Swing and a Miss

In my dream, it was someone cheering at a baseball game while I was trying to have a conversation with my cat (if you think that part’s weird, you should also know I fucking hate baseball).

My first thought, as I awoke to hear his final cries for mercy, was of the last thing he had said to me before leaving camp that night: “If there’s grass on the field, play ball.” Now, if there’s one thing I hate as much as a twenty-something pedophile who hides behind the anatomical similarities between an impressionable teenage girl and a grown woman, it’s a slob who takes sports metaphors in vain.

I wasn’t sure when his screams had ended as I was too focused on walking silently toward their fire. Around it, the raucous group--who were very clearly not, as she had said, a group of friends on spring break--lauded the girl’s performance in trapping their dinner, as they passed portions of my buddy from grubby hand to grubby hand.

For hours, until they were all asleep, I hung as soundly as moss to the bark of that tree watching them with dumb, cold reason; a two-hundred-pound man, I calculated, couldn't satisfy a dozen haggard mountainfolk and I’ve never really been a “dessert” kind of guy.