i am not an athelete

I played tennis with my friend Leo on Thursday. In order to play tennis with Leo, I had to rush home from work, change clothes, grab my raquet, and then run over to Leo's house to pick her up and walk her over to the courts, which all had to occur at precision speed because I was booked to meet up with SK in exactly two hours and I didn't have a moment to spare. I was also exhausted, having been at work since 8am, on five hours of sleep after working till midnight the night before. Yeah, yeah. Cry me a river.

So, at precisely the moment I was supposed to be arriving at Leo's, I found myself trudging from the bus to my house in the hot sun, running late, of course, so I called Leo and suggested that I bring over some beer. "You wanna drink beer and play tennis??" "Well... I want to drink beer..." I whined about being exhausted and Leo said "Bring some beer over, that's fine, but we're playing tennis, I don't care how tired you think you are." So I brought beer over and hoped Leo would see my wilted little self and say "Hey, let's just sit in my shady backyard and drink this delicious, cold beer, and chat for an hour, then you can go run your errands and meet SK." Leo said no such thing. She said, "Put that shit back in your bag, let's go." And we went.

There were four fire department people (three men and a woman), all big and burly with tight-fitting, navy blue t-shirts, playing tennis on the one court at the park in Leo's neighborhood. Leo, being Leo, ran them off. We set up and each took a few swigs from the big, brown screw-top bottle of Pabst I'd brought over. It's what SK and I have been using to kill slugs and I can't look at it without thinking "poison," and I'm sure SK would agree with my assessment. However, when you're really tired and it's really hot and you can't be bothered to do anything and your opinion of the world is already pretty poor, it's a poison that goes down refreshingly well.

So, fueled on Pabst, Leo and I played the roughest 45 minutes of tennis on earth. We sucked, but we had a lot of fun, running and laughing and missing and tripping and hitting it too hard, too high, too far right or left. Our goal had been to "just volley" and have a good time, however, we sucked so bad we couldn't even keep a volley going, but we *did* manage to have a good time. I was shocked when I checked the time at what I thought would be the middle point of our game and it turned out to be late, later than I'd planned to leave, longer than we'd planned to spend. So we gathered our stuff and made plans to play again. I took my slug poison back home and took a super fast shower and ran to the store for supplies for the dinner SK was cooking and managed to make it from the tennis court to SK's in 45 minutes. Amazing.

By the time I got to SK's, I was as exhausted as I could possibly be. Tired from lack of sleep, from working, from running around -- tired, obviously, from the exercise, which was a shock to my sedentary system. SK was worried that my poor, underused muscles would sieze up in the night, that I would awake the next morning immobile. She wanted to force me into a warm bath before bed, but I resisted and it never happened. Miraculously, I woke feeling fine, no tightness in the calves or ass muscles, no soreness in the shoulder or wrist or forarm. I was fine, and that's pretty unbelievable, considering how little exercise I get in life. If Leo and I can get it together to actually play tennis every week, we'll both be gold-star atheletes by the end of the summer, slug poison notwithstanding...