Ah, Monti. What bonnie little brae is it that names thee? Or art thou after Jefferson but soft cee’d? Thy restaurants glow like beacons from the fields of the hardy spinach growing farmers, their sleeves and trousers rolled, a hint of e coli on their breath. Thy inns are famous ‘round the globe, with their screams and ichor-stained streams, their bullet-proofed concierges ever helpful, their rare bars of soap a delight to behold if unearthed before the golden moment of checkout. Thy saloons roar with Euterpe’s tootles gnawing at the medulla oblongata, mixing memory and desire and the blasts of Colt Saturday Night Specials and lo, it’s only Friday. What wondrous city is this, that mine eyes take in each Colombo’s eve?
Then again, Montrose ain’t exactly the City of Light either. Especially if you stay at the Watergate.
This year, with the Bullups so early, for all practical purposes Monticello was the real kickoff of the season, since from now till April, excepting intergalactic holidays, every weekend has a tournament on it. The goal of Monti was to pack ‘em in, and pack ‘em in it did, ultimately resolving its numbers at 108. They were, in a word, hanging from the rafters. This makes tabbing relatively easy, once you get things started and the noshows are clearly dumped and whatnot. All you have to do is keep the ranked judges on the bubbles, and there were more than enough for that, or how else would Joe V have gotten a flight off? I mean, we weren’t ranking him a C or anything. And the Sailors did admirably, with RG taking top speaker and making it to Quarters, and the second-year folk picking up some ballots in what was at least for one of them a first varsity experience. All in all, a worthy start to the season.
The Coin and I also tabbed PF, which given the small number of teams (13) went better than you’d expect. The brackets somehow held pretty well, and there wasn’t any 4-0/0-4 pairings as there occasionally are in small fields. Of course we did it all by hand, and ameliorated the process by judiciously stealing clean and capable LD judges from that pool, but it all worked out well in tab, and since no once stormed the battlements in protest, I have to believe it worked out as well for the competitors also.
But I know you, and what you want to hear is all the dirt. I mean, you put all the coaches in a room together for the first time and there has to be some result, right? Now, as you well know, the problem with the northeast debate coaches—people like the Coin and JV and Kaz and me and O’C and God (AKA the retired RJT who was there making things happen except for the TV, so she didn’t get to work to watch the Yankees lose the Stanley Cup or whatever it was that they were losing) and various other passers in and out over the weekend--is that we don’t hate each other’s guts all that much and we don’t cut each other’s throats or stab each other’s backs at the first opportunity, unlike what I hear tell about the coaches in other regions. As a matter of fact, we tend to relish our peaceful existence together. We have some differences, but we settle them like civilized people, by playing “You Don’t Know Jack” for instance. So our eyes are not on ourselves but on others. There is no blood in the tab room, in other words. We throw our blood out the door at others.
And what were we ranking on (which I assume is a verb form of rancor)? Oh, some fun stuff. Make-believe teams, for one thing, are always a hit. So-called independents are a thing of wonder in the debate universe. One suspects that they think that no one knows what they are up to, but since, obviously, all the coaches tend to hang out together (I had to forceably pull O’C away from the slot machines as he insisted that he had WTF money to burn and damn, but he wanted to burn it), if there are issues with a school, sooner or later those issues bubble up and are shared with the professorial community. If you don’t pay your bills, or your school doesn’t know you exist, or you’ve created an inutile judge whose lack of English is only matched by his abundance of absence, we’ll all tend to find out about it. And then there’s the basic generally unreliable judge, the last to pick up a ballot and the first to call up with a reason for being late, yadda*3. They expect to be hired in the future, or expect that we’ll accept them as judge coverage, and again, how dumb do they think we are? Practically speaking, judging is just about money for nothing, and it’s not bad bucks for a day’s work, even if you only show up on the Saturday. But that does require showing up. Then again, I like the harried looking parent who shows up in tab begging not to have to judge. Depending on my mood I’ll tell them I understand completely and I’ll only use them if I absolutely have to, and then I pat their hands and put my arm around their shoulders as I walk them to the door and then go back and click the “on in all elims” button, or else I’ll tell them that I have no trouble taking them out of the pool but they’ll have to drop 4 teams along with them, and just give me the kids’ names and I’ll take care of it. At Monti I was on the warm and cuddly side, it being a warm and cuddly weekend where, actually, there was little mumbo jumbo being attempted by many people. But every tournament has a little mumbo jumbo. It wouldn’t be reality otherwise. And it wouldn’t be any fun.
I guess I’m making Monti sound like part Wisteria Lane and part Dazed and Confused, but mostly it was sitting around listing to moldy oldies on the iPod, introducing Set to the girl of the streets, eating chips and brownies (and I’ve learned that when everyone says that a certain batch of brownies aren’t any good, they’re the ones for me, and vice versa), listening to the abhorrent walkie-talkie squawking at irregular intervals, marveling at the teetering health status of the Lexwegians (who seem to be a living rebuttal to the Sept-Oct neg), attempting a drool-free nap, and suffering the shame of JV finishing my Saturday puzzle which I swear I would have figured out without him given enough time (and I will point out that he didn’t even buy the paper himself, dog that he is).
And what happened at Casino Royale? Did O’C indeed go into eternal debt with his endless collection of DMV $5k fees? Feh! The place wasn’t half as degenerate as I was hoping for. A few of us had a quick chat about NFL, did some horse-trading on Manchester-In-The-Sea, and then ran screaming from the place as soon as the band started playing. Other people get revved up when they hear covers of modern classics ordinarily only heard over school bus loudspeakers (and you have to wonder where bus drivers get their musical tastes from). Debate coaches head for the hills, their hands over their ears, wishing they were football coaches, who never run away from anything.
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