Brewery. Awesome beers. Awesome times.

One comment about Denver and Boulder: people are really fit there. Also, I was gawking at some of the women this weekend. It was 100 degrees and they were beautiful and wearing really pretty summer dresses and skirts and shorts and legs and legs and legs. My god, I didn’t realize what living in San Francisco can do to a guy (other than make him feel confident in his homosexuality). I didn’t realize how long it had been since I had seen a woman’s legs, but with the fog bombarding the city and the highs in the 50’s and occasionally the 60’s, all I ever see is the occasional biker girl cankle out here. Makes a brother want to move to Colorado.

Also, I have a type. I met three women (non-frizzer women that is), and they were all between the ages of 31 and 34, all beautiful and athletic, and all in relationships.

Dear 20-somethings,

I feel old talking to you. Please leave your home phone number and the date that you turn 31, and I will be in touch then. It would be helpful if you were already married or at least in a relationship at that time.

Best Regards,
Chuckles McChazzerston

I am on the cusp of something really good in my life. It’s exciting. I can feel a shift happening toward more happiness, more openness, more serenity. I suspect some of that may be the narcotics I am currently taking, but some of it is not. Sometimes an alphabetical gratitude list can be a useful tool. I am grateful for Asking questions, Baked goods, Candice, DVD’s, Emergen-C, Fiddle, Great Lakes, Highlands, Inside-out backhands, Jokes with Jess (I love you, Jess.), Kindred spirits, Learning, Meagles, Narcotics, Outdoors, People, Quiet, Riffing, Swear words, Total Recall, Ultimate, Vacations, West Coast, Xtehn (I love ya, buddy.), Yaz (a band, and now a drug), Zahlen (respect). Holler back.

It’s all good, other writers. I’ll cover the entire month of May with this post. By the way, it’s no fun writing posts when you don’t have a job. Job = wanting to write posts. I guess I’ll check in though.

I must admit that I just don’t get tired of the disc out here. It is SOOOO good. Even the winter leagues out here are killer. There are 20 teams or something, and every single one of them has a roster that makes me think they are going to win…except mine, and we made quarters, so what’s up now? You want some? Get in line, son.

I just finished 14 months of try-outs. I say that because I think that in order to make a men’s team out here, you need to try-out with them at least twice. Oh yeah, or just be one of those guys who makes it their first time out. (I would recommend this approach by the way.) The point is, you not only have to be good enough, you have to PLAY good enough, you have to have what the team needs, and in my experience, you have to come back next year. When I moved out here, I was arguably a worse player than I am now, but I remember pretty much catching everything that was thrown to me and winning all the discs in the air for awhile during try-outs, and the fact is, if you are an unknown, that’s probably not good enough.

Anyway, I will find out this week if I am on Revolver. I like this team a great deal. I like the captains. I like the heart. I like the way these guys bring each other up. There’s so little ego directed inward at team-mates, that it makes it a real pleasure to go out and make plays. This is the first men’s team I’ve been around like that, particularly in the elite category. They’ve done a good job of getting some guys out with height and toughness this year. Depending on who they take, they could put out some pretty big lines for the first time and develop a more dynamic deep game. Oh yeah, and by the way, they can still break the mark and take 100% shots until the cows come home. Not a bad combo. Kinda like the #4 at Wendy’s.

What else is new? I am not working. My band is playing a good amount and close to cutting an album. We are The Wayside State, and we’re on Myspace. www.myspace.com/thewaysidestate

I have a beautiful girlfriend, and my sister is getting married. Give him the stick; don’t give him the stick!!! I watched the fensler gi joe PSA’s again yesterday for the first time in a couple of years. My god, what a comedy goldmine.

It was nice seeing a bunch of you last month in Chicago. No Sandblast or Poultry for me this year. Over the past year, I aged 5 and realized that sitting around and getting enough sleep - and not vomiting in 90 degree heat until I almost lost consciousness - is nice.

Luego

hey blog! how’re things? i guess its been a while.. a month? well i guess i’m a bit embarrassed. but honestly i haven’t had anything to blog about except love and romance and the total absurd money pit that is wedding planning. exciting yes. affordable? doubtful. poor papa town. at least i’m the only daughter. i’ll try not to post about wedding stuff but i can’t make any promises.

in other news.. guess who won paganello? bjorn. single handedly i might add.

this just in from our casual ultimate quality control : bjorn had a team. a team called scandal. who knew? i figured he just went out there by himself and ripped beach ultimate apart. either way i believe we can now say chicago is the home of the beach ultimate champions of the world.

the entire globe. think about it.

and in even other other news.. mr. brizzle and miss casual are breaking up their happy home. mr. brizzle has bought himself some real estate. a real home for slider which he so truly deserves.

and in other other other news… our own chicago son, mr. chuckworth townington, is headed to chicago. soon even. stay tuned because im sure shennanigans will ensue and we want you there.

okay thats it. i feel so much closer to you now blog. really. this time has been special.

edit: i expect all the people / events mentioned in this post to be blogged about by their respective casual ultimate staff memebers.

Some people do “strength training” to “build up a base” for “the next season” of “extreme Ultimate flippy-disc”. I, on the other hand, have been keeping busy….I joined a new gym….that’s just one thing.

I had a physical assessment when I joined the gym, and the lady took me around the gym to see what I could do. Number of times I’ve been on the bench since college: 20 times in 4 years or so. We put on plates and gave it a go. 10, no problem except that it wasn’t that easy. We added some 35’s. One….two…thrrr….yup. Two. We took off the 35’s and added 10’s and 5’s or something like that. One…two…three..four…fffff…yup. Four. Nice job, big guy.

So with my “One Degrees 2008: Year of the Sideboob” body condition, I think it’s safe to say that I can bench about 1/2 of my body weight or another way to think about it, which I think is the metric system (not sure what the metric system actually is): I can bench at least the amount of food that I eat in a week if you could somehow turn it into a bar that I could lift while lying on my back.

Another thought about this exercise: you really should be sitting up if you want to digest your lunch properly, so I would say don’t eat RIGHT BEFORE YOU WORKOUT. That’s a late breaking fitness story from the West Coast. You heard it here first on casualobesity.fat.

Next, they did a body-fat test to see what percentage of my body is actually undigested milkshakes. It’s 27% with an 8% margin of error. My confidence level is high that I am above the “suggested level for a guy your age” of “ideally 10% but no more than 15%”. C’mon. Really? What year is it? 2000 BC? Am I (a) hunting for my food every day or (b) talking to some former D1 soccer player who did both her knees and is now a trainer in the Financial District of a major city in the fattest nation in the world? Darken in the oval by the letter B on your scorecard completely.

I found somebody with 10% body fat in my journeys, and I found another person with a body-type similar to mine as well. They are both small and fit on your lap. Here they are side-by-side.

Kindest Regards,

Chucktown: Population Fat

I’ve gotta say. It’s really not that bad. There’s pretty much no one here. I’m wearing jeans. I’m listening to music. I’ve already masturbated twice. Ok, that last one’s not true. Still though, not bad.

I started listening to Pandora.com on a friend’s recommendation and I’m kinda digging it. It’s streaming music that is similar to Thievery Corporation right now. I just typed in Theivery Corporation, and it makes rocket go. Also not bad.

I’m dating this exquisite creature that the earthlings call “Tracy.” She is like a cross between seafoam icing and freedom. Not bad.

I guess the work that I’m supposed to be doing should be taking priority right now, but I can’t say that I’m too fired up to get it done. I’m happy to say that I’m not too opposed to getting it done either though. Man, peanut butter sounds good right now. Does that mean that I’m pregnant?

I heard some rumors about Ultimate next year. I’ll put them in order of confidence:

1) Everyone will wear helmets next year through Regionals. Nationals: same rules as always, no helmets.
2) All three captains of Revolver are gone for next season (2 retirees and 1 traveler). I sort of had it tucked in the back of my head to play with them this year, but now I’m not so sure. We’ll see.
3) Jam is way more talented than Revolver and has less character.
4) Wendy Chan has a several photo spread of a layout D she got on game point against Shazam in semis against a dude (Jon Ladd to be exact). It’s in the UPA Newsletter I think. Check it out.

Yeah, those last three may/may not be true, but the first one is certain. I suggest Gaia chinstraps by the way. Very comfortable, but order them now if you want them to get across the border by the Fall Series.

I’ve been thinking about the old body and about some of the “greats” of frisbee past lately. There are many that played at the top for however long or not even at the top for however long, and now their bodies are wrecked. It’s a little concerning. I don’t want to have all kinds of junky joints and handicaps as I raise my kids. When we’re playing in the Townhouse Backyard, I want to be able to run around and bend and jump and do all those sort of things with my kids. Basically, I NEVER want to lose in a game of 1-on-1 basketball against my child. The reason I play Ultimate today is to be in shape for when that day rolls around and my kid is up 9-8 in a game to 10 in the backyard. I will beat him. I will rise to that challenge. I will foul him flagrantly if he comes into the lane. This is my house. Ya betta know dat, son!

I think Ultimate is doing a fine job of preparing me mentally but perhaps not physically for that challenge. What if I get really hurt and ruin my whole “knee area” or my whole “face area” (those are medical terms)? Hell, my room-mate had surgery on his eye after playing one game of winter league. I’m not sure this is the best sport for people who want to not be broken old people.

And on that note, Merry Christmas to all of you in the US. If you are not in the US, rot. Cho, I’m looking at you…although I can’t see you because you are very small and at a great distance. If you are reading this, feel my cyber-gaze.

Oh, and Jews. Hope that festival went well. That’s a pretty cute little holiday you guys have. Awesome. Jews.

It’s Christmas time in Townville. We are all gathered in Pompano Beach, FL to annualize our love for each other. How do I love thee? Let me count the years that I have come to this same place in the month of December.

This year, we tried something new: not playing tennis. Here’s some pictures of the tennis we didn’t play.

(footage not found)

I’d just like to make positive mentions or “Pos Mens” of two gifts in particular. Mama Town has a tradition of giving Jess and I a particular gift every year. For Jess, it’s an angel. For me, it’s a nutcracker. However, this year, she took it to the next level and created a nutcracker of me at Nationals in all my Brass Monkey gear. For Jess, she created this bike-riding angel. I think the symbolism is quite powerful. I have powerful jaws that can be controlled from my lower back in real-life, and Jess is a messenger from God in real-life. That’s why it makes sense.

Here are the pictures:

“The Pilgrims ventured into a new land bonded by a common past. On this Thanksgiving Vinnie and I have chosen to make an equally bold journey together into adulthood…or eachother. Whatever.”
-Doogie Howser’s Journal Entry from Thanksgiving ‘92

“You know, I was thinking the other day.”
-Kevin Nealon

“There’s only one b-tch in the world. One b-tch with many faces.”
-Jay in Chasing Amy

I guess I just wanted to say Merry Christmas to everyone in Chicago and elsewhere. I grew up with you guys. R.T., I lost my virginity to your daughter, for crying out loud! Rob, you were there.

I guess you could say that nothing I’m saying is original. You could. You could also get a good look at a T-bone steak by sticking your head up a bull’s ass, but wouldn’t you rather take the butcher’s word for it?

I’m just sitting at work right now at 5:30 on Black Wednesday listening to Sarah-McLachlan. Sunday I was sitting in a tea shop in Piedmont listening to Sarah-Welsh. Next week, maybe I’ll be starting Sarah-P (read that name with a lisp). That would be nice; having someone who just listens. Why don’t you just sit the next couple of plays out, Champ? Stop talking for awhile.

Do you ever worry about nothing really at all? Low-level anxiety, I’ve heard it called. I have that. It’s like a knot in my stomach. Every single outcome is ok with me, but I’m still stuck in a worried state. The Wayside State.

I’m on the brink of being happier than I’ve ever been in my entire life. More available, more plugged in, more serene, less bullshit, less worry, less judgment. I don’t know exactly what it will look like. I think it’ll come though.

I’m thankful for:

Linda S.
Mama Town
Papa Town
Anger
Jessica
Frisbee
Idris
electric fans
Becky
Gunder
Jonny Rem
Grandma Rose
my house
my life
Stephen
Will
Pat
ankle sprains
gum
fiddle
bass
my childhood
discgolf
Frodo
Mader

Let’s eat until our hearts stop.

well right now as im typing ms. ultimate is flying across the country to come back to chicago for casual ultimate 60622: thanksgiving reunion special. hopefully this will involve some if not all of the following

- lemmings, piece, and quenchers (this is already in the works so if you’re in town wednesday night holler)

- brunch, manicures, and light shopping

- napping, arrested development, and live blogging the law and order mini marathon drinking game i have devised

- a battle of wits between slider and the door of tony’s truck

- more bulleted lists

also in an unrelated incident… i overheard a conversation this morning about oprah’s ‘favorite things’ show, which is on today. its the one where she travels around and gives people in georgia presents like new cars and diamond jewelry for taking her to the best hot dog place south of the mason dixon. the conversation in question was between two guys who decided she should say her favorite thing in 2007 is ‘making it rain.’

the idea of oprah saying ‘im gonna make it rain’ tio a bunch of old ladies in macon is more than i can handle right now.

There were a lot of great things that happened this weekend at Nationals. I talked to Becky about life. I said what-up to Vijay after he sent me a benediction last week. I saw that Mischief is a really great group of people who care about each other immensely. I saw Tim Murray as a pretty respectable, mature individual who loves the game (that was really over the course of the season and not just this weekend). I saw the Ring/Backhoe social circles in motion. I saw how nothing really changes in that regard and how the lowest common denominator: drinking, mocking, hooking up, and other pretty dumb things seem to shine through in most cases. I felt the tug towards romance, and resisted it. I struggled not to judge myself and my team-mates at times. By Sunday, some of my better friends on the team had become so irritating to me that it was almost too much to be in a room with them.

Mischief lost in Quarters. Shazam showed up and played hard in all their games. They are good folks. I saw my humor turn towards ridicule and mockery this weekend instead of just light-hearted observation. I saw stress and anxiety bring out the best in some people (our late innings come-back against Shazam really made me happy to be on Brass Monkey). I saw one of the sickest D’s I’ve ever seen AGAIN from Wendy Chan on game-point against Shazam against a guy (Ladd). It was just unbelievable. Better, I think, than the one last year in semis that Wendy had. I saw Nate, the guy I would lie down in traffic for, one of the greatest team-mates and players I’ve ever seen grace a field, not win a title this year.

The sacrifices that people make to be at Nationals and to play at Nationals are unreal. I think maybe the best moments of the weekend were Saturday night after games were over, seasons were over, and dinner was over. Monkey sat around one of our condo units and told stories and gave speeches and just really enjoyed each other. I laughed more on Saturday night than I have since the last session of One Degrees in Tempe. What a soulful, filling experience it is to just laugh with each other.

I got to introduce Nate and Becky on Saturday night. It was like introducing someone to my family. I got to just say, “Look, Becky. This is the guy that I’ve told you about. This is why I love playing for him.” They talked for 10 seconds and Nate drove the conversation as he does the huddle, and it was just pure and simple. She looked at me after Nate had left, and I could just see that she understood. In 10 seconds, she just understood why I like him.

The first time I went to Nationals was in 2004, and I had been diagnosed with mono on Monday and was not able to play at all. My team, Machine, went 0-7, my new girlfriend at the time, Sarah, had way cooler friends than mine (Brood et al), and way cooler ex-boyfriends than me (Michael Jamkung, formerly Namkung). I had a knot in my stomach that weekend as big as a fist and I didn’t play a single point. I do believe the antibiotics that I had taken gave me a skin reaction that made me look like I had frickin pink polka dots all over my body too. I was so terribly unhappy. I was so hurt and hopeless.

My second trip to Nationals was in 2006 with Brass, and I had not played a point of Ultimate (other than the weekend prior) since the end of August due to a horrible ankle sprain. I wasn’t sure that I would be able to play at all. I prayed that my higher power’s will be done and that I could just be present and do his will. I played and played great. I really brought joy to my team, and in our big semifinal loss, I played one point, and I didn’t feel, at any time, like I was being cheated. I wasn’t hurt or hopeless. I was proud and honored to be on this team. My team had a lot wrong with it that year, but it had a lot right with it too. We have a rookie this year named Mike that reminds me of me last year. He’s just happy and proud to be with this group, and that’s a really awesome way to approach Ultimate, I think. On Saturday night last year, I left the team dinner to be with a good friend in a hard moment and grew closer to a few people. I wasn’t the life of the party that night. I wasn’t making some hot girl. I wasn’t doing anything but being me and doing what I thought was right. That was awesome.

This year, I went to Nationals healthy for the first time, again with Brass Monkey. This year, we had something that we didn’t have last year: the ability to pull together and play big in big moments. Our hearts weren’t fragmented and in close games, we were able to play up. I wish that we could have given ourselves a chance against Shazam instead of dropping down to a 7 point deficit and not getting our engine started until 12-5 or whenever it was. We played them to 11-14 and were really close to a couple blocks on that final point. It’s a little too much to ask to score 5 in a row against a great team like Shazam with the season on the line. I wouldn’t have put it past us though, the way we were playing.

On a personal note, I don’t think I’ve ever pulled as well as I did this weekend. They were huge airy bombs and they were all in bounds until the Shazam game. I would kind of like to just go up to Seattle or somewhere and scrimmage Shazam for 4 or 5 hours with Brass. I just like playing against them. I want to play a lot of points against them. It’s really fun. I don’t have very much fun at all against Mischief, and I’m not entirely sure why. I guess I can’t really think of anyone on that squad I like to guard for some reason. With Tyler, I’m usually backing him. With Kyle Smith, I’m usually busy nearly biting my tongue off while he elbows me in the face. With Shazam, it’s just a battle though. I love it. They are good, they are fast, the throws are on the mark, and for whatever reason, I like playing them. I like playing d and beating them and mashing their faces into a fine paste and then dousing their faces in kerosine and lighting them on fire and then breaking their mark, zipping down field for a wide-open 15 yd under and throwing a buttery goal to Nate up the line, while a faceless Shazamer runs after me with his burnt eyes trying to figure out what happened and why he will always be hideous for the rest of his life and never have children or friends. Whoa, sorry about that. What I mean to say is: Ultimate is fun.

This week’s episode of the Chris Farley show:

Chris Farley: Hey, Steve Finn. ‘member when you were on Sockeye?

Steve Finn: Well, yeah Chris, I do.

CF: Man, you guys were awesome…

SF: Why thank you, Chris.

CF: ………God, I’m so STUPID. I’m such an IDIOT.

SF: No, no, Chris, you’re doing fine…

CF: Really?…Oh, man…..You remember when you were on Brass Monkey?

SF: Yeah, yeah I remember, we won it in 2005.

CF: Man, you guys were soooo good….

SF: Thanks, Chris.

CF: …..God, I don’t know what I’m DOING on this interview. I’m such a FAILure….

SF: You’re doing fine, Chris. Really.

CF: You’re just saying that.

SF: No, really, Chris.

CF: Well…remember when you won your third consecutive Masters title at age 47?

SF: Chris, I’m not sure that’s happened yet although I’m sure it will.

CF: Oh….why did I SAY that?! I’m such a MORON!

SF: No, Chris. You’re really giving a good interview.

CF: No, I’m not. I’m making all kinds of mistakes all the time.

SF: Well, Chris. You know I’ve learned over the years that it’s not about whether you do things perfectly or not. Everyone makes mistakes. It has more to do with whether your mistakes ever result in something other than a National Championship. I think that’s where I’ve had a lot of success in my life. I only make mistakes that somehow lead to me being a National Champion.

CF: ….

I saw Ray Parrish’s teeth from about 500 yards away, and a few minutes later, I could see that the rest of him was also there as he continued to walk towards me. That guy was so huge for me at Sandblast when I had heatstroke and couldn’t take care of myself. I would marry him if I were some girl with really huge fake breasts, the way he likes. Sidenote: Can I just say that the reason Starsky and Hutch is a masterpiece is because it makes fun of homophobia? Can I just say that right now? I have made a living on that kind of humor (or no money at all as I look a little closer), and guys acting like they have no emotions and like they don’t care about their friends or anything for that matter is just not human. I care about my friends.

Thank you to Bil Elsinger for all the great photos and write-ups of the Mixed Division this year, which is a real division with uniforms and everything.

Dragon foot, ball of yarn, bamboo pole, Chinese boy…Prune Candy.

When’s Tempe?

There’s been a lot of communication back and forth with Chicago this week, particularly about the headless horseman scavenger hunt & bi-cycle race in two weeks, which is going to be fantastic. word on the street is that the peach pit is sponsoring with beer- and pizza-related prizes and rodan is hosting the afterparty. let’s spend some time on this blog talking about how fantastic their mojitos are. but for real: all my peeps in chicago need to congregate and have the happy hour to end all happy hours tonight.

back in eastern standard time, ms. ulty is excited about the prospect of getting back on her iron horse like the chicks n’ drinks ladies in chicity….eventually. the bruises from my battle with a biology professor’s hood are pretty much gone, but my right knee still has this weird swelling on it, it’s a little hurty, etc. now you know. i can’t help but think that if i’d gone to berkeley i would have had doctor welsh’s expert consultation. maybe grandma’s right, maybe i do need to start hanging out with the medical school.

since this accident kept me away from regionals last weekend (so frustrating), i picked up a new pastime to cheer myself up: stump. this game is what it sounds and looks like: you put a bunch of nails into a tree stump in a circle, with one in the middle. everybody playing picks a nail and the object of the game is to be the last nail standing. you achieve this by flipping a forester-sized hammer end over end, cactching it on the fly and immediately striking your opponents’ nails/the stump/miss catching it and permanently maim a bystander. i got pretty into it, and finally won a round by the end of happy hour. needless to say every aspect of the competition improved over time since it was part of our weekly outdoor happy hour.

speaking of which, miss casual, i seem to remember us making a graph of crunkedness over time at one point. last friday, at the as-close-as-new-haven-gets-to-a-bicycle-bar bar, we were doing something similar and my friend esteban came up with a complex version involving four axes. general consensus at the table was that he’s a shoe-in for the nobel prize. turns out that went to al gore instead, but maybe next year we’ll get his submission in on time.

but back to ultimate. congratuf’inglations to machine, and my heart goes out to everyone else. while no one wanted their seasons to end in the sooner state, the good news is that, while machine is having two-a-days in 50 degree drizzle, you’ll be inside watching football, eating steak and drinking beer. same goes for happy hour: do it up chicago, make some happy hour magic so miss casual has something to post about on monday. rally the troops - i want shenanigans, hijinx and pictures. remember that time bp and miss casual got into a fight at that crappy indoor beergarden? remember when that kids got headbutted by the crazy bartender at the hole-in-the-wall on armitage? avoid those places, and instead go to lemming’s, order a kind midwestern brew and catch up with your friends. do it or else i’ll come at you with my hammer.

Cheers

So my team does cheers after games sometimes. Not really all that often these days as my room-mate, Henrik (the mastermind behind all of the cheers), is no longer an active player on the team, but we still do some crazily elaborate cover-cheers when he makes it out. Last year the big hit was Gin and Juice (the Gourds - folky version) “mind on my monkey and my monkey on my mind” kinda thing. It was a solid jam with me laying some heavy fiddle on it and Lauren Casey filling it out with some mando. We never did get around to doing a cover version of Devil Went Down to Georgia, although on the train in to work the other day, a homeless guy sitting near my feet asked me if I had a viola in the case, and I said “Naw, it’s a fiddle”, and he immediately launched into the first few verses of that Charlie Daniels classic on a crowded commuter train. Awesome. Thank you so much for doing that. Without grassroots support from people like you, this day would never have been made possible (the words of Aaron W, my former room-mate from Paulina).

Back to the lecture at hand. This year, I have some work to do to cover a really tricky riff from some Chili Peppers song called “Hey-o” maybe and an awesome bassline from a Beck tune. If you are going to Nationals and are in our pool, that’s good news for you. If not, maybe get elinimated before us and then check out some of the post-game magic.

Why do I like the cheers? It really brings this great energy to the team. It is something that is very Brass Monkey, and without it, it just doesn’t feel like the team for some reason. We F around a lot and have a good time regardless, but cheers bring it to another level. It’s also indicative of the idea that Brass plays great Ultimate because we’re having fun and enjoying each other. Last year, in my opinion, we didn’t enjoy each other as much. There was some chemistry that was a little off, and there was a general lack of ease that isn’t there this year that kept us from playing great when we needed to. That is not to say that we will go any further or even as far as we did last year, but I think the soul of the team is intact this season. It feels good and loving. Sidenote: maybe one of the things that I don’t completely like about Open is that this loving piece is pretty much missing. At least it doesn’t show up in the same way as it does in coed. Nothing says loving like spiking on each other in practice and kicking a water bottle. What Open gives up on the positivity scale, it may make up for on the humor scale though. Ladies, I love you, but guys are just WAY funnier. I met this guy once. Oh man. So funny.

Flying, Magic

So Regionals briefly: it was cold, windy, and rainy. Needless to say, I excelled in that environment coming from the Midwest and practicing on the shores of Lake Michigan for 3 years in college. We had a relatively easy road to finals with arguably the easiest pool (Bozos, Night Train, and Denial) and Golden Spike upsetting Mischief to face us in semis. Golden Spike, by the way, is a phenomenal team, and deserves to be at Nationals. However, since they have a couple of guys on their team that are COMPLETE pricks, no one is too sorry to hear that they lost 3, count them, 3 games to go to finish 5th. Our game against Shazam was VERY upwind-downwind, and each team had 2 breaks I believe. 12-11 was the final with both teams essentially holding serve. These guys play really well. I like playing against them because they don’t cheat, they don’t really get chippy, and they play good Ultimate, even though they have one of the stupidest names I’ve ever heard. By the way, there is an awesome story about Shazam in this month’s issue of Poof magazine. With Shazam, everything is so dramatic and flamboyant; it makes me just want to set myself on fire!

Ok, enough. Love from the Left.

a guest post from another of our friends in the dirty south… mike d.

I’ve been playing ultimate for some 12 odd years. I love the game, love the people I’ve met, love the competition. I guess through my career I’ve been blessed with some awesome experiences: throwing the game winning goal to go to college nationals my senior year, being involved in some great back end games to get to Sarasota, coaching a sectional qualifying northwestern team. But, something I had yet to experience was a stomach punch game.

Well, that experience, I’m sorry to say happened last weekend.

As most of you know, I moved to North Carolina this past spring for a job in the big city. I started playing in Spring league and met a couple people from this team called Los(including Haley’s brother-in-law Jb, who is Hales south.) They suggested I try-out. The schedule seemed light enough and the team competitive enough to keep me interested without burning me out like in year’s past. In all honesty, by November for the last 5 years, I’ve vowed never to play this game competitively again because:
a. My body is a wreck.
b. This sport is filled with cheaters.
c. In college, I always ran into this dude on Indiana, who was roughly my size, but like 20 years my senior, 20lbs heavier, looked like Grizzly Adams, and walked with a hellacious limp. He kept playing and playing, looking more ragged everytime I crossed his path. I did not want that to be me.
…So throwing caution to the wind, I ended up trying out.

Unknown to me, there was a talent influx, including 5-6 former ring players, some out-of town ballers, and a bunch of talented college kids. I could tell within the first practice that there was a lot of unharnessed talent. It was just a question of if there was enough time to gel.

Flash forward 4 months to last Sunday…after battling in the ac regionals, including a revenge victory against a team we were 0-3 against on the season, we met up with pike for the second time on the weekend in the third place game to go.

I can’t remember the exact play-by-play, but we took half 8-5. I had a couple of scores(I play offense now, who would’ve thought), one from chasing down a play, the other off of a tipped pass on an underthrown disc. The celebration is seen here…

Dance for me monkey…

Anyway, after the first half, we turned it up, making some sick athletic plays including…

…this from a sick defensive freak named Matt Thomas. I’ve seen him get more lay-out d’s in a weekend, than most teams get in a tourney…

a sweet hammer catch off a blading hammer…

and Ray Parrish being…

…a crafty…

…veteran…Score!

Anyway, we run the score up to 14-9. And from here it is kind of a blur, but we had several scoring opps, including a couple endzone drops/throw-aways, and a game winning score called back because the thrower’s foot was in the endzone.

This is a picture after said score…

…not so fast Los.

So, Pike battles back and rattles off 5 straight, then takes two out of the final three to win 16-15…season.

So, I’ve experienced the stomach punch game and it is more painful than I could ever imagine, but unlike the past 5 years, I really have a desire to get back on the ultimate field already. This year’s experience of meeting all these young and hungry players, mixed with the crafty veteran talent you need to have a national caliber team has rekindled my fire faster than years past. Hopefully, my teammates share this desire and grow enough to bring Los to Sarasota next year.

Anyway, good luck this weekend Chi-town teams and my Iowa boys and girl. Hope you all make it and maybe we’ll meet up next year…or in 10 years when I look like a hobbled garden gnome.

mike d out

Dudes and female-dudes, it’s time for some of that hot nasty Frizbone action. Brass Monkey is going to compete until you can’t feel anything but pure ecstasy. We are going to swing your dumps and pump it deep to our streaking strikers. We are going to have intercourse on your team, bigtime. Here’s a picture of me intercoursing two people.

Yeah, the series starts this weekend, and as Zaz would say, “I’m getting old and I like math.”

We get to play Mischief this weekend who is missing (I presume) Tyler Grant who is “the straw stirring the drink” for that team with a pretty bad ankle sprain. They’re pretty damn good without him though. A win against them would be big because they have a couple of girls that are faster and taller than me or so, and their offense is REALLY hard to deal with because they throw to people that aren’t open and oftentimes do that without putting any air under the disc. It’s like playing Ball State or something where you have your guy so covered that you just assume the throw won’t go up and then the guy catches it behind your head and you bitch at your team-mates for not making “up” calls because you’re still blaming your parents for your shortcomings as a man. Actually, that wasn’t really as much of a hypothetical as it was a snapshot from my past.

We, Brass Monkey, played Shazam twice a couple of weeks ago on home court at Labor Day and split games with them. They have Steve Finn on their team, who is extremely old and also plays boardgames with people on my team when he comes to town. I still don’t understand the boardgame thing. Tony, Carlo: I don’t get it. They were boring when I was a kid, and they’re still boring. You guys should hang out with Steve Finn. Anyway, other than that one loss, Shazam has had their way with everybody they’ve played this year, including the final of that tourney in decisive fashion over Brass. Mischief has had a couple of close ones with Shazam, including once being up 7-2 or something in pool play at ECC and then losing on double-game I think. Shazam is still clearly the team to beat in the coed division, but luckily, I love beating the team to beat. There’s nothing more gratifying than playing big and upsetting a 1-seed and then taking all their girls out for a nice seafood dinner and then never calling them again.

There’s literally nothing better. I challenge you to find something better than that…………..Dorothy Mantooth is a saint.

Time to take Glucosamine, Chondroitin, and MSM combo pills. Is everybody ok after the meningitis outbreak? That’s a serious disease from what I understand.

our friend moved away to be brainwashed in some kind of ‘tree and squirrel saving landbound cruise type graduate program’ on the east coast so we have an opening for a new friend this fall. the right applicant will be trained via teleconference by the original ms. ultimate herself. they will be crunk, smart, ride a sweet bike and have a sweet forehand.

we will be conducting interviews friday at lemmings between 6 and 730 pm. please bring a resume and headshot as well as a desire to drink beer out of cans and a thirst for adventure. please answer the questionnaire below to see if you pass the first hurdle.

1. (submitted by trbizzle) you are cutting towards the end zone. you are looking at
a. the disc
b. a puppy on the sideline
c. your united shoelace

2. it is saturday morning. you are
a. sleeping in
b. drinking your intelligentsia coffee, listening to npr, and reading back issues of the new yorker
c. out for a run

3. weeknights are for
a. catching up on sleep and laundry
b. watching law and order and getting takeout
c. working late and microwave dinners

4. friends dont ask your opinion on _______ unless they REALLY want to know.
a. high heels and lindsey lohan’s progress in rehab
b. carbon offsets and the new patagonia fleece colors for fall
c. tax shelters and rock climbing gear

if you answered mostly b’s come out to lemmings cause we want YOU!

while it pains me that tobias funke can no longer be the first thing i see on casualultimate, this is a great post from our very own brady, who just returned to chicago after a year in china. check it out to learn more about summer league, beijing-style:
——————————-
Sunday began like many in the past 6 weeks. Plenty of heat, time spent
cramming some food into myself in the early afternoon to make it thru the
long summer league day; and hoping that I remembered to wash my summer
league jersey before the crowded van ride to the fields (not that Beijing
doesn’t provide enough smells to mask any offending odor my jersey may
contain).

As i blogged about before, Peggy and I really lucked out with the location of our apartment. As it turns out, ‘carpooling’ for ultimate meets a mere 10 minute walk from our apartment building. The meeting place for all trips ultimate in nature is in front of the local Dongzhimen mall. There we all pile up on the steps, creating quite the staring feature for the locals, and wait for everyone to show up 30 minutes late (ultimate time being
universal).

Transportation in China is relatively cheap, but people still prefer to pinch maos when they can, especially when the directions to the place we are going are rather difficult to explain to your average cab driver (who will still act like he/she knows where he/she is going). Also, since getting fields is even tougher here than in Chicago and only a few people are on top of where we are going this month; we rent 3 vans (13 people fit in each) and cram into them for what is always a ‘bonding moment’ of a trip to some
hopefully grassy area. We have pretty nice fields for summer league as it turns out, just past Happy valley Amusment Park (haven’t been yet, but Im planning to go). The fields are big enough for our 4 team league to have both games going simultaneously (though with a shared sideline and about 35 yard wide fields only).

The fields we’ve been playing on have one flaw, they are near enough to a factory that more often then not we are running around and breathing in what smells like burning perfume, sulfur, or something. Forget playing at altitude, try playing when the local factory has the one day a week when they burn off all the chemicals they are done using. Yuck.

However there are a lot of great things about Beijing Summer League. Thanks to the hard work of several ex-pats in particular, ultimate has started to spread to the locals and there are even a few local club teams that competed at tournaments this past year. While many of these players are from local universities and go back home for summer, there is still a good contingent of local players on every summer league team. Its really exciting to witness the growth and excitement of the local ultimate community. Another great thing is we draw and audience everywhere we play.

These fields happen to be stuck right next to the local neighborhood’s public park. When the local guy with the 15 foot whip isn’t spending his Sunday cracking the whip in the middle of the park, we are public entertainment #1 (I can now understand why whipping people is a devastating punishment.the whip cracks sound like LOUD fireworks. Quite something to see). The locals (mostly kids) line up along the old fence and watch us from the moment we show up and stretch until the moment we pack up and go home. Sometimes they even tear the wiring that is keeping old fence holes closed and sneak in to watch us at a closer distance…at least until the guy overseeing the fields comes to scare them away and rewire the holes closed. (This repeats pretty much every week with no tactical improvements by either side, this is pretty typical of Beijing life.)

Summer league involves more than just the games here. It was setup particularly to help expand the number of people playing in Beijing and their skills. On alternate weeks we warm up as one big group of about 70 people and then split into beginner and advanced skill sessions / drills. The other weeks we work as individual teams on the basics of game play (stacks, dump n swing, etc.). Next we play your standard ultimate game to 13 with about an hour an a half time cap to save some time at the end for us to mix it up and break into one or two pickup games. Many of the people end up going out for a big dinner at a restaurant after the game (once we squeeze back into vans for the ride home). Its quite a complete day, running from about 2pm to 9pm if one stays for dinner.

This particular week my team was again undermanned/womanned with low turnout. We were matched up against Peggy’s team, certainly a bitter rival. Somehow we found ourselves battling all the way to double game point, with us receiving. My team, employing a horizontal stack that we just learned, ends up with the two middle receivers both taking off deep after I get the disc centered off of the pull. Both of the players had a few inches and a few steps on their defenders, so I decided to push it and let a forehand fly. Alas, not the trajectory one would want as the throw hangs and arcs a bit too much. Somehow all four players manage to misread it (summer league),
however one of our players makes a great grab falling over while trying to chase the disc arcing over his head. We patiently work the disc the last few yards and put it in the endzone for our first win of the season. Peggy will never let me live that throw down, but Ill never let her live down the loss. so all is well.

(The game in question above was about three weeks ago.our team finished with only that win in the 6 games of play before the playoffs. However we pulled out our semi-final last week against the top team (who only had one loss). The forehands looked a lot better last week . Peggy’s team won the other semi-final so tomorrow its put up or shut up in Beijing as we decide which one of us will have bragging rights for all eternity).

I saw this Muppet show once where Dr. Bunson Honeydew makes a machine that can combine things. Shortly following the exposition of this novelty, Beaker ends up sticking his arm in at the same time a puppy dog is placed inside; machine turns on, and suddenly Beaker has a living puppy head instead of a hand. The effect was disorienting and horrific, and left me, as a child, rather afraid of the inarticulate Beaker thereafter.

Today I experienced just this same sort of shudder when I came across this pillow resting on the windowsill of my hotel. And while I like to think that I support innovation in nearly all it’s forms, my heart goes out to the unfortunate pillow, stuffed lion, soccerball and crucifix that were jammed into Dr. Honeydew’s machine this time around.

(i am putting together some of tony’s updates from the road. i think hes just leaving traverse city. for those who dont know… our very own tbrizzle is biking all the way around lake michigan for two weeks with only his iphone for company. he has all his stuff in a trailer and is camping half the time. -miss casual)

late as usual

minor crisis this morning, the skewer that holds my trailer to my bike was unfit. i couldn’t find a shop that sold only the skewer so i bought a whole new trailer and left everything other than the skewer hanging in the window at rapid transit. so i have $350 in store credit if anyone needs anything…
classic.

many thanks to jess and claire for hanging out this morning and especially to mr. rick russell for supporting me emotionally through my tomfoolery.
leaving…now.

mile 32

Flat tire in Gary, in.

Fixed, but still a bit annoying.

first day

78 miles through chicago indiana and a little of Michigan. Dinner with mom and monica. Tired.

mile 242: alonzo gives me the rest of his pizza

Day 3 was long, but finished well. Made it to silver lake mi, land of the dune buggy. My campground is packed (on a Monday no less) with every kind of 4×4. People have been consistently friendly (e.g. Giving me pizza). Looked silly strapped to my bike but no chance I was going to turn that down.

mile 304: smoothie break in manistee, mi

There’s coffee shops and wireless everywhere…what an age we live in

day 5: reality check

Tired today. Arms more sore than anything else. Roads terrible, no shoulder. Only 50 miles today but I’m beat…rewarding my capitulation with a night at the grand old wellington inn, traverse city, MI. Wifi, free beer, and tight next to downtown.

Starting the ride again will be hard.

i am a manly man

my hotel room

sandblast weekend is drawing to a close. as i type this i am sitting in my living room with the bulk of team dego tea who took it to the finals today and then lost by 3 in a tight game against hurt locker. tyson and georgia’s team took home the title again this year but it was a good day of ultimate for the dego team regardless. the semi final against briefcase was an especially good game. it came down to two points between case and their former teammates and friends. we spotted the lovely maxine on the briefcase sideline and dr. welsh was in town holding it down with the other usual beach suspects.

dego had faced some serious competition from friends and family earlier in the day also. becky scored the game winning point in quarters going up against her own sister with her brother close by. if theres a more gifted family in ultimate we at casual ultimate have yet to see it. the pool play on saturday was a bit more easy going although it was a bit hotter and the water was closed because of ecoli so we almost melted. here’s chucktown pulling down the disc in spite of the heat.

in the final game dego tea was dropping players left and right due to sickness and injury. megin was tough as nails when her shoulder dislocated. kolb was all over the beach until he got sidelined by cramps. even chucktown hit a wall with the heat and had to come back chez casual / brizzle for an ice bath before our current viewing of anchorman. here are two of our chitown peeps who were uninjured - becky working it out on d and bjorn getting up in the air. chicago represent.

outside of the ultimate field… the town kids ate some burgers at kumas on friday night after putting down some dego tea chez casual with bjorn, jess cookie, foxy, brian, and goetz (who you might remember from spring break). dego tea is a concoction developed by bjorn and becky which consists of a special proportion of ice tea and lemoncello. danger. saturday at the fields we established our supremacy in the ‘most parented sideline’ category with the towns and the merce-dogs in attendance. we missed having bjorns mom and pops but theres always next year.

looks like ms. ultimate will be back in the chi-tizzle tomorrow night so well be getting back to bizness as usual around here. it was nice to hang with such a great group of west coasters and southerners this weekend on the dego sideline. hopefully well see them all again next year on the sand.

so its a big week for birthdays because today there are two more. not only is it my brother’s birthday, mr. chucktown, who is kind of a big deal (better reckidnize), but its our friend amy’s (of chicks and drinks fame) birthday too. miss casual spent an hour on the phone last night with mama town trying to scan and email some baby pictures to chuck in honor of his big bday. clearly miss casual is not cut out for i.t. phone support. happy birthday mr. town. cant wait to see you for sandblast.

also im not sure if we made it clear but chicks and drinks is big in hungary. ms. ultimate better look our for our fans on her european tour. amy’s picture of chicks and drinks last week got some more rousing responses from our admirers overseas. im sure tonight’s photographic evidence will be equally compelling. therell be some birthday shennanigans for amy… and some tricks and drinks of course. since regular tricks night imploded chicks is the new tricks. should be good times.

and i almost forgot… ultimate. monday night team close your eyes faced off against baker’s team in the rain and wind. i believe our entire roster showed up which was weird and we saw a huge rainbow when the sun came out. the disc slipped through lyrica’s hands at one point because it was wet and adam had the encouraging speech at halftime that included ‘just get in front of it. if it slips through your fingers… you have airbags.’ nice. we pulled out a win just in time to get one piece of pizza. thankfully. ciao.

heres a typical sunday chez tbrizzle / casual. the girls of cu are in the kitchen, making frozen cocktails out of lemoncello and lime popsicles and the boys, tbrizzle and the viking, are in the back yard stripping the paint off their bikes. watching wes anderson movies and making fruity cocktails was all we had left after an eventful weekend.

miss casual had adam in town from nyc to squire her about town and explore the edge of culinary art. friday night the 25+ courses at alinea changed our lives. i cant even begin to truly describe how perfect the whole experience was so instead ill just post some photos of things that we ate. maybe therell be an in depth analysis on our brother site, scrumptulesence. well keep you posted. after four hours of nausea nirvana miss casual will never be the same again. the next night however… we went to moto and honestly… i want my money back. maybe alinea is too tough of an act to follow… or maybe the bread didnt really taste any better from being dyed in squid ink, frozen in liquid nitrigen, and set on fire tableside. whoever said moto was as good as alinea is dead to us.

but overall a fantastic weekend which harkens back to this other moment in our casual ultimate past. a culinary adventure of another sort… our throwback post today is that time we went out for ribs after cho came to beach drunk. drunk cho, our video game winner, we miss you.

have you ever seen anything so pretty as a million skittle colored bikes like this? this is where miss casuals holiday weekend ended. well i guess technically it ended doing laundry and icing my ankle watching law $ order but really michelle and aaron’s super badass cupcake and bicycle filled bithday bbq was my last stop so well retell the weekend memento style and start at the end.

pulling up to the birthday bbq it was easy to pick out the house as it looked like a parade of pretty bicycles. michelle and aaron were great hosts and amy made some fierce vegan cupcakes. it was nice to drink some sangria and lounge with the ladies of c’n'd. we at casual ultimate feel very lucky to have met such wonderful ladies with such similar interests as ourselves. amy and miss casual are mentally preparing to race our first alleycat on saturday. we need to think positive. theres no ‘i’ in win. but before then there will surely be some tricks as miss casuals skids need work and ms. ulty wants to perfect her skid hop move.

previously the cu staff and stacy had stopped by a bqq thrown by dp and liz. looks like hales is back in town for good and is our new neighbor. baby audrey came looking like she meant business and the boss’s neice was the envy of miss casual in ruffly pink socks and perfectly fluffy hair. with all the babies around it occurred to us that briefcase could easily be renamed ‘team earmuffs.’ good to see the letter j out and about and again we were glad to have friends that appreciate grilling and beer the way team paulina does.

all the bbqs came after recovery brunch because stacy, brooke, and the cu staff started at piece the night before with malt liquor and determination. crunk or die. miss casual had bumped into nat on armitage and he let on the it was going down at dannys so off we went. stacy bought us a shot and it was ON. super dance party all night til stacy looked like she might be napping at the bar. we havent danced so much since… well since the last time we were at dannys probably. a stranger had given stacy and ms. ulty ballons on the walk over from piece so we tied them above our table to indicate clearly ‘this is where the party’s at.’ balloon time.

ms. ultimates bday needs its own explanation from the birthday girl. she also is in further photographic evidence so ill leave it to her. back to the architectures. lates.

Hi, everyone. Mr. Town here, Miss Casual’s brother. Check out our new site:

www.casualtown.com
: ist das Community Browsergame FORREALZ-ischlagen!

Let’s catch up real quick: How are you doing in Chicago? Nice. Yeah, good to hear; I was going to ask you about that, so it all worked out then? Oh, it didn’t. Sorry to hear that. Well she wasn’t right for you anyway. Oh she was, and it was your fault? Yeah, well I mean, I guess life goes on. It doesn’t? Listen, I didn’t want to get into a whole discussion here, but seriously, we used to be friends and I remember that.

I’m doing fine out here in SF. I live in the city now, and let me tell you something: dudes love some dudes out here. I mean, I think it goes deeper than friendship in a lot of ways, especially one way. It’s not affecting me though. I’m straight as an arrow, and nothing will change that. I don’t even give awkwardly long hugs to guys more than once a week or so. That’s a fact.

Anyway, here’s a day in the life so that you can get an idea of what my life is like these days (Midwest translation is in brackets so you can follow what I’m saying): I get up at 7:30 (9:30 CST) and take a shower. I hop on my normal bike for losers (fixed-gear bike) and hit the road. I’m hella tired (tired), but I hop on the downhill slope (like the Midwest but kinda slanted) and just coast for a while. I realize that I forgot to shave, and then notice a few girls (lesbians) riding bikes alongside of me who also forgot to shave…their faces. It’s cool though. I breeze by a couple Carl’s Jr’s (Hardees) and swerve to avoid hitting an old Asian women (black guy). I work for 8 hours (10 hours), and then I marvel at the beauty of the Bay Area on my way to watching the Warriors (Bulls) go down 1-3 to the Jazz (Pistons). I then go to sleep in an 800 sq. ft. 3 BR apartment (3500 sq. ft. 4 BR) while my openly gay room-mate (…errr…) watches South Park.

Here’s your pre-season scouting report for Ultimate out here in the Yay Area:

COED:

Brass Monkey: Sweethearts, great leadership, returning their core for one last go of it. Expect a good year from them. I may roster up with them again since it was such a great experience last year, and they have a spot at representing the US in VanCouver in ‘08 if they finish at the top this year.

Mischief: Defending National Champs in the coed division. They have one guy that wins all their games for them: Tyler Grant. He is back again. They will win again.

WOMEN:

Fury: They picked up five really good players, and they just happen to have an amazingly good coach: Matty Tsang. He’s the reason they will win again when it counts.

New Team: This other women’s team that is a mixture of Homebrood (RIP) and Skyline. They have no identity and fragmented leadership (a la Justice League last year). They will probably have a tough year.

MEN:

Jam: Idris is captaining again this year, and Hollywood and the Body (aka Greg Husak and Brandon Steets) are coming up from the Condors to join an already stacked team. These guys don’t seem to play with a lot of heart, but this team has the players to win a title if it all comes together. They’re also no longer pretending not to be Jam. I’ve been trying out with these dudes, and it’s a lot of fun.

Revolver: Lot of ex-Stanford on this team. They play small ball, breaking the mark, taking high-percentage passes, and really grinding with teams. There’s some great chemistry on this team, and they are looking to add some height (possibly me) to their roster. We’ll see if it’s a fit. Nick Handler is something else. I’ve never been impressed with dump cuts before or seen a guy who is 5′7″ go deep as well as he does. Rivaled maybe only by Josh Wiseman (same team, same height, almost solely a deep).

I guess that’s all there is to say. I will be at Poultry Days with USDA, getting there early on Friday and staying Sunday night if you wanna hang. I’ll be at Sandblast (Thu-Tues) with Dago Tea, a really fun crew mostly from the Bay. Let me know your plans for those two. Unless you’re Jacob Dee. Then just sit tight and wait for your spanking.

Chuck

first off, congratulations to team teamocil, again captained by captain berg. apparently only three team members showed up saturday but we only had to forfeit once. capt. berg negotiated a 13-13 tie for the second game. ms. ulty missed had to miss the games because she was hanging in the big apple with her little sis and dan the man. miss casual needed to, uh, taper so as to bring the pain next weekend.

the weekend started friday with dinner in little italy; it was supposed to be little india, but we couldn’t make it that far. we ended up not going to this restaurant, although the name alone promised culinary treasures beyond imagine. word on new york: new yorkers like to defend the fact that they leave piles of garbage in the street by saying that real estate is too valuable for alleys. truth is, it just makes all the streets smell and look like alleys, but actually even worse because there aren’t enough garbage cans. points to chicago on this one. anywho, after dinner we walked past an awesome bike shop; ms. ulty thought of miss casual and wanted to go in, but it was 11 pm so no dice. there were some late-night phone calls about bikes that had our rims (miss casual, i saw yours too. sugarbomb is cuter though). z&u hopped the train to williamsburg to hook up with some of zibber’s friends and go dancing. i wish i could have spent more time there, because it’s the wicker park of nyc and vice versa. we tried to convince zib’s friend shawn to move to chicago and produce a double-deuce based version of the burg - so far we have ‘the park,’ ‘wickertownvillage’ and ‘22′ as working titles. auditions will be held next weekend. it will be a wealth dejin, inc. production. in other acting news, zibbers may not have provided a law$order walking tour, but the big news of friday night was that she’s friends with a special victim. unfortunately ms. ulty didn’t have her season 7 dvd bixed set with her, so no autograph. new york is clearly the celebrity capital of the world.

saturday was shopping in soho and coffee. ms. ulty pondered buying miss casual these shoes as a passover present before trudging across manhattan to chelsea to go gallery hopping instead. someday perhaps she’ll be able to afford the works of art on display. until then, she’s going to rely on zibby becoming a famous filmmaker to hob-nob with the artistic elite.

saturday night was off the heezy thanks to dan the man, a former obie and ultimate playa. and by “off the heezy” i mean we ate mexican food and then played settlers of catan for three hours with the hil formerly known as gerson and mr. mike. according to tony, bk and little have this game and are mildly obsessed with it. there’s a reason why. this game might make an appearance at future happy hours.

sunday brought a little moma action and late afternoon naps. zibby has fallen asleep in the course of writing this post. it’s probably a sign that this should be the end. i hope the weather improves in chi-town and we can get back to our frisbee ways.

Life is moving fast at casual ultimate headquarters these days and it seems we may have left a few loose ends lately in our posts so today’s a wrap up. (In our defense Ms. Ulty is ivy league bound and miss casual is busy at work making every building going up on the near south side look sexy in pictures. But as we all know losers make excuses, winners make it happen… its happening.)

Our last night in sunny florida was spent in a bacchanalia of carbohydrates and singing plumbing. The dolphin in the walls at the town house was in rare form and so was the insane homemade ravioli and cake with seafoam icing. Chuck and Mama town even played a little something while the kids were at the pool. We didn’t get to spend enough time with nick, a self proclaimed ‘considerate little f^&*er’ but im sure well run into him next year when we might even play Frisbee.

Last weekend was ‘ride and die’ as we cruised around the northside… from watching basketball on Lincoln, to mike d’s going away in wrigleyville, finally ending up at a bar called the California clipper where there was swing dancing and a few champagne cocktails. We wish we had been getting green margaritas made in our mouths with becky but alas mostly it was basketball and naps.

However on Sunday miss casual learned how to trackstand like a pro. Is it too late to quit my job and be a professional bike trick do’er? Since team bon vivant lacks a practice schedule miss casual enlisted a private tutor and took off for a sunny spot at the zoo to practice. Before long she was standing for almost a minute! Hopefully bon vivant will a. get a new name and b. start meeting regularly now that tbrizzle and miss casual will be roommates. We will need to correspond with our sister bike gang on the west coast (captained by dr. welsh) to coordinate jerseys, names, handshakes etc.

Lastly sugarbomb, miss casual’s iron steed, got a makeover with some pink deep v’s last night courtesy of our friends at rapid transit. While sugar will never be as pink as mr. tristan’s bicycle, it still looks pretty sweet. The cu staff celebrated by adjourning to HQ to watch law $ order (it ended up being c$i instead) and discuss strategies at getting on thats show ‘the amazing race’.

Thats enough for today. Expect an excited, high pitched, squealing post about girl talk, spring league, etc tomorrow. Lates.

with all the excitement and 5 full hours of sleep behind us friday night, we pushed on through to saturday and our trip to miami. after a few hours on the sand in fll we packed up and drove down to our ho-tel, mo-tel, bad ass days inn… which conveniently had metered parking and the most unhelpful staff on earth including such highlights as chrisnise, who couldnt give us more than 2$ in quarters at a time, and funny joking concierge guy who tried to call miss casual a fiend when she asked where the closest coffee shop was on sunday morning. ha frickin ha ha.

everyone did their hair and fluffed their dresses and we were off. alaina and the cu staff adjorned to the delano hotel for a foo foo cocktail and awed at the beutiful interior and crowd before heading to dinner and meeting the rest of team extreme… to the max. we got more food than we knew what to do with but thankfully we had chucktown, who wasnt too full of thai donuts to help out, and tucker, who ate a shrimp tail off ms. ulty’s plate and earned the title ‘trash eater.’

then we set off south to find trouble / a bar / the meaning of life. we stopped at some kind of tiki bar for frozen cocktails and phone calls to long lost friends. expect matching outfits this weekend from our favorite twist cone, brown bear and ms. ultimate. heres alaina in the junlge looking more composed than the rest of us. after that we kept walking in search of more trouble / fun / flourescent booze. turns out though its tough to pick a destination when we have 9 people and a buzz on from drinks mixed in an alley. so we walked to the end of miami. almost to cuba. aliana threw pennys at a stranger, tucker got on a strangers motorcylce (that was coincidentally a ‘cbr’) and then the cu staff tried to break off because of massive blisters on our high heeled feet. we ended up coming back to join our cohorts, post tgi fridays, at teds hideout. what a fun sexy time for us.

ms. ultimate made friends with the new zeeland cricket team before miss casual dragged her away from their accents and big blue eyes to reconvene with our group somewhere around 5am at free spirits. another night of good times and 5 hours of sleep.

we needed to get some material out of this trip so we made the ultimate sacrifice for the blog. we went for 24 hours without sleep (besides the occasional cat nap) to pack as much awesome into our first day as possible. heres how it broke down.

day 1, part un
daybreak : chicago. 4am the casual ultimate staff is up and getting ready for our trip to ohare. 510 am. we gave a rousing cheer for denardis when he sauntered up to us at the gate for our flight. 645 cat nap on plane. ms. ulty does unibomber impression. 10am touchdown in the fll and grab becky before heading to the house and waking up chucktown for scones and coffee. 1123 first trip to the pool with papa town, the cu staff, becky, denardis and chucktown. also in attendance were various residents and their visiting grandchildren. it reminded ms. ulty of her grandmothers pool in willmette what with the old people and whatnot. miss casual lost a game of marco polo to the biggest midget in the game. 1217 pulled pork time. thank you mamatown.

day 1, part deux
146: trip to walmart for sunglasses, towels, special ed sandals for denardis, high life, and best friend forever necklaces for the ladies. 228: cu staff tosses disc for first time in four months. we forgot how much we love this game (even though we were not technically playing a game). it felt good, real good to throw again. our admittedly fantastic skills made us realize we should rename the weekend team, from el camino to team extreme. now say ‘team extreme’ like ’shake and bake,’ with the wavey arm motion and finger pistols. you could do that 100 times and i wouldn’t get tired of it. it riles me up. because we’re doers and not thinkers, we’re going to spend the rest of the trip finding a place that will make us t-shirts that say ‘team extreme’ on the front and ‘to the max!’ on the back. preference is for hypercolor, but we’ll settle for airbrush with dolphins. here are some pictures of our first trip to the beach. denardis got his hat stuck in a palm tree trying to be a smartass and it required 3/5 of team extreme to extract it. then ms. ulty and d destroyed a little boy’s dreams, and his sand castle, and buried ms. ulty in sand. it was cozy.

day 1, part trois: interlude
604 pm: we get back to the house after driving around a bit. chucktown at the wheel was delirious from lack of sleep. 617 pm: we eat denardis’s body weight (playing weight) in beef fajitas and fresh guacamole. ms. ulty declares this best vacation ever. 7:14: showers and talladega nights. lainers came over around 9 and got us off the couch with mike’s help.

day 1, part quatre
1130: lainers leads us to coyote ugly; we owe her an apology for doubting her skills at finding a bar, because we end up at this awesome place with swinging bench seats overlooking a lagoon and a freight train route, but this place is frightening when you first drive up people. ms. ulty thought there was nothing but prostitutes and college boys on the streets, but apparently that’s the way they roll down here during spring break. jesus. 131 am: ferrari’s flight lands at fll, and the rest of team extreme heads to mardi gras. 213 am: all eight members of team extreme are together at the same swinging bench for the first time. we elect tucker rookie of the year for suggesting we drink a couple sparkers to get the party started. (note: the original five had already done this in the parking lot about 3 hours before. there are zero laws regarding alcohol consumption in florida; there actually might not be any laws at all, but lainers actually works for a judge so we know that to be false.) 247 am: discussion of whyte noise, the club immediately behind us. ask us about this one when we’re off the clock.

day 1, part cinq
318 am: c.u. staff gets margaritas made in their mouths at a bar called bricks, shortly before almost getting vomited upon by a total stranger. you’re going to have to go to the vip folder folder to see these pictures, because they’re going to get us kicked out of the miss america pageant. i motherfucking love this country. 357 am: we steal denardis for a minute, much to the dismay of his new dance partner, and flee from the scene. the gps system leads us straight to the mcdonald’s drive thru before heading home for the night. 423 am: sleep at last.

and that was only day 1. needless to say we bailed on any ultimate-related activities previously scheduled for saturday morning. just ask yourself this… what does the dolphin want?

miami is going to be bananas. i think george micheal bluth said it best when he gave us our post title. at left youll see an actual dramatic reenactment of denardis and ferrari coming up from the pool. while the casual ultimate staff failed to get airbrush tans we are still bringing our a-game to this weekend of sun, naps, eating and naps. oh and frisbee. i think theres gonna be some frisbee. and naps. on the beach.

monday night we had an installment of casual dining with bk, akira, and the boss playing the part of an under the weather ms. ultimate. while the wine was lovely and the vegetables were yummy, a curtain that was supposed to be ‘ambiance’ was all up in miss casual’s grill and our waitress was like pat with a weird little purse she carried around. over all i give it a b-. thats right b m-i-n-e-s. i didnt even study. but im partial to la sardine. look out for a more articulate review on our favorite food blog.

mama town is already cooking and papa town is undoubtedly laying on the couch napping and watching golf so its on. we’ll try and post from south beach and by ‘try and post’ i mean well drink a margarita with becky and giggle about something blog related and then forget all about it.

what could follow a night of such magical wonderment as friday? well saturday i guess. the cu staff recovered by hitting bongo room for brunch followed by light shopping and naps. the evening found our team split between two neighborhoods with ms. ulty throwing down for martha’s bday in wrigley and miss casual and the boss taking the lovely ladies of the er out in bucktown.

dr welsh had finished her test and freshened up before coming down to meet us at piece. (in a side note, the cu staff, inspired by ferrari’s manuary, will be throwing femuary, a midwinter celebration of being girls, and it will involve lots of freshening up for sure, as well as manicures, sleepovers, and romantic comedies.) then we moved on to rodan for icicles and hot toddies. do you know how much heat a person gives off? 150 btus per hour, which was enough to partially thaw out the window at rodan.

after all that we barely had enough energy to bake a mountain of cookies to take to the boss’s crib on sunday to watch the superbowl. the callaways were nice enough to bring their little one for ms. ulty to gush over and tbr was nice enough to bring thanksgiving. turns out the cu ladies would make excellent lesbian mothers. witness miss casual helping ms. ulty with her beer while she holds audrey.

the game itself was a bummer since our team lost and the ads were all sinister and depressing. the boss dubbed it the ’superbowl of crying’ after an ad with a sad robot almost brought miss casual to tears. she recovered in time to discuss the referees’ high waisted pants and what to do about them with tbr and monica. the only reason we remember any of this is because we transcribed our notes from the evening off of miss january.

even though the bears lost it was a good night and it was nice to watch nick swardson like 4 peas in a pod after the game. tv makes us feel safe.

well its friday but i swear this was the longest. week. ever. i don’t even know if ill make it to 530 when ill pick ms. ulty up in the casual mobile and head back to the double deuce to start the weekend with a manhattan and a fresh kitten chez ultimate. last night we regrouped to plan our attack of the weekend with the boss and treem at sweet alice. why have we not been to this place? it has good greasy food, fat tire, and a bald bartender who calls me hon. what more could we want? since it is a stone’s throw from paulina im sure we will be playing a lot of foosball there in the near future.

the boss has a cold so it’s lucky for him that dr. welsh is in the heezy this weekend. she is in an aeroplane right now headed towards chicago to help us throw down for the super bowl. it has been a week of stressful showdowns at casual ultimate headquarters but it didnt even give miss casual cause to buy a pair of gucci sandals so it couldn’t have been too bad. however stressing out is against dr.’s orders so we well be putting an end to that and say a little prayer for our friday to go smoothly.

dear lord baby jesus, in your tiny golden pajamas watching baby einstein videos and learning sounds and colors, please let us last through our workday and bring the pain to this weekend with dr. welsh. also please let the bears beat the living tar out of the colts and let our hangovers, be they from food or 40s, be mild on monday. also because of a contract which stipulates that i mention happy hour at every grace id just like to say that it will be delicious and that i hope the boss’s surprise for ms. ulty involves video games. amen.

the town children spent thanksgiving together in the sunshine state of san francisco. we had a t-giving feast in oakland with some of the brass monkey crew and some very nice canadians. i chatted with some jumpy dude who thought he could talk hip hop to me. ha. then we spent the next few days doing what the towns do at the holidays - eating, sleeping, seeing movies, and throwing in the park. chucktown showed miss casual the best mexican food in his particular zip code, the best mojito anywhere and how to throw a forehand. we biked through the park and ran into the deyoung museum which you see here.

*warning - architectural idiocy to follow. only carlo and maybe rob should be reading* the museum is a new herzog and demeuron building and one of their only built works in the states. it was detailed nicely but ultimately i feel like their work was better when it was materially driven as opposed to the formally aggressive stuff they are doing now. like where do the oblique angles come from? is it just a contemporary pretense? is it programmatically necessary or inspired by the site in some way? or is it just expensive and ‘cool looking’? ugh. the screen they used on the exterior was interesting but the interior kind of looks like everything else. chuck is always so nice when i drag him to buildings he doesnt care about.

after that detour we spent an afternoon with the philips’s seeing the new bond and getting texts from denarids. ‘tell chuck i love him. tell him to call me so i can say all the things i never said.’ good times. we saw dr. welsh and her crazy scar on her knee. i almost forgot she gives the best hugs ever. she walks like a pimp cause of her knee surgery. we took down some crepes and gossiped a bit before miss casual had to head back home. it was nice to hang with the 90210 crew. good luck with your move to NOPA chuck. keep it real.

just in case you thought halloween only came to florida this year, here is a belated all hallow’s eve greeting from our favorite doctor (she’s the skeleton on the left). she is giving bjorn and his superman costume a serious run for his money. also shes a home owner now so holler at her.

Due to the number and magnitude of events, this is going to have to be a post in two parts.

* ULTIMATE *

If you really wanted the play by play you’d have read it on the UPA’s championship site by now, so I’ll give a quick overview. Briefcase was glad to establish regional dominance (asterix) by beating Moe on Thursday, and of course it was fun to play Chucktown’s new team. I think their name is copper orangutan, i’m not sure, we called them Chuck’s Team. Deliverance brought the pain and the dueling banjos. Luckily mr. town was close at hand with his fiddle to defend our honor. After a relatively quiet night at the condos, we won a couple outside the region by beating hooray! and bad larry. We had to add a period after Mr. Briefcase. on the scoreboard to even the punctuational tables before playing Hooray!. Bad Larry was a fun, fun game, with some our lady alums on the other team to liven things up. We were psyched to go into the quarters play-in game that afternoon against Amp….unfortunately we lost. The wind picked up but our energy level didn’t; surprising the donuts Lauren brought to the breakroom didn’t do the job. Intense game, case.

Friday night put a starving Briefcase squad huddled around the bar at Daquiri Deck, thanks to the masters team that stole our table. Apparently they serve the blue plate special under an 8 o’clock reservation for “mr. briefcase.” We showed them who’s boss by playing flippy cup while waiting for the main course; keep it classy, chicago. And of course the osprey house drowned its pre-quarters sorrows in the pool and hot tub. Curry ref’d volleyball until everyone realized the that it was folly to challenge a team with Ness on it. Steve-o, remember when you whiffed that jump shot off the steps? Best play of the weekend.

A sleepy and ambivalent Briefcase awoke Saturday morning to find themselves pitted against an NYC team stacked with two 2005 BC interns. I wish we had beaten their asses, if only to punish them for going to work for the competition. We kind of got back at them by forcing one of their handlers to huck a disc into a bystander’s face - his girlfriend’s - at point-blank range. I’m sure she took the vacation days and made the trip all the way down to Florida for that. Our next game vs. Montana….well, Lainers brought us cookies. Here we are in the picture that’s going on the xmas card this year. Thanks for making the trip, quaddie!

We watched some fantastic finals games in the sun with our other Chicago friends on Sunday. Dubes won the spirit award for Briefcase, and Akira won by Machine - who won for Nemesis? Send us a picture of you in yourr fuzzy 5 ultimate hat.

All in all, the ultimate was hott and so was the team. It was a sad plane ride home. Ms. ulty and miss casual had so much fun formatting your TPS reports this year. This team went through a major overhaul in Q2’06, in both the roster and style of practice and play. The results would suggest our execs delivered for the shareholders. Thanks to everyone for a fantastic season - I can’t wait for next year! I think we’re going to come back better than ever.

play ultimate. stay casual.

thanks to our war room phone (its red) that connects miss casual at home base directly to mr briefcase we have some information from pool play at nationals.

briefcase lost two yesterday, one to their former colleague chucktown and his team brass monkey, but made it into a quarters play-in game with AMP this afternoon. unfortunately they lost but they had a good day overall, beating bad larry and flaming moe.

according to bk, our correspondant in the field, machine was in a similar position to briefcase, upsetting condors early but losing their play-in game to ring 12-15.

nemesis is in a similar position playing for placement tomorrow after losing a tight game to slowdown out of texas.

brass monkey won all their games and are headed to quarters in the morning along with becky and her ladies on backhoe.

well try and keep you posted as the weekend moves along and look for a big ol post monday from ms. ulty herself.

thanks to our new friend bil at ultimatephotography@gmail.com for the photos. we owe you some good old fashioned chitown hospitality (read: pbr) if you ever make it over this way.

while ms. ulty was holding it down in the chi, miss casual was celebrating her birthday with brooke (also known as ‘plan A’) and the boss, who some of you might remember as adam from our happy hour at black beetle. the weekend was a whirlwind of shopping, art, and most importantly, eating like champions and drinking really expensive cocktails. remember our 10$ rounds at chipp inn? try an 80$ round at a place called the pegu club. it seems pricey but they put magic in the cocktails with these little eyedroppers at the left. the drinking went to the boss’s head obviously becuase here he is trying to proposition the birthday girl.

brunch is serious in new york. in brooklyn the girls wear shirts cut down to their navels and on the lower east side we saw a girl in purple eyeshadow up to her brows. as brooke noted, ‘thats a lot of eyeshadow for 1130.’ totes.

we held our own at teany, moby’s teahouse. after hearing that they were out of cupcakes, yours truly told our waiter that he, personally, was ruining my birthday. he made it up to us by bringing me a life changing scone and we were off to shopping followed by 11-sies, which actually ended up being guacamole and margaritas at 3:30. (if miss casual was a superhero her fatal weakness would be the salt rimmed glass and salsa.)

then we went to dinner, which was lovely. the boss broke out a bottle of some swanky bubbly and we toasted rambo and the boss moving to brooklyn and miss casual turning 28 again. (doesnt 28 sound better than 29? i like the even years. i especially like the 2’s and 8’s so im gonna stay 28 for another round and then turn 30.) best birthday in memory for sure. here are the perpetrators looking casual after our bachanalia of a day. thanks for the memories people. the dirty mistress signing off….

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in case you missed it in the comment thread from last week, ea was nice enough to set us up with a flicker pool. you can find it here. also we updated the ‘who is cu’ page and if youre reading this you might be on it so check it out

this will be way more fun if you guys post comments to fill in the some of the blanks. so here goes.

yesterday miss causal and ms. utlimate hightailed it out of work and then _______. it had been a ________ day. once the cu ladies were back in wicker park we ________ before we ran into cho and bk. we all got dinner and cho turned to the girl next to him and said _________. he didnt realize it was roadhouse. the cu ladies were all giggles when pfil and bg showed up and said ‘cu is so _________.’ of course the BRs were no far behind. tbr had bought a new ________ and cbr was obvioulsy uncomfortable with the ________. after more _________ and ice cream after that, we all biked up to _________. who knew that wed meet ferrari and akira? a spontaneous game of ________ ensued and we played until it was time for _________ . quite a fun night in the __________ of the casual ultimate universe.

Good evening, because whatever time it is in Cali, it’s always 11 PM in Chicago due to time change.

while miss casual was holding it down/dashing ms. ultimate’s dreams of ever being a league champion in chicago, the other half of C.U. was getting casual formal for Ben & Bacers’ wedding in la jolla. for those of you who don’t know, la jolla is in SoCal, just north of the whale’s vagina. it’s a lovely town, filled with seals and tide pools. ms. ultimate fulfilled a childhood dream by visiting the san diego zoo on saturday, home of this panda. this panda is on the blog mostly because stacey loves pandas, and this post is about her wedding (i still don’t have a guarantee i’ll make the final album).

after the requisite brunch and pedicure, the other 75% of the quad got decked out and headed to the beachside hotel to watch little bacers get married and change her name, all so that her email address could be slutkoski@gmail.com. ok, actually she put a B in there for her middle initial, but her nickname’s slutkoski from now on regardless. i know C.U. isn’t the place where you come to read sentimental sap, that’s mike’s world, but people i can’t help it she’s my bestie. the ceremony was lovely, simple and very stacey&ben for those eight readers who know her. it was outside, in a park overlooking the ocean. aside from the sunset, the best part of the location was that it meant the snakes on a plane banner flew by more than once - i hope it made it into the background of one of the photos. the bride and groom looked so happy i couldn’t stand it. i was crying so hard the whole time my eyes hurt the next day. the only complication came at the end, when it turned out the actually wedding papers were nowhere to be found. best man Ned had to go find them in the groom’s room, supposedly under a dirty pair of underwear. we won’t ask questions. anyway, they got it signed in the middle of the cocktail reception, although the judge was so tipsy i’m not sure it’s a binding legal document. lainers? russell? professional opinions? ms. ultimate was pacing herself, but apparently judge and his bosty botox second wife knew they weren’t staying for the reception and took advantage of the open bar while they could (thanks, by the way, mr. and mrs. gerson).

of course it wouldn’t be stacey’s wedding without a little sass, so here’s the blushing bride at the bar across the street, waving her finger at somebody. probably adam, because he was wearing a suit and tie instead of the pirate shirt he’d ordered from international male just for the occasion. the bride and groom left pretty soon to make it official, and the evening trailed off from there. we hear there was some fighting and bloodshed among the groom’s friends later in the evening…maybe they can fill us in on the details.

it’s all pretty casual from there. hilary got the same american apparel bathing suit that ms. ultimate has, even though she knew i’d be wearing it because i brought it to vegas. we lounged by the pool, took walks along the ocean, pestered sea anemones, etc. we ate mexican food for lunch and dinner - anyone know where a girl can get a good lobster enchilada in chitown? it was a fun weekend. congrats to stacey and ben! i hope simon didn’t miss you too much and bite you in the eye when you got home, like that crazy cat at the hotel.

here’s adam gettin his hustle on in the kitchen last night before we went out for a late dinner involving an obscene amount of sushi at sushi wabi. having him in from out of town forced me to miss team M kicking some major ass at summer league last night but i got to wear my new sneakers with a matching tube top to dinner so i guess it was worth it. adam wore his orange patent leather air force ones so we looked like some sort of deranged japanese couple. he thinks the blog has too much frisbee. i think thats probably not going to change until it snows.

today kind of sucks what with the rain and gray and such. but tomorrow is going to be beautiful. ahh chicago… the sunshine state… so get ready for happy hour. make sure you bring your beer drinking shoes. black beetle. 630. it could get casual.

sorry for the late post but it took me all day yesterday to recover from sandblast…and i didnt even play. and by ‘recover’ i mean ‘eat an absurdly large brunch with the towns and sarah and jason t. and hit the movies with bk’. it was so great to have chuck and sarah in town this weekend. here’s a picture of chuck about to go to work on saturday.

and work they did. briefcase played a sick nasty tournament this weekend with our own ms. ultimate having one of her best tournaments ever (this is a third party opinion from numerous sources). unfortunately she wasnt around for sandburst saturday night becuase she was watching a mariachi band at her parents house. sandburst was awesome. we ate at el cid (heres a pic at right with chuck in his work you dog shirt and sarah throwing us some blue steel) and then chilled at the BR’s with beer and mini kit kat bars. no wonder i love those guys… the talk turned to soccer, moisturizer, and how miss casual needs to marry a mob boss. i already have the pointy toed italian leather heels and big gold hoops so if anybody knows a soprano, hook me up.

akira and cho didnt make it because they were bringing the pain to the official sandblast party. through a C.U. correspondant we got reports of them stumbling home late and not being able to open their front door with either of their keys. (we are working on getting a photo of the offending lock to inspect it’s obviously defective nature.) then cho proceeded to shoot said correspondant using his finger as an imaginary gun. gangsta.

so unfortunately be’ach got upset in the quarters on sunday, possibly because of their a-game tactics at cherry red the night before and briefcase had to watch / play against the speedo team. ick. however we did get the C.U. MHP (most hilarious player) out of that game. Jarrett shaved his number into his back hair and so goes down in history… (does anyone have a pic of this?)

bjorn, who was off filming a doublemint gum ad on saturday night, brought his a-game on sunday where he and becky and their madison team bested briefcase in the finals. it was sad to see briefcase lose but it was nice to have some casual peeps on the winning team. so big ups to bjorn and becky and the volkmans whose divine dinner sunday night made losing a little easier to take.

its like homecoming this week. becky rolled into town and it made our win last night against billy’s team at summer league that much better to roll up to piece after and drink von awesome with becky. unfortunately this is not the car we rolled up in. look at the rims on that impala! theyre up to my hip. granted im short but still…i expected this in the ATL but not the peoples republic of wicker park.

beach tonight should be good. its great weather, becky’s gonna bring her dirty south stylo out to north ave, and i think ive recovered finally from my car key fiasco. oh and nothing quite so dramatic as a stabbing last night but if you guys aren’t going to do stupid dangerous things for us to post about im going to have to start making them up. holla at a playa.

heres some more pics from last night…baker with his game face on, our pizza, our waitress who tried to remain aloof while sporting a white napkin like headband. miss casual has a tip for ya darlin…its hard to pull off pouty teen angst when you look like frickin karate kid.

this morning i got an email with chucktown in a flier for sandblast. i hope this is an omen that this year he is coming back to town to work. you. dog. i also think sarah and akira and carlo are on the banner for the sandblast website.

ms. ultimate and i brought our a-game to summer league and piece last night. here is a picture of jeff and mike looking intimidated by our game faces. actually that might be mike throwing blue steel…i can never be sure.

so far our nameless summer league team is winning some games but im concerned that we lack what the french call a certain ‘i dont know what.’ hopefully our chemistry will get better as the weather gets warmer.