why a mets blog?

Over the winter I decided that I was going to start a Mets blog, which was a kind of a weird thing for me to resolve on, since I generally hate the internet, and until recently was ambivalent about sports. But the Mets have always had a special place for me and they were just huge winners in the re-distribution that took place in my psychic economy when I graduated from school and set about the task of working in modern society and not losing my mind.

Recently, a friend broke off on a tangent from a pointless, repetitive, and boring conversation that we were having about the NBA, to ask me why it was that the athletic competitions between people that we did not know personally, and institutions that we had no logical reason to be invested in, took so much of our time and energy. I told him that it sports offered one of the only breaks from the degrading monotony of industrialized society; one of the few breaks from the crushing weight of the mundane. I find something about spending eight hours a day doing a job that I don’t really care for, that sends me just running into the world of professional sports; I think this is a lot because in life in general things are perpetually on going, there is never a resolution to anything, ever, or even an ability to say, with complete accuracy and confidence, what just happened. Sports provide us with a time frame during which identifiable events will take place. Yesterday, for example, I brought several minor problems to my boss, who was able to give me indifferent amounts of advice, leaving me in only slightly less confusion and ambiguity, basically to hope that things would somehow resolve themselves of their own accord, or that at least no one would notice if they didn’t; also the Mets lost 1-2 to the Indians. Of those two events, I find the latter much more comforting, even if I am disappointed in the outcome- the game happened when scheduled, after nine innings a result was obtained, and the fans were left to turn to the AM talk shows and start shrieking their deranged opinions.

I will, unfortunately, continue my observations about the relationship between sports and the deadening effects of industrialized society in a future post, but I’ll end now on a topical note. Yesterday the post ran a piece with the headline “WRIGHT: I’d move over for A-rod.” http://www.nypost.com/seven/03052007/sports/mets/wright__id_move_over_for_a_rod_mets_mark_hale.htm, the substance of it was basically that someone asked David Wright if he would move over for A-rod, Wright said yes, and also expressed the somewhat eccentric opinion that A-rod was great. Whatever- its all several light years away from happening, which they mentioned somewhere in the latter paragraphs of article, which existed only to use famous names and take up column inches. I sincerely wish, though, that they would think, for like a second, before running hideously disturbing shit as headlines. Somewhere in Queens, there is an old man who has been following the Mets since the 1960s; his kids moved away long ago, and his wife is dead- the Mets are one of the few things that keep him going; in the moment that he read that headline, all those summers of ballpark franks took their revenge on his heart, and he sinks to the floor, not to be found until his neighbor notices the smell on Wednesday. But the tragedy isn’t that he died, it is that, mixed in with the memories of his life that flashed before his eyes in those final moments there is also a crystal clear vision of what he thinks is the future: the Met’s inglorious exit from the first round of the playoffs as A-rod lines into a double play with the tying run in scoring position- and then gives a press conference about how he had to take Delgado off his list of friends on Myspace.

You know what, New York Post, that old man was all of us: you guys are jerks.