chapter 3: baseball

I wake up and check my phone to see if there are any messages that would give me a clue about what happened last night. There is a message I sent to the red haired girl. It just says “you should come over.” She responded to my request by saying she was out of town. I wonder if she actually is in town. I wonder if she deeply regrets spending the night with me. I wonder if she knew I was only texting her drunk. I wonder if this offends her. If anything, she should be honored I went through all the hard work of getting drunk just to send some stupid text. But people never think about those things do they? Most people can only recognize the result, completely ignoring the work. The more I think about it though, this woman doesn’t strike me as the oversensitive type. She doesn’t seem like the type to overthink things. Her indifference to almost everything is what I truly like about her. Her lack of caring about everything takes all of the pressure off of me. If nothing matters to her, then nothing matters to me. It is like slipping into a trance. Who knew it could really be that simple?

There were two other numbers I had texted that weren’t saved in my phone. I had sent a message to both saying the same thing: “you should come over.” Neither had responded. I delete them both. It is too embarrassing to keep them. If I can't see them then they don't exist. It is kind of like that experiment they did with the cat in the box. It is dead and alive at the same time until you look in the box. By looking in the box you kill the cat, or save its life. I think it is better to just not look into the box. I could never live with the guilt that I killed a cat. I would have to climb inside my own box and wait for someone to look in at my dead body so that I would actually be dead. The funny thing about the whole experiment is that if you just leave the box there forever then the cat will definitely die. By doing nothing you actually do something, and that something is murder. The experiment implies that we play the role of God, and I have never liked that idea. That is way too much responsibility. It seems to imply that if we just keep our eyes closed and lie in bed then no one will get hurt. Nothing bad will happen, and nothing will exist. Unfortunately, sometimes I have to be awake. I have to open my eyes. I have to get out of my bed. When I do this I drink. When I drink I send texts I regret. When I realize these texts have been sent I delete them. Then they do not exist.

The anxiety that always begins after a night of blacking out is hitting me like the blow of a passing car. I know the pattern. I lay in bed thinking of anything to stop thoughts of what I might have done the night before. The harder I try to not think about it, the more I inevitably obsess over the details of the previous night. A circuit, a system, that can only be interrupted by a greater and more powerful system. This greater, more powerful system is the depression that comes screaming into my brain. Like an active shooter at a wedding. The ending of some great romantic comedy, turned back into a tragedy once again. During these spells I always keep my curtains tightly drawn. The sun has always been an enemy of mine. It gives me headaches. It exposes my blemishes. It brings everything to the light. As I gaze at the curtains I am reminded of the man in the brown hat. I get up out of bed. Squinting I walk to my living room and peer between the blinds. Light attacks my pupils. The car isn’t outside.

I sit on my couch, intermittently glancing out the window, petting my cats as they purr and sleep. My phone goes off. It is an unsaved number. This fills me with great dread. It could be anyone. It could be about anything. It could be the police. It could be a killer. I feel all the control I had carefully built around my day slowly start to slip into a deep, dark, cavernous well. I wish I had a penny to throw down the well, so I could wish the well did not exist. I look down at the message. It says: “sorry I fell asleep.” I quickly delete the number.

For the past few nights I keep having this dream. In the dream I am walking this animal through the desert on a leash. It is not a typical type of animal, and I do not know how to describe it. In fact during the day I can not even think of what it would look like if I drew it on paper. It is like when you read a book and you picture the protagonist in your head, but then if someone asks you what color of hair they have, or how tall they are you don’t know. They just are. They exist on the lines of the page, and in the shadows of the mind, but they could never be pulled into the physical world. The animal is a giant, but has this lovable goofy charm. Like the giant shy kid at school who should be a bully, but writes poetry instead. Around the animal’s neck is a sign that says: “SPY.” I can tell in the dream that the animal is very timid and scared. Every time I go to comfort the animal, my phone rings, and when I answer it someone is screaming at me in Russian. Despite the fact that I do not know a single word of Russian I know for a fact that they are saying: “Do not go near ‘the beast.’ The beast is a spy. If you touch the beast you will be shot.”

Even though I feel bad for the beast, in the dream the threat of getting shot stops me from comforting the beast. It’s funny, because if someone in my actual life threatened to shoot me, I wouldn’t be scared at all. These days I would probably encourage them to take my life. I guess I value my life in my dreams more than my life when I am awake. As I walk through the desert with the beast I see a phone booth surrounded by three cacti with flowers growing at their base. Red, blue, and yellow flowers. I go to the phone inside of the phone booth and pick it up. I call 911. A man answers and asks me where I am. “I don’t know where I am!” I tell the man. He says, “If I don’t know where you are, I cannot help you.” After I hang up the phone I continue to walk away from the sun, because in the desert when the sun is beating down on you all you can think about is avoiding its burn. As I walk away from the sun I can feel my teeth begin to loosen in my skull. I pull at my front tooth and it pulls right out. I toss it on the ground. The beast eats it. I continue to pull out teeth as I walk, and the beast continues to eat my teeth. The phone rings again. “Stop feeding the beast,” a voice tells me in Russian, “If you feed him again, you will be shot.” “Okay.” I tell the man. As my teeth fall out after this I put them in my pocket. Just as the sun begins to set behind me I see a gas station over a hill.

This is usually the part of a dream or story where the gas station would be a mirage, but as I approach the gas station I can tell that it is real. There is only one pump outside. The station has no doors or windows, and everything is covered in sand. A fan is blowing at the counter on a man who looks like John Wayne. He wears a black hat, a jean jacket, and is hunched over behind the counter playing solitaire, ashing his cigarette in an ashtray filled with cigarette butts. “How do you do, kid?” he says to me. I run to the freezer and purchase two Coca Colas and drink them immediately. I pay for the Coca Colas and then remember the beast. I purchase a bottle of water, and one of those red solo cups. “See you again soon, partner,” the cowboy says to me. “Thank you, sir,” I say back to him. I pour the water into the cup and set it down by the beast. The beast drinks ravenously from the cup. I realize more of my teeth must have fallen out as I drank the Coca-Cola. I must have swallowed them. Then I hear a gunshot. Then I wake up.

The man in the brown hat just pulled up in front of my house. I heard an engine approach and then begin to idle. I look between the curtains in my living room. He is in his car, and he is staring straight in my window. I pull the curtains back together and remember something from last night. I remember talking about baseball to a man at the brewery. He was short and puffy and arguing that he loved watching baseball. He wore some expensive looking watch. Why do baseball fans always wear watches? Isn’t the whole point of baseball that you are supposed to ignore time. That is why they call it a pastime. Because you literally just sit there and pass the time. I had told the puffy man that people only love the idea of watching baseball. That in a modern world there are far too many superior forms of entertainment. I had told him that in the early 20th century life was so boring that baseball was exciting. It is why those pioneer children thought a hoop and a stick was as exciting as an Iphone. We don’t play with hoops and sticks anymore do we? No.

History and tradition were what made baseball so much better than other sports, the puffy man had told me. This made sense because I had noticed he was wearing a cross necklace and drinking a Diet Coca Cola. He was clearly a Christian. Christianity is founded on tradition, and caffeine. This was a man who could be entertained in a church pew, so baseball was the next logical step in the hierarchy of boredom that this man happily bowed before. He also couldn’t be a football fan because football is played on Sundays. So he lied to himself and decided that baseball was the greatest American sport. There is no way that Jesus died on the cross for the sins of mankind just so we could spend four to six hours watching bloated men in pants throw a white ball back and forth.

I don’t like the thought of baby-faced, bloated Christians coming to breweries. I liked it better when Christians were teetotalers. It meant you could go to a bar without having to talk about baseball or Jesus Christ. Bars were sacred places where men went if they really wanted to sin. Since these days every type of person goes to a bar, there really aren’t any places where you can go to feel that creeping sensation of taboo. The only time I truly feel seedy is when I try to buy speed in the back alley from this homeless guy named Forest. Something about the whole experience makes me feel totally filthy. I love it. My heart beats a little faster just thinking about it. There never are Christians in alleys. In fact, it's one of the few places they aren’t at these days. I’m sure I said and did ridiculous things to try and shock the puffy Christian man until he finally took the hint and walked away. I hope I just went home after that. I’m so shy that I am completely humiliated by the idea of my eccentricities on full display in a public place.

I wish I could just be normal. If only I just felt happy and didn’t think. Went to work. Loved my wife. Cared about my kids. Went to church on Sunday. Found comfort in the Lord. Watched baseball in my La-Z-Boy recliner. No wonder that is the American dream. It all sounds so perfect and comforting. And I could have it all, if it wasn’t for me and the waking nightmare that is my life. My paranoia. My mind. A reinforced, steel room, filled with water, that houses my brain. It can never be shut off. It must lament in slow agony forever. Is life even worth living if you only feel pleasure when you are sedated or asleep? That is a question I do not want to grapple with. The beer is doing nothing to make me tired tonight. I’m going to take a couple Benadryl and stop thinking until tomorrow.