AA Flight 2402

Editor’s Note: I wrote this last evening, but after going out on North Clark Street last night, I didn’t get a chance to post it until now, on my way out the door. I'm no longer cranky.



I’m on American Airlines flight 2402, Austin to Chicago, in the last row next to the toilets. There’s turbulence, and quite frankly I’m still not right from staying out too late last night. The occasion was my last week at my job. For the second consecutive year I’ve left a position in June to spend the summer meandering towards what comes next.

Tomorrow I will be in the bleachers, my first baseball game this season. I’m perfectly thrilled. It’s been too long. That’s the only thing counteracting my crankiness. I can’t tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to tomorrow.

It is sometimes the case that a period of your life feels paradoxically both somehow recent and distant. In some ways, it feels like yesterday, you think, and in others, like a million years ago. That is not the case for me with Chicago. It does not feel like yesterday, and it’s hard to believe it’s only been a year since I left.

I tried to remember the name of the street in Wicker Park that I would take from Milwaukee Ave. to get to my sister and brother in law’s apartment; I couldn’t do it. I already know that my favorite bar in Bucktown has been demolished and rebuilt as condos, the first time the cliché personally slapped me. So I’m slapping back with a cliché of my own: thank God Wrigley Field is yet still above time in at least a small way.

There was an article in the New Yorker a few months ago written by a woman whose name I cannot remember, and I know that it was not available online because I checked at the time I read it, wanting to cite it. It was a personal narrative by a New Yorker -- Manhattanite, actually, a distinction that matters -- and early into the piece she turned an adage on its head: New York is a great place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit there. The point being that a place like Manhattan changes not only quickly but constantly, and that while you live there you adjust to the constant adjustments -- the bakery becoming a Thai restaurant, the new construction, and so on. When you return to the city from being away, however, these changes are jarring. She’s on to something with that.

It’s true for any big city and maybe even some of the medium sized ones, and it’s certainly true for the neighborhoods in Chicago I visit, that it doesn’t take long to become not just an expat but an outsider. This is how I feel as I approach the city from the south, miles above Fort Worth. I expect to be jarred.

Which is alright. I am not concerning myself too largely with metaphysical questions of identity -- whether I’m a Chicagoan, or a Midwesterner, or a Texan, or an Austinite. Tomorrow, I’m a Cubs fan.

That doesn’t mean that the metaphysical questions are entirely gone, however. I was reminded of them by a teenager’s t-shirt in the terminal: “No such thing as curses. Just win. Chicago White Sox.” Which begs the question: is it true that there are no such things as curses?

Well, let’s come at it from the long way, because I’ve got time to kill. Are mathematical truths somehow necessary such that no universe could exist without them? Even if the entire universe -- or, if you’re sci-fi inclined, all of the universes -- were to cease to exist, or had they never existed, is it not the case that one plus one is still two? If so, then there are such things that exist above and independent from reality, like mathematical truths.

I’m not saying curses are such things, or that curses exist in some sort of realm independent of anything real. But my goodness: 99 years?!? Ye gods, indeed. Supernatural forces may just become a better explanation than natural forces. At some point, the Cubs may be defying math, and if that’s the case, maybe it takes one metaphysical entity to vanquish another.

It’s a flimsy argument, I know, if you can even call it that. It goes against reason; just because lightning strikes does not mean that Zeus is throwing the bolts from Mount Olympus. And in the case of the Cubs losing -- again -- there are plenty of natural explanations that we can get our head around, unlike the Ancient Greeks when they invented Mythology to explain phenomena.

But to admit these explanations exist is to open the door to identifying them, and it’s a lot less fun exploring the Cubs recent history than it is exploring the nature of lightning. If the Cubs were science, Benjamin Franklin probably would have been a bartender instead.

The problem is that a lot of people -- the chatterers, I call them -- are only going halfway with their explanations, and even worse, halfway with their arguments for how to achieve improvement. Trade Mark Prior, I hear. Trade Jacques Jones, I hear. But these arguments are not only flawed, they’re vacuous. And if you’ll indulge my crankiness so I can deal with it and set it aside, read on.

There has been exactly one instance in this Cubs era that a “Trade X” position was sound without a following “for Y” clause, and it was Sammy Sosa. The Cubs should trade Sammy Sosa was a sound argument because for anyone or anything was assumed, and correct. If Jim Hendry could have gotten a beer and a firm handshake from another GM, he should have taken them for Sosa after 2004, and then offered to pay for the beer. As it is they got Hairston, and via Hairston, Nevin, and that’s not bad.

But for everyone else, it makes absolutely no sense to argue “The Cubs should trade X” without saying for whom. I don’t even wanna hear it. If you want to start, “Suppose they could trade Mark Prior for ...” then we can talk. Otherwise, it’s wasted air, except maybe as venting of sympathies.

And that’s fine, venting, because Cubs fans are rightfully frustrated and we gotta direct it somewhere. But when I’m cranky, I have little patience for when people masquerade sympathies as arguments. People call that emotivism, and its prevalence underpinning too many moral arguments was the reason Nietzsche was able to pronounce God dead and ethics ultimately arbitrary. Trust me. So by way of roundabout reasoning, I’m not going to get into what the Cubs should do as far as trading their players to prepare for next season. Not until there’s something to actually talk about.

I’m also wondering where the “move Cedeno to second base” chatter came from. Did I miss a memo? Was there a public forum meeting that I slept through? All of a sudden this seems to be common thinking, and I have yet to hear anyone explain why it makes sense.

Here’s why it might: Cedeno does not slug, and it will be easier to find a slugging shortstop than a slugging second baseman. As to whether or not that stands up to reason is debatable, mainly for the same root problem: who’s to say who will be available to sign, or trade for? But Cedeno is the Cubs best shortstop, and until they have a better one, why would anyone be talking about moving him to second base?

All of this chatter, then, is a big waste of energy as far as I can tell. If you want to for-instance, say suppose you can trade Prior for Tejada without including Cedeno. Should you do it, and move Cedeno to second base? Then you got yourself a discussion. Otherwise, talk to me when there’s an argument, not just an opinion or a sentiment. More power to you if you need to vent or rant or expound or opine or chatter away; it’s just falling on my deaf ears.

Here’s why it matters, especially to me, especially today: tomorrow, I don’t want to think about anything bigger in picture than the game that they will play tomorrow. I want to get in line early in the morning and stand there. I want to run up the ramp and secure a good perch in the left field bleachers. I want to watch batting practice, and have my first Old Style of 2006. I want to keep score for the ballgame. I want the Cubs to win. And I don’t want to remember any more than necessary that this win will not help them much in terms of the 2006 season. The season is sunk, but tomorrow does not have to be.

I know there will be this chatter in the bleachers. Cubs Nation is awash with it. Some of it may even be well intentioned, or vaguely constructive.

But this will be my only game in the Wrigley Field bleachers this summer, as bad as the season has been, and I’m counting on that unique Wrigley ability of space transcending time to savor it for all I can.