Love, the Amnesia-Based Belief

Meditations on Mariners Baseball

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Try life in a time of sunrise. The land is pretty much the same as it was the last time we looked. There’s no left-brain reason to expect today will be any better than yesterday except that it will. Rolling fields of amber waves of grain of wooden pegs around which world series rings ought to be shaped in the image of Seattle hands. I contribute from my seat with little rituals so that I might be complicit, implicated, culpable. Incapable and impotent remains the long winter that would sink into bones and temper them with a forge of cold flame. I am alloyed against the lessons I should have learned from the last time we all did this.

Such a thing it is to be handsome in seventy-degree spring. To lose your target up there in the sunny sky. We are so unlike the Carthaginians who lost their city to the Vandals: we turned our eyes to the games after they took over, not before. Whosoever coveteth the land and her jewels doth step inside with a necessary excessive force. Not around or adjacent to the pain of a lost season but through it. There resides in a hunk of metal conductivity to shock the grounded soul. There there, the soothsayers tell us. This time will be our time. There is no other way.

They have laid such careful plans to draw a box around our interest, crafted cunning schemes to narrow adventures of the heart into a zone between knees and the middle of the chest. Red thread ran through with brown dust. Green seats canted so far forward you can’t help but tumble out, your arms seamed in the fetal position as you roll down the stands and get stuck on a fence. A beer-sodden Cubs dude grips you with greasy grilled-onion fingers and hurls you back onto the field. Is this also part of eternal life?

Belief is a thing beyond reason. It flies in the face of any New York review. Time (the swathe between seasons) fell from the sky just the other afternoon and hovers now between us. A certain blood is loose in the water and it will not go back. It changes how you see me. I’m sure of it but couldn’t tell you how.

When I was six I learned about atoms and molecules. I discovered an incredible secret that experts DON’T want you to know: keep punching a wall. Eventually the right space will avail itself between all those shimmying particles and your fist will travel right through like all that effort was absurd, uncalled for, warranted by nothing at all. The nature of the lock will have cracked the tooth of the key.

It hasn’t worked yet, of course. Which is why I need to keep trying.

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