Midnight Badminton

I'm drinking a Gatorade right now for the first time in years, and let me tell you: It's delicious. Why? Because I can feel it replacing the essential electrolytes that I lost whilst playing sports.

Yes, shock follows shock here on the ISB. I not only left my chair, but broke a sweat in a competitive physical activity.

It all started when I got a call from Brandon's roommate, Alex, with whom I've hung out three, maybe four times in my entire life. This is at 9:30, and he's been drinking.

"Chris," he says when I pick up the phone, "Is it still a barn if it isn't red?"

Let's pause and reflect on that, shall we?

So I try to convince him that barns are like people, and they come in all colors, but he was having none of it.

(Note: Whilst looking for pictures of barns, I ran across the blog of a "Happily Married, Happily Spanked Wife." It's my Marla Sokoloff problem in reverse.)

Now while I'm dealing with this, Brandon walks in, completely unaware that his roommate's on the phone upset about multicolored agrarian structures. So I hang up, and Brandon gets talking about how he was playing Badminton today.

"Oh yeah? I was pretty good at that in school."

"Want to go play right now?"

"... Well hell yes I do!"

So we decide a doubles match is in order, and I use Caller ID to call Alex back, and we demand that he comes with us, telling him to assemble a crew. Unfortunately, he's at some gal's going-away party, and even though I got on the phone with her and turned on the charm, she wouldn't leave her party to go play badminton with three strangers.

So we swing by and throw Alex in the car, and then go to the park where Brandon assures me that we can use the tennis courts, despite the large wooden signs above them that read "COURTS CLOSE AT DUSK." Kind of hard to play with no lights, you know?

We walked across the street to the new courts, but those were on lockdown. The parking lot, however, was well lit, and we decided the hell with it, let's just play one-on-one-on-one in the parking lot with loosely defined boundaries.

It was so fucking extreme.

Now I'm super-pumped to sell my book at HeroesCon.