Friday, August 18, 2006

scenes from a punk rock bar

The conversation started a few weeks ago, when I confessed to one of my best friends, V., that I had been writing this blog.

This has been a hard thing for most people I know to understand. Unless they are already baseball people, they are bemused, confused, cynical,patronizing, condescending and a million other similar adjectives. It doesn’t compute. They don’t know how to respond to it. They leave voicemail messages like, “Well, it’s Sunday afternoon, so you’re probably at a baseball game...” And all I ever want to respond is, Yeah, asshole, I probably am. Where are you? Drinking in the latest hipster bar in LA or Brooklyn or wherever? That’s certainly new and unique and progressive. You are seeing the same people you always see.

But it is hard. It is like I have announced that I’ve turned Republican or religious or something (and I don’t much care if you are one or the other or both, leave it). It’s just baseball.

This week V. is in New York, and we are out drinking on Avenue B. There is a game, but I have one night to hang out with her while she is here on business.
Shaking her head: “I don’t understand it.”
“Neither do I.”
“So you write every day?”
“Sometimes.”
“I think it’s great that you’re writing every day again. You’re excited about it.”
“I am, that’s why I started it.”
“What do you write about?”
“The games, the people, what it’s like to sit there, what I’m learning about...”
“You write about the experience.”
“Right. It’s not that much different than me writing about music.”
“You don’t write about numbers or statistics or anything like that--” She looks fearful, for a second, trying to figure out how I have turned into a person who likes sports.
“No, no, not at all. I can’t do numbers. I know more or less what they mean but I could stare at them for hours and they would never make sense to me.”
“And people read your blog? Still?”
“Yeah, still. Some people read me every day.”
Another incredulous look.
“With all the things you have written about...”
“Well, this is the next thing.”
“But this! Of all things.”
“You know, I never thought I would be the person who would go and choose to sit in a baseball stadium, and know who the players are, and follow the rivalries, or come home and say, ‘Honey, can’t we just watch Baseball Tonight? I don’t feel like I know what happened around the league today.’”
She shudders.
“And I listen to sports talk radio.”
Horror now. “You don’t!”
“And I get upset about what some of the callers say.”
“NOooooO!” She reaches for her cocktail. Gulps.
“I love it because it is new, and it’s different, and I’m outside, andthere’s air, and there’s beer, and the green is just so soothing and peaceful, and I get to talk to people I would never ever in my daily life have any opportunity to have a conversation with. I’m not talking about the war or politics or gossip or what musician X did this week or what so-and-so wrote on the internet. I can have conversations with 9 year old Hispanic girls on the 7 train, a bank teller up on E. 82nd Street, the people who sit around me every Tuesday and Friday, the old drunk Polish guys who see me walking home from the game in a Mets shirt and want to know why we lost. It takes me out of myself and my world and my life and engages me in the rest of the planet.”

And that was something that even she could understand and approve of.

This approximated the conversation Wednesday night. When I was out West I had come clean about this blog to her, my independent businesswoman, total leftist-feminist-progressive, former anarchist-punk-rocker, modern revolutionary pal. We talk about the ACLU and police brutality and fashion trends and life and love. Sports was so far away from anything we considered to be our orbit.

But V., unlike most of the rest of my friends, is fascinated and supportive and curious and asking a million questions, and, while flabbergasted at this turn of events, is thrilled for me. The only thing she wanted to know is when I was going to get my merchandise line together.