Dangerous Sport

Khoi

20 years ago

Summer always makes me feel hazy, like I can’t quite get my brain into gear. When I went on vacation last week, I slept like champ, sometimes as much as 11 hours a day, all told. Since coming back to work, I’ve been relatively alert, able to focus on clients and learning all kinds of neat new tricks in Microsoft Excel and also on learning a lot about the numbers that make a business run. But it feels like a thousand years since I’ve sat down and engaged in any kind of hands on, creative activities for myself. Among these basically meaningless little blog posts that I’ve been producing lately, I can’t think of anything that I’ve written that I’m actually proud of — which is to say nothing of my occasionally stated intention to redesign this Web site.

Dropping the Ball

I’ve more or less abandoned or placed on hiatus all of my personal projects since the mercury started climbing, owing at least partly to vacationing and being busy at the office. Of course, the other thing I could blame it on is all the freakin’ baseball I’ve been watching all summer long. Too much, far too much.

My brain is getting flabby and my concentration dissipated while I feast on this immensely engrossing sport. Even before the mid-point of the season, I’d spent a small fortune on baseball tickets already, more than I thought I’d ever spend in a lifetime to watch men in pajamas chasing around a little ball. But it’s not just watching the game live, it’s all the other media I’m consuming too.

So Many Poisons, So Little Time

My reading list, which once included some at least pretentiously substantive content, is now primarily composed of the sports pages from the horrific New York tabloids and dodgy treatises on the game like David Okrent’s nevertheless superbly structured “Nine Innings.”

During our vacation, without television, I diligently tuned into hear the Yankees and the Mets games over AM radio. What’s more, I actually rented “Still We Believe,” a basically silly documentary of the eternal heartbreak that is every Red Sox fan’s cross to bear (in retrospect, it was a cruel delight in their pain that moved me to watch it).

And back at home, almost nightly, I return exhausted from the office and park myself — with a regularity that suggests tremendous faith — in front of the YES Network. And now, tonight, I’m heading off to a bar to watch the so-called “Bronx Bombers” try and stick it to the Red Sox at least one more time in Fenway Park. A part of me can’t wait until it’s all over after October, and another part is just praying summer goes on forever.