GAME OVER TIME by max keanu 2012

The last game of the season, the last minutes of the last quarter, the championship game will I become the hero tonight, a proud Tiger tonight?

The ball comes down the court on the right side. I glimpse it in my right eye's peripheral vision, hear the dribbling ballpumpf, pumpf, pumpf, pumpf precision-bounced with confidence by fellow teammate Michelangelo, a.k.a. Thelonius Michael Angle.

I knew the drill, knew it by heart. I am the master of the mid-court shot. Without looking, I instinctively know the ball exists in mid-air flight and is coming towards me.

I look at the man guarding me, cast an evil eye, to his evil eye, then grunt a mean guttural snarl to put him off balance. I look in the opposite direction, feign movement in that direction and then jam to the opposite direction, all the while anticipating success and Michelangelo's artistic ball-passing instincts. His pass accelerates like a swift and perfect spear, zipping through the cheering, roaring exuberance of the crowd. The heavy hot and humid air in the gymnasium is filled with anticipation of my upcoming catch.

Only then do I look towards the brown spinning orb, appreciate its perfect trajectory, recognizing Michelangelo's unique rate of spin to velocity momentum. My brain clicks in geometries of flight and angles. I prepared to intercept the ball.

Up high in the air, leaping to incorporate the incoming ball's momentum into my swinging arms. With my arm's added strength, I envision propelling the basketball up the final ten yards to the hoop. I feel my mind mapping the trajectories and let my hours of practice; practice that incorporated the immutable laws of Newton and nature take its course.

But something happens... my mind goes fuzzy, an unforeseen man, the center of the opposite team places a huge open palm into the velocity of my face and nose. I strike it hard, then tumbled over a ferocious waterfall. Falling, falling, I perceive a dark pond surrounded by thick jungle... falling, falling, falling.

* Tumbling down the falls, I gain a terrified momentum, and a profound realization. I no longer exist in a gymnasium in Kansas.

* Hunger!

* For days I exist alone by eating tubers, worms, small fry fish, mushrooms and flowers. Somehow I know what to eat, know how to live alone in the rough. I have mystical and spiritual precognitions that my team will somehow find me.

My team found me. Joy. They speak a different language, but I understand it. Seeing my teamOh, such joy! Once again connected to my humanity, my tribe, my people, my meaning to them.

Happiness overwhelms me as we make our way back to the grass huts on our savanna. We chatter in our clicking guttural language and share a gourd of river water mixed with sweet honey and bitter flower stems.

The celebration around the tribal fire brings me back to a solid reality, safety and a realization of my ancestral life. Although, I also know a new game is always on for the morrow I celebrated my return, being alive, being with my tribe again. Tomorrow, tomorrow, always the game, always a fact of life, always the game, always a new tomorrow....

* We lost the game.

We lost again the next day.

* Two days later comes the morning for the big game that will determine our fate. Our tribe's survival is at stake. We assemble early, before dawn's first light, rub still-wet rhino feces on our skin and chew a locally grown stimulant. All of us know the game will be long and laborious today. Perhaps even fatal for a few of us.

Men who cannot go the distance will not survive. We are down two men; two seasoned and good men succumbed to the deadly bite of the Black Mambos that hide in our sylvan-rimmed and always alive savanna grass-landed life.

We take positions downwind, in frozen body stances with spears, clubs, bone or horn weapons in hand. We wait in silence, communicating with subtle hand signals, and knowing, but nervous eyes.

The last of many gazelles wanders through the meadow. At that moment, I had no concept of the chemical hormones plundering my amygdala, hypothalamus, prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, hippocampus, septal nuclei, and periaqueductal grey of my midbrain the brainy places and things not to be understood for more years than I could ever imagine.

A surge of power courses through my body. The correct moment for the shot approaches the focal plane in my calculating mind. I instinctively welcomed it and....

I remember my first hunts, my father in hunting finesse with profound admiration and reverence etched and now buried deep in my mind's memories. All movements of men, of hunters actions absorbed, all muscles movements correlated to success in the hunt for game, subconsciously registered and stored for this moment.

The time has come. Im required to make the kill shot or at least the wounding shot. Our survival depends on it for sweet nourishment, for the good life, for existence. Survival depends upon my spear throwing perfection.

Reflexively, my bodys nerves and muscles are commandeered by powerful surges of hormones provoking body focus and potent force. I pump my will power and fortitude up maximum concentration, stanchion my stance to my earth, plant myself deeper into my African heritage, and draw my arm back to the ready.

Tightening tendons, pulsing blood, and raw nerves control trained and twitchy muscles...

WHOOSH!

I'd make the shot, a tranquility of mind remains after the release of my concentrated power. I absorb the rebounding counter force and search for the new realities in my rapidly elapsing timescape. I watch in anticipation as my single spear vectors downward to its target. I subconsciously reach back for my secondchance spear, knowing in my heart and mind Mother Nature rarely allows a second chance in this game.

All my tribe's eyes and minds, and hungers, survey my spear sailing though the hot and humid air. Eyes panning, as if in slow motion, hoping for an impact into hide and flesh and fatal red-flowing blood. The sun's first light reflects quick sparky flashes off the chipped obsidian spear point. We all triangulate trigonometries before the figures and facts of trigonometry existed. A surge of collective inhales and quick beating hearts boom internally, but all remain in hesitant and silent breathing modes. Then a collective knowing, a triumphant release, a welling up of success grows in all of us. Soon were onto the real hunt, on the run. Our quarry is wounded. We may eat well tonight. The chase is afoot!

* Then again, we might not taste this success. With success we survive, with failure we starve to death. Starvation is not an option. Hunger is death. Food is life. A man must kill to survive. These facts were celebrated in songs and in our chants since the beginning of time immemorial.

* The spear struck deep into the gazelle hindquarters, a bleeding wound damaging a set of tensing muscles controlling its propulsion and traction on its left side.

The look in the gazelle's eyes reveals instinctive fear and surprise, a black-eyed distressed terror provoking automatic flight from unperceived dangers. The flight reflex propel her, as her pain was now her motivator and spiritual guidance.

Her instincts activate instantly, and she runs, runs hard, a zigzagging run for her survival, going in the direction of a group of Gum Arica tree's camouflage in the far distance.

The hunger inside me changes to a mouth-watering desire to consume her flesh. I smell and imagine the sizzling of her body fats on an open fire and savor the flavor of her flesh on my tongue's taste bud memories.

As the team runs and runs in a well-coordinated and knowing pursuit, all I can think about is tonight's meal. Smell memories to be satisfied, a full stomach in my future, and a rescue from this deathly persistent gnawing hunger. Perhaps a heroic metamorphosis from desperation to success, a raging fire, a dance of celebration. For to eat until full, immediately after the kill is the demon invading my soul now, but all decent men know sharing, teamwork is the first commandment of the successful tribe.

A primal, aggressive and vicious force redoubles, emerges like an enraged creature, from a dark cave deep in my mind. Take this quarry for yourself! Sooth the hunger! Claim it! You are the victor! Nevertheless, a calming father memory tells me to control it, to channel raw aggression, to focus in on the long run, to act in unison with the tribe.

Oh, I tell you, hunger hurts! It drives one on in utter desperation or a grudging sacrifice. The plateaus and platitudes of the heroic melt in the face of real hunger.

My body begins to adapt to my hunger. It had to. I ask the deities of wind and water to toughen me for the long run I know will come. The sun's shadow begins our survival countdown. And we run, and we run, and run for her life.

* The score: Hometown Homo sapiens - 1, Mother Nature's fleet of foot gazelle - 0

* As a boy, I'd run for miles, far behind the main team, but always with them in view. Behind the big men of the tribe, so use to the running miles in the pursuit of game, so knowing in the knowledge of... running. For the hunter must be aware of the miles made of more miles, compounded by even more miles in the hot sun of our equatorial existence.

Oh father, please teach me how to run the course and let me fling the killing spear! A boy must dream, a boy must always run and dream. Dream and run and defeat the sun. Run!

* Running the savannah for hours, barefoot over sharp thorns and jagged rocks and splintery piercing wood no longer of conscious concern. Eyes on the prize in well-regulated muscle coordination, in synchronized forward bipedal movement, always forward movement, in rhythmic arms swinging at a steady pace, breath conserved, eyes on the prize running, always running for the prize. And we run, and we run, and run for our lives.

Thoughts of exhausting the wounded beast play exultant in all the team's collective eyes and minds. Clicking tongues, hoots, yells, all vocalizations strategic and of an a priori, and hand-me-down intellect. All focus is on the game, all for all, all for one, all of a focus mind-state in our tried and true survival methodology.

Black bodies moving over golden-grained grassland, a mountain of snow-capped majestic awe appears, someday to be called Kilimanjaro. In the far distance, not a cloud in the sky, the merciless sun draining precious body fluids and still we run. And we run. And then we run some more.

* You know when the quarry weakens. You see the signs. You adapt a new game plan immediately and all miraculously know it, sense it while on the run. Win at all costs mentalities, men hard-trained to rely on past successes, but we must run for eons in success to drive new and innovative spirits into the tribe's genes and bloodlines.

The team compensates to the gazelles changes in directions as a corporeal body towards one glorious harmonious action; of runs and movements faster, keener, with thoughts of determined success closer now, the target closer, the distance between anticipated moments of the kill closer, creating a frantic horrific panic, a peril perceived in the weakening and frightened prey.

Noonday sun blazing and we still run. The gazelle was more of a challenge than we anticipated. We lose her...

* The score: Hometown Homo sapiens - 1, Mother Nature's fleet of foot gazelle - 1.

Nevertheless, the game proceeds or we die.

* For three fingers to the sun, she eludes us until I pick up her scent, a scent of fear and blood and urine and feces about a half a mile distant. How I discern her scent was not known to me, it just was. That is why I am captain of our team. I have a nose for sporting game, for the killing game, for the pay-off.

My son, his son and his son's son will inherit my nose, my visual acuity and his daughter's, daughter will always pass on the genes of success and maybe an expanded tendency for compensating neuron connections to alleviate the hungers that will always plague and frighten us. Our team must win at all costs, as starvation is never an option. And we run, and we run, and run for all our lives.

* Under a spread of shade of the Gum Acacia, the mortally wounded and exhausted gazelle stands in noble resignation to her defeat. Exhausted, sad eyed, panting last snorts. Inhalations of resounding desolate breath sounds out, echoes of her plight and fight penetrate the vast expanse of the savannah silence. All around I sensed the eyes of my teammates looking to me to take the last shot, the kill shot.

The gazelle looks at me. I see orange highlights on a white and tan fur tapestry, bold black stripes. I will paint her majestic last sand and struggle in our special cave. I will pay her homage. I will be her spirit. She is food, she is hide, and she is horns for our spears and knives. She is revered by all of us. She is of the land. She is of us.

Her small black eyes peer into an unknown future. Perhaps, she knows the score, knows this is her final minute of life. Perhaps she realizes she was vanquished by one man's prowess, his refined luck and his team's well practiced and soon to be celebrated position at the top of the food chain and beyond.

* Id taken careful aim, suffer my opponent's hand hitting my nose, but I shake the strong-arming off and recovered from the falling sensation to see the white woven material of the net at mid-distance. I discerned the bright caution-orange roundness of the hoop and let the basketball leave the tips of my fingers with confidence....

* Oh, I tell you, the moment the ball is in an arch, floating up as if by magic, endowed from some distant past, from a deserved inheritance of ancestors or of a magic never to be known or understood. Oh, my brothers, I knew I would make the shot. I had to. It always amazes me I can shoot the important shots under such pressure with such accuracy. From where did this talent come from?

I keep my eye on the ball arching high in the air. My body contacts the wooden polished basketball court once again. The ball, still suspended in game time air, time stretched over seconds so long, time so fleeting in the realm of luck and chance.

That spinning orb, like an ancient rock seeking its target, a kill shot viewed by all and then the anticipated swoosh through a hoop that always represented tangible realities and great possibilities in my life and in the lives of my teammates. And yet, at the same time, it was a goal suffused in the mystical and the realms of ancient magic, luck and chance. All eyes marveled at its trajectorycoming closer and closer and closer to the hoop. My fellow team mates witness and somehow emotionally involved in the physicality before the actuality, before the time of triumph, before the one moment of victory that defeats a worthy opponent.

* The basketball slipped through the netting with a discerned and deafening, whoooosh. The crowd erupts. The ending buzzer blasts. My kill shot wins the game.

Oh, the cheers, the jubilation and the victory!!! We won the big game. The elders, my teammates, the crowd celebrate the team and me. A certain sparkle appears in the cheerleaders' eyes as I look towards them. Im hoisted upon the shoulders of my teammates. Oh, I tell you, were a tribe of real men in the precious moment of victory.

* Well all eat well tonightwine, women and song! Party! Well all live in this victory to play the game again! Only better. Next season, twelve new moons, 364 days to go and we'll do it again.

* Nevertheless, tomorrow is always another day, another game, a different game, for sports, ball games are a reality so real to me. They to have been passed down to me from some unknowable god or magically talented ancestor. A presence of sports memory exists in me going back decades, eons, millenniums, going back further than all the days I might imagine ever existed.

I often wonder what happened to me in the split second during the final game when my mind timetravelled and I saw life in a different light, saw that look in the wounded gazelles eyes.

I told coach about it, about the hunger, about my tribe.

He only laughed and told me to pay it no mind. Told me that I should keep my eye on the ball at all times and always do what comes natural. Aim towards the big leagues and you'll never regret it son. It was his standard response to all the imponderables in his life.

Oh, but I tell you, I love these games, basketball, football and soccer and my teammates can't be beat. It is as if my life depends on them and they depend on me to the end of time itself, as if wed been playing these games forever and ever.

The team presented me a beautiful big trophy plaque to hang on my wall with a big-fanged tiger emerging out of it.

I'm the hero tonight. I'm a proud Tiger tonight. A smiling Tiger.