It's not about you...:Part 5/2 of 3.

When there’s a dearth of time, it’s amazing how little the mind will interfere. You’ve probably noticed this when you've attempted the 'grab your balls and approach a girl technique'. Although I'm sure that many girls can attest to the fact that the effects of this sometimes aren’t pretty,  your mind is not to blame.  But when there's an abundance of time, that’s when the rumination begins.  Here's my case: a man on third, one out, tie game. I tap my right foot to my left then kick up some dirt and dig my left cleat, a little aft of my right, into the ground. I pound my glove three times, crouch, lean forward, and wait.

These are not the early signs of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; every player has some kind of routine (although the situation has exacerbated itself with modernity), when I was playing, players would take routines from ball games on TV, which would amount to stepping into the batter’s box and frantically waving their bat to and fro.

Ultimately, a routine is what distracts the mind. But a distraction is just that; in a way it's like trying to drown out the noise of your children (if, like me, you don’t have any children don’t let it ruin the metaphor, just fill it in with siblings, significant other, etc) with a radio.  You now have two sounds blaring simultaneously. Try catching a ball with that on your mind.

I don’t remember what the batter looked like but if how he hit the ball -which I remember very well -is any indication of his size, he would've been between four and five feet. The ball, hit with such a lack of chutzpah, barely overcame the forces of gravity and wind resistance –pathetically lobbing through the air like a dog no higher than your shins viciously barking up at you, groveling for an non-reciprocated and unearned attention.

 
But comparing a measly hit baseball to a minuscule dog is a bit of a balk: although a dog might call attention to you in public it is a walk in the park compared with having a ball hit at you. When a ball is hit toward you, well actually it was hit to both the short stop and I -which worsened my predicament -you can't look away with disinterest because your mind creates a state of hypervigilance. It forbodes what will happen if you drop the ball, the shame that will ensue, and as you wait for the ball the mind with alacrity reminds you at every moment the possible consequences: it’s a survival mechanism that doesn’t have a safety and more often than not, shoots you in the foot. Its very similar to the fight or flight response, except you can’t runaway (there would be even worse repercussions) and fighting a ball might land you a dinner seat next to Wiley in the mental institution.

And because there was a man on third, one out, bottom of the sixth (we only played six), and the game was tied -it all made the consequences quite large. In my backyard, catching that ball would’ve been as routine as kicking my right foot with my left, but this ball lingered in the air longer, almost like that stagnation of time that yuppie moms dissect while discussing Eckhart Tolle over brunch. But the power of now can sometimes be too powerful, the slowness of the ball an inadequate anchor to the moment because the imagination of it being dropped is too dire to ignore.

Perhaps it was a reflux but I called off the shortstop and waited. And waited. And then I couldn’t wait. I closed my glove and the ball hit the outer edge. In a frenzy, I scrambled to it, hurled it at the first baseman and the batter was out at first. But outs only count in horseshoes or when there’s two of them. That was it, game over, the man on third scored. My play, or lack there of, combined with the universal feeling of empathy experienced by mothers everywhere, a gift bestowed upon them with the birth of their first born, caused these side spectators, these daughter's of Eve, to exhibit the external behavior of wincing because the pain of their hearts dropping needed to be expressed. The dad’s (and the moms with the tendency to bawl at the umpire), unsure of the identity of that boy under that oversized, “fit’s all” cap, but just to be safe -in case it was their own, sacrificed the strain on their necks to bring their heads parallel with the ground. Mighty Casey (I really wasn't that mighty at all) dropped the ball.

Are some of us predisposed to making fools of ourselves, to perfectly positioning our bodies for a belly flop when attempting a flip, to having that awkward silence with a girl linger just a little longer (but making it exponentially more awkward)? Is it nature or nurture? Or neither? Was it the traumatic experience that cracked the shell of self-consciousness or the self-consciousness that birthed the traumatic experience? It must’ve been the birth of tragedy that came first.

Which reminds me of one of the all time great New Yorker Cartoons.

"I'm nothing, and yet I'm all I can think about."

I have wasted this whole post talking about me. My apologies.  David Foster Wallace continued tomorrow.


WOD - Fluvial:

1. of or pertaining to a river: a meandering fluvial contour.

2. produced by or found in a river: fluvial plants. Contextually speaking: "Another fluvial piece -"Tight-Assed River" -was checked by Josh Hersh in 2004." Not a very good context, I know. Taken from New Yorker on article "Checkpoints".