A winning day

Posted on April 5, 2012 by drequa

Opening day in baseball is one of those joyous occasions that almost entirely lack any long-term meaning. It is a day to live in the moment because there are 161 more days that will make you weep, fall into despair, leap for joy and wonder why you are following your team. Yesterday was one of the good ones and made me appreciate that even a moment without long term meaning can lift your soul and make life a joy.

It works out like golf really.  You can duff your way around a course, losing balls and traipsing through weeds to hit shots that would fly better if you just got out a hammer and hit with that. Then, that one glorious moment happens and you watch a ball fly, climbing to the sky, and see it land softly on the green just like it seems to do every time for the PGA crowd. That joy – short-lived and meaningless for the long term – lifts you to go back again and plunk down exorbitant fees after purchasing insanely expensive equipment that will NOT fix your game but you return. Again and again you go back and relive the same degree of success.

Baseball lifts you into such hysteria of joy at times and for the short term it is wonderful. Last year my Cardinals strung together the most remarkable September and October possible and still managed to lift and drop me multiple times before finishing the run to the Series victory. Then the off-season happens. Pujols leaves for an insane amount of money (and I don’t blame him for taking it or the Cards for not paying it) and you try to put back together the team that you love and go back to game one to see what happens.

That brings me back to Opening Day last night in Miami with the garish thing over the centerfield fence and the unexplainable retractable roof (in Miami??). There, my Cardinals played like the World Series Champions they proved to be in 2011. The hitters were on, the pitchers were above their own averages and the new manager enjoyed a cold shower from his exuberant team following a beautiful win. I’m back on cloud nine – for now. I know after years of following baseball and my Cardinals that it is a long season of ups and downs.

Not only did my Cardinals win but I awoke to find my fantasy team in the lead as well. Those of you who play roto fantasy baseball know that is even more meaningless than an Opening Day victory for the real team but just to see my team in first lifts my soul for the moment. It will crash into reality soon enough but I am enjoying my moments as they happen.

It is those moments – the ones that may not mean anything over the long term but that lift you up – that make each day exciting and new and make me look for the next moment of joy. For now I will live on yesterday’s wins. A new moment is on the way. I hope your moments find you and lift you. Don’t miss them and don’t let the times between them get you down. It is a fact that even the Cubs win some games in a 162 game season. We all have a chance.

Just tossing that out on the pile. Thanks for reading it.

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Culling the chaff

Posted on April 4, 2012 by drequa

A long time ago when machines didn’t handle all of the harvest work in the fields what you brought in was a crop you wanted and attached to it was a lot of stuff you wanted to throw out. The machines leave all that extra out in the fields today but then you had to sift through it all somehow and get rid of what was useless. While agriculture has moved beyond those days with automation it seems that news and even what passes now for journalism has moved back into an age that requires a lot of sifting and culling just to find what is really useful.

The recent University of Illinois basketball coach search and hiring provide an excellent example of how things just get a bit out of hand. While most (and unfortunately I can only claim “most”) of the mainstream media stayed true to journalistic standards and reported what they could confirm there were many Tweets, blogs and other online posts that amounted to nothing more than rumor or even outright fabrication by someone. Those took on an air of truth when so many people repeated them and added their own twist until many of the rumors were reported as news. There was apparently a lot of chaff mixed in with the good stuff in this process and there was a general (not universal) declaration that the process was terrible mostly based on what was reported in social media without any real fact check or confirmation. “Sources” were referred to with little real checking and the actual facts were buried in stuff that should have been left out in the field.

I am not free of the same eagerness to repeat what appears on the internet and over the airwaves so I am not just pointing a finger outward. We all need to slow down the process and stop the re-Tweet or publication of what we cannot source with fidelity. It is a whole new world and somehow we need to catch up with the farmers and get the chaff out of our crop more efficiently. Events might take their own course instead of an imaginary one created by those who purport to know much of what they do not.

Take it for what it’s worth.

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The Pile Begins…

Posted on February 23, 2012 by drequa

It is my first blogging experience and I expect thoughts to pile into here and thus the name. I look forward to writing in ways that engage readers and evoke comment and response. No subject will be the focus of this but rather it will be the sum of my thoughts at the time. Pretty random but it should be interesting.

Hang on for the ride and pile on!

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