So yesterday I told a story about one time when I decided to practice my pitching in my driveway at 3AM under the influence of 4 hits of pretty good acid. To recap, I’d recently joined a baseball team, where I was asked to join the pitching staff, despite the fact that I had never pitched in my life. Since I didn’t want to end up like Rick Vaughn, Charlie Sheen’s character in the movie Major League who knocks the head off a pitching target, I decided I’d better practice my pitches. So one Friday night, well past midnight I went out to the driveway, tennis ball in hand, and proceeded to throw pitches at my garage door. Oh, and I was tripping my brains out at the time. So there was that. Also, I was narrating my performance with a play-by-play call in the style of Vin Scully. Well, in the style of Vin Scully if Vin Scully was under the influence of powerful hallucinogens.
About ten minutes in, as I was perfecting my 12-6 curveball, the neighbor across the street came lumbering over. He was wearing a fluffy gray fleece bathrobe and a pair of unlaced work boots. He looked irate, which confused me. Why wasn’t he happy for me? After all I was now well prepared for left handed hitters!
He said, “I gotta ask you to cut it out. You’re making a hell of a racket.” He turned to walk away as I stood there. “If you keep it up I’ll call the cops,” he said over his shoulder.
“And that’s gonna do it for the right hander,” I intoned. “The manager is going to the bullpen, and it looks like he’s going with the left-handed fireballer.”
The next morning, I told my parents what had happened. They’d been out and had missed all of the preceding. I didn’t really want to say anything, but I figured I should at least give them some warning, in case word got back to them. So I outlined the whole thing, omitting the part where I was on drugs, of course. As I talked my father looked more and more amused, my mother more and more agitated.
When I finished my mom said, “At this rate the neighbors are all gonna think we’re the weird ones.”
“I got bad news for you,” I replied. “They already think we’re the weird ones. That’s old news outside this house.”
