Softball: The Insoluble Problem of Brains and Destiny

[raymond...@gmail.com]

Dear People,

 

On a gorgeous yet stress-laden morn’ in which a wave of late cancels and other forms of roster-churn turned my already weary hippocampus into an organette of pure cognitive neuro-mush, my team took on Chris Fure’s for all the marbles. In retrospect, I suspect that Furfeathers may have inadvertently exploited my dubious synaptic state in the frantic pre-match team-tweaking process, but regardless, you always go to bat with the peeps that ya got. 

 

Unfortunately, my peeps sucked. Still, I’m nothing if not an unabashed infracaniophile, and that’s all the more so for those times when the underdog in question is staring straight at you in the mirror—vulnerable and tremulous, to be sure, yet mellow, focused, and defiantly determined. 

 

In theory. In reality, my intended leadership-by-example was an athletic disgrace, and indeed, not only did I go 1 for 6 at the plate, I also popped up to short in the top of the 7th on the crest of an incipient rally with two outs and my team still trailing by six, but with the bases loaded to the gills. This was one of those cringe-inducing failures that triggers the team-wide yearnings of counter-factual history, yet let’s not kid ourselves. Even if I had come through with the grand slam of my dreams, the fact is that we still would’ve been a longshot, for our entire outfield, from Paul Fine to Matt Gober and beyond, suffered from a ceaselessly dispiriting blend of bad luck, chronic distraction, and apparently varying degrees of eyeball rot. 

 

Yeah, we were pure of heart and hypothetically we could’ve, but the harsh reality is that our fate was likely sealed before the first post-tweak pitch was ever thrown. And frankly, if you’re a Calvinist or a Hegelian materialist, at least 6,000 or 13.8 billion years before that, so any ontological way you slice it, it’s clear that my team was doomed to go down, and down hard, 21-13. And therefore there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11 IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond