Hmm well, I don't want to go to bed again, so i'll start writing in my blog again.

So the night of horribleness is over, and I have cheered up. Thanks all for being so nice. Now it's time for me not to be miserable, so this post will be happy, or at least not sad.

Whiffle ball is the greatest game ever invented. Anyone who has ever been at a cookout, or bored with friends knows the joy it can bring. I remember one summer when I worked at Stop & Shop, myself and the people I liked from work had legendary whiffle ball games. We'd have them late at night, when we all were out of work, and the store was on a skeleton staff made up of the strange people who worked the overnight shift. We would all assemble out in front at somebody's car, waiting for those who had worked an earlier shift to meet us. There were usually around 4-6 of us, and, once we all got there, we'd get into someone's car and drive to the back of the store in the parking lot where the games would commence.

Under the lights, the competition was fierce. We'd play nine innings of intense whiffle ball action on the hard cement. The pitchers mound was clearly marked out by a soda bottle of some sort, and home plate was a crack in the cement that was just far enough away from all the places that you could loose a whiffle ball . Before every game, the rules on what constituted a single/double/triple/home run were well established. We had all been veterans of street games as little kids that quickly devolved into shouting matches because of a lack of clarity in the rules, and we did not want this to happen in our whiffle ball games. They were a little bit more sacred than other pickup games.

Througout the games we'd make fun of each other in the most merciless fashion you could possibly make fun of someone without truly hurting them. We'd develop strategies on how to feild. We'd try new ways of pitching. We'd call people out from the "bullpen" if someone was really stinking it up on the mound. We'd complain about crappy pitches. We'd celebrate if we won. We'd bend over in disgust if we gave up the big hit that lost it for us.

I remember having some heroic moments in those games. There was my 7 home run game when I lifted the underdog team of myself and Dewey (a cherubic 16 yo with a lisp who was the store's little brother) to victory over Dan Smith (my nemesis since grade school....just kidding ) and "Billy Digits" ( a quiet/somewhat sad but generally cool guy...his nickname came with the ironic punchline..."cus he gets all the ladies' digits"). There was my game winning home run on the night when either the wind was blowing in or we were playing with some weird ass ball (I forget which it was, but there wasn't much scoring), where, after I hit it and saw it going over, I jumped up and down Carleton Fisk-style.

Now I certainly wasn't a stellar whiffle ball player, but thats the great thing about it. It makes heroes of us all, it makes cookouts and boring summer nights tolerable, and it makes cement parking lots and back yards our fields of dreams.