There is only one bottom

Once, when I was a much heavier drinker, I woke up one morning in December and my woman left me. It was not a pretty month. I had already found myself toiling around rock-bottom, spending my nights in seed-joints with lazy women that I should have known better than to. I slept all day and stayed up all night and had no reason for anything. When she left I found myself unable to really stand up, which is a disturbing feeling. It sort of starts at the stomach and works its way down to the knees and you know that you can tell your legs to move and remain stable, and you get yourself in a working stance, but the emotion is too raw, and your body is overwhelmed. I remember sitting on the third stair in my home.

I remember thinking: this is what the well feels like - the pity of empty in the shallow trough where the bottom is just black and your feet are soaking wet.

At some point she came back, and I thanked god to have her. But now when she hangs the clever over my neck it doesn’t scare me as much. Not because I am unafraid to lose her, but because I have seen the worst already. When you really reach the point of emotional exhaustion and depression you see what it takes to break you.

So, it is good now, because while she may want to leave, it no longer affects me as hard as it did that first time she was leaving, because at that moment it was too real and pure and honest. Like falling in love the first time, heartache makes an impression.

Let that be a lesson if you are a Twins fan, because beginning today, it is good now.

The first time leaving in a baseball season often takes more than one game, it is an extended period. It takes time to recognize that the wheels are falling off. The team does not call you and tell you, ‘This is over, put your shit in a box and give me my lamp shades.’

Baseball takes a slow hand on these occasions.

You see the first time leaving for this Minnesota Twins season actually began on August 4 and it effectively ended yesterday, on September 6. It was 33 days of hell and every fan should now recognize that it cannot get any worse. You should look around you, recognize the stone walls of this hole, look up and see the oval brisk light of the sun above, the aperturic hole of a glimmer.

There is only one way to go from here, and that is up. And trust me this is not optimism, this is the rejection of a deeper pessimism. We as fans have been trampled, and I am sitting on the third step, and I am deciding to stand up. Because, if the Twins miss the playoffs and lose 15 of 20 down the stretch, well, is that really worse than what has transpired over the last month?

If they get within one game by the end of the season and miss the playoffs by losing on Sunday to the Royals, will you look at that game with any more spite than you have these most recent losses? Or will you say, I’ve seen this before. I have been here.

I don’t need to post the numbers of how many late games the Twins have lost in the last month. They have been some of the most difficult games of baseball I have seen as a fan.

Still, there is hope in this desolation. I often think of how a team builds up momentum and where that comes from. For some teams I think it comes from the bottom. The White Sox this year have been a team that seems to win games late, and they are confident in that setting. They don’t mind how many runs they get down. I don’t think they have been near the bottom this year in the way that the Twins have.

The Twins seem to lose games late. Lately the Twins bullpen has been just horiffic, I mean mind-numbingly bad. They seem to have lost all confidence. When they walk to the mound the groan comes from inside. I believe in the idea that the bottom that comes early gives room for a chance to reach the top late. The Twins are there early this season.

The Twins are out of it from my perspective. I will not stop following until some magic number is reached, but it is over in my mind, right now.

In this way things can only be good for the rest of the season. The Minnesota Twins will not win this division, and I have accepted that fully. So, even if this team comes back to me, kisses me on the cheek, rubs the inside part of my thigh and whispers to me, ‘I love you more than you know,’ I will maybe kiss them back, maybe bite their ear. But I will know.

I will know that if the Twins turn on me, call me a ‘fuc-ing loser’ and tell me that I am, ‘a worthless sack of sh-t,’ I will be able to tell them that while I still feel the sadness, I have heard all of this before, and it really doesn’t mean that much to me now.