The Boring, The Bad, and the Beautiful
Slow down, you move too fast
The pleasures of summer in New England — swallows flitting and flashing across the valley, strawberries plump and sweet in the vegetable garden, blue sky and wind drying the laundry on the line.
And yet, sojourner on the way, these eyes are constantly scanning the horizon for passage elsewhere. I have a hard time with the present, with beauty that distracts from the mission, the purpose. I need to intentionally take the time to reflect on what I see, what lies beneath.
What is the mission, what purpose if it doesn’t serve in the moment? All we have is here, now. Everything else is illusion.
Watched a movie last night, Eephus, which I do not recommend to anyone other than die-hard masochists who are also baseball fans, two subsets of people with a large overlap, in my humble opinion. You have to be a masochist to enjoy watching baseball sometimes, and this movie about a boring and bad baseball game, the last game of a Massachusetts summer league in its last season of existence, exploited the same masochistic tribal affiliation that values loyalty over personal satisfaction, teamship over individuality, and tradition over common sense that keeps fans coming back year after year no matter what the team’s fortunes bring.
Watching Eephus, an essentially boring movie to its final moments became a shared ritual about baseball, about America itself, and it made me wonder what I was doing there. But crucially, I also could not leave because, well, it wasn’t over yet.
At best, I told myself, Eephus was a wistful homage to the old favorite pastime and the pastoral age that spawned it and is now almost entirely eclipsed in the North American homeland. It had no larger frame than the field, destined to be the site of a new school and thus the soon to be destroyed and hallowed site of the last ever game between the two teams of recreational guys who just wanted to play until the very end.
With no intentional satire or irony, what is depicted is the fraternal world of old-time, small town New England manhood, with all of its willful ignorance, knee-jerk violence and downright absurdity. Ironically for me though, by celebrating a sport that in itself is a nostalgic paean to our rural past, the movie forces us to slow down and appreciate what we are about to lose. This perpetual nostalgia for the past with all its warts and dirty stains, is a necessary and important thing to recognize.
It’s a fine line between blind self-congratulation and aware self-acceptance, and like America itself, Eephus walks that line confidently and unambigously. If you’re not a fan of both baseball and America, though, I don’t recommend it.