"It's just a game,"

Dotty tells Jimmy when the Rockford Peaches lose to her sister's team, my mom tells me in the top of the ninth when the Yankees have played like the karma crap they get for trading Pettitte and buying a rod and blowing a three game lead. I hope all the old men in Boston who have been waiting for this moment don't die. If the Sox win the Series there could be an epidemic. And while it's still a wonderful life with secret worlds, aced midterms, classy new jobs, perfect lab reports, exciting English professors, sets parties, and a campus set suited up and well-fitted for fall, it's not just a game. It will never be just a game. It's a tradition, a poetic form, a stanza with nine innings, a structure anything can happen in (and tonight none of the Yankee line drives had enough metrical feet), and a house for heroes. It's baseball. As John Sterling says, you just can't predict it. And hoping, expecting, playing is painful, but life is pain, princess, anyone who's says differently is selling something. And the 16th century known equivalency of the truth: for who nill bide the burden of distresse, must not thinke to live: for life is wretchednesse. It's rough all over, Ponyboy. It's lonely all over. Victors' shouts in the street hurt four floors up. All Yanks in New England have disappeared. Only singing rhinoceros out the window. Will it ever get easier each carrying this common weight born in isolation. It could go on for years and years and has for centuries for being human holds a special grief of privacy within the universe that yearns and waits to be retouched by someone. Gilgamesh. It has been true since the beginning. But in the end, there is connection, cursing cellphones frustrating but freeing from living beneath the blindfold of only knowing the world from out of two eyes, from forgetting everyone else is sitting in the dark, waiting, lighting fires, and telling their stories too. In the end, there are families, habits, poems, careers, knives, dead soulmates, trees or teams to fall back on. If you come to a fork in the road, take it, and I would like to thank the good lord for making me a Yankee fan.

Such Great Heights

I am terrified of heights. I forget fear until the last foot from the top of Dorr's CAT or half way up the spiral staircase to the University Theater grid. The staircase was a dizzying climb to ninety feet over the black blank stage. Hand over hand, I tried to focus on the railing but terrible curiosity led eyes to look down at the drop. Everything natural screamed, "Too high" and "Is this really necessary?" Hanging out over nothing, trying to hide all hesitancy to walk across the beams, I wondered if flying or fly crew really might not be my idea of a good time. Bobby pointed out that if the curtains caught fire the grid would become a grill. Army Andre (was in the Marines and sometimes wears fatigues) devised an escape through the roof, using coiled cabling to climb down. Circling down to the ground, I wondered how hawks do it, if they're ever shaken by a gust of terror. Refusing to be blown away by a little instinct, I signed up for lighting and hours up there.

Three wins up. The Yankees looked down at the Red Sox from the heights of historical precedent. Three nights they could have squashed Sox hopes. Why do we always have to do the crazy thing? Now it's level, they're eye to eye. My eyes are wide. Each team will watch each inning. Someone's last day of the season. Like Sophocles, counting on the momentum of a curse, fate or the force that shapes ends rough hew them how chopping bats will. I like Ionesco and Albee, but I hope this play won't have an absurd ending.