Underachievers, Please Try Harder

Up A Twee: When feeling sad in a natural way, which is about 99% of the time since the Dodgers traded for Adrian Gonzalez and Hanley Ramirez, I play Camera Obscura on the stereo and stand by the window, waiting for confirmation of, well, anything. The ancient Egyptians (or maybe the ex-girlfriend who worked in a pet store) ruminated that the world looked less evil when viewed through smudged glass, but I know the truth: life is a sexually transmitted disease guaranteed to end in tragedy and farce, e.g., watching Barry Zito walk the bases loaded in the first inning with 68 MPH curveballs and a 74 MPH heater that doubles as a straight change.

There, I said it: my life is so pathetic that it’s a struggle not to care about professional baseball. Oh Melky, what hath thou wrought? Why didn’t you take HGH like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemons and teenage Chinese swimmers? For one glorious game our lineup was a legitimate big league affair, with four genuine sluggers in Cabrera, Posey, Sandoval and Pence, which took the pressure off of Pagan, Belt, and Bruce Bochy’s wife. But poof, just like that, Melky gets busted, claims that he inadvertently ate a phony anabolic salad dressing purchased from a phony website, thus elevating his batting that elegantly clear enemy fences, and making little kids cry in their Panda hats. Welcome to reality, you little bastards.

It’s called hardball because it hurts, because it bruises, because it inflicts damage and tobacco juice and the piercing stink of trough urinals mixed with gag-reflex hot dog sweat. Wait your turn, close your eyes and hope for the best, which usually ends up being somewhere between Horrible and Fetid (or Aaron Rowand and Eli Whiteside.).

Melky’s suspension was unfortunate and careless. But it was also punishment from the baseball gods — not because SF is the epicenter of the homosexual and vegan-cyclist agenda. Not because Google, Facebook and Twitter are local businesses. Not because Diane Feinstein spends her daylight hours strapped into a Pacific Heights’ coffin paid for by Iraqi construction contracts awarded to the various vampire shells owned by her billionaire hubby, Tricky Dick Blum.

No, the baseball gods are withholding their largesse because of the sacrilegious behavior of SF fans at PacBell (or ATT Park, or the Cash Machine in the SBC Global Lobby, or This Week’s Telecom Boondoggle and Sanitized Death Hole Garden Arena.

Our crimes? Have you been to a game lately? The behavior is appalling. Adults bringing their gloves to the park. Adults taking pictures of themselves during the windup. Adults waiting until the batter steps into the box to make another beer run. Adults wearing panda hats. Adults diddling constantly with their iphones. Adults jumping up and down like corn-holed heifers every time a TV camera points vaguely in their direction. Adults unaware that Ayn Rand was a poster child for full frontal lobotomies.

If a certain violet haze overcomes me, it’s because the Melk Man turned out to be a Melk Dud — and it’s karma. True, we wouldn’t be in first place without his extracurricular vitamins, but now there’s an absence in the line-up that Brandon Crawford just can’t fill. As you pervert philosophers are aware, “post-coital tristesse” is a feeling of melancholy  after sexual intercourse , defined by when your top slugger gets suspended for 50 games in the middle of a pennant race. Worse, it’s more common in men  who refuse to wear panda hats or eat garlic fries in a public setting. After watching Affeldt walk in two runs against the Braves, Spinoza himself wrote: "For as far as sensual pleasure is concerned, the mind is so caught up in it. But after the enjoyment of sensual pleasure is past, the greatest sadness follows. If this does not completely engross, still it thoroughly confuses and dulls the mind." Just like watching a game at PacBell surrounded by idiot fans drinking white wine spritzers and texting their idiot friends with pictures of their idiot faces.

Kant you here me? I’m right here, stuck between freeway onramps, hastily scrawled mid-term papers, and the eventual spouse that leads to the eventual ungrateful child and the eventual existential crisis of planning a permanent vacation from the cubicle farm hell that is techno-scam America. Who doesn’t dream of gnawing off a limb in order to escape the air-conditioned nightmare? I do. But I also need money for a new flat screen TV because the Niners look good, Tebow’s causing a circus in New York, and there’s another storm pounding the Big Easy. Film at ten!

Q: What does a Zen monk say to a hot dog vendor? A: Make me one with everything. Q: What does the vendor say when the monk asks for change for his twenty-dollar bill? A: Change comes from within.

Belated thoughts on the passing of a legend. One day Alex Cockburn asked me to drive his car to a lecture he and my father were giving. I said sure, and asked for the keys. Alex raised his eyebrows, taken aback at my naïveté; as if I’d asked him what kind of cheese the moon is made of. “Ah, yes, well… there’s not an ignition in the typical sense,” he said.

I had grown up with problematic cars — in fact, it seemed a point of pride for my father to treat automobiles with venomous contempt, seasoning our Hondas and Volkswagens and Caltrans-auctioned Suburbans with coffee grounds, orange peels, waterlogged copies of the London Review of Books, and the dust of dirt roads from Yorkville to Elk.

But Alek’s decrepit piece of Detroit thunder muscle made my father’s various clunkers seem like amateur hour. It was heaped, not sprinkled, with books, newspapers, clothes, even a potted plant or two. There were gardening utensils, a rusted manual typewriter, and clumps of strange hair. (Evidence of Sasquatch patrolling Petrolia?). If I didn’t know better, I would have testified in a car of law that it belonged to a homeless person.

Naturally there was no steering wheel and the ignition mechanism was likewise missing. Seeing my concern, Alex grinned, “It’s an automatic.” It was like saying, “Don’t worry, they’re all Pisces” if we were attacked from a horde of Mongol invaders.

Alex started the car by pushing a jerry-rigged button resting on a nest of wires. To keep the car between the sidewalks, one grasped the steering column with both hands: “Not unlike skippering a Soviet frigate through Baltic ice.”

Besides his beautifully derelict cars, Alex is the only person I’ve ever seen wearing black tuxedo pants in the dead of summer. The rest of his outfit consisting of a pale green silk shirt, unbuttoned to sternum, and brown square-toed boots custom made by a woman in Santa Cruz.

One night, after hours of lefty plotting refreshed by liberal glasses of wine and cognac, I saw Alex flat on his back in bed, while Bruce wrapped both hands on his friend’s right boot. Seeing my father’s resolve waver, Alex said that they would be easier to remove in a few months, once the leather softened. My dad pulled mightily — then stumbled back: the first reluctant boot was liberated! “Superb, Bruce! You were no doubt my knight gallant in a previous life.” After a few more tugs the left boot is likewise dispatched.

The next time Alex spends the night, he sleeps with his boots on. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I understand this was because he was dreaming of corrupt and mediocre arses to stick them up.