Balls (and Strikes)

 

This is going to be a bit thrown-together as it’s late and I have been occupied this evening, but I’m trying to think of a post here that doesn’t qualify as “thrown together” and… yeah ok, you got me. Situation normal.

Tonight was the second baseball game I attended this year, but the first minus the anti-plague social restrictions of the past 15 months. I sat there in a seat, maskless, cheek-by-spittling-jowl with breathing humans on either side of me and it was… well, it was threatening and weird but mostly? It was fine. Fun, even!

It wasn’t liberating or cathartic or a triumphant march back to normalcy. Some people still wore masks, which you have to do on an honor system if you haven’t been vaccinated. So the jumpy status quo lingered in plain site to remind us of the flicked cigarette butt of danger laying out there among the shoots of new growth. But people were… happy. Pleased. Fucking downright chipper, some of them. And how could I tell? Because they weren’t wearing masks. How easy it was to forget that the human mouth was also an effective means of nonverbal communication, not just a dispersal system for weaponized bat flu? This will take some getting used to.

Anyway, my team won. Barely. A guy hit a grand slam. People cheered, heartily, lustily. They did The Wave in a totally not ironic way that also didn’t peter out when it hit the expensive seats. Kids kicked the back of my seat. Some asshole threw a beach ball. We lived in a society that made mundane, banal sense again. Routine (there are 81 home games for EVERY TEAM you guys). Boring. It fucking ruled.