Thur Thoughts

Is spring really here?  Hmmm......  I'm not sure, but Tue night's practices were very cold.  It took half an hour or more back home to warm up to a comfortable level.  In fact, I'm not sure when I've been colder, at least not recently even with the cold, cold winter.  The temperatures were forecast for the mid- to upper-50s and the Detroit readings were so-read.  My auto thermometer never went above 45, all day, and there was a strong and biting northwest wind, with blustery gusts to boot.  Part of the cold was my fault, at both practices.  I should have helped organized drills better.  For some reason I didn't.  Maybe it's another sign of senility?

Speaking of that, last Sat--the last pitch to the last batter--I was tossing BP.  All had gone well, although I was getting tired after about 45 mins.  I struggled to throw the last few strikes and really concentrated on grooving the last one, if only to get out of there.  I did groove it and the kid nailed it--right back at me.  I deflected it with my glove, but it still caught my sunglasses and ripped a tear above my left eye.  I was too intent on focusing on throwing a strike, not on fielding afterward.  And, perhaps, it's another sign of getting a bit older, that my reflexes were a tad slow.  I'm not sure if I had let it go if it would have hit me.  I'm pretty sure, had I not been wearing sunglasses, it would have been just a glancing blow, not hard at all.  Regardless, the ER MD said, "Oh, I think you'll need a couple of stitches."  I guess in medical terms, "a couple" translates to seven.  Gee, those are the first stitches I've ever had other than having a wisdom tooth removed about 30-35 years ago.  All those sports as a kid, two sports in college...and not a single stitch until now.  I guess I must have been a wimpy athlete?

I see the Obamas are after us again about what we eat.  OK, I suppose that's well-intentioned, although I resent someone telling me how I must eat.  I'm a big boy and if I want, well, a Big Boy, I should be able to eat it.  I do think there should be consequences, though, for one's choices of food.  But that's not the point here.  The Administration wants to tell us how to eat, even through the schools, but then also backs wider use/legalization of some drugs.  That seems to be a bit incongruous to me.  Of course, maybe that's just me.

I heard a term last week that has stuck with me, "Culture of Leisure."  I have been mulling it over and over.  No doubt, for the vast majority of us, we have created such a culture.  Regardless of people's belly-aching about the economy, about "income inequality," about "the greedy rich," etc., many people have lives of leisure today that I could never have dreamed about when I was growing up.  What many consider absolute necessities today were frivolous extras back then, almost toys for the wealthy.  That is, if those frivolous extras even existed 50 years ago.  Has such a culture led to people being "bored?"  (I use quotation marks for "bored" because I don't like the word.  It's misused by far too many people--like the word "ironic"--and it is not a word I identify in my life, at least not with my lifestyle.)  Is that a cause of our malaise, our troubled world today, particularly in the US?  Do we have too many "toys," things that really don't provide any meaning to life or lives?  Is life too easy, outside of a lot of the made-up maladies that keep far too many so-called "helping professions" in business?  Have we lost the sense of real accomplishment, many finally figuring out (perhaps even subconsciously) that winning a video game is not a big deal, that making the little league all-star team isn't the top of the world (not when so many make the all-star teams), that wearing an NFL jersey to an NFL game doesn't make one an NFL player, etc.?  So, then, we turn to other things to combat the "boredom," things such as shooting people with real guns, killing them with real bombs?  Perhaps all the toys have desensitized us to reality, that these are real guns, are real bombs, etc.  I don't know.  After all, in the video games (and on television, in the movies the dead people all aren't really dead).

And maybe all this leisure, all these toys, have led us to become a culture of "Peter Pans," never growing up.  We don't become adults, but willingly remain kids who play with toys, as high tech as they might be.  Again, I'm not sure, but this might be a way to explain what's gone wrong.