A License To Hunt Snowbirds

The home of the Cactus League does not consist of only baseball pilgrims. Others flock to the desert because the desert offers warmth. Snowbirds abound, but most of them are easily avoided because they are old and are in bed before the sun slips below the Shadow Mountains. A motel breakfast lounge is where you are most likely to run into them, and they will certainly want to try to make conversation with you. Most just want companionship, but others like to assert their intellect because it is the closest thing they feel to an erection these days.

There are often double standards in breakfast lounge conversations with snowbirds. The old coot by the bacon can bitch endlessly about trivialities from a certain location, but if that particular soul gets called on something about where he is from, a murder of crows will swoop in to stop the inquiries. Meanwhile, the much better looking guy by the orange juice gets gruff for asking about the toaster.

Anyway, the solution is to avoid breakfast lounges in hotels, and you can usually avoid most snowbirds, which are pretty much harmless anyway. Go straight to the bar. Drink your breakfast, and forget the snowbirds altogether. Most breakfast lounges have a shitty view anyway.

Fuck the Canadian snowbirds though. Their passive aggressive politeness does a very poor job of concealing their contempt, which of course, they don’t really want to conceal anyway. “Wow, we really thought there would be citizens patrolling the streets with assault rifles down here. Imagine our relief that things aren’t what we thought.”

What makes their contempt so comical is they are Canadian, not the French. Hello, what has Canada ever accomplished? Dieppe was a goddamn disaster, their whiskey is just gross, their beer causes gas, and their hockey league has to be propped up by American teams in warm weather climates. When you point that out to them, they reply, “But Drake promoted the 2016 NBA All Star game in Toronto, so that means it was the best All Star game in the last twenty years.”

Look, you asshats made enough money to come down to Phoenix to bitch and moan about America for a couple of months while your land is frozen. Your money was probably made in a criminal manner, and as Americans filled with the frontier spirit, we do not besmirch that at all. What does piss us off is you interrupting our Cactus League discussions with your interjections on U.S. politics. If I am talking to my daughter about the odds of obtaining a Mike Trout autograph at a restaurant, that is not an open invitation to interrupt my dinner conversation to ask me my feeling about Donald Trump or gun control. How is that oil economy doing these days anyway?

I don’t want to talk American politics with you, Mr. Canadian Snowbird. If we must discuss anything at all, let’s discuss the juvenile bat flip your star baseball player employs every time he makes solid contact with a baseball, Oh, I am a racist for bringing that up? I forgot what a diverse land you are from. How are those First Nation Tribes doing? How many minutes did PK Subban play in Sochi?

Listen, you Canadian fanboy, it is not racist to think bat flipping is an affront to the decency of baseball. Just because some of Jose Bautista’s detractors don’t like Latin players doesn’t mean that all of the bat flip detractors are racist. In fact, it is really fucking shallow to lump all those who don’t care for bat flips in with the racists. You make it easy to hope that Bautista fails a steroids’ test.