Everything was put on hold—my work, my family, my life. My entire calendar had to fit around these ridiculously late nationally televised games. I willfully sacrificed my liver to the baseball gods. If someone were to tabulate my beer costs in the past month, I could rightfully become a shareholder in Sam Adams. I ate junk, gained weight, stopped exercising and shaving. I’m a spent man. And was it worth all of this to watch the 2007 Boston Red Sox win a second World Series in four years?
You can bet your sweet ass it was!
For those of you who might not be Red Sox fans (if you’re a Yankee, then I only have one thing to say: “Shove it, assholes! How do these apples taste?”), it might seem that this surrender of self just to see a bunch of overpaid grown men pig-pile, spray champagne, and ritualistically engage in some of the most homosexual acts you’ll see anywhere with complete exoneration is, well, absurd. It is. I’m no closer to understanding why I wore the same clothes for two weeks than I was before The Olde Towne Team sealed the deal. It’s the intangibility of being a Sox fan. You do these things because it makes sense on some raw visceral level. And the payoff is this: complete self-indulgent satisfaction with the universe.
Sure, it’ll wear off, and come February I’ll be ready to bitch and whine about the off-season dealings—the failure to sign so-and-so, things I might deem as inadequate preparations to further humiliate the Yankees. But for right now, for this brief moment in the ponderous continuum of time, I’m to revel in this feeling and realize, in the most existential of senses, that happiness doesn’t have to make sense.
So, to these filthy rich men that I openly berate on this blog, I thank you. For however briefly, you’ve made me a happy man.
Go Sox!
You can bet your sweet ass it was!
For those of you who might not be Red Sox fans (if you’re a Yankee, then I only have one thing to say: “Shove it, assholes! How do these apples taste?”), it might seem that this surrender of self just to see a bunch of overpaid grown men pig-pile, spray champagne, and ritualistically engage in some of the most homosexual acts you’ll see anywhere with complete exoneration is, well, absurd. It is. I’m no closer to understanding why I wore the same clothes for two weeks than I was before The Olde Towne Team sealed the deal. It’s the intangibility of being a Sox fan. You do these things because it makes sense on some raw visceral level. And the payoff is this: complete self-indulgent satisfaction with the universe.
Sure, it’ll wear off, and come February I’ll be ready to bitch and whine about the off-season dealings—the failure to sign so-and-so, things I might deem as inadequate preparations to further humiliate the Yankees. But for right now, for this brief moment in the ponderous continuum of time, I’m to revel in this feeling and realize, in the most existential of senses, that happiness doesn’t have to make sense.
So, to these filthy rich men that I openly berate on this blog, I thank you. For however briefly, you’ve made me a happy man.
Go Sox!
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