High Fives With Strangers

It’s 1:25 a.m. on Monday as I write this, and the Red Sox have just won their second World Series of my lifetime.

The Thirsty Scholar is right around the corner from me, and I honestly don’t go there enough. It was packed to the rafters tonight when we headed over between the 7th and 8th innings to watch the end of the game with fans rather than alone. I watched a few of the other playoff games there, and it’s a great feeling to be surrounded by people with whom you share a common goal (albeit one you can’t really contribute to), even if you share nothing else. John (Emlyn) made that point well in his comment on the previous post: The Sox hold Boston together like nothing else. Call it the history, call it the proximity (Fenway just seems so much more “in-town” than even the Fleet Center/TD Banknorth Garden/Whateverthehellitis), call it whatever. The Sox pull us all together. As I walked home, you could already hear the car horns and screaming celebrants echoing through the streets.

Just because I can, I’ll leave you with some mildly pretentious words written on the same occasion in 2004, after a stroll down into Copley Square.

The moon shone through a haze of cigar smoke as it came out of eclipse over Copley Square around midnight, as October 27 became October 28, and a generations-long drought finally came to an end. Perhaps the stellar conjunction was appropriate, given the near-cosmic resonance this moment carries across New England.

The revelers walking through Copley may or may not have noticed the words carved on thes tones under their feet, part of the Boston Marathon monument, which quotes Tennyson’s Ulysses:

“One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

For a nation of fans who’ve waited eighty-nine years (since before women could vote, as the TV helpfully pointed out), these words seem equally applicable. This is a drought that outlived a major superpower, for crying out loud (Soviet Union, 1917-1990).

It would, of course sound sacreligious to compare this to any other event in sports history, but in my brief perambulations, I was reminded of the 2001 Super Bowl. It was my junior year at Johns Hopkins, and the Ravens hadonly been in town a few years, ending a long absence of football from a football-loving town. I had attended the game that clinched them a playoff berth, so I had witnessed some of the excitement that finally came to a boil that night, but it was nothing compared to what we saw cruising downtown after the game. People ran between the lanes of parked-car traffic, slapping hands with the people sitting on the windowsills of their car doors. Pretty wild stuff, all in all.

Play Ball

Sittin’ at work, sporting a Papelbon shirt. Something about the death stare/Riverdance combo really appeals to me.

A confession: until recently (the past five years or so), I never really followed baseball. Sure, if I was asked, I always said I supported the Red Sox, and to the extent that I was ever paying attention, I did. To be perfectly honest, I found baseball a little boring, even when I finally decided during my college years (thanks to cheap last-minute seats at spacious Camden Yards) that a game was a pleasant way to spend a sunny summer afternoon.

I think it was moving back to New England (and eventually back into Boston itself) after college that really did it. I know a few people who are planning on moving here in the near future, and I’ve made an effort to explain to them that baseball seeps through your pores here, but I don’t think that I’ve really captured it. It’s hard to convey that while you do need to know a few things about the Sox and how they’re doing to keep up at the water cooler, you don’t need to worry, since it’ll seep in through your pores, no matter your expressed level of disinterest. What’s more, someday you’ll get the warm feeling inside that comes from hearing the cheers from next door and knowing that everyone around you is doing the same thing at the same time.

Will Leitch in the New York Times thinks that the success of the Red Sox in recent years has made Boston fans more “normal”, and less into the martyr complex that people (often non-Bostonians) seem to feel that everyone here has. He may have a point, and he may not. Boston was, for a long time, and Irish town, and to quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan (in a wildly inappropriate way, as he was speaking of the assasination of John F. Kennedy): “I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.” Being a Boston sports fan used to be about suffering, but now it’s about fun. Is one nobler than the other? Is fun the point of sport? Is victory too simplistic an outcome for the psychosocial drama that we construct around sporting events? Hell, I don’t know. I’ll save a deeper meditation on sport for later in the series.

Go Sox!

Unplanned Hiatus Ends, Multitudes Rejoice: An Eclectica

It’s getting cold again. Sweater and blazer weather, which I like. That fall crispness in the air, which I love. It’s getting dark if I leave work much after five, which I like less, and my hands get awful cold on the scooter in the mornings. Soon it’ll be time to start riding the T with the hoi polloi again. More time for reading, but I have to leave the house earlier, and it’s more expensive.

This is one of my favorite times of the year, about on par with the morning you wake up to find that spring came during the night and the world is suddenly full of college students playing frisbee (this happens more suddenly in Baltimore than Boston). Socially, it falls right between the sudden bustle of the High Holidays/back-to-school (which has a surprising impact on a working guy with no kids) and the Thanksgiving-to-New Year’s gauntlet that ends the year. Seasonally, while summer’s oppressiveness is mellowed by the cooling air, we haven’t yet hit the bleakness that comes as November draws to a close. It’s one of the year’s golden means.

I loved this article, especially the description of the gear in their car (I’m geeky that way). That said, I’m not really sure I care for their goal. I’m not a driver by temperament, but I do kind of like road trips. Obviously, their goal isn’t to see the countryside, but there’s something that strikes me philosophically askew to racing across like that. Of course, it’s also kind of frighteningly unsafe. I think that Jason Kottke put it best: “This is the sort of thing that is really, really cool up until the moment Roy’s tricked out BMW makes contact with a family minivan at 120mph…and then, not so much.”

Listening to the Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want, and it strikes me that there’s an odd perfection to it. Oddly, though, it’s not my favorite Stones song. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Any thoughts out there on this?

The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass is pretty fun in it’s own right, but it’s a fantastic proof-of-concept for the stylus controls. Despite some glitches (sometimes my hand obscures the boss I’m trying to fight), they work great. Reinforces my conviction that Nintendo is the Apple of the console world.