magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

I was wondering this morning if today was some sort of holiday that I wasn't aware of. Other than tax day, of course, which for me involved an eight minute phone call to the IRS's extension tele-file hotline and an approval to withdraw 3/4 of my available balance from my checking account, which is probably still short of what I'm going to end up owing when I sit down and figure it all out. So no, that wasn't it, unless everyone in the office just decided to take the day off because it was tax day. More likely it was because this weekend is forecasted to be the nicest two day block of spring so far, and people want a jump on it.

Whatever the reason, the office was dead quiet, and by lunchtime I was ready to take off and do something more interesting with my day. That is of course exactly when the changes to the files I produced yesterday start rolling in and glue me to my desk for the next five hours. Given the tax debt though, that's okay.

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When I did leave work I headed out to Roosevelt Island, where Chris said that he was meeting a bunch of people to play soccer on a field at the southern end of the island.

I got off of the F and walked down the path along the western side of the island. To the tip, where Louis Kahn's FDR Memorial would've / could've / might've been. 'Did you mean the northern end of the island?' I wondered. Although the weather was pleasant, and the walk at sunset with Manhattan skyline views was nice. I continued around and back up along the eastern side.

Much closer to the middle of the island, at about the level of the subway station, behind a mound of dirt from a new building under construction, I found the soccer field. I was at least half an hour late by this point, but with a call to Chris I found out that everyone else was just arriving.

I wasn't so much planning on playing as simply watching. When the teams were decided upon though, Brooklyn vs Queens, the Queens side was down a player, and being the odd Manhattanite, I was drafted to even the sides. As it happened, the Queens team had the better soccer players and we were quickly up by some number of (uncounted) goals.

By about half an hour in, I was winded, coughing, cramping up, had been kicked in the shin, but was still having a good time. The Brooklyn team had gained another player, a late arrival, but we were still winning. And then, kicking at the ball simultaneously with someone kicking from the opposite direction, my knee popped, and I went down.

I pushed myself back up to me feet to see if it was broken. 'Ouch. Fuck, that hurts.'

'Are your okay?' someone asked.

'Um no. I don't think so.' Although I could walk, which was a good sign. Sprained maybe, probably nothing broken. 'I've got bad knees,' I was explaining a little later, 'I shouldn't even been playing soccer.'

'What's the source of your bad knees?'

'It's genetic. My grandfather has bad knees. My dad has bad knees. Both of my brothers have bad knees.'

'Actually,' Chris cut in, 'he was engineered in a lab.'

'Yeah,' I said, 'what can we do to weaken his knees so that he'll never play soccer? Eventually we'll have a race of people who can't play soccer and we will have eradicated that evil game.'

When everyone got back to playing, and I was still walking around, realizing that as soon as I stopped the knee really started cramping up, the Queens team was two players down, and things where a little more evenly matched. And as the game was wrapping up, a group of eight or nine 14 year old French school boys walked by and asked it they could join. They all joined the Brooklyn team, and eventually scored the last goal, which in some opinions was the only goal that counted, since we weren't keeping score.

After the game, the French boys asked us what there was to do or see on Roosevelt Island. 'None of us actually live here,' someone answered.

'I almost lived here when I first moved to New York,' I said.

'Are you a rocker?' one of the boys asked.

'Yes. He rocks out,' Chris replied.

'There's a lighthouse up at the northern end of the island,' I offered.

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Later, icing my knee in an apartment in Long Island City, I realized that I must have hurt my ankle in the ball kicking incident as well. And the ankle was what hurt he most heading back home.