Baseball to me way back when

It's the fourth again. This being that time of year, I suppose a post on baseball would be deemed appropriate and less surprise.

This post/poem really fails rather badly at explaining its main point—why the appreciation males have for sports and baseball in particular can somehow cause a sane clarity in people about sadism and males controlling girls that could possibly avoid some sort of evil apocalypse. I'm not looking at things exactly the right way, I guess, or, yeah, there's something a little crazy in there. I mean, my explanations might be valid in explaining a slight such association, but I seem to be trying to want to make a more important and fundamental point that I suppose just eludes me. Anyway, on an intellectual level, baseball still seems to me kind of stupid mostly, as I've mostly thought true since 11^th grade, and even emotionally, I kind of think it largely is. Still, there's something sort of to it I guess, and vaguely I feel whenever one has confused feelings into such matters possibly involving apocalypse, it does seem best to hurl up high from a distance such meagre inspiration as one has out into the open for public inspection (or, as the case may be, the few sufficiently interested in examining the matter further) by those who come across the landed missive—the public too may help in figuring out what I am getting at. I suppose avoiding apocalypse ideally a democratic open process should be, and anyways, it's not the absolutely safest sort of thing to keep secrets about, I guess because people will yeah think you're secretly plotting to take over the world or something when you have something to say about it but don't do so and they see you thinking.

For a good while, I have had quite ambivalent attitudes toward sports, and spectator sports in particular. But about a week ago, I sort of relived my childhood feelings toward that in a poem (at end of this post). I suppose it still mostly seems to me that as a kid I liked sports too much. Sports can be what insanity tends to like too much. But in a way, this being the case gives sports its value. A large part of success in athletics arises from playing very sane. Take baseball. Play like the ball is a beast to be obliterated, and you'll swing with power—more precisely, with a swing such that if it encountered an object that offered much resistance, much force would be applied for a good while during the swing after the object offered the resistance—, because such power is helpful in knocking the beast down. But what determines the energy a baseball receives is determined mainly just by the energy transferred during the transient impact, determined basically just by bat speed upon impact and where the ball is hit on the bat. Even bat speed should be sacrificed (especially by hitters not so much seeking home runs as a higher batting average) for the sake of a smoother shorter swing more capable of being changed (or withheld) quickly and accurately according to the trajectory of the baseball. Such precision is not necessary for beast bashing. And the enthusiasm and determination, so appropriate for desperate struggles with nastiness, as it can keep one fighting after having been compromised, really gets in the way of the calm boringness and artistic sameness of checking whether the pitch is likely in the strike zone. Similarly with other sports. Play defensive line like a savage and the screen pass will ruin you. Play football like you're up against a bunch of forcible sodomizers and you not only will incur too many penalties, but also you won't play with the vaguely gay-like artistic feeling so necessary because football is a fast game where (except in practice) reactions should mostly led by feeling. But there is a continuum of sports. Football, from its high level of physicality, is better at eliciting the insane emotions, but for most people the physicality of it is much greater than anything real world that might require a very sane response. It's easier to be sane about baseball, but such insanities that exist about it perhaps are more similar to the real world ones that need to be understood. Golf is way out there beyond baseball. What golf is concerned about is so different from anything that would cause unsheltered people to be insane about, it would seem to lie way out on the continuum and not serve much purpose by way of training people to be sane. I do not like golf—it is too dull—but it is good in the sense that it is a sport that rich people care about, and perhaps rich people, having an elitism that denies any significance to anti-abuse emotions, most are in need of sports. Baseball I think was the best sport when I was a kid. But in the period after that, football probably became better, I guess because football tested for hormone use much before baseball did, and wide-spread steroid, etc., use in baseball for a while at least made the game stupid brutish. Basketball, hockey, and other sports like soccer are presumably fine, too, but our neighborhood was unsuitable for basketball—not being sufficiently paved with long stretches between baskets suitable for running—and even more hockey wasn't possible because only once did the lake ever freeze enough to skate on it (skating, which I've learned just in past few years at a rink during a few sessions, is great fun, but oh well), and soccer, well, that just wasn't played in our neighborhood. And sports tends to be more interesting if one has played them at least slightly.

As I've gotten older, sports became less enjoyable. Neighborhood football becomes less fun and more painful as speeds and weights increase simultaneously. And after elementary school, baseball (the only organized sport I did, which I only played in elementary school) and the other sports I knew of I figured more-or-less required to a certain degree guys showering near each other and wearing athletic supporters, i.e, a type of underwear with a hole in the butt (and being practiced in remaining sane while walking around in public wearing underwear with a hole in the butt seems of limited utility and not much of a fun accomplishment). As someone with natural anti-sodomy sensibilities who was underweight, who only once before college went to the bathroom during school (in the fourth-grade, I think, during a stomach ache, I suppose I had eaten too much food), no, uh-uh, that was not for me (and besides I was not very skilled in sports). Even watching sports very gradually became less fun, until now it is only moderately fun, and not something I do much. (Though it is easy to spend much time playing computer games.) I'll still watch a Vikings game occasionally, and girls' gymnastics and ice skating are cool, but the latter for obviously totally different reasons than what I am talking about. (I was weird growing up because, though living in Maryland and having nothing to do with Minnesota, I only liked Minnesota sports teams, at least before Carew left the Twins.) I suppose as one gets older and more familiar with the emotions concomitant with sports, one gets more practiced with dealing with all the insane emotions about them, which makes sports less useful (and also less likely to cause you to like them for insane reasons).

Anyway, I've more or less held the view of the preceding two paragraphs for a while. But lately I've been beginning to see another good thing about sports. When girls are captivated by love, they often get this weird tendency to make sure they can hate other males, because if they couldn't hate bad males as normal, that would be a sign their love is fake, caused for example by being under the influence of sodomy chemicals that work merely by making it much easier to feel love and much harder to feel hate. The more controlling the male is, the more likely the girl is to enjoy whatever hate she feels towards others, because, after all, it's when girls are being controlled that sodomy is most relevant, the whole purpose of sodomy being control or even enslavement, and naturally, like any other testing, testing for sodomy is most relevant when there is an appreciable possibility of the existence of what is being tested for. The same sort of characteristics of sports that make insanity mostly incompatible with effective play should I imagine make this sadistic cruelty (which also can be somewhat insane) mostly incompatible.

That girls naturally are most sadistic when being controlled by a male might lead people to think that somehow there be something natural or fundamental about males forcing girls into being cruel to others. But girls' imaginings tend to be quite fantastical rather than real. Boys just plain like their model trains real-looking, but girls are less that way about their toys, I mostly think. Girls' sadism mainly lives in their fantasy world, as it should. Admittedly, there is this much to be said about girls being sadistic—if a girl enjoys being cruel toward others in a seemingly loving sexual context while being controlled, she isn't probably being sodomized. If human sacrifice were something common and appropriate in our culture, something could be said for girls performing the sacrifices while acting on their sadistic fantasies according to their desires, because then the sodomizers or their mates wouldn't be doing the killing, but rather sex partners of males who give sexual pleasure without sodomy (because females feeling love on account of sodomy can't hardly feel or enjoy hate toward others, sodomy being a kind of love potion). Semen contains chemicals like PGE2 that increase sensitivity to pain making torture more terrifying—sodomy is fundamentally about torture and physical violence, and accordingly perhaps the most disastrous thing (though it is all too typical in history) that can happen to a society is for a bunch of nasty sodomizers to satisfy their desire to torture, rape, and kill upon it. But we do not live in a society where there is human sacrifice or where there is any appropriate possibility of it any time soon (certainly when there is much inter-breeding between genetically diverse people, such human sacrifice seems unusually inappropriate, and that is very much what the world has now on account of the many recent advances in travel; and it is dangerously apocalyptic for attitudes toward human sacrifice to change abruptly toward more sacrifice, and most of the world hasn't practiced human sacrifice, well, any time lately), so girls turning their clean sadistic fantasies into reality would appear to be amaaaayzingly fucking stupid and not something a reasonable male would want to force a girl to do. But that is beside my main point. Even if human sacrifice were reasonable, it would be very wrong for males to force girls into harming, because even sodomizers can force girls into killing and torturing (even if they can't force them into enjoying it for its own sake), and so one would lose the main moral justification for girls killing out of a sexual sadism that is enjoyable to them, namely, that at least they almost certainly aren't killing and torturing because they are controlled by likely rapacious sodomizers who have turned them into zombies acting not from natural brain predilections but from terror caused by PGE2 up their butt or down their throat.

Anyway, it is very good for girls to not want to be forced by males into cruelties. Indeed, because girls do tend to feel more clean sadism when being controlled, there be much conflation in the minds of people between girls being forced by controlling sodomizers into accepting or encouraging torture or killing and girls who are captivated by love fantasizing about being cruel just because they enjoy that they can. Now, girls probably mostly don't mind being controlled when having sadistic fantasies; in fact, since they have sadistic fantasies largely to test the cleanliness and appropriateness of such control the male has over them, one could say they might even appropriately more enjoy being controlled then. But the control should be largely beauty-based (or so it feels) and definitely not be control for the purposes of encouraging actual killing or harming; nor would the latter sort of control be expected to be enjoyable to the female, since that is the sort of thing even sodomizers could do. Sodomizers are forever trying to make people think the evil tortures they inflict and demand girls and others accept are somehow analogous to the mostly innocuous sadistic fantasies girls use as a test when they are being controlled. Actually, Hitler and Stalin types can and do use this confusion to their evil advantage; the danger is real and girls should be admired for taking it seriously. That said, I sort of wonder whether girls might be a little more discriminating there. I guess in the so-called romance novels that females tend to read there tends to be the dashing controlling hero who darkly forces the female into a mishmash of sketchy and merely rewarding behaviors using a mishmash of nasty and clean sexual behaviors. That's not how it is. If a guy is decent and not nasty, then if he controls a female (by only having especially loving feelings toward her when she behaves as desired) otherwise than by sodomy, it's hard to see why he would use this control to force her to harm others, since she wouldn't need to be forced into doing something she enjoys thinking about if somehow it were safe and reasonable for her. Anyway, the poem below is about how wanting to force girls to harm others may well be akin to the crazy dumb emotions that can get in the way of winning baseball games, and how girls for that reason might like guys somewhat for enjoying sports and might come to appreciate that a girl enjoying being controlled when fantasizing about being cruel is totally different from a guy forcing her to be cruel. The poem is also (more poetically, actually) about how I felt toward baseball cards, which I suppose overlaps somehow, but I don't understand that. Looking back, I look back more fondly on the time I spent tinkering with baseball cards than I look back on the other amusement I received from sports, but I don't really know why.

Minnesota Twins 1977

We dream all of our past amusements

Before I became a serious person

I wasn't.

I should not have changed.

Dealing out baseball cards for no reason

Stacking them according to different schemes

Imagining how that would win.

I remember in second grade

before joining my first team

I was told there might be a trying out

registration day.

Somehow, before showing up I imagined myself

in the all-purpose room (the cafeteria)

with wiffle bat

and the coach pitching the wiffle ball to me

and BAM the wiffle ball went

faster and farther than had been ever seen

I ran around the cafeteria—home run!—with a sense of deserved gleeful joyous dignified abandon

near the giant paper-mache dinosaur perhaps—we made it in kindergarten

standing a testament to past glory—

as all the onlookers gaped in awe.

Deserved because I hit it.

So conformist I was

in fifth-grade

waiting for the pitch

I put my tongue in my cheek

to look like Rod Carew.

Knew nothing of chewing tobacco.

Make weird face and it disconcerts the pitcher.

Embarrassing.

I really wanted Carew to hit .400

and would check the box score each morning.

It seems a better thing to have wished for than

ingratiating myself with the scary nasty boys

passing so-called girly germs

right before they changed

overnight into claiming to already have fully adult sex desires.

Much better.

When I got serious I sold the baseball cards.

Baseball cards is not mathematics nor even useful knowledge,

an improper consideration for the serious mathematician.

It seemed . . . entirely appropriate to sell them,

that part of my life all done,

I'd profit and wash the commodity farther away.

I saw excess drunkenness at college.

I look back at rejecting the drunkenness fondly,

only,

I wish I had been a more discriminating.

I remember going to the dentist a few days before graduating from high school.

A kindly old man, well, recently-retired-looking at least, asked whether I wanted the Sports Illustrated.

I told him thanks, I used to like sports,

but I gave them up

because I no longer cared about them.

He told me he knew why,

"Girls!"

I gave an off-hand gruff "Ehhh" in response.

I'd say about the same thing today as my reason then.

I cared about other things,

though it might have had something to do with it,

it largely wasn't true

as he said it.

But this all one.

Why girls?

What does girls has to do with sports?

Mostly it was the boys who liked sports.

One can be . . . not favorably disposed to boys.

Boys play games well,

that's all they're apparently good for.

Could make me better disposed toward them and my past

if I look back at the distant amusements of men

behaving like boys

or boys?

Could be,

but it's the conformity that interests me.

I hate it.

But my fear of it leads me astray at times.

Universes that don't allow for semisets so wrong,

and yet using them to justify why we can add arbitrary function extensions in separation and replacement axioms, a normalcy I should not have feared to the point of not seeing it to mild gloom.

Sadistic girls and controlling them go hand-in-hand,

because,

after all,

the more she is being controlled, the more useful and fun it is for her to test out whether she can still hate,

different opinions about which can lead to fatalistic gloom in one girl and smiling unwillingness to cede control in her other almost erstwhile girlfriend.

Dark fear bravely carried from love vs. prudent rejection of apocalyptic danger.

But normalishness could perhaps carry the day.

All a guy has to do is love girls imagining themselves cruel in proportion to how beautiful they are being.

Almost, but not quite, like normal guys only having loving feelings toward the extremely special.

Only, love must change from moment to moment, in proportion to how beautiful she be at that particular moment.

Girls behaving fucking stupid crazy cruel not so pretty is outside their imaginings.

Torture and human sacrifice are frowned upon.

Loving girls rightly like resurrecting the fun of the long-ago past.

This like a bee landing on a pretty flower.

Only,

it is not just the fun of my distant ancestors,

but the amusements such as they were from my childhood.

Dealing out the baseball cards on the floor in a newly-sorted order.

So careful and yet so forgetting of what be around me.

While at the same time closer to what fun in former ages used to be,

my childhood, fundamentally past.

Rod Carew wasn't like other players.

He dozed off between innings—that cool.

Or carefully numb to forget each witnessed horror of locker-room jock bravado....

I can imagine myself years hence, old and alone,

finishing up details on my work in logic and moral philosophy,

throwing it out there in a final wistful try

just because it be better than doing nothing.

It's not a bad or unsacred imagining.

I wonder what the girl who loves baseball would think,

yes, yes, I had an imagining half a poem ago.

Baseball is wild to her.

A wild game just maybe of reconciling past friends.

Horrors in the real world can be some fun when only sang about,

and sometimes rightish be normal.