Inside the diamond

I've never had the kind of life that allowed innocent enjoyment.

I carry a number of pieces of baggage with me, including my childhood poverty, the "white trash" syndrome; sexual victimization; the "fat child" syndrome; and the various roles I learned to play in my family of origin, including sickness, flakiness, helplessness, neediness, and invisibility. The stories are boring; you've read them all before. No doubt, if you keep reading this blog, you'll read them again. I won't be able to keep myself from talking about them forever.

Anyway, having two children who are heroin addicts who won't speak to me, and having been diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer which will kill me sooner or later, I have a hard time with much of American culture.

Including baseball games.

I never thought I'd be interested in sports, but I have been following the UConn Huskies basketball teams. Basketball, especially on the college level, requires teamwork and smarts. Not to mention finely tuned athletic bodies.

Baseball, on the other hand, allows beer bellies, and requires excellence in one or two skills. The most important of these seems to be spitting.

Baseball players, in case you haven't noticed, practice a form of spitting that can only be described as "projectile". This projectile spitting happens much more frequently than a play in the game. Sometimes I think if they run out of saliva, they must be shooting out gray matter.

Watch them sometime. Most of them manage to shoot the spit out at a ninety degree angle from their mouths. I find myself wondering if they are all required to practice this, and/or if they have small openings drilled in their front teeth by some unsavory dentist.

This is a secret, folks. The elephant in the living room. The only picture I've been able to find of this projectile spitting thing is from 1997. It involved some guy named Roberto Alomar, who played for the Orioles, spitting in the umpire's face. He was suspended for five days.

I did find one discussion on this phenomenon. If you're interested--it also shows the picture of the uncouth baseball player in the act of spitting--you can go here: http://www.h-net.org/~arete/archives/threads/spit.html

And as Rocky the Squirrel says, now for something you'll really like--at least I hope--I'll load my new assemblage piece in the next post.