"Do You Believe in (baseball) Miracles?"

The Cubs are in the World Series!!!

I almost can’t believe I wrote that last sentence but there it is, how sweet! They need to finish the season with a win of course but just getting there is a feat that this team hasn’t seen in 71 years—of just appearing in a World Series! Since 2003 I’ve been an occasional watcher of the north side abysmals, but always a fan. Why that year?(head drops...lets out a long sigh) This was the infamous Bartman year where that poor S.O.B  reached for the foul ball and ‘interfered’ with Moises Alou’s ability to catch it. The entire city knows now that it was a foul ball, out of play, and Bartman was within his rights to reach for it. Alou overreacted (shouting at him) and so did the tipsy outraged fans at Wrigley. He was escorted out like a criminal by some security guards who protected him from beer-throwing, cursing, threatening fans—a sickening display really.

ESPN did a brilliant documentary on it called “Catching Hell” outlining everything from crowd behavior and crowd psychology to rules governing fan interference. They even selected a sermon from a minister on the connection between Steve Bartman and Hebrew scapegoat traditions.

2003 was my junior year of college. I had time to spare and the Cubs were good! That meant skipping the occasional class to catch an afternoon game and rushing home from late classes to catch the last few innings. Not a lot of work (school or other) got done that year and the biggest let down was that playoff season where we lost to the Marlins. They were just better. Bartman or not, our guys couldn’t strike out the Florida club and managed to create additional problems by overthrowing runners, missing ground balls and walking batters. They were abysmal. Our pitching led by Kerry Wood and Mark Pryor had been almost automatic until the 6^th game of the series (the Bartman game). Kerry Wood threw the last game poorly. Marlins advanced. Cubs stayed home. Wrigleyville faithful drowned their sorrow in Old Style and raised their fists toward heaven—Greek tragedy style. It was further proof their ivy walled stadium was cursed. 

Until last Saturday…they never got over it.

   

The most I could muster since that heartbreaking fall of ’03 was watching WGN (when they still played games) on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Cubs had stars in those years and reached the playoffs a few times; in 2008 they got swept and of course just last year the Mets knocked them out with AMAZING pitching. Last year made a believer out of me like it did for so many. This team was built to win. The front office made purposeful decisions to spend money on young talent and develop it. The General Manager Theo Epstein had similar results with the Red Sox in the early 2000s and he made good on his promise to Chicago to invest long term. Fans sense a dynasty is being put together in the best place in the world for baseball, Wrigley field. Nothing is guaranteed of course but the talent this team has trained, traded for and developed is unlike any team before.

I can’t imagine having the time or passion that I did in ’03 ever again. Baseball is just too slow a game for me to sit down for 3 to 4 hours a night and watch. I suspect this is true of most people, even Cubs fans. The pace and regularity of the sport makes it difficult to focus exclusively on the game. We just don’t watch TV like that anymore and even with the DVR recorders, who can catch 50 games a year let alone 162? 

 I’ll be watching every pitch of this historic World Series though. I might even record a few next season and follow the club better in 2017. So I am not the most dedicated fan anymore but like so many others who have hoped, and believed this day would come—GO CUBS!!

"Getting Ahead in the 1st World" or Despicable ME

I’m in new car season. Also known as pumpkin spice latte season. I hate car shopping. Concern over ‘lemon’ buying fills my head. It shouldn’t. The regrettable purchase from the shifty sales guy hasn’t ever happened to me. Always in the back of my mind though.

The shoulder slumping reality that another item needs purchasing (another blasted thing!) forces me to imagine life as a hamster. Not the bad smell or the short life span (although that too) but the endless wheel spinning. Oh the spinning!  Do people ever really get ahead? I don’t mean get rich by discovering an unknown talent like uh…spider whispering. You know, lure them to their doom (I’d pay huge!). I just mean paying debts, growing wealth, saving money and traveling. How common is it for families and individuals to graph their income as a steady increasing line while keeping their expenses line relatively stable?

I understand that making money and ‘getting ahead’ requires attending to small things and overseeing everyday purchases, no scratch off lottery tickets or Monster energy drinks.  Even after all the penny pinching, dollar skimming ways households manage to level the field, it still seems like certain people make deals and some just survive. We either get it or we don’t. Some women can craft and some can’t; some men can dress and some can’t.

Not that my spending isn’t occasionally frivolous and piggish. I can eat like a state fair rat once the noisome folks are gone; it costs a lot of money OK…so sue me!

Anyone can improve through discipline though. If ‘getting ahead’ means more income that outgo, I have to be content with small progress. Loosing ‘hands’ are inevitable in games of Texas ‘hold ‘em’, but anyone leaving the game with more money at the end of the night than at the beginning is successful.

I need to get a little more income if I am going to get a new car though. Poker isn’t an option. Even if I do get enough money for a new car with the extra income I haven’t improved my lot. Sure I have a new car and that’s awesome but it’s kinda worse. My paid off car was getting me from one spot to another under the same speed limit (usually) and costing zilch. Old cars break down and need constant maintenance putting the owner in the poor house to keep the clunker running. So get a new car and make payments, still in the poor house, but driving to it in a nice car. The hamster wheel keeps spinning.

By the way ‘poor house’—super old phrase. It just kind of works though.

I have an Altima from 2000 that runs quite well considering the high mileage and the condition of the front. See I get a little close to that cement barrier in the parking lot and frequently run the bumper over the edge. So it is hanging in there but showing signs of wanting to fall into traffic, death by speed bump.

I am doing a fair amount of whining here with no real argument for anything but contentment. Sometimes we need to just vent. After that though edit the bad language out and post it.

My arc of responsibility for savings over the last 10 years bends toward progress. I’d like to keep it that way but I have my ‘needs’ and preferences. Vacations are a preference and I take a large one every year. I don’t mean riding a limo through Europe large, but a decidedly spendy trip whereby I leave Oklahoma at least. I need something to push me through the busy summers at work, a carrot propelling me forward through the dog days of the busy football season. Vacation is that carrot.

Until I discover a hidden talent or learn to budget, the complaining about VERY 1^st world problems will continue unabated. 

God Bless.

On Fiction and Writing

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

Elmore Leonard

Being able to describe a thing is a wonderful gift that needs to be curated and perfected, fretted over and dreaded about. What is it that I like good writers to do with characters, scenes, dialog and tension? The short answer...it depends. Non-fiction and historical books draw me in a way that fiction never did. Fiction of the action hero kind is great too and burly enforcers like Jack Reacher are a joy to read. Non-fiction though is the learner type book. Life-long learners seek knowledge and love the presentation a writer delivers through their work.

In recent years I’ve developed a respect for fiction writers who do research on a topic and then write a gripping story bringing the reader along to discover something new. The something new that is discovered is a trick however. The author puts wonderfully human emotions and histories into a fictional world that explains a larger paradigm. Classic novels always do this. They are classic because the characters and worlds they inhibit are almost tangible things. Readers get lost in the plot-lines and threads connecting seemingly separate narratives. Then worlds collide. Stories are suddenly representative of larger events and shifts in culture.

 Boo Radley’s (To Kill A Mockingbird) anti-social behavior becomes a strength when he is revealed as a gentle figure to Scout and Jem. Harper Lee didn’t just understand the South and attitudes about race and society; she knew human nature better than most. During the Jim Crow era, cultural lines were drawn sharply between blacks and whites but human nature remained the same across all barriers. Lee hooks readers by distracting them with mysterious neighbors and myths about unknown people in town. Her trick was to sell the reader on a nasty version of Boo Radley, all the while pointing out how the same fear and wrong assumptions led to the imprisonment of an innocent black man.  

Writers develop by creating a recognizable style or philosophy and exploring it different ways to make for a complete picture. Ayn Rand started doing this by writing plays and essays with a common but basic core theme, self-interest drives decisions. Her book We the Living was her first organized attempt at putting her developing believe in self interest into story form. A clearly fumbling attempt at shining light on a philosophy, it wasn’t Aristotle but it was still good. Her characters were simple one dimensional archetypes, set pieces really, existing to demonstrate an extreme view, positive or negative.

She moved on to richer characters with better histories, and dialogue chocked full of philosophies on everything from sex to existence. By the nineteen fifties she was calling her philosophy 'Objectivism' and her ‘self-interested’ characters exemplified the ‘rational man’ and also the evils of collectivist thought. From We the Living to Atlas Shrugged she wrote essays and gave lectures on her Objective principles while building her own special style, she crafted her ‘voice’. She started with a simple framework and layered it for an easily recognized style.

Mark Twain does dialogue like no one else and his Huckleberry Finn is rich with language and regional accents. Kids in early grade school have trouble with Twain (I certainly did) because the spelling of the words and phrases are incorrect as they are taught. Words like “knowed” “haint” and phrasing like “…I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars” keep kids from ‘sounding’ them out. The mannerisms from the characters feel as genuine as the prejudices defining the small towns along the Mississippi. His short stories have the same language and ‘yarn spinning’ from the mostly Midwest and rural characters.

Not sure why writing development was on my mind, but it helps to be reminded of what I admire in other work, great work.