That's good stuff.
I had a dream about getting fired, for a really stupid reason. And none of my friends — including folks from here — were particularly supportive.
Then after two hours awake, I had a second dream in which I was fired. The firing wasn't the main theme of this dream, but damned if it didn't happen again.
I lay awake once more, but his time for only 15 or 30 minutes, as the second dream firing wasn't as disturbing as the first. I'm not giving details on those dreams, because it's the third dream I want to talk about.
I'm in some sort of bar, and there's a coin-operated video game there. NBA Jam. Around 1992, I played a lot of NBA Jam. I'd take the Mavs, who were the worst team in the league at the time, and with Mike Izzulino and Derek Harper, I'd progressively go two-on-two, beating every team in the league.
So I'm attracted to this newer, updated version of the game. I approach it at the same time some other guy does. He and I simultaneously reach to put our change in. He tells me to go ahead in front of him. I suggest that we play head-to-head, but he says no, he'll play after me.
The original game allowed you to play with two players — presumably the best, but not always (Izzulino?) — from each team, but I think subsequent versions allowed you to pick from a couple of players on your team. I kind of wanted this guy to play against me, because I was intimidated about how sophisticated the game may have grown over the passing years. And sure enough, after depositing my change, the game is taking me through menu after menu that I'm having a hell of a hard time navigating, and despite my best efforts to figure things out, I accidentally select the Celtics.
I'm then taken to a menu of Celtic players I can play as. I'm trying to control the buttons and the levers to sort through them and find a player I recognize, but some of the faces that appear on screen aren't in uniform. I pause at a photo of a blonde white guy in a collared, button-down blue shirt, and I turn to the guy behind me to ask, "Who is he?"
The guy answers that the face on my screen belongs to a Celtics assistant coach. I certainly don't want to play as an assistant coach, so I turn back to my screen to continue sorting through faces, but either I hit the wrong button or my selection opportunity has timed out, because here I am playing as an assistant coach. The game starts quickly, and I have no idea how joysticks and buttons are going to make me perform "assistant coaching" at an effective level, but whatever I'm doing is disastrous. My avatar on screen, now in a jacket and tie, is hitting his players on the sideline, throwing his rolled up papers down on the floor, screaming at the hapless Celtics NPCs that they are the worst team he's ever seen, and jumping up and down.
This is all in the first minute of the game, I can't manipulate the joystick to navigate him out of a small area near the bench (which makes sense) but I can't seem to coax him to do anything positive. What exactly should I be even trying to make an assistant coach do? I lightly tap the joystick trying to make my guy turn around to simply sit, and my avatar slugs a player at the end of the bench in the jaw, and the game seems to end with me being summoned to the owner's office, where he (again) fires me, telling me, "In all my years in sports, I've never seen a coach do more horrendous job in motivating his players."
This assessment is spot-on, of course. I'm the anti-Ted Lasso.
But now I'm not playing a video game any longer. I'm actually a fired coach. And I am wandering around the ballroom/conference room level of the swanky hotel where my former Celtics team is staying on the road. I know my life as an assistant coach and all the perks included end at checkout time tomorrow morning, so I don't want to go to bed, but I don't want to go out out and spend any of my now-limited money. So I kick around the hotel, think about ordering some food in my room while the team is still covering my stay, and I try to figure out how I'm going to explain to my wife how I got fired, because I couldn't figure out my joystick controls quickly enough.
I should have just asked the guy at the bar who wanted to play after me to walk me through the controls before I put my coins in, but I didn't, because of pride or embarrassment or something. And because of that, I'm a violent ex-Celtics assistant coach, wandering around the ballroom level when I should be brushing up my résumé.
|