LISTEN. Well, "starting now" was an aspirational resolution, and now is a rough approximation that may have to await the end of the MLB postseason before it can be delineated with more precise intention. I'm not sorry I didn't forego last night's latest late-night thriller from Houston, and thus wouldn't answer the bell a few short hours later. Only a game, sure. But what a game. Those Sox outfielders!
I don't care who wins, but I care that they care enough to perform with such grit and elan. And it's reassuring to see nail-biting nervous spectators in Houston, Boston, Milwaukee, and LA attesting to the human capacity to care about something so inconsequential. If we can be so invested in that, perhaps we can still muster the will to rally and save the things that really do matter-like, say, American democracy. That's the gist of Roger Angell's smart rationale for sports fandom, as I recall. [Yes, recollection confirmed...]
It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
So... maybe I'll get up at 5 mountain time, or Pacific. Point is to prioritize regular reporting to this journal of no very wide circulation, whatever the clock says. Improve the nick of time, notch the stick of reflective memory, toe the line, keep an open gate, anticipate more than mere dawn and sunrise. Point is not to sacrifice sleep, health, and sanity in the process. Keep your health, your splendid health, advised William James. Mine's not so splendid lately, and precious sleep (say all the studies) is nothing to trifle with.
Anyway, it's good to place another buffer between dawn's early light and first notice of the latest abominations from D.C. Good morning.
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