the longest four days of the year

We have now entered the twilight zone of days. For today and the next three days, nothing will make sense, feel right, add up, comfort or encourage. It is worse than the fiercest February, the hottest August, the rainiest May, the snowiest January. No four days on the calendar are more dreadful than these. And they come every year!

They suck away excitement and joy and wonder and hopefulness and even diminish pain and anxiety--though that is not a good thing in this case.

It is as if a total eclipse of the sun lasted 4 days. Four days of darkness, despair, loneliness, disconnection, ennui , depression, pointlessness, bitter emptiness--like staring into the abyss.

It is the Baseball All Star break. There is no baseball played, right in the midst of July, for four days. Oh, there is a game--but not a real game. Watching the All Star Game is like watching the Rose Parade on New Year's day. Vaguely interesting but what does it have to do with much of anything vital, alive, real, compelling.

I would like to be put into a 96 hour induced coma and wake up when baseball, for real, resumes.

After week after week of 6 games each week for every team. After that since early April--the All Star break is like going cold turkey off the Drug that is major league baseball. A withdrawal just after half the season. What to do for those four evenings. Does the radio and TV still work when there are no games???

So here I am, longing for the resumption of the season....the renewal of the joy...the rejuvenation of the time of hope, longing, imagination, beauty....

O, where are you, Yankees that I love?
Lots of you are in Anaheim, I know.
But where is the green, green grass of the Bronx?
Where is the crack of the bat that matters?
The inside pitch that makes me draw back along with A-Rod?
O, boys of summer, how can you desert me
for four whole days?
What will I do with myself?
How am I to behave with no yesterday's game
to relive
no today's game to anticipate,
no changes in the standings
or the statistics?
May God isn't dead....
but there is no baseball for four days....Alas....