Category: Blog Post

I apologize for the mess, Reverend, but I wasn’t expecting company. Things have gone to hell around here since Delmar moved into that old pop-up camper out back –says he got tired of captivity, as if that filthy camper he bought on eBay is anything but an even smaller cage.

That’s the thing about Delmar, of course; he never gets tired of captivity. The man can’t get enough of it. If you threw him out in the middle of the wilderness he’d curl up in a ball and starve to death before he even needed a shave.

I remember one time when we were still dating we went driving in the country just outside of town –I’ll never forget this, Reverend, not for as long as I live. There wasn’t nothing out there but gravel roads and fields and silos, and Delmar turns and says to me, “I get the creeps if I can see too far.”

Seeing too far was never gonna be a problem for poor Delmar, of course.

I always did know there was something just slightly off about that man, but I guess I took some small comfort in that ‘just slightly’ part. By now, though, it’s pretty clear there’s not a damn thing just slightly about it.

Everything’s gotta be whole hog with Delmar. He couldn’t just live with the crazy notion that he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body; no, sir, he’s bound and determined he’s going to go right ahead and become a woman.

Yet even that’s apparently not enough to make Delmar happy; you’d think it would be, but no, of course it’s not. Now Delmar is insisting he’s got to be a woman with big tits.

Good heavens. In a town like this? I can only imagine what people must be saying, and I don’t think I even need to tell you, Reverend, that the man sitting out there in that camper in one of my old house dresses is not the man I thought I was marrying.

I’ll tell you exactly what I saw: they had the mediocre man trussed in a wheelbarrow and they rolled him out into the middle of the street and blew him up. He was round, agitated, and full of guts, and he babbled nervously right up until the moment when they set off the detonator.

I suppose to be fair I should point out that there were feeble bursts of indignation in the midst of the nervous babbling. I’m sure the mediocre man had some points he wanted to make, but by that time it was too late. Nobody had any interest in hearing what he had to say; we were all just there to see the explosion.

One of the –I’m not sure, really, what they called themselves. Rebels? Insurgents? I know there was some kind of acronym involved. At any rate, one of the leaders of this group read a prepared statement, but it was difficult to understand him, speaking as he was through a ski mask and without a microphone. I’m pretty sure I heard him say something about the ideals on which this great nation was founded, and I’ve no doubt he railed a bit about the corruption and abuse of power and the only justice unchecked power understands.

That, at any rate, was the sort of thing these characters were always carrying on about.

There was a decent crowd on hand (and it was growing by the minute), and the few government soldiers who were present merely observed from a safe distance. The guy who was doing the talking finally got around to pronouncing a formal sentence on the mediocre man. I didn’t catch all the wording, because the crowd was getting pretty riled up at this point –some people were throwing things– and there was a television news helicopter hovering directly overhead. What I did make out, though, seemed to follow standard bureaucratic boilerplate –“We hereby declare…,” that sort of thing. The usual nonsense, I suppose, but it struck me as kind of odd, given that these characters fancied themselves rebels.

I also thought it was odd that in pronouncing the sentence the guy actually spoke the mediocre man’s full name –Karl Christian Rove. The speaker, I think, clearly did a little improvisation at this juncture, declaring that the prisoner’s middle name alone represented a grave enough blasphemy as to provide all the necessary justification for the detonation.

It was quite an explosion, I can tell you that. I can also tell you that the mediocre man made a spectacular mess.

Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind…

–Samuel Beckett

Since I have almost nothing else to tell you right now, I’ll tell you who I both feel sorry for and envy at the moment: The beat writers for the Twins. Can you even imagine the lives of those poor wretches? That pack of glum bastards has to sit there in the press box every night and try to find fresh words to describe the fresh hell they are forced to witness.

For that, of course, I feel sorry for them. These are the same people, after all, who were so full of hope and blithely optimistic prognostications six months ago (as we all were, as were we all), and they have had to gut this thing out with a gun to their heads every night. Lord knows, that can’t be easy. And whatever they’re being paid, it almost certainly isn’t enough.

I’ve been in their uncomfortable seats far too many times at this point in seasons just like this one –in seasons far worse than this one, in fact, at least strictly in terms of won-loss records. There have been years where I sat there in the Dome in September when there was so little cause for optimism in the present or future prospects of the team that it wasn’t even really possible to call the Twins a disappointment.

Let us not forget those almost entirely hopeless years.

That there was so much hope this season is precisely what makes what has transpired such a keen disappointment, and I suppose if you have to pick your poison you’d take this one, however reluctantly.

That doesn’t make the routine kicks to your heart smart any less, certainly, but at least we had expectations, and can still find reason to harbor some expectation and hope for the future; which is more, I know, than fans can say in many Major League cities.

As I said, though, as much pity as I might feel for the beleaguered beat writers, I also envy them. At its worst, it’s still a decent job, a dream gig for all sorts of people who have absolutely no idea what a grind it can be day in and day out. I don’t think people can begin to understand the long hours these characters put in, or the relentless travel schedule and impossible demands –physical, psychological, and logistical– of the job. Look up there in the press box some night when a big lead has evaporated and a game is headed to extra innings with deadlines looming. What you’ll see is a collective nervous breakdown in progress, as the beat writers –with early deadlines looming– curse, wheedle, and scrap nearly completed game stories to start over wholly from scratch.

I also envy these people the enforced discipline of the job. Every day, come what may, these writers have to find something to say, something to write. They have to try to make sense of what has happened and what is happening, and put it in some larger context of expectations, disappointments, and pennant races. Some days, of course, they just need to find the quickest possible way to get from A to Z (or, if they’re really in a hurry, from A to B), to describe the game they have just watched, however brutal it might have been, in the clearest, cleanest possible manner. It’s certainly not easy, but it’s also nice to have vigilant witnesses for those times when even the most diehard fan’s natural inclination is to simply punch out.

I depend on the beat writers more than ever at times like this, those stretches when I find myself drifting away from the television or radio in the middle of the game, or tuning in late. I need them to keep me connected to the game and the dwindling season, however tenuously.

As Shakespeare, I think it was, once wrote, “Some must watch, while others sleep.”

I’m grateful for that, grateful for the watchers, still thankful that I know I’m going to get up every morning to game stories and box scores in the newspaper, even as I increasingly find myself thinking, “Better them than me.”

One Sunday near the end of his days the old preacher stood up before his dwindled congregation, and as had been the case so often in recent years he circled and paced in his mind for the familiar words that were still permanently lodged there from long repetition and which were now accessible to him as something almost like muscle memory.

He had been tracking back through his old words for many years now, repeating himself, and repeating the words of the legion of others who had come before him and had found themselves standing in similiar places on Sunday mornings stretching back for centuries.

The few parishioners who still filed into the tiny sanctuary each Sunday were drawn there by numb custom and ancient habit as surely as the preacher was, and had heard his stories repeated so many times by this point that they knew them by heart.

The preacher lived alone in a deteriorating house that sat at the edge of the overgrown cemetery out back of the church, and he had mostly kept to himself since the death of his wife more than a decade earlier. The marriage had been childless, and the preacher’s wife had been killed while crawling across the state highway at the end of the long driveway. She had been headed, the preacher felt certain, toward the river, where she had intended to drown herself.

There had also been a succession of dogs that were rumored to be buried among the graves in the old cemetery. The last dog had been blind and, like the preacher’s wife, had wandered onto the highway and been struck by a passing car.

After the old preacher had rambled for a time that Sunday morning near the end of his days he had paused for breath and searched the high ceiling of the church.

“I do not believe in Judgment,” he told his congregation. “That is finally something I’m afraid I simply cannot believe in. After a long life I have discovered that I can find no place for such a concept in my image of the Creator in my mind’s eye, which is where, truly, the Creator resides in each of us.

“There is no place for Judgment, no room for it, in the solace He has provided me these many years, so that I am forced to conclude that Judgment is wholly the creation of man, and as such is one of the most pernicious behavioral management tools ever dreamt up by human cunning.

“And Judgment, I think you will agree, goes hand in hand with shame, another concept in which I am now unable to believe. I will go to my grave with no shame, and no fear of judgment, despite the fact that I have committed sins too numerous to mention, sins which, I fully understand, God is under absolutely no obligation to forgive.

“All of our lives we strive to fill our lies with enough light that they become truth, or at least come to resemble truth to ourselves and to each other. In dark moments –and there have been many dark moments of late– I realize that I have failed miserably at this project, and, in doing so, have failed you as well, for which I beg your forgiveness.

“I would ask you to consider these things as you return to your homes today: Mercy. Grace. Compassion. Forgiveness. Redemption. Peace. Solitude. Generosity of Spirit. Justice –real justice, a justice of equality and basic human decency rather than a justice of revenge and retribution. Tolerance. Faith. Miracles. Faith in miracles. Wonder. Vulnerability and despair. The human community. Light piercing the darkness. The transformative powers of longing and desire.

“All of these things –these ideas, ideals, and values– are in the Bible in great plenty, and in all of the other Holy Books of the world that I have ever read. So I would ask you: Why is it that so many purportedly religious people, so many of those we now associate as standard bearers for faith and mouthpieces for God, speak so little of these things, which are so consistently –even relentlessly– present in the primary religious texts?

“Why do they choose ‘an eye for an eye’ over ‘do unto others’? Intolerance over tolerance? Violence, retribution, and bloody revenge over peace and mercy and justice? One heavily edited and selective version of the same essential, ageless story over another? The conversion of the other over self-transformation? Reaction over reflection? Hatred over love? Why do they traffic in damnation over salvation, and offer curses rather than blessings?

“Is it because all these old words and values are so basic as to seem somehow soft in our hard world? That they are such pure and simple concepts that they can no longer be grasped in our age of so much complexity? Or is it, perhaps, that they are so utterly fantastic that they can no longer be recognized –if they are recognized at all– as anything but the tidy dreams of fiction?

“I ask you these questions today because they have been very much on my mind in recent days, and I would ask that you give them what thought you can spare in your busy lives.”

And with that the old preacher cleared his throat, stepped out from behind the altar, and shuffled off through the side door at the front of the church.

The words of the preacher left the remaining members of his congregation feeling disturbed and, in many cases, profoundly sad. For many of them, the preacher’s performance that Sunday was the last, conclusive proof that the poor man had finally lost his mind.