Pitch to Barry

Now that the postseason has rolled on without my local teams, the A's and the Giants both, I thought it was strange that a friend left a "Pitch To Barry" t-shirt on my chair as a gift. I mean, sure, he'll be playing next spring, but until then, what does this shirt mean?

It means give a fair challenge to the overachiever. There is nothing more frustrating for an overachiever to be given a half-assed or mangled and mis-managed challenge.

I know whereof I speak.

And then you ask, why do these mis-managers get appointed/ hired/ elected to frustrate the overachievers who after all only want to do their very best for the team?

Because people love an optimistic bully, and moreover they want THAT guy to lead us, and at BEST they want the fatalistic nerd who believes in the sanctity of fair challenges to be a sidekick or some other humiliating post, like vice-president.

This is coming from the middle of the long (ok, not long, but long for slow readers, i.e. me) Al Gore chapter in Sarah Vowell's Partly Cloudy Patriot, where she muses on the both every day real and mythological/ archetypal nature of the Nerd Versus Jock Struggle.

This is the struggle of my life, and it certainly is not behind me. I think this is one of the reasons the recall election has depressed me so soundly. The biggest, most optimistic, and most Nazi-esque candidate for governor won, in part because of a vote from the person I'm dating, who believed this cartoon-character bully couldn't be worse than what we have already, who is a pessimistic dweeb. This person I'm dating is, like me, a still-recovering-from-high-school nerd. I'm really interested in her use of her vote in that horrible election.

Is there something in us nerds that sometimes longs to, for once, be on the winning team? To just walk away from the "right" and the "wrong" of the #2 pencil blue and white test form, and just go with the "flo"? Even when the "flo" is running us over a waterfall into a morass of poverty, denied rights to minority/ marginalized parts of the community, and infrastructure failure?

I am not speaking ill of our new Gubernator, who hasn't even taken office yet, I'm just trying to get inside the head of a very intelligent person who maybe is prone- as I believe I also am- to seduction by the prospective dark fun of dirty dealing, mangled command, the overachievers being thwarted and bullies running amok.

This is the side of us nerds that watches the Sopranos, the side that dresses up as pirates for Halloween, the side that wants to learn how to properly shoot a gun. It's a fantasy that we will somehow win if we side with the bullies who inevitably seem to prevail.

But will the mis-managers take notice of our loyalty when the time comes? Will we finally be spared our regular humiliations as brainiacs who just want a fair challenge, or will we once again get a painful lesson in democracy, which is that life is not fair and democracy is MUCH more unfair? Won't we, the overachieving nerds, even the nerds who helped elect an anti-nerd to office, despite our better knowledge, keep expecting people to play fair, stepping up the plate and praying for a nice, clean pitch?

After Some Contemplation..."Kicking Our Own Bicycles," An Anology for the Recall Fiasco

Sometimes everything breaks down, and we call it a fiasco. This recall election was a total breakdown of the democratic process, and it was so massive a breakdown that we could even call it an attack on democracy. It was like the electorate was taking out its frustrations on the electoral process.

I had a boyfriend once who was a nerd, and had always been one. Riding his bike home from school he would often be cornered and beaten up, and/ or his bike would be wrecked or stolen. One time, I think after three bikes had been stolen, he was cornered, and he just got off his bike and started beating the crap out of the damn bike. The bullies fled.

This is the electorate, feeling like politicos have stolen our government (whatever that means... it's just a general feeling of not having power or representation in government), and now an election rolls around that gives the electorate a little opening to express itself rather freely. It gets off its bicycle democracy, turns on it in the middle of a circling swarm of perceived politicos, and hauls off and elects a joke for a governor. It's more than self-deprecation, more than self-loathing-- it's a self-preservation urge gone twisted and desperate, lashing out at a PROCESS, a means to an end, as guiltless as a bicycle. It's so lacking in faith that you have any power in a situation that you just turn on an innocent object and tear it apart, alternately cynical and mindless and scared.

Speaking of tearing things apart, my tabby girlcat is raptly watching with me "The Lion Queen" on the National Geographic Channel. The lioness "Scarface" is our favorite character.