I'm a dead-eyed husk without Ichiro, etc.

Plus: extreme discount psychiatry!

Feb 18, 2021

My life is worse since I stopped caring about sports.

I used to watch a lot of baseball. This was when I lived in Seattle and the Mariners were my team. And they were actually pretty good for a while. Back then, I noticed that I always knew whether the Mariners or the Sonics had won or lost that evening before I went to sleep.

Then I turned my life upside down, which involved moving to Minnesota, right around the time the Sonics were murdered and the corpse moved to Oklahoma for zombie reanimation. And now I don’t really care. I like the Timberwolves, I want them to succeed, but it’s always felt like an ironic fandom. And I never have the right tv lineup to see their games.The Twins were available for me to latch onto but watching them has always felt like hanging out with a friend of a friend. Like you have something in common, sure, but there’s something missing in the middle. And even though there is abundant hockey here, I’ve never been a hockey guy.

So sports just became something I liked in theory. I enjoy the storylines of the NBA. I can get sucked into an NFL game but it’s an exercise in self-loathing because it is, after all, planned and systematic human maiming.

I think I was mentally better off when I cared about sports in a sincere way. Yes, it’s a distraction and no, it doesn’t ultimately matter. The players aren’t our peers and only rarely are they from the part of the world where the team is based. We cheer for laundry, as Seinfeld said. But sports fandom - with a healthy perspective, of course - is a good emotional workout. The sadness, the joy, the anxiousness seems good to be able to experience precisely because it is devoid of true circumstance. It can go too far (the movies Big Fan and Silver Linings Playbook depict this well) but if you can walk that line, I believe it’s better than dead-inside indifference in life.

This movie is unpleasant:

Speaking of, let’s do an athlete round-up!

Great article about the golfer Bubba Watson, even if it is littered with unfortunately trite quotations from people like Dr. Seuss and anonymous.

Anxiety has been a part of his life for some time, but roughly two years ago it started getting worse. He couldn’t sleep, lost weight and even feared for his life. Sometimes he thought of his former Green Beret father, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder before dying of cancer in 2010. A few times Watson thought he was having a heart attack and was hospitalized.

I can’t imagine the pressure of playing golf professionally. Yes, I’m serious. There’s the money, of course, but most of these guys have a ton of people in their employ. And beyond that, they have the natural human drive to do well and the unnatural position of having the world watch to see if that works out. Add a mental obstacle to that - either pre-existing or acquired through that pressure - and holy shit.

A recent Twitter thread from former NFL receiver Greg Camarillo got a lot of attention. He talked about what it means to quickly become a former player. I’ve been guilty of thinking “Oh they have so much money, they have nothing to complain about,” but for one, they often don’t have much money after everyone else gets paid, and two, they’re still people and the thing that’s been at the center of their life since childhood has suddenly disappeared.

Greg Camarillo @catchcamarillo

Football players struggle when our careers are over. It's hard. We have been football players for years. It's what we do, what we know, and a big part of who we are. And then it's gone. A big part of our identity lost. (thread 1/6)

This might make you happy and feel connected to the world. Or not. But it sure is neat. Radio Garden lets you travel around the world by radio station. It started me in the Twin Cities but I quickly navigated to Nuuk, Greenland, to Norway’s Lofoten Islands, I hopped around Africa, and spent some time in central Australia.

Observation: people love programming the BBC and old-timey big band music all over the world.