Sometimes I worry that my mind has outgrown my soul. I’ve always wanted to see the world around me as a reflection of my own personality, and maybe that’s why I haven’t made a stand against reality. I need to plunge all the way in, because right now the shiny blue days are so perfect it’s almost impossible not to feel like you’re wasting them, like a heap of fresh oranges piling up in the street. Fortunately, yesterday I went to a Rockies game, where generally, especially in the upper deck, the sun squeezes all of its citrus right into your eyes. They were playing the Cubs, which exposed a fifth column of transplant Chicagoans of pretty shocking dimensions (and yes, I do mean both the number of them and their actual masses). As much as people yammer on with suspicious insistency about how Chicago is one of the greatest cities in the world, the diaspora of Chicagoans living here looks to be of a magnitude the likes of which is equaled only by immigrants from countries that hold a high rank on the Failed States Index.

Being slow, narcoleptic Midwesterners accustomed to perpetual failure, at least they are a less scary lot than the hordes of, say, Red Sox fans that descend on stadiums throughout the country, whose minds, when it comes to baseball, are about as broad and yielding as a pickax. The Cubs fans did become a little enraged about some incident, a supposed bad call, during the third inning, but even then they seemed a bit slow-moving, like a herd of muskoxen trying to get into a defensive formation against a skittering gust of wind. Basically, I think by definition their fans must either be very easily satisfied or excessively motivated by hope. Entirely baseless hope most likely, but then again if it weren’t for that most people would never have a second child. In short, I can see very well how Obama could come out of such an environment (and that picture is in Cubs colors as well, more or less–which also happen to be the colors of America. That should be their new marketing slogan). Speaking of which, at least the Cubs fans did not let fractious team loyalty stand in the way of a conciliatory display of nationalism. My brother claimed you could tell half the crowd were Cubs fans because they actually sang the words to the national anthem and “God Bless America.” I don’t know, I’m not sure we want the patriotic allegiance of Cubs fans. It might turn out like that movie about the guy with really bad luck whom Las Vegas casinos employ to stand near gamblers that have gotten on a hot streak.