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“Deep down I’m pretty superficial.”
Ava Gardner
I am done watching major league
baseball. Nothing to make a stink about, and I doubt anyone will care, but I’m
done. This world series holds no interest for me, I care nothing about any of
it – the people, the places – not the things made of it or the air about it.
Either they have choked my golden
goose to death in an uncomfortable way, or I’m getting older and unable to
create spasms of excitement through the observed violence of sports-based joy,
it’s over – I’m sitting the rest of it out in a comfortable chair while trying
to give advice to my grand-sons from half a century away.
To be fair, I’m currently sitting at
home watching the paint dry on an HOA approved update to a door. This would not
happen to a younger man and I might be lashing out in response to it, or the
fumes.
Basketball lost me years ago. I
haven’t watched a single minute of it since Kobe raped a kid about my daughters
age. I lost all interest in the sport on that day– I don’t follow it on media,
I don’t watch kids playing it at the park. I don’t miss it, there’s something
fundamentally wrong about raping a girl then getting away with it because you
are famous and have a lot of money. I suppose we are lucking he didn’t just cut
here into pieces and throw her out with the trash, though he probably would
have gotten away with that too.
Baseball is more complicated. I grew
up playing and watching baseball – it has been like movies for others – a thing
I just did and enjoyed. Now for some reason it’s dead to me – moldy like an old
love, or a science experiment that cooked too long in the wrong places.
I work at a place that used to just
have time sheets for your payroll. Every day you came to work, you signed the
sheet with your name, your time in, and time out.
Over the years it has gotten more
complicated. Now you come to work and, within a five-minute time allowance
(either way), you call a special phone number at the one special phone
designated for this purpose. You then manually answer many prompts on the dial
pad, as directed, after entering your special employee number and the last four
of your social security number. You do this with the other twelve employees
waiting for you to finish so they can do it too, and you do this when you come
in, and when you leave for the day.
None of this is new -- gilding the
lily was Shakespeare at his best, and who could forget that William Blake wrote of ‘binding with briar's his
joys and desires’ back when the plague was big. I think humans just have
tendency to take the simple comfort and joy in things for only so long, and
then they pile shit on them until they die while ecclesiastically dancing in
the remaindered poo, all the while hoping for a salvation that involves free
will without accountability.
For me, this is kind of what baseball
has become. To be honest, it’s kind of how life has become.
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