The Death of Everything

1.

Burroughs: "Tear it down, tear it down, tear it all down!"

actually it was "Take it back, take it back, take it all back!", but who's keeping track? Bogus attribution and outright lying is the chic literary device of the first quarter of the 21st century. If this seems like a week attempt then it's because I've come unstuck in time.

2.

This is the death of everything. The title reeks of berets and Sartre, of pretension so mundane it's become a Halloween costume. It's like

DEATH

"oooohhh, scary . . . who the fuck are you trying to kid and/or impress?"

There's the big death, and there's the little death. And a few deaths in between. It's virtually meaningless to talk about death, the big empty. Death is too big; death stands in for its own meaning.

Or not.

3.

I call this blog the death of everything because I want it to be, in a sense, a series of endings. I perceive life/reality as a cycle, a series of cycles, a group of cycles, whatever . . . but unlike circles, there's no smooth continuum, and unlike spirals, there's no controlled (or, sometimes, even logical) motion. As such, you can point at any moment and say "that's the end! DEATH!" and you would be right. Or, you could say "that's the beginning! BIRTH!" and be correct as well. It's all a matter of perspective, you see?

Problem is, everyone wants to be RIGHT. It doesn't work that way. The circles have flat spots, the spirals are less spirals than they are a careening about in scenery that is occasionally familiar, occasionally not.

This is life beyond mathematics, spiritual or actual . . .

4.

Everyone wants a new beginning without an ending. Birth without death.

But it doesn't work that way.

So, lacking rebirth without pain, they choose the status quo. Problem is, there is no such thing as a status quo. Everything is always changing.

You get up every morning at the same time. You eat the same thing for breakfast - say, a bowl of Cheerios. Every day. Same time.

But today, it rains. Yesterday it snowed. The sun will be out tomorrow.

The president got shot. Someone flew airplanes into a large building.

You had sex.

Nothing is ever really the same. But

5.

Somehow, it is. Sartre tries to convince us that just because the sun rose in the east yesterday, and yesterday, and yesterday ad infinitum, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will rise in the east again tomorrow.

Sure. I can buy that. But nobody ever lost money betting that the sun would rise in the east.

"The more things change, the more things stay the same."

God, how I hate the old saws, but this one's apropos. It's the spiral, the careening about in scenery familiar and unfamiliar. It's a life of deja vu.

"It takes money to make money."

Less apropos, but I was thinking of Green on Red for some reason, and that line from one of their songs just came insistently barging through. But wait: not so beside the point, it turns out. Because if you expand it to

"Power serves naught but power."

then you are getting closer to the point.

Money serves money. Power serves power. The status quo exists solely to project itself into infinity.

And that, friends, is the source of everything that is burning up our world: the enormous resource drain to power the continual return of the status quo. I don't mean that strictly in the environmental sense (though, indeed, that applies), but a macroeconomic sense, if economy here is expanded to mean the sum total of all exchange. You see, entropy is the natural tendency of the universe

(everything falls apart)

, and it takes energy (or applied energy = power) to fight against the entropy. So, the more mass a given film clip/reality attains, the more power (energy) it takes to maintain the status quo, like holding an ocean liner at anchor. Turns out the status quo is not the mundane, same-old-same-old; but rather, a raging inferno, a nuclear implosion, and energy sink that swallows up everything in its wake.

Entropy, on the other hand, is zen-like. Sometimes horrible, sometimes violent

(ultimate entropy separates atom from atom, fractures nuclei, sends electrons careening from orbit)

but always tending toward the peace of oblivion

(and [need it be said?] no energy/power drain).

The true conservationist does not preserve. The true conservationist is the death of everything.

6.

the death of everything wants to scrape the barnacles off the ocean liner of culture.

7.

Today we have hundreds, nay, thousands of people telling us what's up with this or that. The democratization of message transmission has led to (what can only with extreme charity be called) the democratization of expression. That's fine: it's not as if the voices are any more wacked out, it's just that there's more of them. And besides, some of the most wacked out voices are right there on the top of the "traditional media" pile.

the death of everything strives to break apart the control systems at the heart of the word. This is particularly tricky considering the fact that the operations take place at the level of word. the death of everything is far from pure in this sense, especially when "calmly and rationally" discussing politics

{assuming that this defective, bipolar political monstrosity is somehow a) functioning logically, and b) worthy of "serious" discussion is in and of itself dangerously faulty logic}

or appearing to align itself in the political spectrum.

"Political", here, meaning American politics.

For that reason, the death of everything needs to be taken as a whole. A defective whole, certainly, but hopefully with its moments of

8.

insight? No, death. The breaking apart, the entropy is the thing. Effective in and of itself, the aiming, the focus, the purpose tends to pollute it, but not fatally.

9.

And thus, the circle, the cycle, the . . . whatever. One thing's for sure, after you've looped around, you're not in the same place, even if the deja vu is heavy . . .

10.

Life and death. Death and life. You don't get one without the other. As the ocean liner of this reality trundles along,

11.

becoming more massive and burdened as it goes,

12.

it sinks ever more precipitously to the dark depths.

13.

Our reality is burdened to the point that it is becoming unworkable. It has to be picked apart, torn asunder, loosened up (nuclei split, electrons ejected from their orbits). Something has to die so that reality can live. And, more than just something, it has to be

14.

everything. Anything less than everything would betray an agenda. Everything dies so that all can be reborn.

15.

"Now I die and vanish," you would say, "and all at once I am nothing. The soul is as mortal as the body. But the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs and will create me again. I myself belong to the causes of eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent . . . " Zarathustra's eagle and serpent

16.

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust - Remember always: from ashes you came, to ashes you shall return." Ash Wednesday Invocation

FJM R.I.P.

Perusing the USA Today sports section at El Nap Friday, I came across the standard putdown of free agent slugger Adam "Country Strong" Dunn . . . you know, the one that slags him off as the new Dave Kingman, a selfish player who hits a few home runs, but strikes out a ton, and fields like Sam the Butcher ("bringin' Alice the meat"). Because, as anyone knows, guys who swing for the fences are egotistical and selfish, and little scrappy guys who hit singles are gutsy team players. USA Today then goes on to derisively predict that some loser team will pay Dunn big money, since only loser teams are stupid enough to pay this big selfish knucklehead money.

But, you know and I know, this is bullshit. Dave Kingman was quite the chump, a career .236 hitter with a lifetime OBP (On Base Percentage) of .307. And, by all accounts, he was a selfish asshole. Dunn does strike out prodigiously (7th in MLB this year at 164, which is pretty close to his career average), and smack home runs even more prodigiously (40, which was good for second). His batting average is anemic as well (.236 - recognize that number?). BUT, Dunn was first in walks at 122, and his OBP was .386, which was a respectable 17th place in the majors, better than such media faves as Chase Utley, Carlos Beltran, and even Magglio Ordonez. Now, let me break that down for you: Mags was ninth in the majors with a .317 batting average, which is pretty sharp (and, importantly for Mags and his agent, solid in the statistic that everyone understands - or thinks they understand - the one statistic that says to the average guy "I am a good hitter"). And, Mags is no poke-and-slap hitter, with a reasonable .494 Slugging Percentage, which is in the MLB top 50 (21 home runs). And Mags has less than half the strikouts (76 v. Dunn's 164). But you know what? Even with his pathetic .236 batting average and his 164 strikouts, Dunn was on base a higher percentage of the time (.386 OBP v. Ordonez's .376). All that means is that Mags puts wood on the ball more often while Dunn watches more pitches (balls and strikes) sail past him. I am well aware that there is value in a batter who fouls off a lot of pitches, therefore sending pitch counts soaring earlier in the game than the opposing managers like to see, but in the end, a long fly caught at the warning track is no less an out than a called third strike. Would I take Adam Dunn over Magglio Ordonez? Well, no, 'cause that thing about Dunn fielding like a butcher is pretty accurate, though I'm sure he could get used to first base, and he was on scholarship as a quarterback at Texas, so he can't be a terrible athlete . . . but no, I'd still have to take Mags. But Dunn isn't chopped liver, certainly not another Dave Kingman, and that's the whole point here.

A-and, there's that study that Bill James and company released naming Derek Jeter the worst fielder in baseball at any position. Derek "King of New York" Jeter! The media-proclaimed "player that Alex Rodriguez should be instead of who he is"! Oh, and for the record, Rodriguez finished tenth among third basemen. Not to mention the fact that Rodriguez is a better hitter across the board, even in an off year for him, and that shortstop is his natural position . . .

* * * * *

But I shouldn't be writing about any of this baseball stuff. It gets done so much better at the Fire Joe Morgan (dot com) blog . . . or at least it did, until the other day. When I went there for the chance to gloat over the chink in Jeter's armor, or to find a friend to give a shout out to Dunn, here's what I found:

Hello, everyone.

After 21 years, and almost 40 million posts (we'll have to check those numbers, but it's something like that), we have decided to bring FJM to an end.

Although we have not lost our borderline-sociopathic joy for meticulously criticizing bad sports journalism, the realities of our professional and personal lives make FJM a time/work luxury we can no longer afford.

We started this site with two purposes: to make each other laugh, and to aid and abet the Presidential campaign of Bob Barr. Although we failed in the latter goal, we gleefully succeeded in the first, and thanks to a grassroots internetty word-of-mouth kind of a deal, we appear to have positively affected the lives of actual citizens as well, which astonishes and delights us to this day. We really never thought FJM would be for anyone but us. We are thrilled and kind of humbled to have been proven wrong.

Damn! Fire Joe Morgan was a great blog, not just a great sports blog. Or, if you make the distinction between blogs and the real world, then it was just good writing, period. Beyond all those stats, the obsessively weird insider sports humor, and a whole woodshed full of double-edged lumberjack-sized axes to grind, it was a great example of how to read, listen, and analyze. FJM hacked away at sports media, which admittedly, is a little like a crippled turkey shoot in a petting zoo, but still, they did it with admirable zeal. Theirs was a gleeful deconstruction - they more than analyzed the media, they pilloried it. In an age where the "philosophical" importance of sports to culture floats like an overinflated blimp over the American psychic landscape, FJM was a vital pin to that balloon. Beyond sports, FMJ was a vital part of the map to read culture as a whole . . . of all the posts on my blog, "The Death of Meaning Pt. 1" reads most like an FMJ post, even though it has nothing to do with sports. The whole key is to isolate the subtexts of a given text, and expose them to the cold light of day. Even when the actual critique goes of track, the act of questioning the givens of any discussion is absolutely vital.

We are told that sportswriting can be great writing, and then we are force fed Grantland Rice mythologizing bullshit, and modern bozos can't even approximate a shadow of that hackery . . . well, FJM, you will be missed, to say the least.