Serious Problems

It seems like there are two reasons to have a blog:

1. To be able to write about things anonymously, like a big online therapy journal for getting stuff off your chest. If you were following this reason, no one would know your identity and you could write things like, “My siblings don’t know how much I hate them” or “Not a day goes by that I don’t long for a divorce” and not have to worry about your siblings or your spouse finding out.
2. To be a replacement for personal contact with the people you’d like to think are your friends. If you were following this reason, you would not call or write to your friends in person to tell them about repainting the back fence; you’d just write a blog post about it and then tell yourself that your friendship is just as strong as it was before.

The problem is you can’t do both. Option 1 requires anonymity and Option 2 requires disclosing your blog address to every friend and family member you have. This is why I wanted to start another blog, one with serious anonymity (instead of the fake anonymity I have here), but then I felt like I couldn’t keep a blog a secret from my wife because what if it turned out to be how I met some lady I had an affair with, so then there goes Option 1 because I can never write anything like, “Man, my wife’s been bugging me lately.” (And I know everyone’s going to be, like, “How horrible that he could ever feel that way!” But we’ve been married for eight years, and that’s long enough that we can be honest and say sometimes she bugs me. I don’t pretend she doesn’t feel the same way. In fact, I’m reasonably certain that, at any given moment, she could be within 30 minutes of walking out and I would have to admit it wasn’t a total surprise. I know I’ve got it coming. It’s like a variation of the supposed Middle-Eastern proverb, “Beat your wife every day; even if you don’t know why, she does.” She could leave me at any moment and, even if she didn’t know why, I would.

So Option 1 is off the books for me, although Option 2 becomes Option 1 if none of my friends or family ever actually READ my blog, which often seems to be the case. But you never know when one of them is going to get a wild hair and click on over to A Random Stranger, so you can’t plan on it. (Plus, every blogger’s sense of vanity won’t allow him to count on having an audience of zero. In all of our minds, we have loyal followers on every continent and half of our followers are so in love with us that they’re experiencing relationship difficulties (and that goes double for the dudes). Well, all of this sucks, because today I want to write about something that will make you all uncomfortable and make our next face-to-face meeting awkward: my brain. More to the point, I’d write about the broken nature of my brain, and the way that God holds me responsible for the things my broken brain thinks and makes me do, even though He’s the one who gave me my broken brain. God and I have a complicated relationship, and if I were being honest I’d say, if I end up making it to Heaven, there’s a chance the first thing I’d do when I met Him would be to punch Him in the eye. (It’s a good thing I don’t have to worry about making it to heaven! (Don’t you wish you’d stopped reading about two paragraphs ago? Like I said, awkward!)) Since this isn’t an Option 1 blog, though, I’m not going to be that honest, and I’ll say things like, “Yea, God! You’re the best!”

For a long time I tried to pretend I didn’t have serious brain issues. I figured I knew about them, but I could keep other people from knowing about them. In my bishop’s interview before filing my mission papers I lied about having a healthy brain, and we see how that turned out. But again, I’d be on the hook for not being a missionary, even though the thing that would keep me out would be the brain I didn’t pick. Like I said, right in His eye.

Lately, though, I’ve decided it’s too difficult to ignore my brain issues. The good news is I don’t have any serious friends, so it’s not like anyone would notice if I changed my lifestyle to counteract my brain problems. My wife would notice, but she already knows about my brain (and that’s a big reason she’s constantly 30-minutes away from pulling out a suitcase). I could change anything I needed to and no one would notice.

Specifically, I’m thinking I might need to stop being a Pittsburgh Pirates fan. My brain gives them entirely too much influence over my life, and that’s not a good thing to give to a team that hasn’t had a winning season since 1992. (And 1992 doesn’t even count as a good year because of the devastating way they lost the pennant.) Days are good days when the Pirates win and bad days when the Pirates lose. It doesn’t matter what else has happened. A Pirates victory can make up for the most miserable of days, but a Pirates loss can negate an otherwise great day.

This became obvious to me when the Pirates spent the last week going from 11-7 to 12-14, being shut out three times in the process. The Steelers don’t have this influence on me. I follow the team but their regular-season losses don’t really bother me, and their playoff losses on get to me for a day or so. The Penguins have more of an influence on me. I was upset about last year’s Stanley Cup Finals for probably a week. But really, when it comes right down to it, I’ve been upset about Barry Bonds’s inability to throw out Sid Bream for 16 and a half years.

I said to Persephone the other night, when the Pirates took a 3-1 lead late and lost the game 7-4, “I wonder if I need to stop being a Pirates fan.” She can sort of relate, being a young Red Sox fan in 1986, but two years later the Red Sox won the American League East again. Nothing helps you forget failure like success. The Pirates haven’t had any success since the most monumental of failures. (Besides, Persephone spent the 1990s being a Braves fan. Why did I marry this woman? (That’s the type of question for an Option 1 blog.))

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can decide to not pay attention to baseball, but I can’t stop being a Pirates fan. Even if I don’t follow this season, I’ll know in October that they’ve set the record for most consecutive losing seasons by a North American sports franchise, and I’ll know that there’s no reason to believe they won’t add to that mark next season. There’s nothing to look forward to in Pirates baseball, so all I can do is look back.