9 Apr 2023

The Blue Jays made a bunch of changes this offseason, ostensibly specifically targeted to correct the flaws in their roster.

Well, the games have started this year, and it seems that, with all those changes, they have exactly the same weaknesses as before. In the early going, they look like an edge playoff team. They lost tonight — a high-scoring game, meaning their pitching couldn’t do well enough to stumble to victory carried by their considerable offence. Plus ça change.

This one’s been kicking around your head for a few weeks, or, I guess, more like a month now. You brainstormed a number of openings. “Spring snuck up on you this year,” was the original and most revisited. Clearly you didn’t go with that. At any rate, tonight, a friend of yours showed you a journal entry of his, and, frankly, he has a lot more other stuff going for him than you do, so now you have to vomit this one into the world and prove to yourself that you’re the most observant and reflective, something that it is both desirable and possible to achieve.

You’re back now in the city that everybody at work for the past one year and ten months has insisted on calling “home” for you, in spite of the fact that, since you were a lonely and angry teenager unhealthily obsessed with the idea of home, no place you’ve lived has ever felt less like home. You lived in Halifax for two years, made friends and became a part of their lives, had exhausting work weeks into weekends into exhausting work weeks into weekends into stupefyingly boring work weeks, tried sushi restaurants, went to a wedding, picked a favourite mall, bought some nice shirts, fell in love. What else is home?

But I digress. You’re home now. And it’s beautiful. The Pacific air is vivifying in a way that you don’t remember from that one time you survived here for ten months in a world locked down by a pandemic. The people, whom you remember to be generally stony and cold, are suddenly kind and helpful. Maybe that’s because you’re less depressed this go-around. Maybe it’s because they’re less depressed this go-around. Maybe it’s because you’re better-looking this go-around.

Do you (you, the charming and intelligent reader of this piece, and not “you,” the second-person literary device representing the author) like anime? Or video games? Are you familiar with the idea of a time skip? For those fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the device, a time skip is a mechanic in a story wherein a significant amount of time passes without being explicitly described, interrupting the story and resuming after the elapsed time. That’s what all this feels like. It’s a time skip. Life has not moved along here in an orderly fashion outside of your gaze; it’s jumped ahead in unpredictable, unsystematically selected ways. The people you remember have transformed abruptly into older, more complete versions of themselves. The city has grown more mature, most importantly in that there’s some amount more of your beloved junk fast food chains now: Mary Brown’s, you saw, Popeye’s, you were told by some inebriated young women at midnight on a sidewalk. You haven’t changed, though. That would be impossible. You are who you are.

You don’t know how much you can say about work. There’s a helicopter. People tell you you’re allowed to exist in it unsupervised now.

Time marches on, old man. Your 20’s have just about slipped away so imperceptibly that you unbegrudgingly simply consider yourself 30 now. Where did he go? That 22-year-old who thought himself so smart? You hammer out this piece with Taylor Swift’s latest album blasting in your ears. Plus ça change.

Time marches on, old man. There’s no rest for the weary coming. People have spent your thus far short career telling you to enjoy your time before becoming operational, because you would never experience such a leisurely pace of work again. Who would have thought they’d be right so resoundingly or immediately? The year ahead affords you hardly a breath. The years after will likely be much the same.

Spring snuck up on you this year. It was a 12-degree day in Halifax, bright and disarming. Then, abruptly, it was grey 9-degree day after grey 9-degree day in Victoria. You’re not sure you remember the last time a winter was so unremarkably bearable. Maybe that’s because you had the fortune of spending this winter comfortably nestling in with the love of your life. Maybe it’s because of climate change.

You’ve made it this far without writing about a single person, recounting a single anecdote. This can’t be how one writes. Who could possibly have read this long without one such humanizing element? Have you lost the words? Eaten away by rust, since your friend died two years and eight days ago?

What a terrible thing that would be.

Here is an anecdote: You push a few stacks of quarters toward a friend after he loses out of a poker game before anyone else does, which, you’re told, is a routine occurrence. A number of your other friends do the same. He is playing again. What else is home?

You hammer these words out, lying in another barracks room, uncomfortably close to the age after which you once declared you would never live in a barracks room.

There are two days left in this breath, before the year avalanches down on you.

The decade-long in-between time is over, it seems.

You hope this is home. What came before was not, after all. For the millionth time since you were a child, you hope home is at least coming soon, as you run insistently away from it toward adventure.

You nurse a drink alone at a bar, watching the game intently. Bichette, Chapman, and Guerrero have been hitting well. Bichette’s defence has been bad. The pitching has been mediocre-to-bad. They give up nine runs. It’s clear that the Jays will lose this one.

It’s frustrating, but bearable. The beauty of baseball is that, with 162 games, no one of them really matters, until the season ends, at which point you remember they all do.