Thursday, September 22, 2011

Love, Actually.


Surely it can't be gone already.

The last home game of the season always feels like getting dumped by a girl who was out of my league. Yeah, I knew it was coming, but I had so many things left planned to do. We were supposed to go to a museum, pack a picnic by the lake, or maybe have dinner with my Dad. Now I'm just left with some old pictures and dozens of words that were entirely contextual to how I was feeling at the moment I wrote them and no longer hold weight in the present.

I was supposed to make it to more home games. I was supposed to take stronger advantage of being invited to write here. I was supposed to pick apart every pitch thrown to every player and take joy in the little moments that make up the season. Instead, I feel like I never even saw Travis Snider this year. I feel like I took for granted all the times the game was just on in the background while I was doing something more important (what could be more important?) like feeling sorry for myself or texting obscure rap lyrics to my friends. It doesn't matter, really, because it's over now. The putting off of worrying about what was happening because "There's another game tomorrow" is gone. They're gone again and I am left to my own devices for fighting off insanity for another 5 months. I am alone. Again.

Summer is dead and as any Game of Thrones watcher knows: Winter is coming. Yeah, we'll hear from them again a couple times in the next few months, but it will be short bursts. Internet reports, radio clips, or some fumbling predictions and analysis of the action or inaction of the off-season. But we all know nothing will compare. Nothing can touch the warming glow of the gentle buzz the Jays provide through my TV or the swell of sound as the wave passes through my section live in person at the Skydome.

Perhaps it is the decade and a half of middle of the pack results that have filled me with such apathy, but those who complain about the quality of the team always confuse me. I, for some reason, do not need this team to win to fill the void. Making a deep run in the playoffs would surely bring a lot of excitement to people I know, but for me, personally, it's most attractive feature would be having another 2 or 3 or 4 weeks without having to say goodbye. I simply need them to exist. I need them on my screen showcasing their talents or filling the content of my favourite websites to inspire my favourite writers. A quality team that plays quality baseball is secondary to just knowing they're around.  Knowing they exist. Knowing I can see them whenever I want. And, again, that feeling is gone.

So good-bye again, you heroes of my summer. I will miss you until we meet again next April, when we see each other across the street an unseasonably warm spring day and run into each others arms like we'd never been apart in the first place.

Goodbye. Goodbye. A thousand times, goodbye.

4 comments:

  1. This is exactly how I feel, to the point where my eyes began to water with how close to home it is. I will spend the (where I live, admittedly not very) cold winter months toiling away on research, sometimes from my office, but mostly from the relative comfort of the reasonably small apartment I call home. I will go out with friends and, if you'll pardon the cheese, eat, drink, live, love, and laugh. More often than not though, upon my return, the sight of the Carter and Lind jerseys tagged to the wall above my Delgado bobblehead will elicit a depressingly prolonged exhale from me. The feeling is the same one one gets when looking through old pictures and stumbling across ones of you and your college girlfriend - the one you never quite got over.

    As we both know though, this phase passes as the season approaches, and quickly degenerates into rabid insatiable desperation, to the point where I'm basically incapable of accomplishing anything of substance in the week or two leading up to opening day, the exhilaration of which immediately validates the long wait. But soon enough, every year (usually after Travis Snider's second demotion) my attention starts to wain. Then before you know it, it's September 2012.

    And we're back to square one.

    And the vicious cycle repeats.

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  2. Awesome.

    I'm sorry you didn't get the chance to write more, Archi, you have a way with words that resonates with me.

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  3. Very well written, Archi.

    Is it April yet?

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  4. Thanks for the kind words.

    I'm going to try seeing some other teams for the next few weeks. My friends say it'll be good for me but I don't know... My heart just won't be in it the same way.

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