It’s been an interesting last couple of days as I’ve moved into my new apartment. It’s nothing spectacular but it beats living out in the cold, or at least what you would call the cold. The temperature as of late has been in the mid 50s, which for south Florida is absolutely freezing. Any time it gets below 60 degrees you see everyone around here put on big puffy jackets and wool gloves, wearing a disgruntled look on their face wondering whatever happened to their slice of sunny paradise. Meanwhile, you have tourists who are vacationing from Michigan casually walking around in shorts and a wife beater.
Anyway, I’m trying to adjust my dog to my new place and that includes taking her for walks around the neighborhood to get acquainted to her new surroundings. One of the places we pass is a recreational park across the street from the sidewalk we keep to. This afternoon there happened to be a group of sexy young ladies playing soccer, “frolicking” as it were. Being the suave Casanova that I am, and thus knowing exactly how to act in order to charm their sports bras off, I play it cool and avoid eye contact by looking straight ahead and walking at a faster pace than normal. If that doesn’t get their attention, really, what will?
As I’m walking down the sidewalk, I hear one of them yell out, “HEY!” Two possibilities immediately cross my mind. The first is that they have just finished their game and cannot wait to get into a hot shower but really don’t want to wait to get home so maybe I can be of assistance, seeing as I obviously live around here. Just as planned. The second would be that Suzy the Token Fat Chick forget her inhaler at home so they are short a player, and seeing as I’m of a Hispanic descent I obviously must have been bouncing a ball on my knee inside my mother’s womb so I’m the perfect man for the job. What they fail to realize is that I am the least athletically gifted person in the entire world. Ask anyone that has seen me play in a pickup game of basketball and they will tell you I make Stephen Hawking look like an Olympic gold medalist.
So I look up, ready to reply that I may be short a few bath towels but I have this awesome chamomile body wash when a soccer ball rolls to my feet. My dog, living up to the bodyguard title of Man’s Best Friend, scurries away from it as though it was carrying dog AIDS. I look over at the blonde goddess across the street and she is waving at me, or at least I think she was as I was entirely too distracted by her enormous breasts barely being contained by her much-too-small tank top, which matched her much-too-small shorts that introduced her long glistening legs to the world. After realizing I had been staring past the point of “merely confused” and into the territory of “predatory stalker”, I reached down to pick up the soccer ball. Now, had my brain been functioning at full capacity the intelligent and charming thing to do would be to walk across the street and introduce myself, casually mention all the excess Gatorade there was at my apartment. [It is important to note, I rarely do the intelligent and charming thing in these situations.] No, I felt it was necessary to channel my inner World Cup Goalkeeper and throw the ball back to them. Yeah.
It felt like the ball was hanging in the air for an eternity, or at least long enough for me to be in awe at such a rare display of brute strength and momentarily regret throwing it so hard as for a second I felt the ball would go over the entire teams’ heads. Mind you, this street was not a highway, major intersection, main road, or anything remotely close to it in size. It was practically the width of a residential driveway. So you can imagine my embarrassment when the ball barely made it to the middle of the street before taking a couple bounces and rolling for a bit. She even had to take a couple steps forward to pick it up because it didn’t make it the entire way across. Someone in the background yelled “Thanks” but all I heard was “If we were animals in the wild trying to find a suitable mate your genes would not survive another generation!” I nodded my head and kept walking with a smile on my face. I’ve come to expect these kinds of things to happen.
