UPCOMING EVENTS

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The Wages of Hubris and the Beauty of Laundry

All a fan wants is hope. They want it before the season starts, and they want it as late in the season as it can be reasonably managed. Even before Friday night's anemic loss, which plunged the Mets out of first place for the first time since May, and at the worst possible time to be Not In First, I had precious little of this commodity.

But it still existed on the last day of the season for the Mets, however briefly before Tom Glavine shit the shittiest of beds that has ever been shitted (as I saw one Deadspin commenter put it). So I suppose I am grateful for that, if little else.

Earlier in the week, DHL had failed to deliver my playoff tickets. That was fine by me, because I really didn't want them resting against my front door, just waiting to be stolen. But it took a few days of fruitless phone calls to determine where and when I could pick them up. Ironically, I was expending more energy to get to the playoffs than the Mets were.

Friday night after work, I tried to drive to the DHL depot in Woodside. Of course, it immediately began raining the second I stepped into the Olds. Nothing serious, but a light rain + Friday night rush hour = Vehicular Horror Show.

I got as far as Borden Avenue, three blocks from the pick-up spot, when I met with one of those ridiculous accidents that only happens at the worst possible time in the worst possible place: a car-carrier truck, full of brand new Escalades, sat jackknifed across the avenue. Just ahead of it sat the white Honda Accord it had clearly sideswiped. In defiance of all precedents set for them by decades of traffic accidents, the two responsible parties--the truck driver and a young couple--stood on the sidewalk, chatting calmly as they waited for the police to show up.

So I parked on a side street--and I use the word "park" in the loosest possible way. I was so pissed off and afraid of missing DHL's closing time that I pulled into a barely legal spot, three feet from the curb, with the car's hood sticking out at a 45 degree angle.

As I charged up 60th Street, trying to make up 12 feet with every stride, the rain quickly dissipated. The setting sun and the storm clouds combined to make a strange, ominous purple-orange sky. Are they gonna get the game in tonight? I wondered. And also, do I give a shit if they do?

To my left stood a nondescript apartment building, the kind of brick dwelling that infests large swaths of Queens like a rash. A man sat on his tiny iron balcony, which had only enough room to hold himself, the plastic deck chair he sat on, and a wobbly little table. He wore the outfit of the Lazy Older Man In Summer: white sleeveless undershirt, khaki shorts, dark sneakers, black socks hiked skyward. I heard Ed Coleman's voice crackle from an ancient transistor radio that sat on his wobbly little table.

He was listening to Mets Extra. He stared off into the distance, at the angry sky ahead of him, almost as if defying it, daring it to rain on him again. And he had the strangest look on his face. It was the look of a father waiting up late for his wayward child to come home. A schizophrenic amalgam of anger, disgust, worry, and love.

He hated listening. He was tired of listening. He was scared to listen. But he had to listen. He was no doubt on that balcony last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. If all went well, he would be there next year, and the year after that.

Before making the trip to DHL, I debated not going to Saturday's game, the last game of the season that I had tickets to. And I debated whether I should just pocket the money I would get for my unused postseason tickets, rather than use them for another plan, because I was so disgusted with the Mets' lackluster play.

Looking at this man, I realized I would do neither of these things. I would go to Saturday's game. I would get another plan next year. And, finances willing, the year after that, and the year after that. Because I can never pretend I don't care. In order to turn me away, the Mets would have to do something truly and utterly indefensible, something so morally bankrupt that they'd be subject to UN sanctions.

Short of Fred Wilpon funneling profits to Al Qaeda, or changing the team's name to The Klansmen, I will be that man sitting on the porch, listening to Ed Coleman for all eternity.

Jerry Seinfeld made the now-famous observation that rooting for any sports team these days is like rooting for laundry. Some people see that as a depressing reminder that the Good Old Days of players like Ernie Banks and Mickey Mantle playing for one and only one team are deader than disco.

I find it strangely liberating. A year ends in disappointment, like 2006. Or even crushing collapse, like this year. Next year, there will be a whole different set of people wearing My Favorite Laundry, some of them for the first time. I can cheer the threads, and not worry about where the Laundry Wearers' true hearts lie. 2008's Laundry won't be infested with 2007's Laundry.

All summer, as the Mets lollygagged their way through one series after another, my mother worried that the team would fall short. I would always counter her doom-and-gloom with some rose-colored, cockeyed optimism. She warned me, "They're gonna break your heart. They always do."

Today, as the axe has finally fallen, I don't feel heart broken. I've had too much real heartbreak to call this feeling by that name. It's more like another sad feeling you get this time of year, as you watch the leaves turn brown, and feel the chill in air. The summer's over. Winter will soon be here. It sucks, but it doesn't last forever.

Meanwhile, I've already got some great material for my latest art project: A Collage of Folly. It's similar to my never-executed idea to make a big mural of all the shitty handbills that are shoved in my face on the street. But this one would be made up of playoff tickets for games that were never played. I've already got two World Series tickets from last year and a whole sheet of unusable postseason tickets from this year.

Behold: The wages of hubris!

Posted 09.30.07 06:45pm * Permalink

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