Because I have no news to report, this is an entry about the tournaments.

In Eastern Maine, this February vacation is structured around the Eastern Maine High School basketball tournaments.  It is a huge event, a legendary pligrimage to Bangor to watch 6 games a day, every day, as the B-C-D teams battle it out.  Our class system is A-B-C-D, A being the biggest schools, and D being the smallest.  The school I went to was C, and then D, when I was in high school, and last year moved back up to C.  For reference, there were about 200 kids in my high school.

It’s been written about, the tourneys, and those stories are always about the CInderella story of some high school upsetting another, or about a player who survived a car accident to make the big game, or about a coach who survived cancer, again.  They talk about the impact on the economy (it’s huge) and the influx of people to Bangor for that week (huge, again.)  But I see the tourneys from a different angle, now.

For one, win or lose the boys on the court are going home to blow jobs. Or, they were when I was in high school.  They may be celebratory or sympathetic, but a lot of those boys are getting blow jobs by the end of the week.  Except for the fat one (always number 55, because school uniforms might as well be printed with their sizes), he’s going to go home and be hugged by girls who think he is "like their brother."  All of this will happen at someone’s parents’ camp, and there will be beer involved.  Number 55 will be the one telling jokes to the cheerleader who is always a ‘good strong base.’

There will also be a motorcade.  When that bus rolls into town, the local cop (or one from a nearby town) will greet the bus before it gets to the hgih school, and parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and alumni who still Believe will follow, honking and flashing thier lights, because these kids! They worked so hard!  By the end of the week, most of those kids will ahve come to terms that there will be no Gold Ball this year, and they start making plans for baseball and softball season.

These little rural used-to-have-a-mill towns drain out and pour into Bangor.  They use vacation days so that their kids can swim in a pool to tide them over until July, when the lakes are thawed and warmed up to swimming temperature.  They go to the buffet restaurant, and to the chinese places, and the Pizza Huts and Wendy’s — all the place that their towns don’t have.  They spend money at the Super WalMart and the mall, excited to have a real JCPenney to browse, not just the catalog.  Maybe they’ll go to a movie.

But during the games, they wear their team colors, they wave streamers and signs, and they hope to see people they haven’t seen all year.  They get firecely angry at the refs, they get way too excited at That Guy who still leads crowds in cheers with his loud voice, even though he’s been graduated for 15 years.  That Guy will probably be wearing his varsity jacket, the year of his graduation on the sleeve letting the world know that it’s been way too long for him to wear it. 

For some people, this is the height of excitement.  The kids on the floor haven’t yet had to worry about things like mortgages and health insurance and wondering just what the hell they should do with their lives.  This is the biggest moment of their life, and they know it.  Later, it might look as silly to them as it does to outsiders, but not now. Right now it’s enough to bring you to tears when you foul out, or to make you jump in the air and pump your fists in victory, while the other teams jaws move in a silent "Fuckin Sucks." 

I’m glad that I don’t envision the tourneys as the pinnacle of excitement, but I can understand why people do.  And that’s why I don’t refuse the job of shooting.