Life comes at you in a series of pitches; a fastball of joy, a slider of shit, baseballs of being that the great cosmic inventor of physics winds up and throws to you.
The catcher’s mitt of your mind can easily handle most of these pitches Other times you’ve signaled for another fastball down the middle, but this pitcher decides to throw you the most vicious breaking ball imaginable. The stuff of Randy Johnson’s most sick and twisted dreams. It’s unexpected. It’s something you’ve never seen before and before you can’t react. It’s in the dirt and screaming past you. You just realize that the bases are loaded with your fears. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Is the error going to be assigned to you or the pitcher? Are you going to be the reason you lose, or will you be sent down to the minors, knowing everyone is looking at you knowing you’re there because you failed?
Melodramatic? Sure, but I’ve felt like this for awhile now. I don’t know how to get out of it, but I do know I have in the past and I will again. I know I’ll feel like this again. It’s part of who I am. It comes and goes. It is just life. We think we control what happens to us, yet we know deep down that ain’t happening.
That brings me to two books I’ve just read this week (weird segue to a book review huh? Deal with it).
First was “The Destiny of the Republic-a tale of madness, medicine and the murder of a president” by Candice Millard.
This is an almost unbelievable story of how a dirt poor and fatherless boy became the president of a college at 26, and the 20th President of the United States at age of 49 (a position he neither wanted nor campaigned for) only to be shot by an insane would be assassin who inflicted a non-lethal wound…. make that “would have been” a non- lethal wound if the culture of America and the physicians in America weren’t so ignorant. But, like the sacrificial lamb, it took the unnecessary death of a young and promising president to change American views on antisepsis, civil service reform as well as moving the nation’s post civil-war healing process in the right direction.
A fine example of great cosmic wild pitch.
The second book was “Mile Marker Zero: The Moveable Feast of Key West” by William McKeen.
This book follows the new “lost generation” (more found than lost) as it did its best to emulate Hemingway in their own way.
The water of this gumbo of art was Tom McGuane. The other key ingredients in this recipe were the likes of Tom Corcoran, Jimmy Buffett, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Guy de la Valdene, Russell Chatham, Hunter S. Thompson, Jim Harrison, (to name a few) alcohol and weed. Add to taste the spices of smuggling, pirate legacy, heat and humidity, and you’ve got Key West circa 1969-1977. That’s when Buffett released Margaritaville and the Key West of the new Lost Generation began to collapse on itself from its own gravity. The combined creative mass of Hemingway, McGuane, Williams, Thompson, and Buffett exploded into a supernova. The resulting nebula of old stories, old lies, and old dreams swirled around the little island drawing in with its gravity the wannabes and the modern-day carpetbagging remoras that feed on them. They are ones wanting the “stuff of legend” without giving some sacrifice of their soul to have created it. All they need is a t-shirt shop, a photograph, and an anecdote and they can go back to Phoenix or Baltimore and wear their Sloppy Joe’s t-shirt with the picture of Hemingway on it, and tell their friends via Facebook and Twitter they had a (sip of a) Mojito (“These are awful Marge. Are you sure he drank these?”) where “Papa” used to drink. When actually the real Sloppy Joes is across the street and down a-ways. It’s now called Capt. Tony’s.
Another example of unexpected life happening to people and the world changed because of it and how the reacted to that “wild pitch”.
