The game is off

I’ve recently received three different voicemails assuring me that my loan application has been approved at the highest level, which is wonderful news except that I have not applied for a loan. Then there was the alert that a possibly fraudulent charge had been made on my X Bank credit card, which would be alarming if I actually had an X Bank credit card.

It seems swindlers and scammers are more prolific than ever before. This shouldn’t be surprising since it is more lucrative than ever to make a dishonest living.

The local paper did a front-page story yesterday with the headline “World Series ticket prices are sky high.” The face price of a ticket is pretty darn high because everyone and his mother wants to go to the first World Series in Wisconsin in 44 years, but the article also has interviews with the people euphemistically called “ticket brokers.”

These are people who buy up tickets and then resell them at inflated prices. When I was an innocent tadpole, these vermin were called “scalpers” and the government tried to arrange for them to stay in unpleasant facilities behind bars. Then the politicians recognized that they could cut themselves in for a piece of the action, and the laws against scalping tickets were relaxed.

There also was a time when gambling was discouraged. Some of the greatest baseball players in history were tarnished by their association with gamblers, going so far as to ban them for Hall of Fame consideration until long after they were dead and gone. Now some of the biggest gambling rackets are run by the government, and you can’t avoid the ads for gambling apps watching the average sports telecast.

I am always in favor of repealing laws and relaxing regulations, and these ticket sales and gambling operations represent agreements between consenting adults. I just hope people realize that when they buy a $98 concert ticket for $600 or a World Series ticket for $35,000, the profit does not go to the artist or the ballplayers, it’s pocketed by the unsavory characters who sold the ticket.

I know, I know, it’s hard enough to make an honest buck anymore, so you almost can’t blame those who try to make a dishonest one. I just am nostalgic for the days when scalpers and other swindlers were scorned as dirtbags and not celebrated.

That said, it should be a great World Series between these two scrappy teams, and I look forward to my Brewers winning it in five games, just like the 1969 Mets, my last baseball team who won the Series. No, I don’t have any money riding on that prediction.

We have achieved world peace

Here we are on Thursday, time for me to plug one of my books again. I can’t give you a book link for this one from last September, because it’s in my upcoming tome What I Came to Say: Making the most of the time that’s left. Watch this space for information about availability.

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It’s 4:18 a.m., and the morning newspaper was just delivered to my mailbox. What an interesting process — people collect information (news, advertising, photos, artwork, etc.), manufacture a large booklet, and send copies out via courier to boxes all over creation, including a box on a post 40 feet from my garage door.

Similar processes generated the thousands of items stored or lying about this house, one of millions of homes across the country, billions around the globe, each with thousands, or hundreds, or at least dozens of belongings, each item requiring the cooperation of countless people to reach the place it occupies now.

Thousands of my belongings are discs and tapes of music. I’m not entirely sure what I own and what music I never owned or don’t own anymore. I enjoy exploring the shelves and I don’t, because I know there are gems hidden in the unexplored and undocumented spaces.

Each recording took lifetimes to produce — years of learning by the various contributors, hours of practice to create just that sound from each of the instruments, the right settings for that particular blend of sounds to emerge, and the manufacture of the discs reproducing those sounds, which represent a message from a moment many years ago, perhaps the sound of a winter concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938. The weather that day, the energy from the hundreds of humans in that room, echo through the electronics and are pumped through the speakers in an imitation of what that great hall sounded like that night, here and now in this little house in a field 1,000 miles and 87 years away from where the musicians performed.

Or perhaps the sounds were recorded in a little room on the other side of the world.

And those are just a couple of examples. There is this ceramic mug in my left hand that was fired on the other side of the globe, filled with hot liquid brewed from coffee beans grown in Jamaica and transported to a small factory north of here, where the beans were roasted, ground and packaged, then brought to a grocery store filled with people who stock shelves in a particular way so that I know exactly where to find and purchase my Door County Coffee Jamaican Me Crazy blend.

Each and every one of the items scattered about this house has a similar story. Each was produced, shipped, and delivered through a process of cooperation and collaboration.

You ask if it’s possible we can overcome our differences and get along? The answer is obvious in everything from this coffee mug to the house itself, or the complex machine sitting in my driveway that can take me over mostly smooth roads to the stores where I replenish my supplies.

Everything we see is evidence that humans can get along and live with one another in peace. Don’t tell me that we can’t, when it’s clear that we can and do, every day, all day and all night.

A promise always kept

As Summer and I took our Tuesday morning constitutional, I heard a familiar but unexpected chattering tweet from above. Sure enough, it was a red-winged blackbird perched on a power line calling down to me. I’m used to that blackbird song being an harbinger of spring, not October chill.

‘What are you still doing here, buddy?” I called back. “Did your friends fly south without you? Are you an elderly beast who decided to live out your last days here in God’s country? Or have I misunderstood your lifestyle all along, and you and your friends are always around and I never noticed before?”

Whatever the case, it was comforting to have a reminder of springtime as we begin the annual slog toward winter.

“Spring waits at the end of this road,” God and the blackbird promise. “Just hang in there for a while.”