Northbound

I am an idiot magnet, maybe you are too. Wherever I am, wherever I go, there are idiots. Maybe there’s just a high enough proportion of idiots in the world (I live in Jersey) that you can’t avoid them. Idiot parents, idiot single people, idiot children, everywhere, talking in movie theaters, not watching where they’re going in airports, vacantly staring past you in shopping malls.

I mention this to say that we were at our minor league baseball team’s next-to-last game last night; they’re limping to the close of an unspectacular season. We ended up sitting across the aisle from the idiots this time; they were just a bunch of loud frat kids drinking too much beer. One of them was a whistler, and I can’t abide really loud, atonal whistling. This guy was loud and he whistled at everything. One of the other ones was a would-be comedian, and he kept running his fat mouth. And he caught a ball someone threw from the dugout, which I should have had, if I were paying attention. Bastard.

Anyway, one out, bottom of the ninth, and the good guys are winning. Two strikes on the batter, and the next pitch is called a ball. It’s a bad call, and it’s cold, and we want to go home.

“Hey ump,” Mr. Fat Mouth says. “You oughta go work for the Pac-10.” (A reference to the Oregon-Oklahoma game.) I got it, and I snickered; it was funny.

And — oh, God — the guy heard me. I mean, it’s true. If you run your big fat drunken mouth the entire game, eventually you’re going to say something funny; it’s the law of averages. But now this guy thinks he’s funny because he’s made me laugh, which is just going to embolden him to do worse the next time. Should have just kept my mouth shut (good advice, that).