Two and One

OK, so I'm going to try an experiment here. I'm not exactly live-blogging because I've decided the decent thing to do would be to spare you the blow-by-blow recap, but I'm typing this as I'm watching the first postseason baseball game for my home-team LA Angels since 2009. I'm embarrassed to say that how the rest of this comes out really really depends on the success or failure of one or more grown men wearing colorful matching pajamas in public while trying to hit a ball with a stick. I'm an adult with real responsibilities, including the literal human survival of three other people at this very minute, and yet this is what I allow to be the foremost present thing in my mind and soul.

The good news for me is that I have found that I am able to limit the amount of time I cede emotional control to events happening on my television. Curiously, the intensity of the control is more pronounced via television, from a distance. When I'm actually present at baseball games, I find I'm often distracted by the idea that there are no privacy barriers between the urinals in the men's room. Don't get me wrong, it used to be worse. When I was a kid, Anaheim Stadium went old-school trough-style which, as an unathletic boy-child not yet inured into penis-normative jock culture and being the only XY in a house full of XXs and thus used to an ascetic level of genital privacy, peeing shoulder to shoulder into a common receptacle with my fellow men was something that was emotionally impossible to achieve. The stadium has since transitioned to the slightly more modest individual urinal, but still in a bank on a wall and of a style and placement not idealized for privacy. I can do it in a pinch, but not without some emotional effort and certainly not without spending what would otherwise be intense baseball-watching time redirected to considering how to configure the zen-levels of calm and focus that will be needed when the moment inevitably arrives.

Also with television, the effect is amplified by the normal mind-control carrier waves normally used to convince me Axe body spray isn't a hate crime AND FUCK HOME RUN KANSAS CITY.

Goddamned 11th inning. How do you lose a home game in extra innings?

I have to go. As disappointed as I was when the team missed the playoffs for five straight years, that also meant I had this time of the newborn autumn to focus on the things that make this season special for me, like the temperature dropping on the slowly elongating nights and how I don't give a shit about pumpkin spice anything at Starbucks.