Yu Darvish

It wasn't a bad neighborhood, but it certainly wasn't Beaglesonia.

Kind of reminds me of one of my favorite Merle Haggard songs:

I showed her most of Tennessee that's all I could afford
I even thought of stealing so I could show her more
But she never did seem happy and I often heard her say
Hey, I like it here but I love Montego Bay.

He would do anything for this girl but she loves Montego Bay.  He could have moved there with her, but I can't see Merle hanging with the Rastas.  And I reckon that from his days kicking cans down Talman Avenue to the univiyed halls of Gage Park High he dreamed of living where you couldn't see the smoke from his neighbor's chimney, and could doze undisturbed in his blind while Bambi nibbled in the middle ground. 

So it was with me, but when I kicked my can I thought of downtown (where all the lights are bright).  I loved being there, the symphony of the auto horns, the big beautiful tall buildings, the hustle, the bustle.  When I decided that I wasn't going to get out of this city alive so it was time to move out of my parents' attic, I moved downtown. 


There hasn't been any hustle or bustle for over a ,month, but the busses and the trains still run their weekday schedules.  Sometimes just to get out, just to go somewhere when there is nowhere to go, I ride the train to the end of the line and then get on a train going back downtown,  Before the corona riding the train was kind of a hustle and bustle thing, a car full of people getting on and off, likely I couldn't get a window seat, and I didn't pay that much attention to the city gliding by outside the window.

Now there is no problem getting a window seat,  Sometimes I am the only person and at its most crowded there are maybe half a dozen, scattered throughout the car per the new rules.  The city slides by in near silent splendor.  But a little boring sometimes so I bring along an old paperback.


I had a my nose deep in it yesterday when I happened to look up and there, affixed to a brick wall, was a big poster for Marquee.  (Marquee is the brand spanking new Cubs network.  It carries all the Cub games and if you want to see them you have to pay a pretty penny into the gaping maw of the Trumpist owners of the team, and even if you don't, such is the way of cable tv, you have to pay anyway.  The owners were planning on making a killing.  I don't know the details of the contracts but I hope they are taking a huge loss,  Behind the big Marquee logo there was a Cub hurler, and squinting my eyes I could see that it was Yu Darvish.  The Cubs had given him a huge contract in 2018 and he had been a bust, but towards the end of the season he had gotten way better and a month and a half ago Cub tongues were wagging, would he be this year's superstar?  Not anymore of course.

The book I had taken my nose out of was Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, written 44 years ago by Doris Kearns Goodwin.  Vietnam.  Forty some years in the past and yet the very mention of it takes you right back.  The issue of our generation.  Kind of thought we had won that one, but twenty-five years later we were back at the same old shit in the mideast this time.  A little different, a lot more distant for us, nobody wanted us to fight it, and hardly anybody we knew was going over there, and the press was kept at an arm's length and compared to the mess of Vietnam it was way more muddled and it was still stumbling along when our great hope Obama took the stage and we thought the forces of enlightenment had won, but that never happened, and then Trump, and right on his heels, the way they shoot off everything at the end of the fireworks show, the corona.

Before I was reading LBJ and the American Dream I was reading The Universal Baseball Association by Robert Coover from 1968.  Briefly the guy is some kind of accountant and his life is falling apart around him, but all he cares about is this baseball game he invented ruled by the roll of dice.

Somewhere Yu Darvish is putting on his mask to go for a toilet paper hunt.  On the way out the door he passes the coffee table with the ball nestled in the pocket of the glove.  He moves on.