Strangely

[prog]

...actually, it's not very strange, knowing me, that I don't feel any different today, apart from being rather less tense (something I'm sure I share with most everyone else in this town New England). Not completely relaxed, because of stuff going on next week, between dad's surgery, the election, and having to deal with my dad and the rest of my family during and after election day[2].

I am more looking forward to seeing how Boston life and culture will change as a result of this. You know that it must; for generations, for the entire lives of most New England natives (Y.T. among them), the Red Sox being... what they were[1] has been a fundamental -- I'm bering dead serious and literal here -- a fundamental part of Boston's culture and psychology. And suddenly, in a single night, it's all changed. A bit in the city's constant registers has flipped, and here we are, on the other side of a very local Vingean singularity, o yes. When the celebrations are done, what will be different? What will change in insidiously subtle ways? It's likely that I could never subjectively say, being right here in the heart of it, but I'll do my best to stay attentive.

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For my part, I am glad at how I spent the evening. monkeybot is in town from Baltimore this week on a work thing, stuck in a Quincy hotel but escaping into the city when he can to explore (as he's never been here before) and eat chowda at a different place every night. I assisted him on his quest yesterday (even though his wife had IMed me with suspicion that he had already exceeded his daily chowda quota (sorry leahleaf)), showing him around my favorite places in Harvard Square, and ending the tour at John Harvard's pub in The Garage, where we watched the first three innings among v. merry anonymous company over a coupla beers 'n' potato skins. I watched the last innings home alone, Tivo-delayed, so I could fast forward every time Fox tastefully showed archival footage of Buckner.

If my life were the David Letterman show, the camera would have panned up to the bruise-colored, eclipsed moon after Foulke's wonderfully informal underhand toss to first. Babe Ruth's broad face would have appeared within, looking down in disbelief, and then roared in pain and rage like Sinistar as it dissipated into nothingness.

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[1] The "curse" explanation, while muttered by sports columnists for many years, became popular only recently as a jokey way to blame the supernatural for the Sox' alarmingly consistent and decades-long penchant for headslapping upfuckery and plain ol' rotten luck, as well as give an extra edge to their rivalry with the New York Yankees (which will continue unabated next spring).

[2] We do not agree on who should win. That is, they all feel one way, and I feel another. And they're the ones in the swing state. And have long since voted absentee, which I forgot they'd of course do (coz of the surgery), dashing my hopes for any last-minute conversions. I maintain that I coulda knocked away their Bush votes if I laid out the reasons why, as fiscally conservative, old-skool Republicans, they should see he's a mad boy-king squandering their money on shit and death. Cough, sorry. I made a feeble effort, Amazonning them a copy of Fahrenheit 9/11 as soon as it came out on DVD. To my initial surprise, my dad (but not mom or sibs) watched it without any followup urging from me, and said that he liked it, and found it a well-crafted piece of cinema in the same way that the Goebbels/Riefenstahl propaganda epics were. I really should have taken him to task on the ridiculous comparison then, but it was a 1 a.m. phone call and I didn't have the wherewithal to press the issue, I guess. The next day, Google informed me that mentioning Goebbels and Moore in the same breath is a typical Murdochian bon mot, which doesn't surprise me, but does disappoint me, showing me how deeply that damned truth-twisting station has etched itself into my family's minds.

(And did you watch the game on Fox last night? Did you see how when they switched to the soldiers watching the game in Baghdad (which I did appreciate seeing, mind you), they captioned them simply as "MULTINATIONAL FORCE"? Oyyyy. They may have well said "MULTIRACIAL AND DEFINITELY MIXED-CLASS FORCE DESPITE WHAT YOU MAY HAVE HEARD" or "LIBERATORS AND NOT OCCUPIERS GOD DAMMIT" and it would have been just as tasteful and nonpolitical.)

Comments

nitpicks

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia says "The phrase already had a long history", so I don't think it "appeared only recently".

Also, it was Foulke who was pitching for the final out, not Schilling.

But yeah, the MULTINATIONAL FORCE caption creeped me out too. Why would Brits care about baseball, anyway?

Re: nitpicks

[prog.livejournal.com]

Edits made, thx.