Improbability drive finally kicked into high gear? Has the world flipped on its head so that sun rises in the west? Is the 12th of Never a fall day in 2016? Has the entropy of hell sufficiently lowered for a snowball fight? Have geneticists developed a flying pig? Will monkeys fly out of my butt? Or the Cubs win the series?
Month: October 2016
A Reckoning
You promised that you'd do it When the Cubs won the series The chances so improbable, It wouldn't happen even in theory, The girl you said you'd marry, When the Cubs won the series Well its fifty years later, I hope you love her dearly The debt you said you'd pay back When the Cubs won the series, Well its forty years later, The interest accruing yearly All the healthy things you said you'd do When the Cubs won the series, Well its thirty years later, Even your scale refuses query You told me you'd put spots on zebras When the Cubs won the series, Well its twenty years later, Spots instead of jail stripes would be rather cheery You promised me a ton of cheese When the Cubs topped the world, Well its ten years later, And your milk hasn't curdled You thought it would be the end of time When the Cubs won the series, There is no more waiting now Your plight is getting serious. A day of reckoning is here Your old promises you mock Now you will be accountable When the Cubs put you on the spot
The Accord
I am 108 years old. I was born on Oct 15, 1908, the day after the Cubs won the last game of their last world series victory. My life has been great, full of adventure and travel and working with smart people and making love to beautiful women and sometimes being a little closer to history then I would have liked. But through it all, baseball, the Cubs, have marked the time. Baseball has passed the days and the nights creating as many highs and lows and stories as the time that passed through it.
I’ve only had one regret in life, I think. I don’t know. It is just something that has lurked in the back of my mind. Maybe, I just have the slightest trace of PTSD. I have never shaken it. I was 36 years old at the time, leading men onto sandy beach to die during a beautiful sunset over the ocean in the South Pacific. Our intelligence was bad, there were far more enemy troops here then expected. Men dropped on either side of me as we stormed the beach. Zeros cruised over head straffing and dropping bombs; concussion blasts ripping men to pieces as they ran. The life expectancy on the beach was about five seconds. A wave of enemy soldiers came at us, bayonets clashing, rounds firing and whistling by me on all sides. I broke through the line and saw a thousand more men up on the hill ready to charge us. I dove into a foxhole and put my back to the dirt wall and the enemy. The only victor in this bloodshed would be the last person to get there when everyone else was already dead.