Opening Day (not really about baseball)

I've noticed that I haven't written much recently and nothing at all in the past week. Then I was watching a terrific little documentary on Fran Lebowitz directed by Martin Scorcese (called Public Speaking). Lebowitz is a humorist who has a famously chronic case of writer's block (she says it's more of a writer's blockade in her case). And I was wondering if I was blocked in some way. But I don't think so.

I think the main thing is that March was just an awful month for me, any way you want to figure it, and I didn't write for the same reason I didn't do lots of things- I just didn't feel like it. This is a predictable consequence of being someone with a juvenile sensibility and an adult life. Also, because many of the people who read this blog know me, I don't really want to say anything that could be hurtful to anyone else.

Anyone who's ever been in a bad mood knows that you've got plenty of things and people to complain about when you're feeling lousy. But even at my worst and most selfish, I try not to consider myself the ultimate arbiter of who's right and and wrong. Maybe, at least for this particular time period, I just suck. So if I've got nothing positive to say and don't want to either be a whiner or hurtful, there's not much to blog about.

But forget all that, it's Opening Day. Actually, Thursday was baseball's actual opening day, but because I was so desperate for April to begin, I'm picking Friday as my opening day, and it helped that the Phillies opened that day as well. But the more important point is that it's a new beginning. It reminds me of something I read about baseball back when I was a kid.

There was a baseball player that I only knew about because I had his baseball card, named Hank Aguirre (pronounced "ah-GEAR-ee" with a hard g). No relation to the excellent basketball player Mark Aguirre, he was a moderately successful pitcher (633rd best pitcher in baseball history, whatever that means, according to one source) whose debut was a month before I was born and who played mostly Detroit, famous mostly for being an atrocious hitter.

When I was around 12, I bought something called Baseball Digest, which had a few articles and all the prior year's statistics. One of the articles contained a bunch of tongue-in-cheek predictions, and one caught my fancy:

Hank Aguirre reports to training camp and declares that he has a "new attitude," setting a major league record of 12 consecutive years with a new attitude by a pitcher. Aguirre said that his attitude this year would be surly.

So when I see you next week and you think I'm being surly, don't worry, I'm just approaching life with a new attitude.