SHORT TAKES & SUCH: Anti-Obammunist Tea-Bagging Patriots, Queen City Man Molesters, Rambling Attempts at Activism, & The Whammo Kid Strikes...

DAYTON, Ohio (ZP) -- Unashamed and unrepentant, the balding middle-aged gentleman announced that he was proud of his role in promoting tea-bagging as a form of protest against what he called "Obammunism."

Ya know, for some reason, when a strange old fucker tells me how much he likes tea-bagging, it always reminds me of similar conversations in The Castro...

I'd made the mistake of opening my mouth in an airport bar. I am, at times, a dumbass.

But, well, in all fairness, it's not often a "freedom-loving American businessman" gets a chance to discuss politics with a younger dude who thinks massive public debt designed to help select elite maintain a chokehold on a monstrously large government is a bad idea.

It was the piece I was reading at the time at the airport bar, a selection from Samuel (Dolgoff) Weiner's Ethics and American Unionism, that started it. Apparently lonely and looking for conversation, the guy'd asked me what I was reading. As soon as I said "...well, it's this essay written by this libertarian housepainter from New York...," the guy slithered up beside me, slurred a drink order to the server, a round on him.

For the record, there's no such thing as a free drink in this world...

He'd been at the so-called Tea Party protests in Chicago earlier in the year, a protest of what many on the Economic Far-Right associate with something akin to Socialism and financial nationalization...

... And yes, he even defined, for a young fella like myself, what he meant when he said libertarian: a libertarian, in this Age of Regression, refers to a fundamentalist born-again Christian, gay-hating, anti-reproductive-rights, flag-waving Patriot, the owner of a four-bedroom, three-bath home in the Columbus suburbs, owner of a chain of stores that sold Chinese-manufactured goods and provided minimal employee benefits, a downsizer of the Masses who was proud - PROUD - of the fact that he'd saved the economy (i.e. his own ass) by laying off about a dozen people...

Oh sure, buddy. And when the economy was lining your capitalist pockets, you jerked off to Reaganomics and Ayn Rand novels...

And, lord, the guy just wouldn't shut up about how much he loved tea-bagging, being a tea-bagger.

I didn't have the heart to explain that Samuel Dolgoff was actually a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World, the man who coined one of my favorite phrases to describe the Bush/Obama bailouts (i.e. "State Corporate Welfarism"), a bona fide Wobbly revolutionary who loved freedom and his fellow workingman, an anarcho-syndicalist Jew from the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

And that guy, trust me, wouldn't have taken a free drink from a such a libertarian without an argument about how how Rush Limbaugh is supposedly right.

Motherfucker, please.

- MORE -

CINCINNATI (ZP) -- It was a clear case of mistaken identity. The woman thought I was someone else.

But, well, it's not often a middle-aged woman walks up behind me just outside of Paul Brown Stadium, grabs my ass, and bites my neck.

Well, not while sober, with nary a bar in sight, in the middle of a beautiful sunny day. I couldn't smell any booze on her breath but, well, hot chick in a low-cut blouse and whole lack-of-a-bra/ tid bit nipply there thing was sorta interfering with my perception.

"Oh, you're not Tommy's son, are you?"

"Um... no."

"You're sure? You're not _______?"

"No ma'am."

"Do you play football at [a smaller Ohio university]? I'll bet you play football...?"

I guess the question-and-answer session was her way of coping with embarrassment. Went on for about five minutes before I rather awkwardly excused myself from the discussion.

Okay, so maybe the woman was on something other than booze. But, well, from the looks of her, and given her rather obvious fondness for small college football players, well...

Whoever Tommy's son is, he's one lucky bastard if that Desperate Housewife has her way.

- MORE -

RANDOM COLLEGE TOWN, Ind. (ZP) -- I'm a lousy educator. I'm usually the first to admit it.

But I guess I'm fairly decent at bluffing my way through situations where a real presenter or lecturer would feel more at ease.

It's a gift. Or a curse. Not sure which.

The free wine and pizza helped.

The gathering's hostwwwess stood up in front of her coffee table, tapped her glass, and introduced me as "one of Ohio's most controversial bloggers, a librarian and cultural critic..."

Jesus, everybody hates a critic, I thought, trying not to smirk.

I was invited, this time, not to talk about librarianship, or blogging, or, well, being critical.

Nope, I was here to talk about life, about social networking and privacy, about how nobody, in the 21st Century, really buys that ...And the Meek shall inherit the Earth shit of sermons and puritanical patriotism.

But yep, sometimes that all overlaps with the information sciences, blogging, and critical examination of the world's systems of power.

C'est la motherfucking vie.

"Well, thanks...um...that was a wonderful introduction. Let me start by thanking _____ for hosting this great party...

"...And I'll try not to bore you with, heh, batshit and rambling stories...

"...And who owns the content of our World Wide Web? This fucking company owns that site, owns that server... but who owns the Internet? The answer is simple - humanity... The Web is bigger than any company, andy government, any one group..."

I tried my damnedest not to ramble. Honest-to-God. But, well, wine... room full of college kids...

And yes, for some reason, there's a bunch of undergrads (mostly female) in the U.S. and Canada who think I'm some younger version of Noam Chomsky because of my political rantings as of late...

Though having the chance to say I'd rather not be compared to anybody but myself, in person during casual conversation over glasses of box wine, does wonders for the ol' ego...

The Literate, the Life Scholar, and the Free of Thought have no patience for inheritance, a relic of an increasingly transparent capitalistic world filled with product-driven media, church dogma, greed, systems of oppression and coercion, and political partisanship...

That was, well, the point I hope I conveyed in what ended up being a somewhat batshit, rambling discussion, full of questions and comments, head nods and darting eyes.

Lecturing's a lot tougher than blogging.

Especially when there's box wine involved.

- MORE -

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- The Whammo Kid had me backed into a corner, two six-shooters aimed squarely at my chest.

I was a goner. I didn't even know my offense or crime. He made no demands whatsoever. His guns glistened in the sunlight.

And no one in Martin Luther King, Jr., Park offered any help. Nobody even gave my assault a second glance, in fact.

What a way to go...

The Kid's cowboy hat sat cocked to one side, his jeans dirty and shirt stained. A wicked grin cut a tight-lipped canyon in his otherwise smooth face.

"Gimme your money!" The Whammo Kid finally demanded.

"But... Kid... I don't have any money...that's why I'm going to the bank..."

Sweat was beginning to fill my own Stetson, the moisture soaking down into the brim beneath the summer sun.

"Why?" The gunslinger asked. "Gimme FIVE DOLLARS FOR ICE CREAM!"

I felt my assailant's eyes cutting through me like a thousand daggers.

"Kid, I don't have any," I said. "Is...is...eh...your mom or dad... somewhere?"

"NO! I AM A ROBBER!"

I was ready for the end. Having no money to give my preteen thief, nothing of value, I watched in horror as The Kid aimed his plastic water pistols, fired.

Squirt. Squirt Squirt.

Squirtsquirtsquirt.

It was all over in less than a second. Being nowhere near tall enough to get off a body shot, his two-foot frame had to settle for a crotch shot.

My pants were soaked.

And with his first victim a mere notch on his summertime belt, the Whammo Kid took off running, ran all the way to a blanket in the park. A young woman looked up from her book as the kid pointed my way, blushed, and mouthed a silent apology.

I laughed, waved as if it didn't matter, and kept walking towards the ATM.

Kid, be glad I don't have a Supersoaker handy.

Where I come from, we don't bushwhack another cowboy in front of the bank...

- # # # -

(SORTA) SHORT TAKES AND SUCH: Of Charity and Foreign Women, How Poor Tippers Earn the Job Market's Wrath, & Yo F**kin' Mama Jokes

PHOENIX (ZP) -- She sipped her wine as if the glass would burst at any second.

Delicate, graceful sips. Too delicate, in fact, for an overpriced, low-grade airport bar Zinfandel. She said she loved it, at least the gesture of a young man buying her a drink after bumming her a cigarette in front of the Sky Harbor terminal, but all the elegance in the world cannot mask the rancid bouquet of a shitty Chilean vino.

She was leaving her husband-to-be, flying back to her native Balkan homeland to see if she could salvage what was left of her professional and personal life.

"American men, pfft!" she said. "Worse than Russian men."

I smile as the woman explains her predicament. She's visibly angry but, well, glad to have someone who'll listen. I may, in fact, be the last U.S. citizen other than a flight attendant that she converses with for a long time.

* * * *

There was a time, for those born with a penis or from within this continent, when North America's men were thought of as being as iconic and desirable as we are in our globally broadcast media, in our frontier literature and poetry and Western shoot-em-ups and love stories, thought to be the perfect Modern Life Partners of Tomorrow by the romantic dreamers of Eastern Europe and the Least Developed Nations of the Southern Hemisphere.

But, well, when the Iron Curtain fell and the Third World started clawing its way into the Internet Age, that entire mythology was soon stripped down to a harsh, bitter reality. We're not - and never were - the models for a liberated, independent manhood our writers and actors have made us out to be.

And, to be fair here, North American women aren't exactly considered leaders in the liberation/independence arena anymore, either. I once had a women's rights activist, from an African nation, no less, refer to the so-called Women's Movement on this continent as nothing more than an academic joke, risk-free beyond a fiery lecture or blog post in the war against evils such as wartime rape, sex slavery, or even women's reproductive rights.

But I digress...

This is about North America's men. And there are too many men on this continent who value golf more than their partners, men who would kill to keep their toys pristine and perfect before they'd defend their spouse's rights to self-determination, men who are more like the Ming the Mercilesses of a Discompassionate Capitalism than the Flash Gordons of New World independence.

* * * *

She thought she'd fallen in love with a cowboy - a real, honest-to-God COWBOY! - on a Mediterranean cruise a few years back. He said he owned a ranch, horses and cattle, drove a big pick-up truck. He talked a good game, too, with promises of citizenship and endless trips to Las Vegas and the Hawaiian Isles.

They made love the first night they met, spent the rest of their holiday together, made love across Italy, Greece, and southern Spain. And they parted ways to return to their home countries, emailed and talked on the phone and wrote each other long love letters.

And then, despite her still Soviet-leaning mother's warnings about the evil Capitalists of the West, who were JUST like the Russian capitalists, she decided to leave her country just as its civil problems were subsiding and to move to the good ol' United States to be with her boyfriend.

She threw away her blossoming career in a developing free market economy, cast aside her doubts and her advanced college degrees in the applied sciences...

... Only to waste whole months of her life playing babysitter to a "cowboy" who turned out to be nothing more than an alcoholic, abusive prick who'd inherited a Big Western U.S. ranch, chopped it into tiny pieces of real estate, and sold it off to suburban developers for enough cash to live the carefree life of a lazy multimillionaire.

* * * *

She'd finally decided to return home after picking up an adjunct teaching job at a university for a semester in her field. After all, she'd been a professor back home...

The Bullshit Cowboy demanded that she quit. She wasn't fixing him dinner every night, wasn't making sure their Mexican housekeeper wasn't stealing his gringo finery, wasn't spending time with his buddies' wives shopping and doing girl things. She was, after all, another piece of gringo finery in his collection, a thing herself.

His jealousy and anger, his insistence on her being able to fly to Cancun during midterms or to cancel classes because he needed a pretty armband to gamble with him, ended up proving her mother right: love can't be bought, even in the West, even by a wealthy wrangler wannabe.

* * * *

She finishes her wine with a swirl of the last sip and a final delicate tipping of commercial-grade stemware. I ask if she'd like another; she says she doesn't want to abuse my kindness or for me to get the wrong idea about her. She's put down two glasses already and a plate of potato skins, all on my credit card.

And I'm almost half her age, a young man, after all. Young men who buy women drinks in airport bars...

"Honey, if I'm ever in your neck of the woods, and we meet again, you can pay."

"You are - how do you say - a 'ladykiller,' eh? Flirting with old women..."

"Nope. Just been where you are now. And your ex must be an idiot to let a woman like you..."

Sometimes, a North American, particularly a natural-born man of these ol' United States, just has to do his patriotic duty and buy a No-way-she's-really-44! Balkan woman a drink in an airport bar.

And the best displays of patriotism, the best my country has ever had to offer the world, has always been through our often senseless acts of compassion. The same holds true for my compatriots in Canada, in Mexico, in the Caribbean and even Greenland.

Hey, the women of the Developing World once thought American men were the solution to their own problems, and relief to the coldness of the officially sex-neutral alternatives offered by Soviet-style communism, once thought we were the icons of our silver screens, all Errol Flynns and Clark Gables and Cary Grants, Deerslayers and cowboys, astronauts and athletes and the Men of Tomorrow.

How far those iconic visions fall from the truth, sometimes.

- MORE -

CINCINNATI (ZP) -- They were like overgrown fratboy versions of gorillas trapped in a zoo, throwing bullshit bravado about like lower primates throw turds at elementary school kids on a field trip.

Affirmative Action. That was why this trio of Local U. alums couldn't find jobs. How these supposedly educated men ranted about illegal aliens and minorities, about Feminazis and peaceniks!

I mean, c'mon... who HASN'T blamed their lack of a job on ... er... liberal media bias?

Never mind that they'd spent their undergrad careers building resumes full of student activities, social events, and the occasional charity gig. Never mind, too, that the only jobs any of the three had ever worked were summer jobs in high school, as lifeguards and caddies at country clubs.

They did internships, goddammit! INTERNSHIPS! They typed up copy, fetched coffee for lower management! And my God! Who could live off that Fortune 500 company's offer of ONLY 30K a year? They have expenses, need to buy new SUVs, buy houses, plan those trips to Europe, get hot corporate exec-style bitches!

And who, right of college, should be expected to work for - GASP! - less than $70 thousand a year? In Ohio? That's, like, what poor people make!

* * * *

"Dude, what do you pull down? I mean, librarians must make, what? A hundred grand a year?"

Oh suuuure, I thought to myself. Educators are just rolling in the dough.

Hell, I know library and museum employees who would kill to pull down thirty grand a year. There are public librarians working in cities eligible for fucking government assistance, teachers in rural areas living below the poverty line along with their students.

But, no, it's Affirmative Action laws and not the unrealistic expectations of the lazy, not the lack of experience or the arrogant salary demands of recent college graduates who don't seem to understand that nobody gives a shit how many Greek Weeks their organizations won.

Welcome to a shitty job market. Now suck it up and go scrape by like the rest of us poor people living below your lifestyle poverty line...

* * * *

The woman who'd invited me down to dine with her and her friends snickered as I rolled my eyes and looked at the clock on my cell phone.

She knew I was bored. She knew I'd be bored when she invited me to hang out with her childhood friends and their respective boyfriends. That was the point, after all.

I've written about the ol' Local U. in Oxford Fucking Ohio from primarily my prospective and those of other Oxford residents. It's about damned time I wrote something about what other Ohio college students and graduates see, particularly when their friends return home with that expensive Local U., Public Ivy parchment in hand...

Her parents were retired schoolteachers. And they'd made, like, so much money in their lives that she'd been able to coast through college on as little as a shitload of financial aid, two jobs, and four credit cards' worth of debt.

She'd been accepted to the Local U. but couldn't afford it. She went to a supposedly less prestigious state school, graduated, and took the first job she could find - outside her preferred career path. Hey, she waited tables through college - there's no way retail sales could be any worse. Money's money in a faltering economy, after all.

* * * *

"Yo, Jerry-"

"JASON."

"Yeah, whatever. How much you pulling down on that web site? You know, with ads and shit?"

"Um, I'm an ad-free blogger."

"What about those-"

"Nonprofits and charities. I don't make money off the thing."

All three of these supposed future leaders looked at me as if I'd just murdered their firstborn child, recrucified Jesus of Nazareth, and had shat along the hallowed sidewalks of Wall Street.

No money? Write for... fun? As a hobby?

Oh, the horror. The horror of it all.

* * * *

When it came time to pick up the tab, the gorillas were the last to go for their wallets.

They waited. Waited to see how much of the check their employed girlfriends would pick up. After all, THEY were the ones who would have to go beg Mommy and Daddy for money later in the month...

Everybody paid cash and tipped out the waitress. I tipped my five bucks. My host, a former server herself, tipped a whopping ten bucks on a twenty-dollar share - mainly because of the server, an attractive, perky light-skinned black woman from Downtown, had been forced to deal with her friends' obnoxious drunken beaus. Her friends tipped out at the standard fifteen percent, to the penny.

And the jobless trio, the future leaders of industry who were being stripped of their destiny by the welfarish slave wages of the middle-class, by women like our server?

They tipped a combined two dollars and fifty-three cents. On more than one hundred dollars' worth of alcohol and food. One of the chachballs even made a point of handing the waitress his dollar and telling her saying something like, Keep the change.

I dropped an extra ten-spot on the table. If I hadn't, well, I'm fairly certain I would've dropped three overgrown pricks right there in a crowded restaurant.

As somebody who worked his way through college and who volunteers his free time to help out Local U. students in the same boat as he was, well, there's no way to explain my rage in even normally profane terms...

"Bro, yo! You tipped twice."

"Yeah, it's all that mad librarian money I make."

There's a reason you're begging for Mommy and Daddy Warbuck's help, boys, even with those expensive pieces of parchment.

And it ain't Affirmative Action...

- MORE -

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- He plopped down on the barstool beside me, tipsy but strangely perplexed.

A few minutes earlier, I'd made a joke about his mother. A mutual acquaintance had, well, been so drunk as to make a pass at his mom (a very nice lady, really) the night before. And I'd, well, just had comment on it...

It wasn't even an obscene crack. Almost PG-13 in intensity. Nowhere near the usual sorts of Dude, I fucked your Mom last night... or I would've called but your Mom wouldn't get her fat ass off my face... maternal barbs commonly overheard at the ol' Local Watering Hole.

Calm night for insults all around, actually. Not a single Dead Baby joke to be heard, only one reference to sodomizing dead celebrities, not even jokes about clown suits and child molesters...

* * * *

"Can you fucking believe that fucking guy? What the fuck, man?"

Another, more intoxicated bar patron had apparently overheard my friendly insult. And apparently, wherever he usually drinks away his Friday nights, it's not in the same sort of bar this one happens to be.

"Dude, that asshole said I should punch you in the fucking face for, like, talking about my MOM!"

"No shit?"

"Yeah, he, like, even said he'd do it for ME for twenty bucks!"

"You're fucking shitting me..."

"No, serious. This fucker just wouldn't shut up about it..."

* * * *

Obviously, like I said, the would-be hitman hadn't visited the bar before. It's the sorta saloon where mothers are the natural target of every obscene jester's insults, even amongst the women who frequent the place.

And, well, if ya drink or eat there enough, well, trust me, your mom will turn into a punchline, too.

* * * *

"Dude! Wait!"I said, killing off my pint. "That skinny-ass bitch wanted to fight ME...for YOU?!?"

The guy sitting beside me, you see, is a former high school and college football player. Besides the usual Your Mom jokes, he's often pelted with wisecracks about everything from 'Roid Rage to being a dumb jock stereotype. And, well, he's built like a brick shithouse. The guy's got arms the size of tree trunks.

"Yeah, crazy. We've been doing this for, what? Three fucking years?"

"Well, maybe you shoulda taken the money. I mean, I dunno... do ya think I could take all 120 pounds of him? I mean, I'm, like, a librarian an' shit..."

Ya know, I'm not exactly built like your stereotypical librarian. In fact, I'm more likely to be mistaken for a cop or a Marine, given my build. Kinda built like a brick shithouse myself, given my profession.

Not to brag here, but I'm fairly certain that would be one physical information literacy lesson that poor scrawny kid would remember.

And that, well, was funnier to my former football player friend than the crack about his mother.

- # # # -

FORGOTTEN WARTIME BASEBALL: The St. Louis Browns, German Snipers, & The Healing Power of Time

CINCINNATI (ZP) -- He tells me that the pain isn't so bad, that a slow death surrounded by his grandchildren and great-grandchildren is nowhere near as bad as what he'd seen back in the Second World War.

He'd been shot in '44 - bullet tore a chunk of meat from his shoulder the size of a pork chop. Shot by a goddamn Kraut sniper at the end of the goddamn summer, smack dab in the middle of a goddamn war, a few weeks before the goddamn World Series back home.

And that Wehrmacht sonofabitch took out Tommy from Kansas City, Big Brooklyn Lou, and Injun Pete, all in one night. Injun's face had been split in half, right at the bridge of his half-Cherokee nose, one shot to the head from behind some grove of trees.

But, the old man explains, that skinny little sniper got what was coming to him. One burst from the ol' M1 Thompson tore the scrawny Deutschländer in half, opened him up from behind and dribbled forth German intestines and bile and blood. He remembers losing it, just a little bit, as his corporal had to pull him away from beating the rest of the corpse into a mashed lump of flesh.

"See, in wars you can't lose it, because then you go from bein' a soldier to a killer."

* * * *

The old man stares out onto the suburban Queen City landscape, out from the shopping mall and towards the Interstate off-ramp. He's waiting on his grandson's wife to pick him up, to drive him back to his daughter's house. The State of Ohio took his driver's license when his eyes failed him years ago. The kids sold his house when their mother died, sold all of the furniture and appliances and other evidence of one's physical existence.

But, even as the doctors lop off toe upon toe upon leg, as they fight back diabetes and decades of machinist's diet, he still has his memories. Just the smell of cigarette smoke sent him into a tale about Joe Nuxhall, the longtime Cincinnati Reds pitcher and broadcaster.

Nuxhall - a 15-year-old rookie in 1944 - died earlier in the week from cancer, partially attributed to his years as a heavy smoker. The old man reminded me, as I reached for a cigarette, that smoking killed "The Kid" at a youthful 79.

How the veteran loved talking baseball. Of the beauty of old Crosley Field, how he'd hated those four long-haired Liverpool lads for defiling such hallowed ground with their British rock and roll, how he knew - KNEW - I was a lifelong Baltimore Orioles fan, based solely on a question asked about Frank Robinson.

He remembered, too, that the Orioles, prior to 1954, were known as the St. Louis Browns. And shortly after that German sniper cleaved open Injun Pete's face, the Browns clinched their only trip to the World Series before they left a decade later for Baltimore.

* * * *

Back in that European Summer, a few weeks after Operation Overlord began, a group of American G.I.s went out on another routine patrol, one so routine that they'd gotten sloppy.

A friendly conversation had just turned into an all-out debate over whose team was better, which city's fans were more dedicated. Injun hailed from eastern Missouri, and, having always been a half-Cherokee underdog himself, had been a lifelong fan of the perpetually awful, almost-forgotten American League Browns.

Instead of watching the tree lines, they'd been talking about the Browns and their race against the Detroit Tigers, about the Reds being in third place in the National League, when the first crack of gunfire overpowered the dusk.

He never lived to learn about the Browns squeaker of a pennant against Detroit, to hear about the last World Series ever played completely in St. Louis. In October 1944, the dreaded National League Cardinals beat Injun's boys in a six-game series that hardly any baseball fan alive remembers.

* * * *

The old man paused, mid-sentence, as old men tend to do. When he started to once again speak, it was as if the whole of his existence had been charted through France and Germany, the ghosts of long-dead war buddies channeled through the medium of America's Pastime.

He'd tried to forget Injun Pete, all of those war buddies he'd lost. After the war ended, it took him years to recover, to accept what'd happened and why he quit going to Crosley to catch games after work, why he didn't care about baseball for a good 20 years...

But then Frank Robinson was traded to the Orioles in 1965, he explained. Read about in the paper, along with accounts of another war, Vietnam. All of Cincinnati was in shock - Robinson was supposed to be a Red, dammit, forever. Just as people, too...

The next season, Robinson led the former St. Louis Browns to the franchise's first championship - over the Los Angeles Dodgers, Big Brooklyn Lou's relocated home team.

Like baseball clubs sometimes change cities and players sometimes get traded to new teams, he changed his mind about how he thought about those buddies he'd lost back in 1944. It took the passage of time for him to be able to talk about what he'd seen, who he'd lost, and what he'd done as a young man. He told his Cincinnati machinist buddies, his wife, and even his own father.

He started listening to Reds games on the radio, started routing for the team again, started being a fan for the ghosts of dead men and the phantom former ballclubs they cheered for, back when the world was alive with war and baseball.

And something magical happened. The Reds started winning. With the departure of Robinson, up from the minors came the era of Pete Rose and Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, Dave Concepcion and Cesar Geronimo. Between 1965 and now, the Cincinnati Reds have played in five World Series, winning three.

They did, however, lose to Injun Pete's former St. Louis Browns, my Baltimore Orioles, in 1970, the same year ol' cozy Crosley Field was abandoned for the concrete doughnut aesthetic of Riverfront Stadium.

"I think those guys forgave me for losin' it back there in Germany, on that German kid..."

* * * *

Baseball, like all sports, really is played on fields of dreams, the illusion of something meaningful in a bat, a ball, that extra base hit. But war decided on fields of nightmares, the coldest athletic competition ever devised by humanity.

Joe Nuxhall, after all, pitched his first professional baseball game on June 10, 1944. Thousands of miles away, on the beaches of some unsporting place called Normandy, kids barely out of high school were already four days into a fight to liberate an entire continent.

The shores were already washed with the blood of British footballers and Canadian ice skaters, American quarterbacks and, yes, even aspiring pitchers by the time that 15-year-old rookie took the mound against the St. Louis Cardinals. And, as the Allies advanced into France, they left behind the corpses of hundreds of German alpine hikers and skiers, killed untold numbers of tennis players and hurdlers.

Once, long ago, I heard a noted sports historian claim that, in the scheme of things, 1944 was a bad year for baseball. He was right - all the best players were at war. The same holds true for all of the world's great sports.

A lot of great athletes never played anything, ever again.

At least, in the States, kids like Nuxhall, teams like the Browns and the Cardinals and the Reds, gave us a few innings' worth of illusion, kept us sane while the world went mad.

* * * *

The old man once again stopped, coughed, and apologized for wasting my time with a story about war and baseball. A young man like me, he said, should be out chasing women or causing trouble, not helping old men navigate their wheelchairs through shopping malls like some goddamn nurse.

I told him that, well, it was an honor to help out an old Reds fan. Like my Baltimore Orioles, the Reds haven't so much as broke wind near a World Series in more than a decade - sometimes it's just nice to commiserate together, to talk smack about the Boston Red Sox and, especially, the New York Yankees.

His children never understood why he loved baseball so much. His grandson had no clue why, every so often, he'd take his cashed Social Security money down to a sports memorabilia store and buy a new Reds home cap to mark the start of the off-season.

He added that he never talked to his kids, grandkids, or great-grandkids about the loss of his best pals back along the Rhine in 1944 - he never talked about why he liked to listen to ballgames alone, to turn on the radio, close his eyes, and act like that crazy old fart who bummed away summer afternoons.

"You know, I promised those guys I'd take 'em to see a ballgame in Cincinnati after the war..."

- # # # -