A friend who never reads this blog unless I force him to went to his second baseball game ever yesterday. This is only remarkable because I have been to one more than he has. All three of the baseball games I attended were company events, the choice being either spend some time getting to know your coworkers and their weird habits, or stay at the office the rest of the day and work. I am a team player.
There was still a smoking area at the ball park then. It was an isolated balcony, a sundrenched Siberia overlooking an industrial wasteland.
Fortunately one of my coworkers had brought sunblocker.
The office had cleaner bathrooms and less beer. I cannot remember the games, and I don't drink beer.
That is to say, I don't drink beer unless I am out with the bookseller once a week and we're digesting politics, contemporary society, modern culture, drunks playing in traffic at the nearby intersection, existenzangst, and ein allumfassender abscheu an zügelloses pot-raucherei und rap-musik.
Plus, in his case, a hamburger.
After one beer, and keenly inspecting the art in the alley, we head over to a dive bar for whisky, where one of the screens shows what's on television and another has videos suitable to the lyrics of whatever song is being misguidedly sung. Howled. Or drunkenly moaned and wailed.
He watches the teevee, irrespective of whether it is the game or the elderly Buddhist abbot with magnificent eyebrows discoursing unintelligibly in Chinese about dharma, and I watch the karaoke screen hoping that somebody will sing something that Teresa Teng sang years ago.
We listen to the yowling and loud dice games, and continue conversing.
It's a tradition of ours that developed over the years.
Keenly relished, yet lamentable.
I rather enjoy horrible performance art, he is strangely obsessed with baseball (and elderly Buddhists), and the Cantonese patrons largely ignore whoever is singing, except if they are white and acting in an eccentric or shocking manner which it will be great fun to watch.
My friend and I are impartial observers.
We're not from this planet.
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