It is baseball season, and after the joke that was 2020, and the slow 2021, this year almost feels like normal. Masks are off, Jomboy, the great Yankee fan lipreader who breaks down plays can once again read lips and let the slavering masses know what is being said between umps and their opposing forces. I, like most fans, enjoy a good manager ejection. My favorite will always be Terry Collins and Syndergaard both getting chucked; Noah for hitting yet another batter, probably on purpose, and Terry because that is what managers do when their ace pitcher gets thrown out the game.
The common thread throughout all manager ejections, is the common call of offended and distraught managers everywhere, namely, “It is bullshit….and you know it!” Of course it would be so much worse if the Ump didn’t know that their calls were totally off and that strike was a ball, that slide into first was in time, or ya know…the pitcher with a grudge did not just bean the opposing batter for the 4th time that game. Shit happens, both in the world and baseball, and that is what makes baseball so seductive to me: it mirrors life.
Not all of us have a Terry come out screaming when we are attacked, even if we do happen to be in the wrong. I often feel like I am in that gaggle of scared baseball players hoping that it doesn’t all kick off. I suspect Noah got strips torn off him once back into the clubhouse, because in a tribe, we might defend our wrongdoers against outside attacks, but we generally deal with our own somewhat harshly behind closed doors.
Of course my baseball joy is limited to my absolutely kickass fantasy team which is spanking the rest of the league, watching the Yankees play like the Yankees again, and sometimes throwing a ball with my increasingly strong son. I am now the weaker party in those sessions. He eclipsed me some time ago. In his mid teens he is so much stronger than me it is ridiculous. It is a good job he is such a sweetheart that wants to take care of me and look after me!
That doesn’t mean I can’t often be found shouting that managerial battlecry whenever I read the news. I can often be found yelling at the screen those exact words: “It is horseshit!….And you KNOW it!” They cover a multitude of situations, from various Presidents saying they did not have sex with that woman, to other Commander in Chief assertations that they could not possibly have known that baby formula was going to be rarer than hens teeth, or the big phony one saying that that various right wing goons storming the Capitol had nothing to do with him. It’s horseshit…and they know it.
Of course their job, and that of their handlers and spin-artistes is to make sure that the horseshit gets a nice glossy treatment, and is presented on the finest platter, liberally (or sometimes conservatively) sprinkled with fools gold, capitalist-pig-snuffled truffles and Russian caviar, and decorated with alleged photos of Soviet Sparrows indulging them with golden showers. Spin it, decorate it, add flavor and meaning, it still remains, at the heart of it all, utter crap.
The news recently reminds me of one of Warren Zevon’s tunes, Play It All Night Long, which starts with the immortal line, “Grandpa pissed his pants again, he don’t give a damn!” The entire track is a list of various depraved and reprobate acts, as wrought by ‘Nam vets, incestuous couples, sick cattle and dying grandmas, topped off with the refrain, “We’ll get through somehow!” I have to prepare myself just to load up the page. I am glad this shit isn’t on paper, but call me paranoid, but how easy is it to adjust the past when it exists in a non-fixed form on the internet. You can’t argue or reframe, or adjust with print on a page. Not a jot or tittle can be changed in print. There always remains a definitive copy of the truth at the time…that is unless some Pol Pot figure starts up the book burnings.
Now we have the joint horrors of book burnings and internet tittle tattle. How much actual truth, not spin nor crazed misinformation is out there? I am not one for some Ministry of Truth Brave New World horseshit. Is is a danger when the prevailing political view seeks to define Truth with the caveat of NO DEBATE. Full stop. Underline. Fucked. It is equally ridiculous, yet less dangerous when the Flat Earth, this Kennedy or that is coming back from the dead bunch start their jive talk and naziraps. These freaks can be defeated with a bit of reason, and if not, it is best to let em be, I think. There have always been roaming bands of the different and the strange, the misinformed and the totally off the edge of reason rovers. If we were all forced into total compliance we never would have any cultural revolution.
Generally what is good and true sticks, and the rest withers on the vine, even if it is planted in the finest quality feces, you can’t grow orchids out of shit alone. There needs to be a quality seed for something to thrive in this world. That is not to say that the landings are not rocky. They are as rocky as the moon landings and as treacherous as alien based conspiracy theories. There is generally turbulence, as prone as us humans are to fancies and insanity.
Our own litany of repugnance makes its sad way onto our news outlets on a daily basis. White House darlin’ Jen Psaki leaves for a career in news, instead of spinning it. Russia cuts Finland off from Russian electricity supplies. Ukraine is still fighting the good fight, or a proxy war, and barely winning. I get it. We all do what we have to in order to survive, and they are not the bad guys in all this mess. Russia threatens to nuke all of us that don’t do the cossack dance with Ivan. Netflix allows freedom of speech. The cattle all have brucellosis, in Zevon’s country world, and in our great land, everyone still has covid, except now some children are getting liver failure at a greater rate than 1970s rock stars with ethanol and cocaine issues…and nobody knows why. It is all horseshit…and we know it. Of course The Powers That Be Know. That is their job – to Know. It is the job of the citizen to survive the intrigues that go on way above our pay grade, while trying to enjoy life.
I hear that Elon Musk wants to create a willing kami kaze workforce that will work six days a week, nine hours a day, and sleep at work, and complains that the communist and deeply subjugated Chinese are willing to do it, while workers in America work to live…not live to work, and quite like to see their families and enjoy life. Why pay for an apartment when you never go back there? Fuck Elon Musk. Or rather don’t. I have no idea why the women of America are not on sex strike. No abortion, no sex. That will put a fire under the mobile gamete haver-ers, and speed up their decision to forget all about their control over women campaigns. It is chaos out there, and I really don’t know anymore if we have a hope of ‘getting through somehow.’