Soccer Balled!

Ok, now that I've expunged all that sensitive, feel-good World Cup crap from my brain it's back to the painfully bizarre. As you know, every joyous event has an underbelly of absurdity, and I'm about to tell y'all about it, yo. This one is fo' the fellas in da howse today.

You all know that classic male-targetted cartoon/slap stick comedy scenario: Coyote falls from cliff, lands with legs straddling fence? Or cowboy jumps from top of saloon and lands backwards nut-first on the horsey? Well, this actually happened the other day - Italy's V-Day- amidst the craziness on St. Clair.

On Sunday, as we waded through the mess of insane Italy fans on the sidewalk, a group of 15 year old boys went screaming past us, flags rippling. The straggler- a skinny olive-skinned lad with hair gelled to the max and wearing big baggy soccer shorts was running to catch up to his friends and whizzed by my arm -- almost on the edge of the curb. See the picture above?

In the flash of a second, about 4 feet in front of us, his head disappeared and his ass went straight up in the air - stopped dead at the sack by an unseen bike post!!! Instinctively, all 4 guys present in our group immediately clutched our tender packages in mimed sympathy and grunted out loud. Then we stood there gawking in beer-inspired smirking amazement, as Nads the Impaler peter-tottered on the top end of that bike post for what seemed to be about 20 seconds. Poor kid.

We saw him about 10 minutes later. He had caught up to his paisannos, and was huddled in a ball in a bank kiosk as his buddies howled. In the end though, I'm confident that he was comforted by the swollen pride he felt at Italy's cup win. At the very least, he had gained himself a nice big souvenir set of Azzurri balls.