Big Flags and Bad Decisions

I've been thinking about updating the entries here for a while, but every time I come up with some brainstorm, I realize that (a) it's just me griping about something and/or (2) it's something I've already griped about.  I could put up a link to some old essay and be done with it, but I really don't have the interest in it and besides, if you have a horrible gripe about something in your life, you can search it in the window and up will pop a wordy version of your 30-second version of whatever you are upset about.

In the meantime, I went to the Phillies' home opener on Monday.  In some ways I question my judgement and in other ways I feel the need for some sort of Internet intervention that would keep me from clicking on junk that I should just Add to Favorites and lie down until the feeling passes.

Part of the reason I wanted to go was because "everyone else was going" (which, of course, was only partly true) and because I was anxious to get the baseball season started.  The thing that the interventionists would have reminded me of was that I had a ticket to game number two on Wednesday, and my desire to start the baseball season could be salved by watching it on television and joining the herd in two days.

After all, what is "Opening Day?"  It wasn't even the first game of the season. It was the first home game of the season.  As a society, we are pre-occupied with firsts and even-numbered anniversaries of junk that we forget about until the tenth, twentieth or 50th anniversary rolls around.  At Opening Day they roll out a giant American flag and introduce everyone on the team, including the Assistant Trainer.  Otherwise, we don't know who the Assistant Trainer is.

Sometimes we need to do something to realize that we don't want to do it anymore.  It wasn't so much that I regretted going to the game - which featured 30mph winds and a lackluster effort by the ballclub (both of which are regrettable, but also outside my sphere of influence) - but that I spent $180 for a ticket from StubHub.  Sitting in the Hall of Fame Club seemed like a good idea, and clicking that Buy button was too easy.  A concerned person at my Internet intervention would have wrested the mouse from me and stomped on it before I had the chance to spend the money.

So, there I was, less $180, being blown across the parking lot into a baseball park into a place that finds it reasonable to charge $8.75 for a pint of beer and $6.00 for a boiled hot dog on a roll.  The entire time I was there, I kept thinking "I'd rather be at work," which is a horrible thing to think, and compounded the misery of spending the money on a ticket for a game that I wound up watching on the television in the concourse of the Hall of Fame Club.

The fact that there are televisions in a concourse where a sporting event is being played just outside the window is both odd and strangely convenient.  That I was sitting at a table drinking a $8.75 beer and watching the game on one of those televisions could have been portrayed in a Norman Rockwell painting as a metaphor for the sadness of life and how modern convenience clouds our judgement.

If only I could paint.