strike that

shirts & skins

Portland – as is discussed with appropriate awe and wonder by many new arrivals – has an unlikely concentration of hip attractive young people. It’s downright improbable. Go to any concert or coffeeshop or busstop and there they are in swarms, wearing marvelous ugly clothes while reading alluringly obscure books. All the geeky misfits I used to gravitate towards at east coast parties have packed their bags and moved here. And what do they do on Sunday afternoons? Why, they play kickball.

You remember kickball, right? Third grade recess, big muddy field, red rubber ball. So little skill required. A game that even mathletes could enjoy. And now that we’re all grown up – that motley crowd of third graders who used to ask for things like foreign coins and chemistry sets on our birthdays – we have returned to the sport that caused the least last-picked angst on the playground.

So aside from providing a chance to run about in the sun, kickball is a Who’s Who of Geeky Portland. Just like third grade, except now we wear the kneesocks with pride and drink PBR with abandon and claim the infield for ourselves. And now, incidentally, many of the geeks are hot. When they’re not running Intel, the grown-up geeks rockclimb.

In an alarming stroke of accidental genius, my Craigslist-assembled team never filled out its roster. So each week we hunt and gather players from other teams to join us. It's a movable feast of smart sporty Portlanders. Our curly headed pitcher last week was a ringer for Chicagoboy. Our blonde bombshell right fielder was an electrical engineer. I got a ride with a future filbert farmer (who currently designs closed circuit television networks) to a bar on Alberta, where we all shared pitchers around pushed-together tables. And that’s kickball, my friends. Every Sunday till dodgeball season starts.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:41 PM