Ayn Rand, Eat Your Heart Out

13 September 2006
Hamburg SV 1 - 2 Arsenal

12' Gilberto (PK) (F)
53' Rosicky (F)
91' Sanogo (A)

To be a writer requires an enormous amount of ego. At any given point you have to earnestly believe that what you are writing is actually of note, that someone out there wants to spend their free time reading what you have to write down, to read the slop I dribble onto a page. Somedays I wake up and feel I have nothing to tell people. Those are the hardest days, those are the days I cannot force myself to sit in front of a computer and write. The worst is when I'm in the middle of writing something, in the middle of a very coherent thought that I've held for at least a couple minutes and it crumbles like dust, revealing fog and I say to myself, "who the hell would pay any kind of money - let alone their time - to read this bullshit?" That's the worst feeling I can have in the world, and I've felt it a lot. It's become painfully obvious by this, the sixth entry in what still looks terrifyingly expansive, that this work is no longer just about trying to make Americans appreciate soccer. That may have been my initial goal, and while it was undoubtedly a noble goal, it is no longer the entire scope of this work. I'm forced to admit that this work is a study of sport, a study of writing, a study of myself - if I have any hope of writing over forty entries on the topic of sport and Americana, there is no way I will avoid examining my life with the finest microscope. The first few entries were like entering a tunnel: hey it's dark but there are lights on the side and noisy cars to my right. This will be fun! But by this point, over a full month since I began, the other cars have disappeared and the lights on the walls are flickering. I'm by myself, I see this now, and all I have to light the way is my passion for sports and writing and music and culture. This is going to be a lot more difficult than I thought at the beginning. I'm having those sensations, the ones I talked about: who the hell would pay any kind of money, let alone spend their time, on this bullshit? As any good writer will tell you, the only way through that doubt is to put your nose to the grindstone and write. Creating is really easy if you can see the light at the end of the tunnel and you're inspired by the project: then the whole thing practically writes itself. That kind of writing is a blessing, let me tell you, and when it happens I have to seize it like I just found a million dollars in an unmarked briefcase. I wonder how often Stendhal or Kafka sat down and gazed out their windows, wondering if their work was going to waste. They were never appreciated in their time, and only years later were they hailed as brilliant novelists. I'm terrified by the thought of dying before being "found": but what if, like I began in the last entry, what if my dreams are never realized? What will I think when I'm in my seventies and shuffling around with a mug of beer in my hand? I hope I find some other kind of satisfaction in life, because trying to get society to acknowledge me is most likely a hopeless cause. How can you tell someone to abandon their dreams? You can't: it's not right, it's inhumane. But since I've graduated from college, I've been confronted with a massively cruel real world that demands my dreams as some kind of payment: "give me your dreams child, and maybe, just maybe, I'll give you a nine-to-five job that gives you an allowance to buy movie tickets and alcohol." This has become a suffocatingly self-conscious work and for that I apologize. It's that tunnel syndrome. Topics get shaved away as I write and slowly one theme appears, the one theme that my entire life has been built upon, the one theme I face in the mirror in the morning, the one theme I ignore as I lie down to bed. That theme is inadequacy; my own, my parents', my friends', the world's: all our inadequacies fascinate me and confuse me and paralyze me. But inadequacy implies that there is something which is adequate. In sports, the adequate is obvious: an adequate pitcher will win you 13-18 games a season; an adequate striker will score you 10-15 goals a season; an adequate quarterback will get you 14-19 touchdowns a season. There is no such bar in life which may be why so many of us turn to sports. I don't know how to measure my success in life yet so I look at Mike Mussina and I know that, even though he's never won 20 decisions in a season, the motherfucker can still pitch a great game. Sports give me something that I can put a bar too, that I can square up and analyze. I don't think it means I'm inadequate at life, only that I'm too scared to look at my own life. Sports fill time, they supply knowledge and depth to a human creation that has no relevance to the universe. All sports are, are us lining up and running around, figuring out where we stack up in relation to each other because we will never figure out where we stack up in relation to everything else. We create larger systems due to the fact that the largest system of them all remains a mystery to us. We will never figure it out, and instead we manufacture other systems that we hope reflect it in some pathetic way. Writing is the same exercise, although less tiring: I sit in my chair, listening to my music, and attempt to pierce reality with my biting wit and fathomless brilliance. Do you see that ego I mentioned earlier? Yeah, it's right there. I'm not that funny and I'm not that smart, but I hope I'm a little of both, and I hope that combination gives me a worthwhile look into humanity so I can better explain it to you all (and myself), so we all leave this experience with higher spirits and brighter outlooks. I write because I have an ego, but I have an ego because I believe in myself and my ability to make each and every one of you happy, because I know I can touch you and change something inside of you. You're getting close to it, I can feel it: all you need is to peer through the looking glass at sports - to see them the way I do. To see sports with the ego of an artist. To see sports as they are seen by the players, the artists of the field. Our inadequacies then are not mental or physical, at least, those aren't the inadequacies that I care about. Whether or not someone is too skinny or fat, too smart or dumb - those are all just relative. Our inadequacy, our collective inadequacy, is cosmic: we don't understand the system we live in, the system we've lived in since time began. This dearth of knowledge is what fascinates me day in and day out because it drives so much of our society, even though it is this huge gap in our understanding. A long time ago, say, two-thousand years ago, people had these faults and decided to believe in a man named Jesus Christ, because he gave them a system to believe in and they wanted to, they needed to. It's so hard to live without knowing what comes after death and if there's a chance at an afterlife, why not sure Christ is my savior. I appreciate religion for so many things it offers us, such as love of all people and certain social laws (remember that murder is bad thing?), but I do not appreciate the fanaticism it can inspire. This is where social constructionism finds its true value. Because we know so little about everything else, we create our reality here on Earth. It's readily tangible, moreso than stars millions of light-years away, so why not? I can walk to my kitchen, but I can't walk to Alpha Centauri. Therefore I will spend more time thinking about my kitchen. My kids will grow up with the kitchen my wife and I fashion, and to them it will be a tradition. If there is something particularly noteworthy about it, maybe knowledge of the kitchen will be passed down in our family and become a myth. This is how social constructionism works: as generations interact with various things and places, the social knowledge of these things and places changes. What started out as two people agreeing turned into a government, an institution. The whole spectrum of human society is based on our interactions with one another. Religion, in my mind, comes from these interactions mingling with our inadequacies. Modern sports are another response to this. Both sports and religion provide paragons for us. The sufferings of Job remind me of Barry Bonds; direct comparisons aside, both went through very troubling times. Job lost his children, and Bonds has been hauled through public hatred. While Barry is a whole different topic for another time, his recent quiet humiliation has been somewhat calming. He spent much time in the past ranting against the media but of late he has apparently accepted the mockery. "What? Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?"