Wake up on a Sunday this early? You wouldn’t do it if you didn’t have to. You wonder why anyone would plan a game this early.
Game time is 7:45 am. (6:45 to our internal body clocks) But the field is half an hour from the hotel and the coach wants the kids there at 6:45 am. Interesting choice of venue. Can you say home cooking.
So some how this all means revelry at 5:45 am. I don’t know, you do the math.
Beep Beep Beep Beep.
Like a saw mill chopping through a redwood, the alarm sound reverberates through the room.
My eye cracks open. I see swirling dots and bursts of color as if my pupils are fixed to a kaleidoscope.
I sense the other soccer dad in the other bed hopping up. He snorts and chortles and wobbles to the bathroom. He sounds like a trash can of broken glass being rolled into an alley.
The light goes on like a laser beam. I shut my eyes tight. But the brightness seeps through my eye lids, like gamma radiation blasting through a cardboard box. It is is uncomfortable as the light seeps into my brain corrupting my pain center.
The door shuts and the light diminishes.
I hear the water start to run. I want to pull the pillow over my head. I know this is only a temporary solution.
I listen as the two boys stir slightly.
It’s O Dark thirty. Seal Team 6 isn’t awake this early. WTF?
The street lights are on in the parking lot. Is it raining? Is it cold? Is there a nuclear winter? Many irrelevant thoughts go through my head.
I hear the toilet flush and the other dad enters the room, followed by a tidal wave of brightness. It’s like the joyous light dying people report prior to crossing over.
“Hey boys. Time to wake up. You want some breakfast?,” other dad asks.
I stare at my phone. It’s 5:47am. Breakfast? I need a defibrillator. Starving children in India would throw a shoe at this man.
The kids moan. Nobody wants to wake up in the dark and immediately eat. It’s unnatural. Is your digestive system even working at this time of day?
I throw my legs over the side of the bed. The air is cold and stinks like boy.
My toes reach for the Holiday Inn Express carpet. It’s hard like bricks covered with stubble.
“Aaaargh”
Why are cheap hotels always carpeted in wall to wall uncomfortable?
I stand and stare into the parking lot. It’s desolate.
Who the hell schedules a game in December, on a Sunday before the Roosters even wake up?
The boys are cranky as they find their shoes. I’m cranky as I watch the boys find their shoes.
I’m dizzy as I stand. Apparently the blood is flowing poorly through my veins like mayonnaise oozing through a calcified garden hose.
I wobble to the bathroom. The light is enough to make me confess to almost anything.
I sneeze three times. Bright light always makes me sneeze. The sound of my own nose exhaling stagnating flu virus at 100 miles an hour in the small bathroom is deafening.
My skin looks yellow, my eyes hollow. My mouth is dry. My hair looks like it has been styled by Vidal Monsoon.
Was I abducted by aliens over night? Was I secretly probed and inspected for termites by extra terrestrial beings.
I feel like crap. This much I am certain of.
I hear the door shut. The other dad and his son head to breakfast.
I look at the clock. It’s 5:50 am.
I look at my own kid.
“Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know,” he replies.
Good answer I think to myself. Who can know if they are hungry at 5:50 am. Is your stomach even connected to your brain at 5:50am? How do you chew at this hour? What does Raisin Bran taste like? 3rd grade paste?
We throw on clothes appropriate for a prison shake down and shuffle down the long hallway past housekeeping carts filled with toilet paper and towels. The carpet is a myriad of swirling purples and browns, direct from the Pablo Picaso Holiday Inn Collection.
Talk about hallucination romantic?
We enter the lobby to the gaze of 3 other bleary eyed soccer dads.
They look like extras from the Hangover II.
There’s a member of the hotel cleaning crew emptying a trash can. He looks like the Bangkok monkey that sold drugs in that movie.
Damn, I need some coffee.
I wave to the other zombie dads.
“Good morning,” one pleasant man says. His words are nails on a chalkboard.
I feel irritable. Not because the man said good morning. I think it is the fact I have to hear any human’s words at this terrible hour.
I grumble something that sounds like good morning as I head to the coffee urns.
The names on the containers are frilly and fanciful. Colombian Express and Shanghai Gold. I laugh to myself. Aren’t those 1980’s monikers for Northern California pot? I think to myself.
I pump the brown steaming liquid into a plastic cup.
The aroma of Juan Valdez’s finest ground beans floats into my nose. I feel the rejuvenating power of the coffee vapor slapping my cerebellum with a steely fist.
Like a snake with an outer skin, I feel the film roll off my eyes and they focus for the first time this morning.
I toss in some creamer and sugar making a high octane elixir of liquid rejuvenation.
I sip the golden juice and let it scorch the back of my throat. Like a heroine junkie getting his fix on, I immediately feel the blood pump through my heart. Like snorting a line of intelligence, like inhaling a shot of adrenaline, I am alive.
I look at the clock.
It’s 6:03 am.
“Good morning,” I say to the other dad with the enthusiasm of a Miss America Candidate.
7 boys are all seated at one table, on top of each other, slouching and slurping and farting and spitting up apple jacks.
They are awake and ready to play the game of their lives. They don’t give a rat’s ass that it’s O Dark thirty, before the beginning of time or in a land far far away.
The boys only know they probably can get out of the hotel without brushing their teeth. I Can’t speak for the other dads at this breakfast table of Armageddon, but I’m pretty sure my son’s teeth were wearing little fuzzy coats when we left.
We drive to the venue. The lights are off, the moon is full, the fields are dark.
“Why are we playing at night?” one of the boys whines.
I look at the other dad and we both smile.
Who the hell knows.
I scan the hill for wolves and vampire bats as I grab my trusty folding chair.
The boys take to the pitch and begin banging balls into the net. From somewhere off in the distance I hear a rooster crow.
The sun’s golden orange brims on the horizon. Suddenly I know that everything is going to be OK.
And that is crazy.™