So last fall, Raquel and I joined a local dart league at Willie’s – our favorite little haunt in CDA. It was kind of a nerve racking decision because we were going to devote 10 straight Sundays to playing 17 games of darts with some of Idaho’s finest. And I mean no disrespect by that – you just know who you are. We had always played darts recreationally while we were in Missouri, but we had never really thought of going pro until one of our coworkers approached Raquel about the idea.
The first day of dart league last fall was at a bar called Paddy’s and it was kind of a nerve wracking situation – just think bad blind date in a bar with NASCAR murals on the wall. I met my two partners – Rick and Vick – and, with a cursory glance to the others in the group, I honestly thought that this was a bad decision. I felt like we had nothing in common – the age gap was roughly 15 or so years between us all, a lot of them were married, had kids, had real world problems. Above all else, they were fucking great dart players. So not only did I feel like I was going to be dead weight on my team, I had this nauseating fear that I was going to follow up my atrocious play by being the “silent-silent” partner that sits in the corner. (As an aside, for those of you who may not know me, when I get in uncomfortable group situations, I tend to clam up and migrate to the fringes of the group.)
As it turns out, when you get a group of people together who like to drink, you tend to find a lot of things in common with each other very quickly. That first night of darts went very well – I think I played well, but, regardless, I made friends with those around me.
This brings me to the point of all this – I think it’s a rare thing in today’s society for people to open themselves up to different groups of people. It may sound a little trite, but we have found ourselves in an age where we truly are defined by the things we own and our outward appearance. Everything we come in contact with is judged within a first, momentary glance. Just think – in the era of DVR and TiVO, we no longer have to sit through commercials or boring parts of television shows or the news in general. We can skip and jump to the bits and pieces of information that we want, right now. So when we see something in the real world that we dislike or does not fit our normal perception, we “fast forward” to the next thing – which, I’m not going to lie, I did when I first met a lot of the people in the dart league.
But, lo and behold, I look forward to Sunday night more than any other night of the week not only for the sheer enjoyment of playing darts, but to see everybody. I feel like dart league is a make-shift therapy group where you have a group of real world, middle to lower middle class, blue collar folk gathering to throw darts, drink some beer, talk a little shit to each other, and just forget about the normal everyday grind. You never know where you’ll find a group of people that helps you escape – so don’t just fast forward to the next thing each time you run into something uncomfortable (cheese ball moral, yes – but it’s true and understated).
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