[Crude Pun On The Word 'Balls']!
I somehow managed to delete the text of a very long and very interesting post about this same subject. You have to live now with the consequences of my idiocy and this inferior post. Enjoy.

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Look, I know blogs are largely a female thing. Like The Sims, they're part of a larger movement where women approach the internet and technology on their own terms in niches that suit them and leave the tweakers and g4M3rZ to revel in their mutually mastubatory sausage-fest digital playgrounds.

In fact, as I consider the list of blogs I have linked to my own there is only MPH's Heightened Thoughts written by a fellow XY. Keep on keepin' on, my brother.

So when I think to bring up the subject of sports, I do so advisedly.

See, I've been a fan of one particular baseball team for ages and ages. Yesterday just about the worst thing that can happen to a sports fan happened to me: they moved into a tie for first place with 5 games to play, making them about a 50-50 shot to win the division and make the playoffs.

I've still barely recovered from the last time they won something. In 2002 I nearly burst a blood vessel in my brain from the swings of anxiety-inspired depression and (ultimately) bliss. The cruel secret is that your team only gets to be champeens for about 4 months. Then the next season starts, the ulcers re-open, restart the cycle.

My first sports-related memory was 1986 when my habitually hapless team was within one strike of making it to their first ever World Series, only to have that dream bludgeoned to death with an opponent's bat. I was 12. I wept.

Then came the 16 year period in between 1986 and 2002 where my team not only failed but rarely even flirted with the glimmer of a hint of success. Sure at the time it seemed interminible, deeply disappointing, frustrating but in retrospect it turned out to be a refreshing break.

And what did I do in the intervening years? I bitched alot. It's what we do.

It's an open secret that disappointment and frustration are actually what sports fans are after. It can't be any other way. In any given sport there is a grand total of one Grand World Champion each year. That means every fan of every other team is experiencing some level of grief over their players' fates, of varying degrees depending on the order of magnitude at which their team sucked that year. And still we keep coming back. We over-identify, over-invest in the actions of people we never met--grossly overpaid and absurdly narrowly gifted people--in order to generate fake stress to shield us from the horrors of actual stress. It's what we do instead of thinking about al Qaeda or the price of gasoline (it was $2.25 at a place I passed yesterday for regular unleaded... that didn't even come with a handjob or anything, that was just for the gas). It seems silly to latch onto something so obviously inconsequential, but it's just one more way people anesthetize themselves from the debilitating effects of spirit-breaking reality. For a few hours a week, we revel in it.

Except for the fantasy sports gnomes, they revel in it 24/7 and require professional help.

So I submit that Cubs and Red Sox fans are lying when they say they want to win. They love their misery. It's a nice safe place, where community is built by commisseration. Plus if either of those teams ever won anything, Chicago and/or Boston would be erased from the face of the earth by the subesquent explosion.

Now think about being a Yankees fan. You have to sit through all that drama every single goddamn year. It's almost enough to make me feel sorry for them.

Almost.


This post on the Narcissus Scale; 7.2


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 10:58 PM