Florence 2000, baby!

(I gotta get this story down so I can give this year's participants shit next year......)

Prior to the 7-hour ride down to Florence, South Carolina a week ago, I did a little prepping: a lone 7-11 chilidog and a hefty side of 33 ounces of Campbell's Pork 'n' Beans. So if you close your eyes, here's the image you'll get: small flashes of light from behind the tinted windows of a white Suburban as it hurtles down Interstate 95. I even woke Coco up from a deep backseat snooze with the smell. Now that's talent, my friend.

Anyhow, despite my toxicity, Steve, Barney, Coco and I arrived at the lovely Florence Comfort Inn (where the cows are out back and the combo McDonald's-liquor store is up front) around 11 pm and met Justin and Tina at the long line of our team's adjacent rooms. And of course, we started drinking (you would too if you were stuck in a 75-mile-per-hour four-person gas chamber for 7 hours). Roy Boy and Sandra wandered out of their room and the eight of us pulled chairs out of our rooms and drank on the walkway between the parking lot and our rooms (which was a scene we'd repeat many times throughout the boozy hazy weekend). No one would sit next to me for some reason, so I just had a few and called it a night, as did everyone else shortly thereafter...

The next morning I awoke just in time to avoid the Barney Bound onto my bed. Augh! Paybacks are hell, eh? Anyway, the rest of the softball crew was due to arrive in scattered clumps that day, so we didn't really venture too far from the motel. Tony arrived in the morning, so he, Steve, Roy, Barney and Justin took off to play golf (combined score for the five-some: 1,468) while Coco, Tina and I anchored down the homefront. Or rather, motelfront. Whatever. Anyway, we bummed around by the pool, had a couple of Buds and listened to some tunes courtesy of Coco's Discman (we didn't have anything else to play CDs on, so he just turned up his headphones real loud--what a guy). Coco began pushing for doing the Hour of Power, which is having a shot of beer every minute for an hour. Hmm. It was only 1:30 in the afternoon. Whatever you want, Coco Loco. I told him we'd do it once the rest of the troops returned from golfing. So he had another beer and a blue raspberry Slushee. Big Mistake #1.

When everyone got back, the Great 60 Minutes of Drinking began outside our rooms (Hey, the Hour of Power is not quite as easy as it sounds--you try it). And at Minute 55, guess what? Coco spewed a bright blue straight-arrow stream of beer and artificially-colored Slushee syrup across the parking lot. For the rest of the weekend we called him "The Blue Streak" (give him credit though, 'cause he did finish the last five minutes).

Well, the rest of the gang slowly filtered in at odd times throughout that evening. Of course, the times only seem odd because I was pretty much smashed. Ken, John and Sean showed up somewhere around 5 (I think) and then our single-women fans KJ and Dorothy (dubbed "The Meat" by Kenny) pulled in a bit later. As for the rest of the night, well, we just sat around, drank, laughed, threw a frog around, drank some more and busted on Roy and The Blue Streak. Ah, nirvana! 'Round about 11:30 as we were stumbling off to bed, Little Mikey showed up. As the youngest member of the team, he was a little bemused that we were all crashing so early. I informed him that we started drinking around noon. That ended that conversation. Off to bed...

Saturday morning. 7 am. I began praying to the God of Coffee. Who's the wise guy who scheduled our first game of the tournament at 9 am?? I'll get you for that, Barney. We rousted everyone out of bed and hit the beautiful Freedom Florence Softball Complex by 8:30. And as luck would have it, the other team never showed up. A victory! Yeah, sure, by forfeit, but we're not beneath that. Not at all. Our next game wasn't until 2, so we drove back to the motel and farted around for a bit (which means we had lunch and a beer or two). And then finally--almost 40 hours after our arrival in South Carolina--we actually played ball. Well, that might be a bit of an understatement. We lost 16-6. But that's an improvement over our first year in Florence where we lost our two games by scores of 23-3 and 32-12. Sheesh. We should've have changed our name from "Thursday's" to "Two-And-Out" that year.

Our next game was at six, so we stuck around the complex and watched the college chicks play in a fast-pitch tournament on the side fields. Of course, that kinda depressed us since any of those teams could've beaten the shit out of us as well. Isn't there a T-Ball tournament for us to play in next year?

Then, as 6 o'clock rolled around, we took the field for what would be our shining moment. Yeah, right. More like shoe shining moment (except you don't get fucked in the ass when you bend over to shine shoes, unlike us out on the field). We--to put it mildly--got shellacked. I think we played against the Cuban National Baseball Team. They beat us by the slaughter rule in 3 innings 16-0. Poor Mikey didn't even get to bat. We had 2 lousy hits and never got a runner past first base. Holy moley moley moley. We hightailed out of there and didn't look back.

Fortunately, we were done early enough that we could still get back to the motel, get a shower, and get in several hours of drinking before the bars closed at midnight. We ended up at a place called Redbone Alley and proceeded to beer-and-shooterize the night away. The highlight was (once again) busting on Roy, and the lowlight (for me, at least) was Kenny burning my elbow with my own lighter (goddamn non-smokers). We rolled back to the motel around midnight and continued the drinking well into the morning (and yes--Mike passed out well before the rest of us). Coco and I had planned to do a little cow-tipping, but fortunately a couple of hours of heavy rain thwarted our stupidity. So we busted on Roy some more and finally dragged our chairs back in our rooms and turned the lights out on Florence 2000...

So when all was said and done (as in well-done, as in us), what did we learn from this trip? Well, I think we learned quite a few important things...let's see here...beans and Suburbans don't mix, and neither do Slushees and beer...making fun of Roy is indeed an art form...Kenny shouldn't play with fire...Mike's college years must have been wasted on studying......

Oh, and most importantly, driving seven freakin' hours to get embarrassed in two games of softball is pretty damn silly......It's a hell of a lot of fun, but pretty damn silly nonetheless.

So next year maybe we'll find a tournament that's, say, only six hours away.