devouring the present

"There's a clever cartoon from the New Yorker... In the first panel a man is sitting at his desk and daydreaming about golf. In the second the same man is playing golf while fantasizing about sex. In the third, he's in bed with a woman while thinking about work."

Sonja Lyubomirsky's point? "Like [him] we habitually fail to enjoy, savor, and live in the present..."

Right. I couldn't find that cartoon, but this one makes a related point: not only do we deprive ourselves of our own vital present, too often we deprive those we love of theirs too:

Perspective

New Yorker,  7.27.09

"...there are frogs there--who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave..."

Spring Training!

The first "real" spring training games of the season (there's an oxymoron for you, I guess) commence today in Florida and Arizona. Unless the sky falls between now and Friday, I'm goin'! Spring Break begins Friday afternoon, and I'm taking the long way to a philosophy conference in South Carolina -- via St. Pete, Bradenton, & Sarasota. Stay tuned for dispatches from baseball heaven (apologies to "Bull Durham's" Iowa).

Baseball has inspired more good writing than any other game, hands down; and New Yorker editor & contributor Roger Angell is the best of the best. Powell's Books did a nice interview with him concerning his memoir Let Me Finish -- http://www.powells.com/authors/angell.html. And see New York's profile, http://nymag.com/arts/books/profiles/17043/, and The New Yorker's Q-&-A http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/articles/061009on_onlineonly01.

Angell once wrote of the pre-2004 Red Sox,

"Glooming in print about the dire fate of the Sox and their oppressed devotees has become such a popular art form that it verges on a new Hellenistic age of mannered excess. Everyone east of the Hudson with a Selectric or a word processor has had his or her say, it seems (the Globe actually published a special twenty-four-page section entitled "Literati on the Red Sox" before the Series, with essays by George Will, John Updike, Bart Giamatti—the new National League president, but for all that a Boston fan through and through —Stephen King, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and other worthies), and one begins to see at last that the true function of the Red Sox may not be to win but to provide New England authors with a theme, now that guilt and whaling have gone out of style."