Love Life, We Were Strugglin Though

Something I’ve been thinking about recently is that a lot of the posts that I’ve put up over the last two-ish months have been, very large modifying adverb incoming, relatively considered. A lot have been about music, and that’s great, but also I think part of the reason for starting to post again was to ensure that I was also just tossing stuff without considering it, starting things in a stream of conscious way, because that’s better for my ability as a writer and will likely help me in writing my thesis. That was true during my master’s and, I guess, proved true when I got good feedback. 

This all to say that I felt like I need to both stay true to my intentions on my return and keep with IMU tradition by starting a post with no idea where it is going to just empty my head.

Yesterday I went to my friend Val’s place to work with him and another friend, Anna. Val broke his ankle recently playing for our futsal team, so we’ve been going over to his place, since he can’t really get around. The two of us have passively made demos for songs at home over the last few years and have talked about working on a song together, so we finally made good on the promise yesterday evening. The song was sloppy but revisiting the feeling of sharing creativity was very nice. What a beautiful thing to have in your life.

While I wish his injury was a one-time occurrence, it’s instead part of a worrying trend on our team. Since the start of our summer season in May, Val hurt his ankle twice, I hurt my back and broke my ribs, and Stephane hurt his ankle. Outside of our team, Sam badly sprained his hamstring. I feel like taking up rec league sports is an integral part of your thirties. You probably played sports in high school, but were never good enough to go far with it, and then moved on to living your life and trying to define your personality in your twenties. With new, adult friends, you return to low-level competition in your thirties as a way to reclaim something that was once important to you. This is all true of my experience with my soccer team  with the added experience of it opening up a game to me that’s always sort of been around me but never really present in my life, if that makes sense. However, these injuries raise an important question: Are we too washed to play sports? How many injuries do you accrue in your mid-to-late thirties before you hang it up for good?

Now that I think of it, I feel like these questions and my commitment to returning broken and battered from futsal each week are really me thinking about my encroaching dad bod. If I could stay a svelte 160 pounds without exercising, would I be this committed to rec league sports? Part of me says yes. But would I swim and bike to make sure that I can keep up in the match? Would I train to stay in shape like I do now? Much like Mike Tyson said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face, everyone has a plan until love handles that are as wide as your shoulders appear.