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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| the good with the badSpring upon us, which means baseball is back in all its magnificence and glory... People puling over how many otiose hours are whittled down consuming the game... The inevitable grievance: why care so much about a red sox team that you have no stock in? Why die and live with every loss and every win when they have no bearing on your own life? My answer is simple: it's not about the team, it's about me. It's about how i feel. Because anyone who has ever been a fan knows what it's like to die and live for someone else. The highs and lows are intoxicating, retching and exhilarating all at the same time. People who are not fans and who have never played sports at a competitive level don't understand. Because once you give yourself entirely to fandom, the sensations are as addictive as the whitest powder, as life-changing as fighting the vilest war. Ultimately that's what fandom is: a war without the physical perils but with the emotional roller-coaster, able to roil away the ennui of the most tedious 9-6 existence. Sure, more often than not you'll end in dysphoria, dejection; that's just the nature of the beast when 30 teams vie for one title. But how to quit? Or for that matter, why quit? I mean, imagine having a kid and watching him or her hit in little league... You know there's a one in a billion chance he or she will become a ballplayer, it's a given that there will be more disappointment than glory, but is there a greater feeling than watching your own offspring hit a walk-off home run? Is there a more helpless feeling than watching him or her go through a slump? And are you getting more satisfaction from anything in this world than from watching him or her swing out of that slump? No, no and no. So you take the good with the bad because you know the few good moments are what shake you out of your everyday stupor. That's what being a fan is all about. Besides, it's either that or fighting in afghanistan. | | |
| timei've been brooding lately about time and about how inefficient my usage is and how little benefit i derive from it (i've been frittering a lot of mine away recently)... somehow it has hit me how valuable, and how scarce and fickle it is... relative to money, for example, time is priceless, incomparable even... let me explain... i--like most people i know--can make money at any point in my life, no matter what the circumstances (probably not as much as i would like, but that's besides the point)... and if by some vicissitude of fortune i were to lose it all, my job and savings, my flat screen and my laptop, everything i own, i'd still be okay... after all, it's just money (for anyone who doubts that money is just money, i suggest you take a wad of cash and let it burn... see how satisfying that is)... in fact, i guarantee you that when i'm in my sixties (i refuse to live into my 70s and am planning to burn myself out in 3-4 years after i cash in my 401k at age 65 by indulging in every hedonistic practice known to man), i'll look back at my 20s and think, 'why the hell did i stress out about the triviality that is money? why didn't i take more vacations and work less weekends?' although for the record, i've never actually worked a weekend. sure, today i apprise my future self that there is rent to pay, a mouth to feed and precious pennies to be saved for rainy days, but i'm 99% certain that is all bullshit... money can be made anywhere anytime. but time, time is another animal... take for instance the act of murder... one measly premeditated murder can land you in jail for the rest of your life... that's 3 seconds (time it takes for you to draw a gun and shoot someone) translating into 40 years minimum... talk about a good rate of return... or it could happen the other way around--some crazy motherfucker could shoot you in the head and the rate of return would be the same... 40 years just vaporized as easy as one, two, bang! no ifs or buts... if you think about it, a murder or a lifelong sentence possibly constitute the most unfair trades of all time in terms of hours put in, and you don't even have a say in it.. and talking about trades, the thing with time is that you don't get second chances as in sports... in a basketball game you can screw up constantly and you'll still have the opportunity to make another shot... or grab another rebound (and you'll know when you'll run out of chances because there is a jumbotron telling you)... in baseball you get at least 3 at-bats with 3 strikes each every game and that's only when a pitcher is pitching lights-out (usually it's more like 5)... but in life you screw up once and you're screwed perhaps forever and you don't know when it's going to happen... that's why prisons and cemeteries are replete with criminals and corpses--very few people have the luxury of a redo... how cool would it be for me to run a ponzi scheme and be given 5 life sentences but then decide i'll just start over at nothing... or be on my death bed or in my case hopefully passed out at a strip club about to croak and just decide i want to switch it up and try someone else's life... but no, no, no.. time is a fickle, petty girlfriend you can't turn your back on. it's the only quantifiable thing that is worth keeping under your mattress because it's priceless, the most black and white thing that exists, the most unforgiving aspect of life in this planet, no legal loopholes, no extensions, no warp in the space-time continuum (that we know of) that can help us cheat it... all else is picayune and worthless in comparison. be happy.
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| floridayou see it in old farts all the time, the inevitable jadedness that is concomitant with senility, that point where little fazes you, nothing excites you, the only thing that lights a fire in you is an actual physical fire... i may be progressing towards that stage faster than anyone i know, as i continue to wave off the non-essential parts of life, belittle those that care too much about things that need not caring... but the point is not that i am on the wrong path, in fact, i'm sure i am not on the wrong path, the point is that there are two things i will never get jaded about, never get tired of, and those are friends and family... and in my neverending quest to rationalize everything, i've been trying lately to figure out why friends and family are unmovable mainstays of a happy life, why this need for attention from people that know you is so important... and i'm clueless... there's just something about eating alone at a pizza parlor looking out into a busy manhattan street on a friday night that is just not right, that's as unnatural as getting raised by wolves... and so i can't ever visualize a life without roadtrips, without those insufferable smores around fireplaces... so it's a good thing everyone in their twenties converges in new york... next up, i guess florida. | | |
| simplicitynot to diminish the work of psychiatrists around the globe, but human minds are not complex enough to warrant 10 years of study... sure, there are a few exceptions out there running amok, unworldly minds that house multiple personalities and unfathomable psychoses... but those are few and far between... everyone else, 99.99% of the population strives for one or more of three things: happiness, knowledge, and philanthropy... the layers we build around those three endeavors are synthetic, fake and, ultimately, unnecessary... every time we claim that no one understands us what we are really saying is that no one can see through all the bullshit we've built around ourselves to disguise who we really are... we hide behind pedantic abstracts such as passion and restlessness and complexity to distract ourselves from the fact that we are basically all the same, the same insecure creatures pining for the simplicity of love and contentment with oneself... it's not rocket science... it's not black hole theory... we are simple people who strive to be complicated for no reason other than to appear complicated to other people. underneath it all we all want the same end; to pay someone $200 an hour to tell you that is just a little wasteful...
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| why notlife is endless possibilities and i know it and i know most of the paths i've ever seriously considered are paths that end up at the same dead-end road but you know what? I'm happy, especially when there is no one to tell me why i shouldn't be, or when responsibilities rest in the hands of others, or when i just don't care, or when it snows fluffy snow... I don't have the motivation to take on minuscule tasks much less the gargantuan ones that take up whole lifetimes, i just want to be, i do enjoy however others' magna opera and i respect, admire, even worship the ability, the sensibility, the diligence, the magnificence but no, not me, i stay on the sidelines, i'd rather watch while the other guy make the shot, no? Why not? Why be anything less than the best and if you aren't going to be the best there is no other option but to live vicariously through genius unless you want to lose ridiculous amounts of oh-so-precious time you could be praising masterpieces but what about my feelings, my point of view? Obviously someone can express them better and already has and that's why they get a mention on my facebook profile, how simple is that, the end. | | |
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