Day of Wrath

The crew

The men hitting their women with clubs

The men playing while the wives wish they were at home

Dave trying to explain a strategy to Lauren. She only pretended to listen and hit the ball the other way

The Bolts of Thunder crew after their epic game

Mimics are all over the place. It's hard to get the real thing these days. I think of epic movies like Ben Hur, then pieces of crap movies like Australia that try and rip it off. That's what this blog is about. No, not Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, but about true epicness. An epic is something that just happens that way because it happened that way. You can't force it, you can't necessarily plan it all out. The right ingredients must exist, the stars must align, and you gotta be just plane lucky. What, you might ask, has this to do with anything at all. Like most of the posts on this blog, it has nothing to do at all with anything. But I'm writing it and you're reading it anyway. So let's get on with it. What I am going to discuss on today's blog is a truly epic day; something that can't be planned for, forced, or anticipated. It's the day that Bolts of Thunder played croquet...  So during the summer, we usually get on this kick of playing croquet at the park. The first couple weeks are just pure fun, then it gets a little competitive, then it usually ends with Matt yelling at Dan for cheating and packing up the mallets and balls for a season. The past 2 summers went that way, I anticipate this summer will be no different. As a side note, last summer's last game ended with Matt ready to shove his mallet down Dan's throat, or up another body cavity. It was pretty awesome. No hard feelings though: TIC (This is Croquet). So one Sunday we rounded up the troops, all fully fledged members of Bolts of Thunder teamed up with a female, and we had a massive game of team croquet. So everyone was with their wife, except bad-A bachelors such as myself and Dan. Dan found himself a woman to play with him, and I found my Mom. She's a member of Bolts of Thunder, so I was happy to have her around. Anyway, so pretty much all the females were there because their husbands wanted to play, and all the guys wanted to play because they wanted to win. It was all the guys against themselves with the women there acting purely as obstacles for the men to overcome in beating the others. We played that men and women had to hit every other turn, so the guy on the team would hit the ball in front of the wire basket, getting the ball all set up, then the girl would hit the ball 15 feet in the wrong direction, undoing all the men had worked so hard to do. What we thought would be a 20 minute warm-up game turned into 2 hours of the refiner's fire on all our relationships. We laughed, we cried, we remained silent as Nick threatened his wife with physical abuse if she missed a shot (just kidding, but I think Nick's mustache did physically threaten other players on the course. We called foul...). 2 hours later, Matt and Hannah came out victorious with Nick and Kim closely behind in second, Dave and Lauren hit their ball an extra 5 feet when it wasn't their turn and others weren't looking because they were so far behind, and Dan juggled other people's croquet balls. It was a true test of friendship for all of us, but I'm happy to say that we came out stronger in the end. The good times, the bad times, we had been through it all together. A team that stays together plays croquet together, is what I've always said. Because of this true test of friendship we had endured, marital bonds were strengthened, and the members of Bolts of Thunder became tighter knit and better able to skate together. You would not be reading this blog if it hadn't been for this epic croquet day, you would be reading the blog of washed up old men who once had a dream. But we still have that dream at Bolts of Thunder because we've been through it all. Like Styx, the only good music to ever come out of the United States... Ok, I have to publicly tell everyone that I'm joking. I don't want to even risk you not understanding the sarcasm in that statement and thinking that I like styx. I don't. Anyway, the last picture there is Nick, he's flying through the air in a half pipe, doing what Nicks and Tiggers do best: Frontside airs....