Badminton's Revenge

I meant to write about this when I first saw it a few weeks ago, but wound up forgetting about it. By now, the perpetrator must be way off somewhere within the highest heights of Permanent Awesome Mode, but the incident still needs to be relayed to the broader public. Or, well, at least the slightly-broader-than-just-me public that reads this blog.

So I was on my way home one somewhat fine day and came across a most curious sight. A fairly large tree was freshly felled in a patch of grass next to the stairs outside my apartment building. There were cut logs, wood chips and sawdust scattered all about the stump. Sitting on top of the stump was a slightly bent, dented and scratched badminton racket.

Now, if your thought process even vaguely resembles mine, that was the funniest thing you've seen all month, possibly all year. Obviously, someone had come by and hacked down the tree in a fit of rage with their sturdy badminton racket. Or, someone had passed by the already felled tree holding an old badminton racket they were about to throw away and thought it would be hilarious to batter the racket a bit more and leave it on top of the stump, bringing the former scenario to mind in future passersby.

There are other possibilities of course. The racket could be the avatar of the vengeful tree, waiting patiently for that dude with the chainsaw to come back so it could get its revenge...somehow. Maybe the dudes who chopped it down found the racket inside the tree and didn't know what to do with it, so they just left it there. Perhaps a battered badminton racket is the calling card of the Great DC Tree Killer, infamous across the neighborhoods for his razor sharp teeth and inscrutable wit.

My preferred theory is that a student at a local high school had just come home from a really, really bad day of badminton practice. Hating the world, the slight young woman was ready to inflict a violent death on the first person who happened to look at her the wrong way. The racket she held in her trembling hand, the racket that she was so unable to find success with on the court, would do nicely for the task. That first person with the wrong look happened to be a tree.

It was all over in minutes. I mean, she PWNED that tree. FTW and such.

Useless now in its damaged, yet amazingly intact considering the deed it had just performed, state, she left the racket on top of her kill as a warning to the world. Oddly elated, she returned home and had mashed potatoes and porkchops with applesauce for dinner. All was well.

I think there's a lesson for all of us in that story. When faced with the desolation of a ruined day, when nothing seems to be going right, when life seems to be singling you out to be the object of all the little tortures it loves to inflict, just grab your trusty badminton racket and beat a large living thing to death with it and your life will turn around faster than you can say, "WTF?!"