keyword: pestilent, title: insufficient funds in misc. flash fiction

The baseball team that I follow isn’t very good. I mean that literally, the Mets aren’t very good, they’re interesting but flawed, they’ll win more than they’ll lose, they just won’t finish anywhere near the post-season. They’ve got great starting pitching and decent hitters, but they can’t stay healthy and their bullpen could only be referred to as “hilariously and historically pestilent”.

I’ve been run off more than one fan message-board for spelling this out, spammed with clichés how one has “gotta believe” against all fact and reason. They all say fandom is supposed to be willful suspension of analysis, invest your soul into best-case-scenarios, that’s supposedly the fun of it. I don’t buy it. Hope, on this crap-sack planet, is a rare and bone-precious gift, to be hoarded, spent only when needed to get through the worst horrors this life has to offer.

If I waste the little hope left to have on a baseball team, let alone a mediocre one, what’ll I do when I stub my toe, when the cat gets sick, when the men in suits finally unleash the nukes? It helps how the message-boards make their cash merchandizing inspirational tee-shirts, of course. Paraphrasing Arthur Clarke, any sufficiently monetized fandom is indistinguishable from a faith.

Two corporate monoliths go to proxy war over the intellectual property rights to Spider-Man, both hoping to use fan devotion as a cudgel against the other for a richer slice of that pie. The Amazon rainforest burns away, the very lungs of Earth up in flames, but God help us if the X-Men can’t meet Spidey. Indistinguishable from a faith.

I know a woman whose only extravagance is VIP meet-and-greet packages before rock shows, in hope their Ticketmastered three-hundred-dollar transactional kindnesses will turn out to be real, will somehow end with herself elevated up alongside her gods. For her sake, I hope her wildly improbable faith is fulfilled but I wouldn’t place bets. Indistinguishable from a faith.

I have however, by din of my time spent in Los Angeles, been graced with the shitty miracle of disillusionment. I don’t “gotta believe” because I’ve seen how pinning one’s hopes on pedestal sitting rich folks just wastes a resource more precious than gold and a thousand times as rare. I will enjoy when my team beats bottom feeders but never count on miracles, and if I never see Spider-Man meet Wolverine on the silver screen, I’ll just re-read my old comic books instead.

I’ll save my hope to consider that humanity might outlive this ugly adolescence yet. I’ll save my hope for the possibility there’s something of my dad that survived his death. I’ll save my hopes for another chance at love out there yet, even though I’ll never know how to play the guitar.

The rest I’ll leave to the validation-desperate and to the hucksters shilling their worn-out slogans. Hope is too precious to be wasted on other peoples’ games. If you want me to sell your faith, I’d better be well-paid.