(adapted from a blog article September 21, 2015)

It is often quoted, albeit incorrectly, that Benjamin Franklin said, “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” and while the team’s pitcher count at Slice’s may be testing the validity of this statement, I certainly can’t argue with its intention. What Franklin actually wrote though, was regarding nature’s daily miracle of turning water into wine, most probably his beloved Port, “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy,” … it just doesn’t seem to have the same ring to it… yes, the same sentiment but too long, too wordy and with too much of a pinky-in-the-air quality to it. So, as the quintessential Americans that we are, what do we do? We make things the way he should have said it. Like a scorebook massaging wet dream, that weak little pop-fly that falls out of the first baseman’s glove, becomes a solid line-drive into centerfield in the scorebook. If it didn’t happen that way, well gosh darn it… it should have. It’s understandable after all, that along the way somebody tried to remember the funny little thing Franklin said about drinking, looked on Wikipedia and delivered a shortened, punched-up and slightly butchered misquote… the common man’s drink, in the common man’s language. While I’m less certain of the theological nature of these statements… and we can’t be certain how Old Ben would have felt about Jager-Bombs, Crown Royal & SoCo Caramel Apples or Goblets of Patron at 3:15am on the South Side of Chicago… by the way, brilliant Rott!!!… I can still taste that, thank you very much. I am certain of the biochemical, psychosocial, and gastrointestinal aspects of the aforementioned liquefi-coctions… and for the record that is not a misspelling. A liquefi-coction is whatever-the-hell Bavery makes during poker, in those 32 oz. glasses, that could double as a paint remover and makes you feel like a horse just kicked you in the side of the head… that in a counter-stroke of “genius”

I packed in a cooler and smuggled in my golf bag during that 94 degree GGO outing, that left Steve looking like a pile of goo that somebody crapped on the clubhouse floor. Payback is sweet! Booze, in all its many glorious forms, has a long and storied tradition as a painkiller among self-medicating athletes of all types and I have endeavored to explore this, with the help of various teammates, occasional poker players and golf buddies, all who have aided in my extensive research into this area of the human condition and as one of my fellow poker table philosophers has put it, “there’s a pork chop in every glass… and it is GOOD!”

Now to be completely honest, these many excursions into the post-ballgame, bottom-glassed, poker-fueled netherworld of after-hours nightlife has not always occurred without incident… ranging from the

absurdly bad, “oh dear god my ears are bleeding” karaoke at the Silver Eagle to the, “is that the fourth hand you’ve lost boat over boat?” slow walk around the backyard time-outs during poker games, to the “why is that guy staring at us?… Luke get your buddy, we need to leave NOW or we’re going to get shanked in the parking lot” visionary kind of moments… or is it shived in the parking lot? Is shank the verb and shiv is the noun, as in “he got shanked with the shiv” or as Ron once asked, “do you get shanked with a shank in the prison yard and shived with a shiv in the barrio?” I’m not certain, but does that seem racist? Well, I guess… if you have to ask the question. Should I ask Oscar and Luis the next time I see them? Probably not… but I digress, where was I? Oh yes, the many varied opportunities that present themselves during post-game rocket-fueled awesomeness, but first because I know “Bert”-inerney is waiting for me to resolve said issue above, here is today’s history lesson via Wikipedia…

“Shiv (possibly from the Romani word chivomengro, “knife”[1]), also chiv, is a slang term for any sharp or pointed implement used as a knife-like weapon. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests shive, a razor, documented in 1915, as the root word.[2] In the 1920s, “shiv” was also a common slang term for a bladed weapon, mostly a knife.[3] In the U.S., these improvised prison knives are often called shanks. These terms, along with “chib”, can be used either as a noun or a transitive verb, referring to the weapon or the act of attacking with such a weapon respectively. In the 1950s, British criminal Billy Hill described his use of the shiv: “I was always careful to draw my knife down on the face, never across or upwards. Always down. So that if the knife slips you don’t cut an artery. After all, chivving is chivving, but cutting an artery is usually murder. Only mugs do murder.”[5]
 
SIDENOTE: Well, thanks Billy… I may have just found my new

favorite quote… and thanks Wikipedia, I take back what I said about you 2 articles ago… I had no idea the use of a shiv was such an art form and kudos to Ron for being mostly correct about the prison yard “shank” and for being only half as racist as I first thought that day 3 years ago… (double-chest fist bump) … my bad.

Trying to sum up the many post ballgame stories of drunken debauchery that litter my sub-conscious is almost always made more difficult by the lack of proper context needed to understand the subtle nuisances in play, but in typical fashion I am not about to let something so monumentally trivial slow me down. Having gone through the off-season work of acquiring the many sponsors we currently enjoy, there is agreement among the players that such efforts and commitment should not go unsupported… ergo, bellying up to the bar that has provided the springtime cash to kick-off the season is like punching in for a 2nd shift job, that while sometimes enjoyable can occasionally be construed as “work”… similar to though not directly equivalent with Dolly Parton’s line from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, “It’s a business doin’ pleasure with ya!”… of course, her business was… well, you know… so maybe not that much the same after all.

Player commitment to sponsor support is strongest early in the night, somewhere between the third and fifth pitchers of beer, when the platters of nachos and chicken wings first arrive. This is the time for early post-game analysis and general griping about how bad the Brewers are stinking it up currently, like when Jean Segura somehow stole first base… yeah, you remember it… when there’s still hope of intelligent things being said and partially understood. Later, around pitcher number seven, we begin to lose folks and the conversation turns to the bizarre… like when Hammie & Dre broke out the I-Phone video of Rocky 4 and nearly gave me whiplash with their back & forth exchange over the awesomeness of the training montage… DRAGO!!!… And Adrianne’s mid-80s classic line,

“You can’t win!!!” … which we now occasionally hear between innings or whenever someone attempts to swat a mosquito. These “group effort” outings have become the cornerstone of the team-building experience.
 
This is the part of the night when it’s deemed time to move to the next sponsor locale and as defacto ringmaster, story archivist and handler of sponsorship money, I help coordinate what is usually a short, confusing discussion of who is riding with who, who is capable of driving (not me!!) and how much tip is appropriate (HINT: always give her more of the tip than you think she needs… HA!). This transition inevitably leads to the loss of half-or-so of the group, who succumb to the “smart” choice of heading for home, while those of us with real sponsor commitment soldier on to the next establishment, sometimes without a car – safety first! – mostly without dignity and only once, without pants. Upon arrival, everyone attempts to “straighten-up & fly right” while concentrating on the next conversation, in an attempt to say something coherent like (while whispering) … “why does Dre have a stormtrooper decal in his rear window?… (and not whispering) … Dre, WHY DO YOU HAVE A… oh sorry, a stormtrooper decal?… in your… window?” … Yeah, it’s kind of like that.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV7Ha3VDbzE
 
SIDENOTE: The video link here is among the best stormtrooper related 9/11 conspiracy crossover sketches available… complete with Jedi mind trick at the end… What if those WERE the droids we were looking for?

The Jedi mind trick is similar to the time Andrey dropped his keys in the urinal and then, realizing I had seen him do that, waved his hands like the penguin in Madagascar and said, “You didn’t see anything” … and I was like, “I’m already texting your brother… I may have been the worst person on the planet to have done that in front of.” It was recently brought to my attention that I’ve now been playing in this league so long that when I first started, my youngest daughter was just 9 years old and would sometimes come to watch our games on Friday nights. She is now 21 and occasionally joins our post-game festivities…  Oh, did I mention my daughter is a firefighter?… oh well, she’ll probably mention it 30 seconds after meeting you the next time she sees you anyway… it’s like this requirement among the EMS crowd. As the night enters this next and somewhat confusing phase, the herd is further thinned as we lose a few more individuals who are unable to sustain themselves against the hours of gut-splitting drinking and heavy laughter… or is that supposed to be the other way around? Aww, piss on it! As we inevitably make the final push towards the evening’s conclusion, while an on running debate about the merits of Taco Bell’s 4th meal is in full swing, I continue the timeless ritual known the world over as, drunk texting. Whether to those who have already left or to those who never arrived, I launch a steady barrage towards their inbox to keep them up-to-date as to how things are going (usually not well), as the garbled letters can attest, those on the receiving end can rarely decode all the awesome flowing their way… or to put that another way, “Dude, it’s like your phone gets drunk with you.” YEAH, IT DOES!!!
 

By zero-dark-thirty, only the true degenerates are left to begin the final infiltration and the codenames are deployed… Murse is on my right, Hot Mess has the left flank, Dish is on point and LBJ is in the rose bushes. The target may be a wet napkin between the toes, head butting a punching bag, sprinting through a used car lot to watch the Northern Lights play trivia crack on the magic box or making Beer-E appear incredibly uncomfortable… all while listening to yet another “true story”… no matter the challenge, this group rises to the occasion. Over the next 90 minutes, they peel off one by one like Navy Seals buddy tapping during an exfiltration of the target area, until I’m left with just my wingman, “You never leave your wingman!”… like the time I was told to “keep an eye” on the redhead at the end of the bar – a far too literal thing to say to me considering the current level of self-administered liquid pain meds in my system – because my wingman was watching “sweater vest” hit on the four “ladies with personality” behind him. I proceeded to stare at her without blinking for 8 solid minutes… prompting a one-finger salute, a clarification of everyone’s current status in the world, a short exchange regarding how to wear a

baseball hat (yes, they were all doing it wrong), a long discussion regarding the proper technique to use with a bar stool when it’s clearly the bar that is holding you up and an agreement that all involved were in fact “nice guys”. Upon exiting the scene, a post bar-time trip to Perkin’s for pancakes was called for (that I may or may not have fallen asleep in), we can’t be certain… the jury is still out on that one…  which was disrupted only momentarily by the aforementioned “ladies” from our previous sponsor, being in the booth next to us. The groups’ leader quieted her companions so they, “wouldn’t offend us”, while we assured her that we could not be “offended”. This prompted her to say something clearly meant to be offensive, to which I gave our groups’ standard poker table reply of, “well, it’ll be better for both of us, if you just relaxed into it”… which in hindsight was probably an overreach considering our 37 seconds of familiarity and now sounds much worse even with 780 words of proper context preceding it. This prompted her to yell, “WHORE!” at one or both of us…

I have since been given assurances that it was directed only at me for reasons that remain mysterious… and the entire episode was recounted the next day with a bunch of Stormtrooper videos. Huh? I guess summing it up doesn’t seem that difficult after all.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfciHHG2cMY
 
SIDENOTE: The video link here was my answer to her unusual outburst… that Ean listened to for a shockingly long time and I now occasionally leave playing on Steve’s computer at work, with the volume cranked up… oh yeah, and PONTY’S A DICK!!!