More from the Weekend

My thumb is not broken. Just sprained tendons, which is excellent because it can be treated with "pain management" rather than splints or casts that render me unplayable at nationals. Excellent.

I couldn't sleep last night. I kept replaying the weekend again in my head. For every awesome thing that happened, I did a ridiculous idiotic thing to counter it. Perhaps I suffered a head injury?

While dressed as Super Mario, I challenged a 14-year-old girl to a DDR bout at the bowling alley. She was there in mesh shorts and a tank top, clearly not a novice. I thought I could take her or at least keep up. She slugged in the tokens and went right for the "heavy" level. In front of 30 teammates and supporters, I made an enormous ass of myself. Later, Lori and Lemme tried to make me feel better by pointing out that she plays DDR like I play rugby. This only made me want to practice harder.

Then, I discovered that a rather uncouth expulsion of air from my body was loudly picked up on the dvd of the men's playoff game against Buffalo, along with everyone on my team loudly discussing its disgustingness. Everyone knows! I'm so full of shame.

THEN, for reasons known only to Satan, I phoned the tight five room and implied that they were all big fatties. Why? Why did I do this?

There we were, surrounded by people who subsidize our bowling excursions and stand in the freezing cold to cheer for us. People who drove 190 miles to stand guard over our Steinlager tent only to lose it to a wind gust anyway. We get texts and supportive messages from other teams in our league who root for us and yet I cannot stop being an idiot. Are we all idiots? Is rugby a big conglomerate of idiots who manage to hide their idiocy for 80 minutes each weekend (or, on some weekends, 160 minutes)?

Perhaps it is just me and my teammates put up with me because that is the rugby way: to love our players because of their oddities and not despite them.