Another Limp Performance

My co-worker has a basketball team that competes in a league for professionals, at the Chelsea Piers facilities on the west side of Manhattan. Despite the fact that my foot is really nowhere close to healing, I decided I owed it to these guys to show up and at least make an appearance. What ended up happening was that only five guys showed up, including your humble Basil who had no other choice but to trade the agony in his foot for the ignominy of competing against guys who are younger, fitter, hungrier, look better playing and, apparently all have attractive girlfriends sitting on the sidelines, waiting for their men to conclude their ritualistic-disembowelment of their oponents.

Consider me disemboweled, and not just that, utterly humiliated to boot.

I played like shit. In fact, I am what comes out when shit excuses itself in order to go to the gents. Shit that takes up basketball as a hobby, plays like shit and then goes off to take a shit was less shit than I was. Shit that...you get the point.

Nowhere was my played-like-shit assessment better confirmed than in the official game boxscore, which is issued at the end of the game: Player [BASIL FAWLTY], number N/A, -1 points.

Negative 1. I didn't score a single basket and on top of that, the other team shot a free throw because I didn't have an official team jersey. The free throw they scored was accomodatingly (accomodating the universe which is out to SCREW me) added on to my column, hence the grand total of negative one point.

And on top of that, my foot looks like it's been beaten with a sock full of pennies. Its present appearance is a real cure for foot fetishists everywhere. If I could induce the same swelling and redness all over my body, I could quit this advertising malarkey and make my living at a freak show as the modern incarnation of the elephant man. If...you get the point.

And so do I. I'm shit at everything. Shitty, shitty McShit-shit. Taking a break from shit to be crap...five minutes later, I'm back to being shit and showing everyone how it's really done.

I really don't recognize myself anymore, in anything I do. I'm the wrong side of 35, sans girlfriend, sans stability, sans country (neither here nor there, to be accurate), sans cash of any consequence and no plan for six months from today. I hate competing at anything, probably because I have the dubious distinction of being quite splendidly average at everything I do, my only vaguely redeeming feature is that I seem to have done quite a lot of things, thus ensuring that my record of medicority is witnessed across multiple different fields and settings.

Negative one. Negative fucking one.

Good thing I learnt to just accept things over which I have no control and stop judging myself. At least, not while I'm sober. I should just accept my role as some sort of patsy for the universe (even that is inflating my own importance; the universe doesn't have the time to fixate on me) and wait for a giant meteor to hurtle through space and crash into the eastern seaboard, wiping out all the fucking basketball leagues in the fucking country.