Skip to main content

The old man and MLB




-->
-->
“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.





Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Satoshi Nakamoto claim

I met a man claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto outside a building I work at near the SF train station. He asked to talk to me. He was white, 50ish, with a 3 day beard that seemed trim.  He was dressed in high quality, slightly worn Patagonia gear.  He spoke in a quiet voice and didn’t appear obviously crazy after a brief talk with him.  He said that he had worked with people in the building that I’m at, but was confused about the details.  “You ever had amnesia?,” he said, not knowing who he was talking  to. “It’s like that.” Having enjoyed our talk - he then asked if I would do him a favor and,  “get the message out that I’m back in town —that’s all,” he said, “They’ll figure the rest out. “ “marshallmathersfoundation.com,” he added,“ they’ll need to know that. “ He’s wearing bright orange gaiters if interested. He’s probably going to be around for a while.  He’s maybe nutty, but since he didn’t bring up Deuteronomy during our conversation, I’m giving him the benefit of a doubt. Later -

Free Willy

“…Some say it's just a part of it We've got to fulfill the book.” B. Marley Before I completely run away from the point, the subject of this essay is free will, or, more accurately, the illusion of free will. It will be interesting to see if free will even comes up laterally over the next few hundred words now that I’ve set it up as a specific goal.  The imp of the perverse makes it a sure thing that I won’t – but that surety might also double back and force  me to stay on point. There are no dogs to pick  in this fight and it’s not a fight,  and if I’m right, none of this is anything but documentation for a litigious god that will never see it. Like quantum mechanics, life is about either time or place, never both, and how we choose to pretty up our choices is neither the point, or even a choice – it’s after the fact punctuation we use to justify and make sense of our ontological messiness.  (Science has proven that we decide things with our body before the brain

We sit in passionate apathy

"You can’t debate with someone who hates you." C. Hitchens   Reason has become a tool to manipulate you into thinking things are true that you know are not true. Science and math have become a tools for the wealthy to increase the piles of money they then use to Rent the laws.  Religion continues to be a form of racist nationalism – a nation built on manufactured words that demand the permanent death of all humans who follow different words. The more the others believe their truths, the more they need to die. Welcome to the new hybrid theocracy -- based on the Eastern Orthodox, but with just enough Texas to really pop. The intellectual framework for western society no longer works for most people – faith has been lost and now ridiculed; common sense beliefs passed down for generations are being discarded while children are being raised as docile pups to be eventually clubbed into the correct forms of submission. We no longer question and an