I saw a rock star last weekend. It was a pretty good concert, complete with lots of flashy lights and eager fans. The rock star played some songs off his new album. He also did a few of those rock star jumps, where the momentum of a particularly fierce guitar riff picks the musician up into the air. He struck some nice poses too, looking for all the world like he was playing in some big arena instead of a medium sized club. The bassist kept jerking his head like an ostrich on speed, while the hipster drummer stayed in the back and tried to look cool.
He was not always a rock star. He used to sing mellow, folksy pop songs that managed to be both precious and corny and sincere without being pretentious. That was before the spastic bassist, the hipster drummer and the rock sound. But it's not bad, just different and I still liked it because even though he was now a big time rock star, there is still a great deal of that relaxed folk in his music.
It's kind of like visiting my family. Every time I go home I am shocked by how tall my younger brother is and how old my parents are. They look strange and ever so slightly different from my memories of them that for a second they seem like some clever band of impostors. But, they are my family and I silently update my memories.
I don't visit the family all that often, so when I do, I feel compelled to do certain things, to take part in certain events. Like going to my little brother's basketball games.
Middle school sports. It's a strange and bizarre world. Kids, little kids, pushing and shoving and jumping and scraping to get ahead. Parents shouting, mostly at the coach, and usually because their particular contribution to the gene pool isn't getting enough playing time. They didn't spend $200 on shoes and drive for two hours to the small gym in a little farming town to see their little Tyler play seven minutes of basketball.
It amazes me how much yelling there is at these games. When they're not yelling at the coach, they are yelling at the referees or the other parents or worst of all at their own kids. I'm sorry but I really don't think yelling \Keep your head up!"" at little Tyler is going to turn him into the next Michael Jordan.
I follow sports pretty regularly, but it has always been something of a guilty pleasure. In between cheering for a touchdown or cursing a missed shot, I occasionally recognize just how stupid the whole thing is. After all, what does it matter if Team A manages to somehow move a vaguely spherical object to some predetermined spot and thereby beat Team B? Usually I stop thinking about this kind of stuff and go back to concentrating on the game.
Still, I have been to hundreds of my younger siblings soccer, baseball and basketball games and I have yet to care about a single event. It just seems to be going too far to invest any sort of emotional attachment in a game played by children. But who knows? People change without having much control over what is going on. Maybe I'll become one of them shouting and cheering and cussing out referees. Or maybe I'll become a rock star.
