I've been thinking a lot about how teaching is like softball. See, there's a couple of things we see as often around here as gallons of milk. You know, quotidian stuff: There's avoidance of immediate physical pain, And there's avoidance of existential pain. Then there's villains. The kind who administer physical pain, and the kind who administer existential pain. That's pretty much the scene we have for like 99% of our stories. And I'm trying to figure this out while watching tv shows and eating snacks as a way of avoiding both kinds of pain, mostly the latter. The TV shows like to make the villains into something more subtle, less concrete. That's just theatrics. In real life, the villains are as straightforward and real as Germans in WWII. We like to turn our villains into cartoon characters so we can pretend anvils don't really fall out of the sky. There's all these layers of irony, yeah, a teacher would know all about that, right, and symbolism? But what's symbolism other than everything that is represented by a symbol? The fucking alphabet is symbolism, fucker. You don't need a degree in talking regurgitated shit about poetry to recognize a stop sign. So we're all screaming silently up and down the highway, avoiding all these kinds of pain, avoiding the certainty of dismemberment and decay, thinking about our jobs. And my job right now is supposed to be some kind of teaching. *Substitute* teaching mind you, so I can avoid the kind of pain that is full commitment to a full identity. But still. It's really hard to think, just so you know. So every time I think (it's Sunday) of the job that I have to do and be responsible for, I get this quiet queasy feeling at the base of my identity that is *uncannily* like the feeling I used to get when it was a weekend at home and I was warmly ensconced in the glow of my family and my life and my typewriter and magic and the backyard and rotting oak leaves and trails and the fall and the cracks in the sidewalk, and a thought would intrude about the inevitable return to school, to gym class, to *softball,* and how you had to play but no-one was allowed to teach you *how* to play, rather they were just required to mock and punish you relentlessly when you didn't do it right. So now I'm having another beer and watching another show. If this were a sitcom, I'd play softball and screw up royally but still manage to win somehow and be redemptive. But life isn't a sitcom. Life is what happens while you're watching sitcoms, avoiding the pain of softball, trying not to get evicted and be homeless and toothless, at least before you're dead and won't care anymore, and it's a shit-holy fuck-up of a hot mess, and the way the sun glints off the hubcaps of the semi truck in the lane next to me as I'm screaming home from the print shop to make some biscuits and eggs for my girls just makes me so grateful I can't even think about softball anymore. Until they get to bed and the house is quiet and the paint is still peeling off the upstairs ceilings. But by then, it's ok. I can handle it now. I'm old, I'm ugly, I'm weak and I'm fading fast. Hand me that bat, fucker, it's time to look like a fool.