Most of the game is one cleat in front of the other as you try to position for a touch—a test to find your teammate with a pass or a chance to flourish with a strike on goal. If you could view the game from a dove’s perspective, finding the best play would be simple. Your immersion makes it more complicated, obstructs your vision, crosses your nerves, flutters your stomach.
Soccer as out-of-body experience
Soccer as transcendence
Soccer as Savior of World Peace in the Atomic Age:
It is a practical thing to recognize as a common responsibility, wholly incapable of unilateral solution, the completely common peril that atomic weapons constitute for the world. Therefore, the United States, as the nuclear power with the most bombs and the worst soccer team, should propose a complete revision to the Geneva Conventions that relegates any form of political dispute that would otherwise result in nuclear warfare to the field of the international game, contingent with complete nuclear disarmament by all signees. The red button would just call your national team. A majority of the G8 will readily accept this proposal by the U.S. government, as it would appear that the U.S. is ceding power based on our winless World Cup performance this summer. However, the U.S. should be confident in making this proposal because if American athletics take prominence away from sports like football, basketball, and baseball, they should be able to field the world’s best soccer team within one generation.
I may be a naïve teenager, but I think that proposal could win a beauty pageant as long as it doesn’t get accused of plagiarism. We believe in Science now, but polisci is as much conjecture as religion. When I was younger, I thought doctors knew how to fix any malady, or if they didn’t they would when I grew up. Just don’t die in a freak accident that kills instantly before you can get to a hospital. Mind your own business with strangers, be wary of cars, don’t drown. I was three or four when I threw my toy boat into the murky East River by the Brooklyn Bridge, watched it sink, and realized that my father, standing beside me, couldn’t get it back. In the old days, believers would want to see a priest before they died so they could repent for their sins, find salvation, and be sent to heaven. Now we want to be sent to a doctor if they can possibly prolong our lives, the new viaticum, though doctors know their limitations and are careful to temper expectations, calling their business a medical “practice.”
If I stay alive there’s a chance that computers will begin to exponentially improve themselves in my lifetime and solve all of our problems. Technological singularity as the return of Christ, our manmade messiah: Superintelligence will calculate and manufacture panacea via genetic engineering, restorative chemicals for the ozone, and robots that can defeat humans at soccer. That’s what our computer science teacher said, but then he got fired halfway through the semester for telling my class not to go to college because the internet will know more than all our professors combined and that we should pledge allegiance to the hivemind instead of arbitrary political boundaries that almost caused a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War. For our species to survive we will first have to avoid committing omnicide, and then before the sun burns out, we will have to either manifest transhuman destiny and evolve into robots or find a new solar system. However, I’m not a Scientist, just a mere mortal of so little consequence in the world that I can’t even vote.
Maybe I’d earn better grades in Science if there wasn’t always a schoolyard outside the nearest [window] that distracts me from studying and provokes daydream. How are we supposed to sit still and concentrate all day if we haven’t spent our physical energy? The patience paradox: as we grow older, we become more patient, though we have lost time to spare. My main motivation for concentrating is to pass the class and stay off academic probation so I can play for the soccer team, because sometimes classmates watch our home soccer games after school, and some of those classmates are female.
“Yes, Alice?”
“So that makes atropine a competitive antagonist?”
“Exactly, because it binds to the same receptor sites without activating them…”
To have people watch you perform your best skill validates the ego slightly less than sex for an average teenage boy, though there are plenty of people who prefer the rush of adrenaline and power from an audience than a single naked body. Why settle for the attention of only one sentient? The homing pigeons flying in great figure eights over the schoolyard—do they see me while I play? As a moving target on black concrete. They don’t mean to defecate deprecate, if only we could communicate, unfortunately they have intricate pitch languages that are too subtle and fast for humans to comprehend. We need an audience with a bird’s perspective and a human mind to best appreciate our performance. That’s why we pay tax dollars for new stadiums—bleachers decrease line-of-sight static, coin of vantage. When an audience is watching, the spotlight is magnified, especially during home games when the spectators are friends and family, motivational advantage. And if there is one particular person who you want to impress more than the rest, and they are watching you, and you think that if you succeed, then afterwards, on the walk home, if the air is delicate, they might maybe let you kiss them…
What a test!
What a flourish!
For a moment there is no static, you fill their line of sight, but how long will they look at your profile before clicking to the next? There are so many distractions, we’re supposed to do homework with an internet browser one click away. The modern wild west is accessible from your home for a few bucks per month and at school for free. Infinite entertainment streamed by the second to the gaze of millions, including you and your friends with whom you can play any game or share any media at any time. The producers of Ritalin are making millions hyperlinking children to chemical dependency by calling their attention deficit a disorder, luckily the bureau said I could focus. But we’re all addicted to the bright flickering information pixels—if you look away, you’ll miss an update. It’s also easy to procure illicit substances in New York City high school. I find marijuana’s discursive thought patterns to be a complementary companion to the internet, like caffeine and morning, alcohol and friends, cocaine and money. The first time you take a drug is unforgettable due to the anxious euphoria catalyzed by a new chemical in your bloodstream—the moment remains in your memory while doldrum slough is discarded, which can lead to the common psychological root of addiction known as chasing your first high. Moments of sober epiphany can be just as singular but are more difficult to attain as they require concentration, so I should stop daydreaming and pay attention.
“Sometimes an agonist and an antagonist are used together for therapeutic purposes, with the agonist acting as a trigger to a desired effect, while the antagonist modulates or stops that effect so that it doesn’t go too far and become harmful…”
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