This weekend is the first clash between the Timbers and the Sounders of the season. While I consider myself a Timber these days, the derby always provokes such conflicted feelings for me. Honestly, I feel like I'm one of the few people around who can legitimately call themselves a Cascadian.
Before the Rave Green
In 1982, the Seattle Sounders of the NASL made a dream run to the championships, though they eventually lost to the Cosmos. Somewhere during this time, my parents got tickets to what I believe was one of the playoff games. This was the first and, unfortunately, the only soccer game I attended during my childhood as the NASL would fold a few short years later. At the time, the Sounders won though! The city was crazy and I remember people honking horns and yelling "Go Sounders!" on the drive out of Seattle (we were too poor to afford a hotel room in Seattle, so we drove back to Yakima after the game.) My take from this game: a Seattle Sounders t-shirt. I don't remember who we played, but I remember this shirt fondly and wore it a lot.
Before Timber Joey was Timber Jim!
Fast forward about 20 years. The MLS has been around for a good 10 years at this point, but pointedly ignores the pacific northwest. I had moved down to Portland for grad school and was getting back into soccer. That's when I heard about the Timbers Army. These crazy fans that came out, sang songs, beat drums, and cheered all for a mediocre USL team. It was so very Portland! You could just show up at the gates, get a ticket for $10, and be part of this European atmosphere where Timber Jim would fire up a chainsaw for the fans. It was great. While I never considered myself part of the Timbers army, I loved going to games and sitting in the GA section. For me, it really re-awakened a love for being a fan of the game and I truly considered myself a Timber
Drew Carey leading a March to the Match
Time moves on though, and H and I ended up moving back to the Puget Sound area where the Sounders were. The rivalry was fierce between Sounder and Timber even in the USL days, though, and I didn't have much interest in becoming a Sounder fan. Something cool happened, though. The Sounders moved up to MLS! Since the Timbers were USL and would only meet Seattle once in a blue moon in the US Open Cup, I could be fans of both! That first Sounders year was a great year, too. The Sounders had recruited local hero and one of my idols Kasey Keller! They had the March to the Match before games, often led by Drew Carey, where supporters marched blocks to the game with a parade band, singing songs and ending at Qwest Field where a carnival atmosphere was going on. H was really won over by the Sounders during this time and frankly, still considers herself a Sounder. Meanwhile, I also followed the Timbers online, my only conflicted moment being the clash in the US Open Cup that elevated Roger Levesque to infamy.
Things didn't work out for us up north, and H and I moved back down to Portland. Then, for me, one of the worst things happened: Portland landed a promotion to MLS. The Rivalry was back on and now in full effect and I could no longer have my cake and eat it too. In situations like this, people don't respond well to you calling yourself a neutral and goad you into taking a side. In some ways I understand it. Attempting to "rise above the fray" smacks of pretentiousness. On the other hand, I do feel like I'm one of the few people out there who has a legitimate claim to both teams.
This time of year, I sigh, and I put on the Timber colors for the game, since if forced to choose, I go with the local team. I'll cheer for the Timbers, but what I'm really cheering for is a tie.
I'm not sure when it happened. It could have been the truly terrible "Episode II: The Clone Wars" movie. It could have been while insulting the intelligence of his fans via the whole "Han shot first" issue. It could have been the final, forced, and anticlimactic "Noooooooo!" I don't rightly know, but the one thing I realized recently is that somewhere along the way I stopped caring about Star Wars. I'm... worn out. Not by all the fan culture stuff mind you. I love the creativity of fans and all of the novelty star wars beanies, cosplay, fan movies, etc.
No, the big thing is that it all seems to be catered to a man who does not respect his fan base. Star Wars is dead inside. These days when I see a desk made to look like a Tie Fighter, I only find myself feeling sad. You see, it's gratifying to particpate in geek culture when the creator is not only the guy who made it, but is also a fan. Felicia Day, Peter Jackson, and Joss Whedon are examples of people who aren't just creators, but fans of their work who will geek out with the best of them.
Felicia Day singing "Still Alive" from Portal w/ John Coultan at PAX
Has Lucas ever done anything remotely this cool?
I don't think that George Lucas is a fan of Star Wars, though. Not anymore at least. All he ever really wanted to do was make movies about hot rods and by extension, hot rods in space. Now he's ended up being trapped in this franchise since the 1980's. And even though he was a probably bit creeped out by his fans and their intense devotion to the brand, he still accepted it and, if not respected it, he at least humored it.
Then came the prequels.
Great film about this!
While we didn't know this at the time, it is now understood that Lucas had become complacent and had started believing his own hype when he made the prequels. A lot of the brilliance of "A New Hope" and especially "Empire Strikes Back" really came from the people who took Lucas' raw vision, refined it, and told Lucas to sit down and shut up where needed. In fact, in Empire he gave up the directing AND screenplay writing to other people so he could focus on the special effects. Some of the most memorable lines from Star Wars were never written by Lucas! Unfortunately for the prequels, the ambitious trailblazing talent this rebel filmaker had surrounded himself with in the 1970's had since been replaced by people on his payroll who didn't know how to disagree with a legend no matter how stupid his ideas were.
Living in this foggy Xanadu, I'm sure Lucas was shocked as he saw the rabid adoration of his fan base turn into feral rage at he and Jar Jar upon the release of "Phantom"; fanboys gnashing their teeth and venting vulgar fury onto the internet. Shock likely turned to frustration, then disappointment, and now his feelings towards his fan base have distilled into a palpable disdain.
While I obviously have sympathy for him, I personally can no longer tap enthusiasm for things Star Wars related since all I can sense is the scorn of George Lucas. At best he is apathetic, at worst he acts with an "I'm going to take my toys and go home!" attitude. He and his fans are now adversaries, which saps away the magic for all of us. His "re-imagined" Star Wars is not just a selfish denial to the fans that would rather not watch it (Lucas refuses to release the originals and will only sell the ones with computer generated images in them), but is disrespectful to all of the other people who worked hard on these movies. The original Star Wars won academy awards for the space ship battles. Innovative geniuses worked to push the boundaries of sci-fi movie making forward, but get no say in Lucas' decision to whitewash over their efforts with computer animated fight scenes.
Which then makes me think, isn't there a better direction for fans to take their passion? Why not lavish it on a creator that deserves the adoration? Lucas has "retired", but unless someone steps up to his or her own vision of the galaxy far far away (eg. The Battlestar Galactica reboot), it will really only serve as a sluggish, wheezing juggernaut blocking up the corridors of imagination for the future generations of creative talent. I, for one, am more curious about what they have to say in their own idiom rather than another Lucas Arts sponsored game or cartoon that continues to beat a dead tauntaun.
Recently, a guy on my team posted a video of us playing soccer. Now I thought I was about average as far as being out of shape when compared to the others on the team. The video speaks otherwise. My skill and even my hustle aren't really that far out of whack compared to my teammates. I look, however, like a man stuffed into a sausage casing. My chest trap and clearance from defense around the 56 second mark is a good illustration of these points.
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Perspective is a painful thing. I think it was only a matter of hours afterward that I signed up for Weight Watchers. There is a reason that in the universe of Douglas Adams, the most terrifying from of execution is via the Total Perspective Vortex. As follows:
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. "Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day. And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her. And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
Douglas Adams from "Restaurant at the End of the Universe"
Now that awareness has been bestowed upon me and my brain unmelted, I had to take some action. There are a lot of pros about Weight Watchers that lured me into signing up. The points system is appealing and technology has come a long way so that you can do most of it on your iPhone.
However, while they have tried to change their image, one thing is apparent when you walk through the door: This is a woman's world. Pictures of happy, slim women on pink excersie balls, on pink yoga mats, and outside in the sunshine maniacally laughing off their hunger pains abound.
Quick which is Woman's World and which is Weight Watchers?
I've done Weight Watchers before, but it was with H. Since she's pregnant, I'm on my own here. While there are a few other guys in the room, all are there with their female sponsor. You really can't look to them for help since they are already clutching their xx chromosome life preserver as is. So you go it alone and your companion is the YouTube video of you waddling around the pitch as your support. Thankfully, that's pretty motivating!
So I'm at the mid point of playing in an over 30 soccer league. When you first enter at age 30, you feel like freakin Maradona circa 1984. You are faster, more agile, and have better endurance than the other people in the league. By the time you leave, you look like Maradona circa 2008.
There is a legend in Argentina that once, in fit of rage during a World Cup game, Maradona ate the game ball
Currently I'm not a liability, but I'm also not the prized asset I was 5 years ago. I can sprint up the field or down it, but not up AND down it. My team is also in last place in the over 30 third division. This is a very humbling situation. Out of all the middle aged guys in Portland who play soccer, we are currently the worst. Thankfully, things are getting better. We are gelling a bit more and trying out new formations has brought us closer to the win column.
The weird thing about these old man leagues is that the competitiveness never really dies out even if you are the worst middle aged soccer team. When you are young, sports are a blazing sun; defining your daily and seasonal activities. When you are old, that fire burns low. Jobs, wives, kids, and responsibility block it all out, but it's still stoked. One bad call by a ref and it blazes. A part in the back of my head is rationally saying, "You work in crisis services. You calm people down on a day to day basis. It's your job to keep a level head." Meanwhile, my mouth is telling the ref he is goddamn moron. Then the yellow card comes out and I leave the field, high-fiving my sub as he runs on.
C'mon fellas! Let's stick it to the Kaiser and do this for the Gipper!
As with most men of my generation, I think we struggle with how to define ourselves as an adult. The symbols of the past (wife, property, kids, pension) are more or less gone or irrelevant and now we search desperately for signs to let us know we have transitioned out of the man-child stage. Frankly, I don't think men of the past really were much more "grown up" than we are, but the signposts they had gave them a sense of progress (though they also limited the routes they could take). This leaves modern men with this odd hazy concept of maturity; kind of an all or nothing mentality. Ron Swanson vs Andy Dwyer if you will. Anyhow, I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this post, but I think lately what I've been learning is that maturity doesn't have to be a universal trait. As long as you know how to be an adult and how to yank yourself back into that mode when it's required, it's all right to act like a kid.
