letters to thailand - part 14

To the boys and girls of the LEO CLUB
C/o the honourable chairperson BeeBee,
The Construction View Hotel Ao Nang

getting physical

To watch sport on tv is not for me, let alone write about it.
Yet plenty of people seem to do both…they spend on average some 200 days a year on the couch, missing nothing.
More than a few have been reported with bedsores.

I know of one who beats all.
His record stands at 288 days…not including the time he needed to recover from all the self inflicted tumbles down the stairs.
Keeping himself alive with the crumbs and bones left over by his cats, this guy just about does anything not to have to leave the house. It’s not that he doesn’t like people, they just sometimes scare the living daylight out of him.

I’m his friend and as friends do we get drunk together.
At times I take the couch, still warm, as he crawls upstairs and I swear I’ve seen him perform one of his nifty tricks just as he thought I was already in a coma.
In his hand he had a small screwdriver, fuck if I know where he got that from, and loosened all the screws that held the banisters to the wall.
Sure enough next day he came rolling down the steps…hollering he’d broken all his bloody bones…ofcourse he was still shitfaced so he’d broken fuck all.

Summer and winter, big sports events have an overlap as were they sticky lovers…the man on the couch knows no rest, he’s keeping track.
And lists…always those bloody useless lists that tell you even whether that year’s favorite had a proper shit on a particular
morning.

Wintertime is for speed skating…local, national, European and World games, then there are Olympic wintergames, ski-jumping you name it.
Now with summer in near view, you can see guys in loud coloured garments cycling till their balls get beyond the point of possible repair.

One of those contests is held in Belgium. Maybe the only one I can understand. Those fellahs steer their bikes into the first bar they come across, down two pints of lager and race out through the back
door. Those who cross the finish line after having passed through at least 30 bars are all declared winner…really!

So yes it’s true, at times it is good fun, more often though because of the comments by the so-called experts…
"He’s slamming his arm straight through the ball!", I heared somebody comment as, just accidental, I’d zapped a few seconds of my life into the world of tennis.
The winner was The Terminator.

The game sucks anyway.
These milionaires  seem to have evolved the game into a one stroke affair..they play it like they fuck and they call the point an Ace …shit, to us, me and my mates, that was an honourary title that had to be earned by climbing soft rock, an incredible dangerous affair that, what else, is still on top of my list of favorite sports.

While the diehards write their stories during the most bitter of cold spells, I will snug even closer against my ‘muse du moment’.
In summer I play my game at the beach…records of Olympic standards go to smithereens in the glow of the setting sun.