It was a mere ten days ago that the Detroit Tigers choked so miserably in the World Series and lightened the wallets of many gamblers around the country. It was a depressing thing to watch, and I was planning to post an entry here about the nostalgic pull that a team can have on someone throughout their lives, how what’s imprinted on the minds of young people ten or eleven years old may become weakened or modified during their lives but is never completely expunged. But ten days after the fact makes those kinds of ideas a little stale, or at least worth putting back on the shelf until the next season rolls around.
But the election tomorrow has me thinking all about the ideas of nostalgia, hope, and idealism all over again. Because just as I used to think that my baseball heroes were paragons of character and effortlessness, I used to think that most adults knew what they were doing and could generally be counted on to do the right thing. And I also believed that democracies worked because, win or lose, everybody involved believed in the process, because the alternative was tyranny.
But to watch the behavior of people during election season time after time descend into such treacherous filthy pits that I can’t talk about elections with my children makes me want to strangle a whole lot of people.
To catalog all the depravity and thievery that’s gone on during the last few elections is too time-consuming and infuriating, and there are many better places to get a more thorough catalog of them. Besides, here in Chicago, a person is supposed to adopt a devil-may-care attitude about corruption, stolen elections, filthy tricks and indicted officials. It shows you’re tough, worldly wise. If we didn’t have our corruption, we’d be no more interesting than Minneapolis.
But the turd du jour in the news—about many districts across the nation where robocalls are pummeling voters and pretending to be from the Democratic Candidate, when they’re actually paid for by the Republican National Congressional Committee—just makes me want to take all these clever dimwits and throw them in a cage with a couple of gorillas in heat. Is it really so hard for these numbnuts to keep their jobs that they can convince themselves this is a good idea?
At the risk of sounding like a motivational poster, I ‘d like to suggest that, before trying some crappy underhanded trick like that, a person would do well to try and explain it in his/her imagination to someone who was important to them when they were 10 years old. A mom or dad, a coach, a cool uncle, someone. And then maybe that person could get over the uneasy feeling that he/she is actually a lizard in human skin.
Or more simply, what would the ten-year-old inside them say?
Okay, now I find out that November is actually something called National Novel Writing Month (or 
November is here. Probably the least appreciated month of the year, what with the dwindling daylight, the prospect of elections, somber Veteran’s Day, and that dutiful holiday called Thanksgiving. Don’t the calendar makers realize that every month should be fun fun FUN? Why are they keeping us from jumping straight from Halloween’s excesses to Christmas’ excesses? 
The perils of 
* This morning, at 7:46 Eastern time, America welcomed its 300,000,000th citizen, according to the Census Bureau. He then managed to pimp me out of the last parking space in the lot.
Throughout the summer, my affections have been pulled in two directions. I’ve been faced with the decision of whether to root for my current hometown White Sox or my former hometown Dee-troit Tigers. 