Better Get Out The Flags And Fix A Parade

Yeah, I'm back. What of it?

Whatever mental funk seems to have afflicted me lately seems to have burned off like so much early morning fog. It's not gone, but it has receded far enough for me to see the shoreline, or at least given me enough confidence to stop caring about my own relevance.

It's baseball season, y'all. From now until the beginning of October, it counts. Well, except the Hall of Fame Game. And the All Star Game, too. Shut up.

A few bon mots from my personal Bard of Hardball, Roger Angell:

"Baseball saves me every time-not the news of it, perhaps, so much as its elegant and arduous complexity, its layered substrata of nuance and lesson and accumulated experience, which are the true substance of these sleepy, overfamiliar practice rituals, and which, if we know how and where to look for them, can later be seen to tip the scales of the closest, most watched games of the summer. Almost everything in baseball looks easy and evident, but really learning the game, it turns out, can take a lifetime, even if you keep notes."

More apropos than that, from the introduction to the collection I am currently reading, written by novelist Richard Ford:

" 'Sports were different in my youth,' he [Angell] wrote in 1992. 'A series of events to look forward to and then to turn over in memory, rather than a huge, omnipresent industry with its own economics and politics and crushing public relations' [again, think stock market, think government]. Now, though, he goes on, 'we are wary of sentiment and obsessively knowing, and we feel obliged to put a spin of psychology or economic determinism or bored contempt on all clear-color memories [and] it is because most of American life, including baseball, no longer feels feasible.' "

That's the heart of what has been bothering me, personally and in general, and what continues to bother me, personally and in general. Things don't seem feasible-it doesn't seem possible to run a country as big as ours is and make sure that all the people within it have a shot at making a decent life for themselves. I am growing more and more pessimistic about the possibility that we're going to make it though all this.

Actor Andrew Koenig, of course, committed suicide, and there has been a more recent spate of news stories talking about teens and bullying, a couple of which resulted in suicides. And what is suicide other than the simple, emphatic statement that one cannot go on? Pessimism writ large. I can't help but feel that it is, on some level, a rational act-to leave a world that no longer gives you pleasure.

I have never believed in the notion, which I believe still holds in the mental health field, that the mere fact that you talk about or think of or even mention suicide immediately makes you suicidal by definition. I can't live like that-my mind has to consider any idea, however outlandish, and asset it on its own merits.

Comedian Doug Stanhope, in a phrase I have quoted before, notes that if you sit through half of a movie, and it's awful, what makes you think the second half is going to be any better? Similarly, in baseball, if you're 30-50 at the break, you're probably not going to go 60-12 the rest of the way. As Coach Bill Parcells used to say, you are what your record says you are. Your life is what it is. You have what you've got.

The opening of baseball season, even when surrounded by a world that seems increasingly run by lunatic charlatans, gives us a chance to look over the pleasing rows of 0-0 in the standings. Everybody's at zero. Everything is potential, and possible, and nothing is forbidden. Nobody's lost, and nobody's won. Last year is history, and this year, like a solid block of marble, has yet to be carved.

Even if life doesn't feel that way, for a moment, we can pretend it does.