• 2025 Nov 03 *

It has been a most glorious weekend: no real plans, lots of quiet alone time. My shoulder’s been giving me pain, so the only physical activity I could do was play soccer. And play soccer I did.

Yesterday I went to a nearby field looking to get some exercise. Nothing too serious, just some light touches1. Not long after I arrived a man with a handlebar mustache and a beret showed up dragging some portable goals. I talked to him for a bit and he invited me to join their pickup game (for free!).

The skill level of the game was higher than I was used to, and I felt slightly out of place. There were maybe 18 of us, split onto 3 teams of 6. Two teams played at a time, winner stays rules: when a team scores, the opposing team goes off. If nobody scores within 7 minutes, the winning team goes off. Other than the time you spend on the sidelines, I actually quite like these rules. I’ve always been a fan of winner stays rules, and the time limit incentivizes winning teams to go on the attack and take risks in order to stay on the pitch.

I got lucky, because despite being one of the worst players there, my team won far more than we lost, so I spent more than two-thirds of the total game time on the field. When I was on the sidelines a few players from the other teams caught my eye. They had that je ne sais quoi I admire so much in soccer players: an elegance, an economy of movement, a self-assured calm, a clear sense of purpose. I watched them and tried to single out what gave me this feeling. A twitch of the hip that fooled the defender? A quick flash of the eyes before sending the ball the opposite direction?

I ended up doing some not-so-great things and a few good ones too. Isn’t that just the way things go? The game was certainly a lot better than the last one I played, and made me want to look into finding somewhere to play pickup regularly.

* * *

Today I woke up confused because before going to bed I had adjusted all my clocks for Daylight Savings. My proactivity was punished: I set my clocks forward one hour, not backwards as I should have.

I made plans to play soccer with D and H at their local field, who came and went. Afterwards two other players asked me to kick around. We ended up juggling and passing and talking for a full three hours.

Two of them, K and M, were friends from work. K was friendly, a Montanan living in BedStuy. M was Greek and a little grumpier: he complained that the original 2v2 we had set up was “pointless” because it was too easy to score. I could see what he was getting at but didn’t see any alternative with only four people. Besides, I think when it comes to playing pickup soccer (or any sport casually, really) either everything is pointless or nothing is pointless. I just thought of the game as an exercise in finishing.

K and M asked me a lot of questions, far more than I would expect from strangers, and especially from strangers on the soccer field. Yesterday nobody even asked me what my name was.

“Haven’t you been here since 9?” M asked. “Aren’t you tired?” I shrugged. K looked at me. “How old are you?” When I told them, M groaned and K whistled through his teeth. “No wonder you’re not tired.” For some reason my usual reflex to return the questions doesn’t work with strangers. Sometimes it only comes after a delay and other times it doesn’t work at all. I finally thought to ask how old they were. “Twenty-eight,” K said. M mumbled what I interpreted as a forty-one. I noticed the silver in his beard. “Sixty-one?” K asked. They laughed.

“What are your thoughts on the New York dating scene?” M asked. A moment passed before I realized he was talking to me. “Oh— I wouldn’t know.” “Are you married?” M asked. This gave me a good laugh.

As the sun crept above us we juggled the ball back and forth in a circle and I learned a lot about them. Where they were grew up (where are you from originally, M asked me), where in New York they lived, what they did for work, what they wanted to do. K told me he wanted to move to Peru and start his own business. (I am only just now wishing I asked him why.) M said he dreamed of moving to Taiwan.

Throughout the course of their questioning I ended up telling them a lot about myself too. M remarked that it must have been some strange twist of fate for the three of us to meet there, and although that thought didn’t occur to me, that he said so struck me as quite touching.

That is, until he left without even asking for my number. (How can you say something like that and just leave? People perplex me.)

* * *

I have found some good short stories recently, namely Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolsom is Buried” and J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”. (If you have any recommendations, I’d love to hear them.)

Hemingway’s Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter in Esquire is no short story but memorable all the same. A man Hemingway calls Mice (short for Maestro) travels all the way to Key West to ask Hemingway questions about writing. Describing him, Hemingway writes:

It seemed that all his life he had wanted to be a writer. Brought up on a farm he had gone through high school and the University of Minnesota, had worked as a newspaper man, a rough carpenter, a harvest hand, a day laborer, and had bummed his way across American twice. He wanted to be a writer and he had good stories to write. He told them very badly but you could see that there was something there if he could get it out. He was so entirely serious about writing that it seemed that seriousness would overcome all obstacles. He had lived by himself for a year in a cabin he had built in North Dakota and written all that year. He did not show me anything that he had written then. It was all bad, he said.

I thought, perhaps, that this was modesty until he showed me a piece he had published in one of the Minneapolis papers. It was abominably written. Still, I thought, many other people write badly at the start and this boy is so extremely serious that he must have something; real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

Yeowch. Hemingway (Y.C.) includes a transcript of one of their conversations.

Mice: Do you know what is going to happen when you write a story? Y.C.: Almost never. I start to make it up and have happen what would have to happen as it goes along. Mice: That isnʼt the way they teach you to write in college. Y.C.: I donʼt know about that. I never went to college. If any sonofabitch could write he wouldnʼt have to teach writing in college. Mice: Youʼre teaching me. Y.C.: Iʼm crazy. Besides this is a boat, not a college.

It ends on the highest of notes:

Mice: Do you think I will be a writer? Y.C.: How the hell should I know? Maybe youʼve got no talent. Maybe you canʼt feel for other people. Youʼve got some good stories if you can write them. Mice: How can I tell? Y.C.: Write. If you work at it five years and you find youʼre no good you can just as well shoot yourself then as now. Mice: I wouldnʼt shoot myself. Y.C.: Come around then and Iʼll shoot you. Mice: Thanks. Y.C.: Perfectly welcome, Mice. Now should we talk about something else?

Ah Hemingway. Never change.

I always say this and then get sucked into hours of serious play.↩

#clippings #english #soccer #wordvomit #writing