entry nº 53 // 20190425

got an early morning phone call from irie-san saying are we free tonight, and would we like two tickets to go see the softbank hawks? yes we are and yes we would, thank you very much. it was super fun. the hawks (our local team, here in fukuoka, owned of course by the possibly-soon-to-be-world-dominating-if-left-unchecked, mysterious shadow conglomerate SOFTBANK) won, via home run double or triple play in the last inning – the first runs of the game. 

we had seats up around third-base. first + most shocking thing about the whole experience was how clean the stadium was, and how like, new? and also, it had a roof?! but then i realized, talking through this with shoko as we walked into the stadium, was that my only reference point up until then was fenway, which really isn’t maybe the best representative of a stadium in terms of newness or cleanliness, not, of course, to knock it in any way on account of its many other allures. 

to my right sat an older man, there on his own, dozing off periodically throughout the whole game. something about that got me, like, what better way to spend some time during your twilight years? watching a sport you enjoy and just kind of letting consciousness come + go as it pleases. there was him, and also the woman behind us, mom-age, and boy oh boy was she screaming at the players down there. very forceful cheering, there. very friendly, too, though i certainly was glad she wasn’t screaming at me to do anything. 

what else? during the seventh inning, everybody in the stadium prepares these yellow oblong balloons and hangs on to them, and when the jumbotron (lol just wrote “megatron” and got a couple more words deep in this sentence before realizing i was mistaken) told us all to, everybody released them up into the sky at once. that type of shit is just magical, right there. top notch. plus it’s indoors so you know those balloons aren’t going to end up getting swallowed by a family of baby birds or anything like that. unless they collect all the balloons afterwards and then force local bird families to eat them?! unbelievable. 

and also: the beer girls. the beer girls go around serving beer, of course, but they serve it out of these backpack-mounted taps so it’s all fresh, and also they have these cute, brightly-colored, elaborate outfits with kneepads and everything that for some reason makes them look like little friendly robots. they also all seemed to have this particular way of raising their hand to acknowledge when they’ve seen or heard you and are coming your way, this like, particular gentle way of doing it, some subtle something or other to the motion. shoko noticed it too. just some little something, there, that certainly isn’t well communicated via this blog format here, but maybe one day you’ll see it for yourself and think, yep, he sure was right about that. 

one thing about the hawks, by the way: i really hate their theme song. it’s basically just a group of tenors screaming at your the whole time, which in and of itself isn’t the worst thing, but it’s also got the “orchestra hit” synth sound patch in there, on multiple occasions, and also, perhaps its most serious offense is how it makes totally heedless use of the melodic minor scale. like, come on. save that shit for the cadences, don’t just hammer away on it like that.