Competition

I don’t know that I would term myself as a competitive guy, but I miss competition. I get competitive at beer pong and music trivia and that’s about it. Those of you who had the extreme pleasure of working with me saw my competitive side. My old WEAMissile newsletter/website always called out the “slacker reps”. It always fired me up that I hardly ever saw another rep out in the stores. You know I always wanted the most display space in your store. I wanted those fucking reps to roll their eyes when they walked into your (AKA my) store. “Shit, Kevin’s stuff is all over the place; even the bands I know he hates. Damn it. I must suck.”

OK, so I was competitive at work. I had easily identified bad guys. I had rallying points, and often the Missile contained such verbiage. Nothing works better as a unifying cry then pointing out a bad guy and creating an ‘us vs. them’ scenario. I did that shit all the time in the ol’ newsletter.

These days, there is not much competition for me. I mean outside the other thousands of losers competing for jobs. Lately my only competition comes from getting really drunk and playing NASCAR 09. For PS2. On the easiest setting possible. And trying to cross the finish line backwards. Did I mention I get really drunk? It’s a meager existence. But I will forever enjoy crashing Jr. out of every race.

For a few summers, I played in a sand soccer tournament. I really enjoyed the training, practicing, playing and the camaraderie of it. It is easily the most truly competitive, get mad and get aggressive kind of thing I’ve done in the last few years. Sadly, I believe those days are most likely over. People have gotten older, have kids, girlfriends & boyfriends (sometimes multiple boyfriends, you know who I’m talking about), have found new passions, etc. But I really miss the feeling of ‘team’ even if it’s only for 2 days and three losses. Plus watching hotties in bikinis who are ALMOST as hot as my wife run around is mildly amusing, too. I guess.

I still play street hockey, but that is totally rec. Yea, sometimes it does get a bit chippy and aggressive, but it’s all in good fun. But there’s no grand payoff, no playoffs to be working towards. It’ still an outlet. Even though no one has a mullet.

So along comes this thing called Dragon Boating. It is very similar to rowing/crew. The boat is long and narrow, and can fit up to 20 rowers. On the front of the boat is a dragon head; at the rear is a dragon tail. At the head of the boat, facing the rowers is the drummer. The drummer has the job of keeping the rowers in sync and calling out stroke changes. I don’t know why they call this position the drummer; but they do have a big drum/bongo that they bang on to keep the rowers in sync. It must be some silly old nautical term. Whatever. At the rear of the boat is the steersperson. The steersperson is provided by the competition because you don’t want some newbie careening his boat off of another boat.

My wife drafted me onto her team this year. As my mind was screaming, “What? Are you nuts? I don’t want to do it.” My lips were saying, “Yes, dear.” Bless my lips, I guess they’re just used to saying that after all these years.

I had reservations. First of all, this event was held on the Schuylkill River, which I believe is toxic. And I would be with all teachers. And of the approx. 18 rowers, only 2 are guys. This prospect is a bit daunting. Every teacher I know is extremely passionate about their job. It’s not really a gig you can ‘fall’ into. You have to work at it, and work very hard. That being said, guess what teachers talk about when they are not in school?

They talk about school. OK, maybe I am being a tad rough, here. I mean, maybe whenever a bunch of plumbers get together, all they talk about is plumbing. Or when pilots go out to dinner on the weekend, all they do is talk about flying. Regardless, there is a certain lingo involved; one that even after all these years is still a mostly foreign language to me. At times, it can be a bit intimidating as this discussion is going on, and I have absolutely zilch to add to it. It’s hard to make wisecracks when you are unfamiliar with the materials at hand. The “Little Johnny” jokes can only go so far. Part of this is my fault. Honestly, I am very shy. I know those of you who know me and have heard my jokes, smelled my farts and read this here Klog will find that hard to believe. But it really is true. So as a shy person, with all these people talking about unfamiliar topics, it gets a bit intimidating.

I’ve been obsessing with the theory of work to reward lately, and dragon boating (which will now be shortened to DB) is a good example. We have three one hour long practices. We use these to experiment with different strokes, acclimate new people and watch the wretched Schuylkill River eat through our clothes. The average DB race lasts under 3 minutes. My elementary math tells me that’s 180 minutes of practice for 9 minutes of action. Which precisely describes me in high school. (Think about it, you’ll get it.)

The day itself is very long. T is the captain. Our day started when we woke up at 4:15 AM. Yes, you read that right, A freakin’ M. Which is followed by getting down to the site by like 5:30. I yi yi. I really think the only fun you can have at 5 AM on a Saturday is sleeping. I will admit that it was oddly serene and peaceful to be by the river to watch the skies lighten and the early morning fog lift. Our first race is 8:09. With traffic and the thousands of people this event draws, you have to get the team there early.

We go through the process of waiting in line to get on the boat, getting life jackets and oars, and rowing into position to start the race. So we row, row, row our boat to the team’s best time ever. And a 7th place finish. I guess I should mention here that it’s an 8 boat race. We totally got smoked by the winning team. They were so fast, they were already back at their tent by the time we crossed the line. I guess they had to go shoot up more performance enhancing drugs.

We go back to our tent and wait. There are approx 20 such races. From there, new races are formed, presumably based on time. We won’t race for a few more hours, so there is plenty of time to gorge on the metric ton of food and drink everyone brought. And lemme tell ya, there is no better way to celebrate a new team record then by having a cold one at 8:30. The scene along the river is actually pretty cool. There are over a hundred tents for the various teams. People grilling up breakfast sandwiches, tables full of food, grills smoking, more canopies and tents erected. This event attracts teams-real, competitive teams-from all over. There were four Canadian teams, as well as teams from DC and other places as well. The established teams-or the ones who went to Kinko’s-get vinyl team banners to hang from their tents.

The drummers can be creative. They can wear whatever elaborate costume they want. Apparently, the DB festival doesn’t care if they fall in and their costume becomes heavy and waterlogged. Much like in real music bands, no one cares about the drummers. Over the last two years, we’ve seen Elvis (cripes this guy is still everywhere), a full fledged pig costume, Ronald McDonald (is there any even corporate America can’t wedge its way into?), witches and sharks.

We get to our second race. One team is missing, and constant public announcements are made. They are holding things up. Our thought is this is one less time to lose to. At the last possible minute, they appear. Turns out they are in the tent right next to ours. OK, now I’m pissed. How can we be there on time, and these boneheads be late? The bad guys have been established. We can lose to every other team in this heat, but we HAVE to at least beat these guys. As we row up to the starting position, we have time to survey the competition. On our port side-left for you landlubbers-there is a boat full of kids, with their parents. Shit, we can’t get beat by a bunch of freaking 11 year olds, can we? Ah, yes, here the juices get flowing. All I want to do is beat the team in the next tent. Later on, we can go back to their village to rape and pillage.

The horn blows and we row, row, row our boat. Unlike just about every other sport where you can see what’s going on the whole time, if you divert your attention here, you may get out of sync. I manage to sneak the occasional glance. I can’t see the team I want to beat, and it looks like those kids are freaking little motors out on the river. We shave a second from the first race, finish fifth, but lose to the late team next to us by .8. That might not sound like a lot-it certainly doesn’t look like a lot-but in any race, that is a lot. Damn it vanquished again. Bad guys win.

Now we can load up on food. Burgers and dogs flow like the river before us. I surprisingly only have one beer the whole day. It is at times like this that Evil Kev can emerge. Evil Kev loves to just drink and drink and drink if there is nothing else to do. Luckily, Evil Kev stays in his dark corner for the day. I do pig out, purely just to add ballast to the boat. More hurry up and wait.

Finally the third and final race is upon us. I will admit to being a bit ‘done’ at this point. The day is starting to get long, and it’s not even like if we win this one race we win a medal and get put on a pedestal while our national anthem played. But we do have pride. Our times have been going down, and you always want to go out on a high note. As we row out, we again have a chance to survey the competition. Again, to our left is a boat full of kids. I think they are different kids this time, because it would suck to have the same bunch of toeheads beat us twice.

We are now facing a huge headwind (i.e. the wind is blowing against us). We can only hope this is the sort of wind that can snap young kids’ arms. The horn sounds and we set sail. I am a bit better about watching the other boats as I row. From what I see, we are doing well. As we row on, I can hear a new urgency in our drummer’s voice. I look up again, and we have achieved some separation from most of the other boats. I can see the buoys slip by. Above the splashing water, I can see just one boat close to us. I see only a few buoys left. I can hear the urgency in the drummer’s voice. I swear I am giving this everything I got now. Two more buoys to go, and we are dragon neck and dragon neck. I put my head down to row. The last buoys goes by, I look up to see…

One boat ahead of us. We came in second place, a team record. From my vantage point it seemed far closer than the official difference of four seconds. It was quite a rush for those few fleeting seconds. It was a good way to go out. But now I want to do what any young stud would want to do after such a day; go home and nap. A day like this is a long day indeed. For only nine minutes of exertion, there is so much more. From getting up at 4 AM, setting everything up, sitting around, race, then wait for a few hours, eat, rinse, rather, repeat.

In the end, everyone had a good time. It’s a great little vibe going on by the river. In the future, we should plan to have other stuff to do while we wait. Something like, say, beer pong? Or strip poker? Just saying, is all. Next year, I see the team being more in sync than a shitty boy band.


DVD Bonus Material
OK, much like a shitty sequel, this was a rush job. I haven’t been able to finish too many Klogs lately (I have 2 more almost finished) and just wanted to get something out to keep you all in the habit of lending me a few minutes to pollute your consciousness. I promise the next one will be better, funnier and hopefully shorter.