Sore Season

My mother, otherwise an enlightened woman, believed deeply that people in show business die in threes over some loosely defined period of time.  No especially prominent Death Trios come to mind at present, but I remember many times feeling a kind of forbidden thrill when she announced that this or that movie star had passed through the Iron Door, and who would the other two be?  

I can't say I put much faith in this notion back then, although, as a budding young snob, I kept hoping for the week that would claim all of the Three Stooges.  Still, as I've grown (much) older and (somewhat) wiser, I've come to realize that there's something to this idea that certain kinds of events come in clusters.

By the way, if you've plowed this far in the hope of something enlightening, let me suggest that there are many better things you could be doing.  This post is unrelentingly trivial.

Ten days ago I was out for a run in Santa Monica when I stepped on something that stopped me so quickly I practically kept running right through the front of my skin.  I bent down and picked up a twenty-dollar bill, neatly folded into quarters.  A couple of days after that, it was two ones.  Then, for a few days, it was deep blue marbles, one per day over the length of a block until I had five of them.  The Age of Marble ended, fittingly, with a large, bright steel ball-bearing.  Today, I stopped and picked up a five, which I have to remember to take out of the pocket of my running shorts before I throw them in the wash.

Okay, so it's not life-changing, although the 27 bucks came in handy and the marbles and ball-bearing are rolling around on my table as I write.  So there was an impact of sorts: not a bullet hole, perhaps, but something like a temporary dimple.

When I was in college, I became inescapably aware that time is a sort of string we flow along, smooth for long stretches and then interrupted by knots of various sizes, complexity, and discomfort potential.  (This notion, by the way, found its way into the upcoming Poke book, The Fear Artist.)  The nice smooth stretches are those most underrated periods of life, the uneventful ones.  The knots are when things happen.

What brought this home to me was the realization, in my freshman year, that I had what I came to think of as Sore Seasons.  Out of nowhere, I'd cut myself on a piece of broken glass (I pretty much lived barefoot in those days) and within a few hours I would have bumped my head on the corner of a cabinet, bitten my tongue, gotten stung by one of the 38 zillion wasps that thought I had moved into their house back behind the campus, and/or hit my funnybone repeatedly until the whole arm felt like I had a finger caught in a wall outlet.

About the time I was feeling like all three of the Stooges jammed together, the Sore Season would mutate into subtler insults, not so much physical as metaphysical.  My roommate would bring home a pet alligator, maybe a foot long, and set up a little carnivore's theme park in the tub.  My cat would poop on my earphones.  (She did this several times to register displeasure at some insult known only to cats.)  I'd get into a small automobile accident.  I once capped a spectacular Sore Season by having three minor accidents in a single night, when I was driving a cab.  I dropped off the cab, somewhat battered, around 3 AM and went home, only to be invited back for a talk the next day.  Turned out they wanted my hat.  They sent me my check a week later, minus the damage to the car.  It was for $23.77.  I should have kept the hat.

The notion of event clusters holds true on a much larger scale, too.  American political life has arranged itself naturally into Sore Seasons: four years of low-level mendacity and wars-of-the-week interrupted by the national snapping-turtle match of an election.  In an election year, men and women who believe in nothing but getting elected and who live on a scale most people can't even imagine, roll up their sleeves, hunker down, and become jus' folks, sharing our pain that our homes and jobs and children's futures have been stolen by the very companies -- quelle surprise! -- that are funding their campaigns.  They fulminate against China, the country to whom they turn for loans to replace the money they've wasted on pork and useless wars.  They promise to make our great nation great again, without stopping to parse how you can make a great nation great again if it hasn't lost at least some of its greatness.  And it seems to go on forever, but it doesn't.  It just lasts until the end of the sore season.

Sore season.  Knots on the string.  It's taken me all this time to realize that the Three Stooges weren't kidding at all.

Tim -- Sundays