Where do we go now, where do we go?

We cant go into every battle assuming that, at some point, we're going to have to have an empty net behind us.

Photo by [Flickr User]. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

The up and down randomized bull@!$%# of life is taking its toll everywhere I look. It feels like we've been in ten different tipping points, at the same time, over the past five or ten years, and I'm growing weary of the wobbling.

I've got lawyers, judges, police officers and ex-wives, in descending order of their relative value to society, pounding on the doors at my own house, front and back alike. Funny lights are flashing in my peripheral vision, possibly due to some pharmaceutical mixup, or maybe my brain is simply malfunctioning, remembering how to seize the day, as it were. Whichever it is, I need a drink and I cant stay here, so I'm off to a roadhouse with unmotherly-like bartenders feeding me Wild Turkey and Molsons, trying to get my team back on track.

This is how you know how low you can go. Or, you hope, is this it? Game 3 was obviously a make or break type of situation. We were writing it off in the 2nd.

When the Sabres were playing the Rangers, they were in the midst of some kind of magic fire, unable to lose. Now, against the Senators, it's not that they cant lose, it's more like they cant even pass.

There's always next season. The depths of our misery will only be fully realized after we're able to climb, presuming we're able to climb, out of the hole, and then peer back down for some measuring and contemplation, and that won't be until at least next fall.

Life is different. @!$%#, if only life were like sports. Sports is like life, except without death. And, of course, it's only death which makes life so real.

I'm starting to crave that really heavy marijuana hit that buzzes and pulls on the back of your head, almost so it hurts, but not painful obviously, just hard, that really hard buzz. I'm also a train engineer, an autopilot politics mechanic and a dismal frog in a faraway swamp, courting the pretty mice and the dragon. I'm not anyone anyone knows, I'm not a name or a place, these are my words and my words are the pain I extract from myself.

Were we talking about hockey or global politics? There were plenty of heated arguments at the roadhouse last night. Kidnapped soldiers, basketball fights, local elections — heated arguments about topics with varying degrees of importance, but everyone seems to be feeling that same wobbly feeling that I get before the self-medication kicks in, before I stabilize myself against the storm winds. Everyone is flinging the monkey @!$%# of their insecurities at each other with words and embraces and gestures and certain kinds of sudden projectiles. It's tough to keep track. The person who hugs you today will stab you tomorrow, for entirely different reasons, the importance of which changes dramatically from day to day, depending on something we cant see. Maybe the astrologers have something going for them, after all.

How many arguments must we have before we realize that we dont believe in the same things?

How many hockey losses must we weep for before we realize that losing in sports is the only kind of hurt we can really handle?

Late in the game, while the dart tournament was heating up in the corner and a couple of leatherhead biker bums had been thrown out by the beer on their beards for acting like grizzly bears, Uncle Rat wandered in and found a stool near my misery. Uncle Rat is the local peddler of organic material. His bike has pedals, not an engine, and he always wears his helmet. Everybody is friends with Uncle Rat, and we wave at each other. He's watching the basketball game, and I've got peanut shells in my hair and beer and tears on my cheeks.

"There's always next year," says Uncle Rat.

He's right, so I can stop thinking about hockey, at least for the time being, until I fall off of one of the real-life spires on which I'm twisting in the storm. I'm hanging on, but I'm wondering how low it's going to get down below before something changes. Eventually, these buildings will have no foundation. We're stripping the concrete up from underneath our parks and stadiums and capitol buildings.

So I go out back with Uncle Rat and get another hit to feel what nothing feels like, and it feels good. If I forget something, after all, there's always my notes from yesterday.

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