Brother Coitus playing Rugby in Iraq.

Catcher's Cup. A Painful Lesson in Safety.

When I got to little league age (which was 9 years old) Dad said "Well, are you going to tryout for little league this year?" Dad always wanted me to play sports. Every sport. All of the time, all year long. The more contact the better. Mom wanted us to take lessons. Skiing lessons, swimming lessons, tennis lessons. Dad on the other hand wanted to raise sports-stars, and I was his first attempt.

"Naw... I want to play another year of PeeWee."

The PeeWee rules let you play until your tenth birthday, Little league lets kids start after their ninth birthday. I chose to play with my 3-year teammates for another challenging year on the "Fred’s Market Cougars."

I think I really hurt his feelings by not being ready to take on that challenge. Hell, I hadn't wanted to play ball in the first place, but Dad pressured me into it. In retrospect I'm glad he did. But at 9 there wasn't that much "retro" in my "spect." All I knew was that some of the guys in my class had skipped their last year of PeeWee to "go up" to little league. These guys were already a year older than me, and had skipped their last year, so some of them had been playing in the "bigs" for two years. All I knew was that they routinely kicked my ass in recess, and that no one routinely kicked my ass in PeeWee. Plus, there were little-kid scare stories of hazing (which wasn't in my vocabulary until MUCH later. I preferred the term "initiation") which was legendary among the wide eyed ranks of soon to be little leaguers like me. No thanks Dad o’ mine... I’m stayin' in PeeWee.

I don't even remember what happened that year in PeeWee. I vaguely recall that my 3-year teammates all went to Little-league without me.

I DO however recall my first year of Little league. I was the 38th string catcher, and I still believe that, the coach put me in the 38th string as a favor to Dad. You see, Dad had signed on as assistant-assistant-assistant coach. Sports careers are built on relationships. My first year of Little League was no different. Since I was a catcher, the Coach took me aside and asked if I'd ever caught before? I had, and I told him so. Then he asked "So you’ve got a cup?"

Well this confused me, because cups are pretty common...even in a small town. But while my family had LOTS of cups in the kitchen, none of them were uniquely mine, and what does this have to do with baseball anyway?

So I said "well, we have lots of cups at home."

"No, a CATCHER'S CUP."

I'm sure he read my blank look at this time. I’ll just bet that I looked like a confused dog... Head tilted to the right, ears up, eyes wide, brain working overtime, no results."

Look son, a catcher needs protection...uh, you know?"

Still blank. I'm lost in the kaleidoscopic array of predictable directions that this conversation has NOT gone. So I guess the answer to THAT question was "no."

The coach, again, correctly read that situation and drove the point home.

"A catcher needs a CUP. It's a protective device that fits inside a jock. It protects your testicles. You get the picture?"

Understanding was beginning to rear its ugly head. I think the Coach sensed this, but forged ahead anyway. Neither my ignorance, nor the coach’s obvious discomfort with this discussion was going to stop such a monumental safety issue from being resolved.

"Before you catch on this team again, I want you to have a cup. A young man could really get hurt out here, and I don’t want that happening to my players. One good foul-tip and you might never be able to have children."

I don’t know whether he was actually concerned, or whether he distrusted my skill at stopping pitched baseballs prior to contact with my crotch. "OK coach. Where do you get one of these.... cups?"

"I think that one of the stores downtown will have them. You just have to shop around ‘til you find one. Let me know when you buy one so I’ll know I can let you catch again."

"What do they look like?"

"Just ask the saleslady in the store... She’ll help you out."

Well, asking a sales lady for a "catcher’s cup" was absolutely the LAST thing on earth that I was ever going to do. I had a premonition of telling an ADULT that I needed a cup to put in my balls in, and getting called names like "dirty" until my parents arrived to cart me to the orphanage.

I examined my options: I couldn’t go back to PeeWee... Too old. I could quit baseball... Dad was one of my coaches though, so that’ll never happen. Thoughts of asking a blue-dye-rinse fat woman to help me with a catcher’s cup shot through my head. There’s only one thing to do. Ask Mom to go buy one.

That evening I did just that. I told Mom I needed a catcher’s cup. She looked at me like I was crazy, then laughed at me. I had to convince her to ask Dad. All this ended with Mom buying me a strange, decidedly non-cup-looking-thing and my first jock strap. Of course, it was Mom's first jock strap too, and she got the wrong kind.

For those of you who are testicularly-challenged, there are special jocks made for catcher's cups. They have a pouch sewn into the front of the nad-pouch. My jock was the everyday economy version with just the web-pouch for my nads. Neither Mom nor I knew this, nor would we figure it out for a year or two.

Ever the trouper, I went upstairs, stripped off my shorts and put on my brand-new-what-the-hell-is-this-for jock. Then I stuffed the it-doesn’t-even-look-like-a-cup into the pouch. I let the wide elastic snap into place with a flourish, then immediately regretted it.

Now, for those of you who've never seen a catcher's cup, they are roughly the shape of the front half of a french bikini (yes, I know that I'm mixing gender stuff here...just stay with me) They are made out of some sort of nearly bulletproof plastic with foam rubber padding around the edge (which doesn't help). The whole thing is a neutral grey color with ventilator holes drilled through the front, sort of reminiscent of the holes you poke in the metal lid of a jar when you catch grasshoppers.

Those ventilator holes were the worst torture known to man... Or boy. Of course, had I been wearing the proper style of jock, I never would have noticed this. But I was blessed with a non-catcher’s-cup-wearing mom, so I discovered pain. And that pain was that special type of pain that lasted as long as I wore that cup. Worse yet, I knew what my baseball schedule was, so I had plenty of warning, and therefore anxiety in anticipation of having to wear that cup. I would rather have just been hit by a couple of foul-tips and had it over with, lack of future children notwithstanding.

Back during my Little League years (I don't mind saying) my pecker wasn't much in the size department. But just about all of the nerve endings in the world were packed into that little sucker. And, as physics would have it, my pecker had more strength than mass, so it sorta stuck out straight.

Straight into one of those sharp edged ventilator holes. So, If I wore my cup (which I'd just learned about yesterday) in a jock (which wasn’t made for the job) to avoid injury (which never happened in PeeWee) my pecker felt like someone was trying to split it like string-cheese.

OK...I'll buy that. All of those adults can't be wrong.

I wore it all that year.

Here's an Email From My Brother in Iraq. This is in response to the media over-reporting Tiller's murder, but under-reporting William Long's murder.

I love my country.

I was on vacation in Hawaii last week, walking through a mall will my family, when a band started playing the Star Spangled Banner. I, and my family, immediately turned to face the music, and put our hands over our hearts. Two people, walking behind me, slammed into me, almost knocking me down. They cursed at me and said things like, "watch where you are going" and "dumbass." Then they walked on, shaking their heads.

As the band played, I looked out the corner of my eye. We were the youngest people in the whole crowd that actually did the right thing. Most everyone standing up and paying respect were in their '60s or older. One man, probably a veteran, actually struggled to support himself with his arms on his wheelchair. He couldn't stand on his own feet, yet he still tried to rise.

Everyone else, from the age of about fifty on down, did not move a muscle. They talked on their cell-phones, sat in their chairs, and sipped their Starbucks. No one removed their hats.

I can't believe I've spent fifteen years of my life defending these assholes.

Kurt Scholz

___________________________________________________________________

Now this is your Intrepid Blogger talking:

Present-day Americans are idiots. There, I said it.

Americans are so accustomed to their life of affluence and leisure that they think it is owed to them. History and wisdom assure us that is not the case.

Nearly every day I'm blessed with the thought that I live in the greatest country in the world. I own my house. I own the land it sits on. I own the truck I drive to work, and I work at a company that is able to pay me well. I am truly blessed, I realize it, and in that realization is yet another blessing.

I buy fresh food at any of several grocery stores. I have money for gasoline, so I don't have to walk. I have money for my guitars, guns, and other recreation. I hunt managed populations of game species. I worship my God in the church that I choose, and in a way that I believe is right. I watch one of my televisions, and hear editorial comments openly critical of government policies. I read newspapers without having the "Glorious Workers' Revolution" style propaganda shoved down my throat. I'm secure in the knowledge that if a policeman beats or kills me, I probably had it coming. I'm comforted by the fact that the state is restrained from throwing me into prison or taking my property unless they can convince 12 people to agree that I broke some law that we all know about. I listen to country music one day, and classic rock the next because our economy is robust enough to support the cost of advertisment, and I'm never subjected to patriotic marching music interspersed with a government spokesman telling me lies. I'm not afraid to tell people who my ancestors are, what God I worship, where I live, or what country I'm from.

All of these things are my everday reality because I am an American living in the U.S. of A.

God COULD'VE decided to make me a 13 year-0ld prostitute in Calcutta, HIV postive, orphaned with 8 younger siblings. I don't have to make the choice of turning out my even-younger sister (which would surely be a death-sentence for her) because I don't bring in enough money to feed my family.

He COULD'VE decided that I should be a child-soldier in west Africa. Or maybe a mutilated beggar in the UAE. Possibly a horny and gullible young Muslim in Jordan with enough driving hatred for infidels to wear a "suicide vest" into a cafe and push the button. He might've decided that it suited his purpose to make me any of 5 billion citizens of other countries. But he didn't.

He blessed me with a life shaped by a country, family and culture that far too many of us take for granted.

For the record, there is no free lunch. We live in the land of plenty because our ancestors all got off their butts, came here, and busted their backs to build a country that would provide the life and lifestyle that the U.S.A. provides.

Is it perfect? Nope. It seems like Black folks, and Indians have a pretty good point about past abuse... But if they ever want to get past those events, either individually or collectively, and embrace the future rather than the past, the atmosphere is more supportive here than in other places. Very few of us will get through life without (many) disappointments. However, this country provides VASTLY less painful disappointments than the alternatives.

Dissidents, revolutionaries, soldiers, and our forebears toiled to provide this alternative to the rest of the world.

That effort, for the last few centuries, put forth by better men than you (or me) is certainly worth one-and-a-half minutes of respect and reflection before a first-pitch or a kick-off.

If standing and removing your hat (or saluting) is just too much effort and life-interruption for you, then you can't possibly include yourself among the people who have made this country the blessing it is.

Kurt, you've said a mouthful.

And to the guy in the wheelchair who tried to rise-- Well, there are still heroes.

Just Another Redneck Rolling Kennel From Wyoming.

Click the photo to enlarge.