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Baseball

I actually wrote this in 2022.

I am a huge sports fan. But only baseball has my love. Only baseball has made me cry. (I got legit wellness check phone calls in 1991 after the Braves lost 1-0 to Minnesota in ten innings in game seven of the World Series.) I have to like a team to enjoy a football or hockey game, but I’ll watch any baseball game at any level, from Little League to MLB. There’s something about the game. It’s timeless; literally, there is no edict of time to the game. It ends with the last out. Whether that takes nine innings or nine hundred. Until now.

In 2023, MLB will implement a time clock for pitchers and limit the number of pickoff attempts to two. A failed third attempt will be called a balk and the runner awarded the next base, and the batter a ball. I understand. The league wants offense. Offense sells. But there has to be another way.

The beauty of baseball lies in tension. The hitters’ idiosyncrasies with the bat, batting gloves, and stance. The pitchers’ mound routines. All in the middle of the most important situations. The hours of seeming inaction are punctuated by acts that are only possible by extremely prepared athleticism. You try throwing a ball even close to 100 mph. Harder still, try to hit one. Hit one out of the park. Hit 62 of them in 162 games. All impossible. Yet possible.

The game is great because it gives you time. Time to keep statistics for everything. Batting average against left-handers on grass during the day? It’s there. Percentage of sliders thrown to right-handers with a two-strike count? Check. It’s all documented. No other game produces more math, poetry, or lore. It is a pastime of reflection.

A clock has no place in a game immune from time.

(And, yes, the Braves lost the ability to hit in the final week of the season against the Marlins, and this continued until yesterday against the Phillies. Solo home runs do not win championships. This is the last time we will speak of this until pitchers and catchers gather in Florida next February to start Spring training. Bleah…)

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Inexorable truth

We all know our own obvious flaws. It takes eons of time and wisdom to more fully understand our more nuanced scarcities, but the others are obvious. You don’t need to tell a fat person they’re fat. In the middle of that spectrum of our obvious proclivities, we are really capable negotiators of denial. A drunk knows he’s a drunk too. But there are a million good reasons why. When you’re fat (like I’ve been), it’s self-disgust and shame. When you’re drunk (like I’ve been), it’s because she did that, or he said that, or I lost my job, or she left me.

Here is the part that’s embarrassing. If you are half a human being, these are obvious, inexorable truths. Did I say obvious? Everyone can see them. Everyone knows they’re true. And I guess this evolutionary survival mechanism helps you explain why it’s not true. And this earned weird evolutionary instinct helps the closest to you in your tribe make you feel better; they describe infections as a phase. As an anomaly. They look for reasons to share blame.

I’m telling you now, a human living in the midst of proclivity. There’s probably no one to blame except the universe. And that’s not really blame; the universe is by definition everything. Your proclivities, faults, and failures are by definition part of everything. It was inevitable, but that doesn’t let you off the hook. If your sadness and falling down were inevitable, in an infinite reality, so was your happiness and standing up.

The choices we make feel like free will. Ok. I choose to be an alcoholic sleeping at a bus stop. Does that make sense? Ok. I choose to finish my master’s degree and buy a house and have a beautiful wife and two kids, and a garage. Those sound like opposites. I am the same person, and I HAVE chosen both. And they both seemed like the exact correct decision when I made them. EXACTLY. THE. SAME. Confidence at DEFCON 1 when I pressed the button.

What I’ve realized is that even the best minds of our generation risk being destroyed by madness. I’ve been mad. Mostly I love, but I’ve been mad (crazy) and mad, and when I was (second) mad, there was no reason to be mad. I’ve come to see, and it’s taken far too long, that madness is actually sadness. It’s like a white blood cell response to a threat to your body. You see a threat, and you grab a can of Raid and spray everything in sight. The people who love you and reach out a hand. Fear is a cunt. You spray their hands and mouth because you’re so afraid of whatever is making you feel is making you feel so much. You spray their hands and then go hide. And hide and hide and hide, until showing your face becomes a threat.

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Hawaiian journal of history

So, these constructs that taught everyone how to box it all in, I didn’t have that. First, I was the fat little boy who seemed to know everything about volcanoes, whales, and the solar system circa 1980. Then the fat pre-pubescent who seemed to know it all, and who certainly believed he did. From the age of 12, I could do whatever I wanted to. No curfew. No rules. (I didn’t break any major societal ones; that came much later.) And at 16, I was on my own in Tacoma at university. The smartest boy in the room, so even more, I could do or say anything I wanted. And everyone seemed to listen. They asked for more. Now, in this relationship world of deadlines and people who cannot understand the pace, I think I am troubled. I used to drink to slow down so I could speak slowly enough. The problem has been that I don’t enjoy or naturally speak or think slowly. Imagine your mind is a browser. Mine is only comfortable with 26 tabs open, and I’m monitoring all of them. This path, though unnatural to me, will be healthier in terms of my interactions. Do I want to shut down 25 tabs so I can make everyone else happy? Can I live in the 1?

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A story about everything

How do we start this? How do I tell a story about everything by telling a story about me? Why would you care about me? I certainly don’t. Why should you? I’ll give you a reason. This isn’t a story about me. It isn’t about what happened to me, though that is all I’m going to tell you. Every word that follows is about you. I only know what I’ve seen and read, so I can only write that. But none of it is that specific. I’m not that good.

This is my story, so it’s everyone’s story. It’s my voice, but it’s your voice too. My friend told me I was self-absorbed. I’ve been wrapped up in the vision in my mind since I knew I had a mind. Her calling me out is just saying the obvious.

We were talking about lovers. She’s happy with hers. I’ve been juggling. I was telling her that as I get older, it has become very easy to talk people into doing what you want them to do, especially sexually. We have this whole pretense, mostly women, about how sex is this fortress that needs to be climbed or conquested. It is not. It wants to surrender. It wants to be given up. It just needs a reason. If not for the world, then for itself. Legs want to know why they are spreading. I didn’t know that when I was a boy. I was always looking for a superfluous cause. Everything is so simple if you don’t make it difficult.

It’s why drunks succeed before they get too drunk. Alcohol removes pretense. It removes that chameleon dance where you jump and jump and try to fit this skin or that color. And instead just be the fucking lizard that you are.

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Deep Ellum

I stood with you, three feet away from Robert Cray at the Gypsy Tea Room in Deep Ellum. The blues. I’ve always had such an affinity for sadness. Some come to mind. I’m not sure if it was born or learned, but it certainly is. I watched the movie, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, because I thought it might be sexual (spoiler alert: not really, unless you’re very patient). And then I tried to read the book because I liked the title. I bought the titular Fine Young Cannibals’ first album for the same reason (and the Screaming Blue Messiahs). I still don’t understand the former. I still listen to the latter.

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Can you kick it?

This is always how it starts. The voices and music don’t come until much later. But this is how it starts.

The anger and the boredom build. Drown them both in wine. Then regret. And try to stop. Usually, on your own. Usually, it works. Overdose on B12 and fill yourself with water until your bladder bursts. Take cold water baths. Bath because you don’t want to seize and fall in the shower. Not too much water, because you don’t want to drown like Whitney Houston. Soft music. Shallow cold water. B12, B12, B12. Valium if you have it. Ativan, but that usually requires an ER visit. Lie down in the dark, someplace soft in case you seize and fall.

Who would choose this? Your judgment means nothing. I don’t want this any more than the people who love me want to watch it.

And I know you’re mad at me. I said some shit before I started trying to kick. That ain’t me. I mean, I guess it’s obviously a part of me. This fucking predilection. I guess I mean it, but it’s shit you don’t say out loud, yet you do when you’re fucked up.

Am I going to kick this time? Probably not forever. It’s a running joke among addicts of every kind: it’s so easy to quit, I’ve done it 75 times. But that, if there is one, is the devil. And when you dance with the devil, I promise you, the devil doesn’t change. You do.

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Hindsight

I’m at my best early. And four am is such a cliché. I remember our shared, casual sadness, bathed in a hope that cried for the sun to rise. This human condition is weird. Defined by its humanity. Your body. Where the skin was so soft and where the bones were hard. Those determinations were not yours. And what they wrought was sometimes choice. I like to think of you as soft. But I’m not speaking about touch.

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Binary determinism

When I was younger, better looking, and dumber, and still knew everything, I was convinced in the indisputable truth of binary determinism. All problems could be solved algorithmically. Broken down into its smallest components, every problem could eventually be converted into yes/no questions that always had a correct answer of yes or no, 1 or 0.

As I’ve gotten older and not-so-wise, I’ve realized, “Hey, not so fast.”

Some questions have proven irrefutably, repeatedly, exasperatingly, and counter-intuitively to have not just more than one answer, but impossibly, every possible answer.

How profoundly that changes life and how it’s lived. More accurately, it is this realization that causes perceived change because what is always was and will always be

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He penikala melemele

You know, when I’m holding a pencil and my hand hurts and I don’t have a computer to type in because last Thursday I got drunk and walked away from my laptop in the park? Run-on sentence. You probably don’t know. I’ll tell you what happens, and you act incredulous. Iʻll try not to say the things alcohol would say. But you can’t tell the truth and tell people what they want to hear. Am I happy? Fuck no. Are you happy? I don’t know anyone who is happy for the next five minutes after they smile. It’s an inconvenient truth how much it hurts to open your eyes in the morning. I look at my son. I look at my daughter. And there is a true respite, however brief. Then my son cries because something hurt him. What is the correct response? Kill what did it? Here’s the truth about life. It’s mostly really boring. Some good shit happens that you planned for, some happens just because. And some shitty things happen. It can’t be avoided. People lie. People die. Nihilism is an easy choice. It’s very easy to wander, and the conclusion that nothing matters is within arm’s reach. You know, I look into my girlfriend’s eyes, even after a fight, even after she just said, “I’m not your girlfriend.” In her weird European accent. And it makes me smile. Those eyes are so beautiful even when they’re crossed. You know what? No matter how much I hope for the contrary? I will die. Everyone I love will die. And if I’m alive when it happens, I won’t like it. What are you going to do?

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Boulder 1991

So I can sit here full of rage. Or I can put the fire out. The last time I was fat was at the Cuervo (beach volleyball) in 1991 in Boulder with Kep and assorted hot girls. I had tweed, multi-colored board shorts with a thread unraveling to my left knee. It’s funny what you remember.

A voice from the pretty crowd said, “Sit down, fat ass.” Quiet calls for calm and respect mocked in four syllables. Da da da DUH. And I was embarrassed. I pretended I saw who said it. I feigned anger. I felt shame.

Two months of steeped fear later. I lost all the weight. Then I lost more. And I was pretty like you’re supposed to be. Happy is a long-term find. It doesn’t just land in your hand because you did what you were supposed to. It’s a ghost whispering at sunset, fleeting. It is a smile clenched. It is never again and probably never was. It wins six nights in a row on Jeopardy. Hollow.

Yes, you understand pain. But it’s different. You were born beautiful. You hurt because people don’t act like you expect. I hurt because they are what they are.