As regular readers will know I am certain that we have this one life to live and that is it.
So when it ends - well, bye and thanks for trying. Not that I will be aware of owt, all will have gone, recognition, speech, sight, hearing, intelligence (the world should feel sad to lose my 157 IQ and my vast (successful) experience in IT, but as the commercial world seems to regard that as unimportant and is happy to leave me to starve, why should the rest of the world worry?).
Meanwhile back to this life. Towards the end of the last football (North American = soccer) season I got tired of the big clubs acting like business monopolies - actually Microsoft and company think more like democracies than the top European football clubs these days. If anyone challenges your monopoly, buy their best players .....
After years of being overly concerned about some megarich dumboes kicking a ball around, I decided enuff was enuff, and kicked any interest into the proverbial touch. The last remaining interest in sport is baseball - when the World Series ends this week, whether the Red Sox win or lose, I shall think about letting that go as well.
One point to be made here - if your team loses, it is not the end of the world. Losing your job, not being able to exercise your talents (OK, kicking a ball around for money if you are good enough), getting into debt, not having a permanent roof over your head, being obsessed that Margaret Thatcher really knew what she was doing - these are serious problems. They matter, they are important. As are being stuck in a war situation, suffering severe health or addiction problems usw.
But your team lost? Ho-hum. The world will continue to turn, and if you have a job that you enjoy and money coming in from somewhere honest (yes, I know that line is getting thinner by the day) - why the **** are you getting upset over some silly vastly overpaid idiot who cannot shoot straight or hit the ball over the wall, or walked in a run?
It is 38 years ago now, but I still remember one of the strangest stories that I ever heard. There are and were two large soccer teams in the city of Sheffield in the North of England. I taught in a school there for a year. In 1974 I left. I loved Sheffield but hated the job, and as my father had health problems, moving closer to home made some sense.
The following year one of Sheffield's soccer teams, Sheffield Wednesday, was relegated to the third tier of the English game for the first (but ultimately not the last) time in history. I picked up a snippet from the national press about a 17-year-old supporter of that team who became so depressed as a result, he committed suicide.
Nowt about his job, family, whether he had a girlfriend, school maybe? Or difficulties with his parents or .... No, merely because he was a fanatical supporter of a lousy team, his life became intolerable.
It takes some believing, but there are many people who have a similar fanaticism. Whether they would go to that extreme in a bad year, though?
Sad, and weird, and definitely not worth it. Perspective? Sorry, but I will not even try to understand. Eventually you have to learn to switch off and switch out.
Anyway there will be other days and other seasons if you are that keen. How many Red Sox supporters have lived through the 2012 and 2013 seasons with contrasting emotions? So even if you do experience a bad year, it is not forever.
Not like losing your job and being stuck in permanent poverty. Not like losing a limb and having to live without it. Not like become addicted to heroin and wanting to live without it!
So come on. Remember that they are grotesquely overpaid and it is only a game! Eventually! You have this one life, there must be other ways to get through it - at least if the politicians, the megarich, the greedy business community and the neo-Fascists in our midst will let us!
No comments:
Post a Comment