Of all my faults, dithering is the greatest. Morality-wise, envy is worse, as is excessive self-regard (popularity-wise), but the fault that makes me gnash my teeth and tear my hair is dithering.
Take today, for instance. The Giants are having a victory parade downtown for winning the World Series. I grew up in Berkeley, across the Bay, and as a kid I went with my mom and my sister to a lot of Oakland A’s games. The library gave out tickets as part of an ongoing reading contest and my sister read approx. one billion books per week. I pulled my weight in the Encyclopedia Brown and Animals Do the Strangest Things categories.
But I’ve been to my share of Giants games, too. I brought my down sleeping bag to Candlestick Park and tried to hop all the way from the stands to the parking lot, like every other kid. I’ve eaten garlic fries at the new park. I like the Giants. I like professional sports in general, though I don’t like The Franchise, and the two can be hard to separate. Whenever a player appears who is too wholesome, shy, homely, devout, profane or weird to be fully commercialized, I get excited. That’s part of why I like the World Cup and the Olympics so much. The athletes seem more human, less brand, and the stakes (national pride! centuries of mutual loathing! ) are legit.
But back to the Giants. This team boasts some truly eccentric and awkward dudes, and the fans are beside themselves. I find their energy and sincerity and diversity moving. Once I got the hang of listening to games on the radio, I really dug it, and when the Giants won Game Five I ran downstairs and watched with my neighbor while the TV camera showed each player’s response to the win. I thought with a happy pang of my rowing days and how it felt to win a big race. My neighbor and I hugged and grinned. The dogs took the firecrackers and whoops and honks in stride.
So the question today was, Do I go to the parade?
Points in favor:
Happy fans
Little kids in sports gear
Feeling part of something
Unlikelihood of another such parade in my hometown any time soon
I want to see that guy with the beard and the 188 IQ
Points against:
I hate crowds
Little kids in sports gear
What if I have to wait forever to get a train home?
The only orange shirt available to me has a Detroit Tigers logo on it
Really these points were part of the great dithermash in my brain that went something like this:
I want to go so I can say I did something. I want to be part of the world instead of just an observer. But wouldn’t you be observing even if you went? Is being a fan fundamentally passive or active? Will you even remember it if you go? Will the kids whose parents take them remember? Do we do things only so we can remember them later? If I went and remembered, would the person I remembered be real, or just a con my present self is trying to pull on my future self? Am I a watcher passing myself off as a doer? Are the parents pulling the same con on their kids? Are these things ever fun or do we go as a sort of investment in the future, so we’re sure we have things to remember and know we didn’t waste our life? Doesn’t professional sports market exactly this form of nostalgia, along with Giants onesies? So am I a dupe? Am I a misanthrope? Are we all trying to meddle with the past before it is the past, making it happier or neater or clearer than it is/was? Do the marketers know this? Don Draper knows this. What kind of a person thinks about this stuff instead of just getting on the train? What kind of person stays home and writes about thinking about going instead of going? If I hate crowds is that lame? If I’m worried my back will hurt from all the standing around is that superlame? Would it be poserish to go since I’m not really a fan? Would the right shirt make me a fan? Or can I go because I love my city, most of the time? Will I feel lonely if I go? Will I feel lonely if I stay? I don’t really want to go. I want to go! No, you want to say you went. You want to tell a story about your life that is different from your life. Do I wish my story had a different protagonist? How is enacting all that by getting on the train different or better than sitting at home and writing about it? Is physical activity superior to mental activity? Is that why we love sports? Because they do stuff and we think about doing stuff? Who are you trying to impress? Why does it feel like a failure not to go? At what am I failing, precisely? If this is something for other people to do, why is that? Why am I not that person? Why is my neighbor not that person either? Do I want to be that person? Clearly I wonder about her. But curiosity is not the same as desire. Is curiosity the opposite of commitment?
I never made a decision. I just knocked around until it was too late and the car with Willie Mays in it had already gone by.
But here’s the coda: by writing about it, I recovered from it. For better or worse, this is the record I kept. The wrong orange shirt, the right record.
again–i love you!!! love your mind and words.
yesterday i sat at a bus stop on college avenue in oakland (yep, back at the damn bus stop). i sat at the bus stop because i couldn’t get on a BART train to get to work! i’ve never seen anything like it. there was a line of 100+ people curving out of the station, down the stairs and out onto the street. all these people with this incredible energy and purpose. they were on their way the parade. it was 10:00 a.m. on wednesday morning. i sat at the bus stop and chatted with the man standing next to me. he told me he had just by chance worn an orange shirt–that he didn’t realize what a strange twist of fate led him to pull out his old orange shirt until people started high-five-ing him as he walked down the street. i said ‘i find this fascinating i’ve never seen this kind of shared joy, pride, and action…and it is utterly bizarre to me that all of these people are going to see a few truck loads of men pass by who are millionaires. he said “i think it is depressing.” In the past I would have been cynical and disgusted and depressed too but I actually felt the opposite. even though i can totally entertain the cynicism and disgust and depression–i actually felt amazed, in awe, curious and a little sad. i looked at a bunch of photos of the players in the moments after the win–i was astounded looking at these images of grown men ripped open with the most profound sense of uber triumph–growling, bulging, screaming, clawing, losing their minds with heroic elation. what does this all mean? don’t have fully coherent thoughts about this…but thought I would share. xo, h
Hi dear Holly! I felt the same way looking at those images of the players. It’s hard to feel cynical in the face of their excitement (to use one lame word to sum up all your wonderful words for it) and the excitement of the fans, but it’s also hard to feel time pride without feeling manipulated by the Giant Hand of Marketing. I would just switch to the Sport of Kings, which makes no bones about it being all about millionaires, except I get so anxious for the horses I get an asthma attack. xxoo.