Today at work I attended a webex (shared screen) and teleconference meeting with about 90 other people. The meeting was almost aggressively content-free, and irrelevant to my job or the tools I need to do it. But it counts toward my development plan, so I was all like whatever and clickety click there I was. To pass the time, I browsed metafilter.com and from there found a link to a very dark and funny mashup between Frank Miller and Charles Schulz. Well, here: http://www.cinematical.com/photos/frank-millers-charlie-brown/1419750/
That loosely inspired the following, but I took it in a little bit different direction (I love productive meetings):
Peanut noir
The silhouette of the small kid with the big round head trudges with resigned determination up the mudslide to the pitchers mound. The rain, the endless rain, pelts the players, but no one has called the game, and no one ever will. The kid wears a yellow shirt with a black jagged slash like lightning across his scrawny chest. He eyes the thumbsucking blanket-hugger in the on-deck circle, and thinks about how that kid is sweet on his sister, and he grinds his teeth and thinks melancholy thoughts. He thinks about the years of therapy, the endless pile of nickels spent on psychiatric bills with the shrieking harridan of a shrink. He thinks about the years of having his foot get just…that…close… to the sweet spot on the oblate spheroid, only to have that god damn football get yanked away at the last minute. Every single time, it gets yanked away at the last minute, and he ends up on his ass, feeling like a total chump. He thinks about the dozens and hundreds of kites tangled up on power lines and trees, with the kite strings macrame’d into an asphyxiating stranglehold around his skinny neck. He thinks about the years of being a patsy, a dupe, a schlemiel, a scapegoat. His eyes are narrow slits as he prepares for his wind up. Maybe this time, things will be different, he thinks.
Overhead, the players hear the drone and sputter and cough of a single faltering plane engine. It is losing fuel and altitude as the pilot returns from another of his endless missions. That beagle again, with his tattered red scarf and leather brainbucket and shot-up flying doghouse and a hornet’s nest in his cranium, is flying another sortie over the ball field. He is the lone remaining conscript from some deranged militia, fighting a battle in a war that has been over for almost a century, chasing a phantom enemy through the hollow skies. No one else can see his arch-nemesis, but no one disputes that the bullet holes in his doghouse are real. The little bird he meets on furlough is the only thing standing between him and a section eight discharge.
The round-headed kid winds up for his delivery. He eyeballs the runner on first, a filthy dirt-covered messy little slob, who tags up. The tinny plinking notes of a broken down piano play a forlorn passage from a long-dead composer, the sound wafting out over the infield. No Hammond B-3 or mighty Wurlitzer blasting out the strains of “Charge” or “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” for this motley dead-end group of washed-up has-beens and never-weres. Just the sad-sack strains of yet another Harry Connick wanna-be, sitting crosslegged at his little garage-sale piano, trying to stifle the sting out of his broken dreams of being signed by a big record label, passing the days picking up a little chump change out at the ballpark. “Buck a shot for pop tunes, and a fin for guided tours…”
The pitch floats in a lazy parabolic arc toward home plate, a little high and inside. Just where the little thumbsucking blanket hugger likes it. How far has he gotten with my sister, wonders the round-headed kid. The bat connects and the ball takes off…
…His teammates are long gone, returned to their dreary dismal lives, working on homework for that crazy teacher whose voice sounds like a muted flugelhorn. The round-headed kid stands there yet, in the rain. He stands on the mud-slicked pitcher’s mound, his back to home plate, facing the spot at the edge of the field where the ball bounced and then rolled into the woods. He chokes back a tear and sighs, and thinks to himself “there is always football season…maybe this time, things will be different”.
