Addictions, Part One

    The first thing I can remember being addicted to was fantasy. Not Game of Thrones-style fantasy, with magic and swordfights and all that; I’ve always found that stuff a little tedious, notwithstanding the fact that I have watched the TV show and made a run at the books. No, what I was addicted to was the dreamy state of pretend, a world where I was a hero or a great writer (most often) a baseball star. For hours and hours on many a summer day, I would stand out in the front yard of our house on 28th Avenue, a bat in my hands, slowly enacting an entire career that inevitably involved being the youngest major league player ever, breaking every hitting record in the book, winning several World Series, and ultimately being inducted into the Hall of Fame on a unanimous vote, acclaimed generally as the greatest player ever — far, far better than mere mortals like Ruth, Mays, or Cobb.

    I continued to indulge in this fantasy for a long, long time, long after the age at which most people cease so intensely to pretend. As I got older my sense of narrative improved, so often I was drafted by some out-of-the-way team like the Brewers or the Reds, who underestimated my talent until it became so overwhelmingly obvious they could no longer hold me back. I continued in it, in fact, after I was cut from my high school baseball team at age 15, after I passed the draftable age of 18, and even after college, where the closest thing I had done to actually playing baseball was hurt my elbow trying to throw an apple over a dorm while drunk. I did it in much the same way, too, standing in the yard of my parents’ house with a bat or a glove in my hand, acting out the games, inventing the heroics, making myself quite thoroughly a legend, if only in my mind.

    There are a lot of reasons I call this an addiction, but the main one is that the role that these fantasies played in my youth and adolescence was not entirely unlike the role that other, much more harmful addictions would come to play in my adult life: they were a way to check out of a world in which I felt strange, alienated, fearful, bored, fat, ugly, unlovable, awkward, and (increasingly) guilty. In a pretend game of baseball, one that ended with me twirling the final strike or clubbing the final homer, I could be in a world in which what I did was not just good, but unambiguously so. This was also true in a world in which I became a famous director and married Kerri Russell, or won a Nobel Prize for literature and was lauded as the greatest since Shakespeare, or found secret messages from the government under a rock and then rode to the rescue of people in distress. Fantasy had the ability to numb the anxiety and pain of being human, something at which I have never been good. Can you think of anything else that does that?

    Too, this kind of fantasy and my earliest stages of serious drug use are intricately linked. I smoked pot and got drunk a few times in high school, and even then I had an intuition that maybe I liked doing these things too much. The thing is, when you’re a 16-year-old who’s trying to prove he’s smarter than everybody else by getting straight A’s, it’s a little bit easier to just say, “Okay, I like this too much, maybe let’s not fuck around with it.” So for the most part I didn’t. It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college, when I was experiencing my first real breakup from my first serious girlfriend, that the incentives switched. I was so miserable, and so inexplicably — we’d broken up because we lived hundreds of miles apart, we’d been drifting from each other for months, and I’d wanted to do it, and yet still I felt sad about it all the time — that when I got stoned for the first time in years and it put me in a dreamy, otherworldly state not unlike the one I’d once accessed with a bat in my hands in my parents’ yard, I thought, Aha, this is the thing for me.

    And so I think it’s probably not surprising that one of my favorite activities, back when I was a pothead, was to pick up my old baseball bat, and go out in field behind my dorm — at Pomona College, these fields were rather preciously called “beaches” — to construct yet another in an endless string of triumphant baseball careers. People must have thought I was strange, a 20-year-old kid in his bare feet and a sleeveless t-shirt, silently, slowly swinging a bat and then staring into the distance, but I didn’t really care that much. That was part of what I loved about pot, back then; I could retreat into the little world of one where I didn’t feel judged or even noticed, where I could forget the times I’d been rejected or done something awful to someone who didn’t deserve it, and just space out. It was such a relief, especially in college, where my feeling of alienation grew more complex and harder to solve as the issues of sex and sexuality became increasingly present and important. Those were the areas where I was most confused, most likely to have been rejected, and most likely to have done something awful to someone who didn’t deserve it. After that first relationship, I began a pattern I have perpetuated ever since, becoming serially involved with people I didn’t care about much because there was little risk involved and I was (for lack of a better word) horny, and then affecting to be complexly traumatized by people I did care about because I freighted our interactions with such intense, often imaginary baggage. (This was before I had added the real jackpot to the mix, getting involved with people I did care about but didn’t really want to be with, thus adding the double whammy of having done something awful to someone who didn’t deserve it and finding that our friendship had become a veritable No Man’s Land, pocked with emotional landmines and artillery craters.)

    Eventually the pot sort of turned on me, and began to cause an intense self-loathing every time I smoked it — which I continued to do, to diminishing returns, until I was about 23 or 24. With it went my access to that fantasy world, the relatively harmless addiction that, I think, also had its uses: I don’t think I would be a writer today if I hadn’t spent so much of my early life lost in a world of my own construction, if I hadn’t come to feel the power of narrative and a built universe. I’m no longer able to stand in a field of grass with a baseball bat and really effectively pretend that I am a great hero of the diamond, a man whose feats elicit the adulation — and, ultimately, acceptance — of millions. Instead I’ve had to find other ways to numb the pain. But that’s for a later date, I suppose, this has already got longer than I meant for it to.

Why I Was Such a Pain in the Ass in Grad School

Below is the text of something I wrote in the winter of 2014, my last year in graduate school.

 

The Various Things, Internetual and Otherwise, I’ve Been Reading and/or Thinking about Lately

Under consideration: James Gleick’s The Information, Raymond Tallis on Jacques Lacan, John Gardner’s reactionary faff, Dana Spiotta’s collage novels, and some other stuff.

 

1. Because the digital world is lonely and deracinating and alienating, and also because beyond that I am an introvert and find face-to-face interactions with people exhausting, I spend a lot of time alone. Because I spend a lot of time alone and am an introvert and am alienated and deracinated and lonely, I have come to be a denizen of a variety of online “communities”, viz, websites whereat lonely, deracinated, alienated introverts can gather and discuss things without having to look one another in the eye; usually these begin as single-serving websites, focussed on something specific, and become broader: the one I have spent the most time at, in my life, is Baseball Think Factory, which was originally a gathering spot for data-minded baseball enthusiasts — sports “geeks”, we were, which seemed paradoxical in 2002 but now feels totally normal and intuitive, since the geeks have taken over the world — but has since become a freewheeling society of (almost exclusively) dudes, complete with friendships, rivalries, enemies, politics, and entertainments; though baseball is still the most-discussed subject there, the most riotous arguments always erupt over real-world politics, with the majority trending left-libertarian and a vocal minority standing athwart history shouting “STOP!”

2. I’m going to make a distinction here, and it’s going to be important in a minute, and I want it near the top so nobody will miss it: there is a big difference between “data” and “information”. The superhuman geek-god Nate Silver might call one “noise” and the other “the signal”; what I think it really means is that you can get a lot of input these days, but not all of it means what you think it means — or anything at all. The most dangerous mental bias in the data age is probably apophenia: the human tendency to detect patterns in random data. The classic example is how we perceive there to be a face in the geologic forms on the moon, though of course there isn’t: the data, in this case, is the image of the moon; the information the mind wants to find there is the shape of a face. The information that is actually there is the history of the galaxy — if you know how to read it. Anyway, the Man in the Moon is harmless enough, but apophenia becomes dangerous when we are presented with an overwhelming amount of data about the world and the universe and start drawing implausible conclusions: that 9/11 was an inside job, for instance, or that global climate change is a natural process unaided by human inputs (or simply doesn’t exist because it snowed yesterday).

3. An example: the word beautiful contains a very great deal of data, but essentially no information, because if a person says another person is beautiful, we really have no idea what they mean by it: do they like tall, dark and handsome? Rough and rugged? Do they have a ginger fetish? Pretty much anything you could call beautiful — a face, a body, a landscape, a sunset, a night sky, a dream, an idea — is going to present this problem.

4. Anyway, the reason I started off talking about the internet is because there is a common practice on internet forums when someone else elegantly expresses an opinion that you share but don’t feel up to articulating: you quote the entirety of what they have said, and then follow it up with a simple, one-word sentence fragment: “This.” When I sat down to write this little thing, I kind of wanted to quote the entirety of Jonathan Lethem’s essay on postmodernism and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and then type underneath: “This.”

5. It has become axiomatic, in this post-post-(post)-modernist age, that identity is composed and not innate and so on and so forth. I find this to be immensely troubling and ultimately kind of preposterous. It seems to me to be a kind of existential overreaction to the terrors of fascism & colonialism: because for so long the powerful presumed there was an innate quality in being white & Xian that gave them the right to do whatever they wanted to those who were not white &/or Xian, a lot of thinkers freaked out and decided that there was nothing innate about people at all and that the very concept of innateness was dangerous. And that’s understandable, because racialism or whatever you want to call it is a ridiculous and provably false set of ideas; equally, however, it is provably false that identity consists only of inputs. There is a unique processor somewhere in a human brain that causes similar inputs to output different people; it’s not that this is totally immutable or intractable — I am in a lather to assure you that I do not believe in the concept of a soul — but that there is a core to any person’s being that will cause them to compose themselves in a certain way, which has very little to do with culture or language, and may have something to do with genetics, though it’s of course important to note that the way this breaks down runs against the assumptions of race or class superiority that drove several generations of human thought. Pretending as though this isn’t true because it bothers us renders nobody a useful service. The British neuroscientist and philosopher Raymond Tallis writes in his crushing review of Jacques Lacan & co: a History of Psychoanalysis in France:

Future historians trying to account for the institutionalized fraud that goes under the name of ‘Theory’ will surely accord a central place to the influence of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He is one of the fattest spiders at the heart of the web of muddled not-quite-thinkable-thoughts and evidence-free assertions of limitless scope which practitioners of theorrhoea have woven into their version of the humanities. Much of the dogma central to contemporary Theory came from him: that the signifier dominates over the signified; that the world of words creates the world of things; that the ‘I’ is a fiction based upon an Oedipalised negotiation of the transition from mirror to symbolic stages; and so on.

This.

6. There is something assaultive about living in the age of data. James Gleick’s magisterial The Information, which is sort of almost a biography of data, is subtitled, A History, a Theory, a Flood, and that feels right: god, there’s just so much of it. Climate data, the home / road offensive splits of the Seattle Mariners, the likely-voter adjustment in a Real Clear Media poll of Ohio voters, the live birth rate in Iran. Those are just the datastreams I, personally, have waded into over the last few days. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed, and equally it’s hard to trust yourself to organize all of it, at least if you’re constantly aware of your own mental biases, which trend apopheniac.

The first “postmodernism” that requires a new name is our sense—I’m taking it for granted that you share it—that the world, as presently defined by the advent of global techno-capitalism, the McLuhanesque effects of electronic media, and the long historical postludes of the transformative theories, movements, and traumas of the twentieth century, isn’t a coherent or congenial home for human psyches. — Jonathan Lethem, “Postmodernism as Liberty Valance: Notes on an Execution”

This.

7. Have you ever stood in a swimming pool at such a depth that you had to tilt your head back and look at the sky in order to breathe, and even then water kept getting in your mouth and you found yourself wondering if this was a good idea and if maybe it was too late to pull the abort switch?

8. If one were to have an interest in watching a novelist grapple with the feeling that modern life overwhelms identities, it might be valuable to read Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, which is about a woman who was once the sort of bullshit-hippie-idiot-terrorist that I’m glad ceased to be in vogue ten years before I was born: you know, the white children of privilege farting about with pseudo-Marxism and blowing people up in the name of something, though just what has never really been clear to me. I guess it’s because I’m a GenXer and was born jaded that I find this kind of thing hard to sympathize with, but it strikes me as dangerously stupid to assume that there’s an ideology that’s going to cure society’s ills, and even stupider to assume that Marxism is it, but then I’m getting off track and anyway the principle narrator of Eat the Document has gone underground and sold out or bought in or whatever ridiculous thoughtcrime growing up is meant to be, and her past comes back to haunt her. Unlike the Lethem essay or the Tallis review or whatever I cannot simply quote a passage of the book and say “this, I believe this,” because on some level the book buys into a concept of authenticity that I just don’t believe in, ie, it seems to me that people are what they do and the attitude they hold when they do it or the, I don’t know, cultural background of their upbringing or whatever other fundamentally irrelevant data you want to bring into the equation doesn’t really matter. On the back cover, in my notes on the book, I wrote, The fetishization of authenticity results from a pointed anxiety about one’s own lack of it. It’s a kind of conservatism. So that — that’s what I think about that, I guess.

9. And then I made the mistake of reading John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction, which, wow, what a piece of shit that book is. Some of this reaction has to do with the fact that Gardner was a small-time novelist taking arrogant pot-shots at people who were vastly superior writers (anyone who dismisses Kurt Vonnegut out of hand, especially when allegedly thinking about how to deal with morality in fiction, pretty much goes straight to the bottom of my shit list). But more it has to do with the intellectual straitjacket that Gardner tries to fit on society, dismissing postmodernists as glib and “commercial”, which I guess might have some merit, but then when he talks about what a book or work of art art or whatever is supposed to get up to, he makes these vast generalizations that stand on a foundation of pure hot air, to wit: “True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values.” Do I really have to explain why this is total faff? Aside from the fact that it’s reactionary and dangerously dismissive of what one might call the great polyphony of world tradition, it’s also the kind of big, baseless assertion that lies in the crumbly fundaments of religions (of which, by the way, Gardner was dismissive, somehow not quite seeing irony there). This is the kind of thing that sounds stern and brave but is really just an odiferous belch in the face of the challenges of modern life. It also precludes what I think of as the diagnostic role of some art in society: I once had a conversation with a woman I was dating about the state of the newspaper industry, which was then in the early stages of the death throes that continue to drag down a few papers a year; she wanted to know what I thought about, well, that, and I gave her my honest opinion: that the age of print media was basically over and in a few years we would live in a thunderous echo chamber made up mostly of tiny niche websites that would help us live in the self-organized feedback loops of corrupt data. She wanted to know, given such a dire prognosis, what I thought should be done about it. And I said, Nothing. It’s going to happen and we can’t stop it. This made her very angry and she said there was no point in having an opinion about something if you don’t have an opinion about how to change it for the better, which I find to be a completely ridiculous way of looking at the world, which I told her, and then I said, Sometimes the patient just has terminal cancer. She really didn’t like that. A few months later she moved to California and I didn’t go with her.

10. It is necessary these days to have one’s perimeter well-defended against bad data. There was recently a story that raced around social media among a certain stripe of conservative, which concerned a former Marine attending a college course taught by an atheistical professor who blasphemed loudly and demanded to know where God was to strike him down. The Marine then gets up, assaults his professor, and says, “God’s busy looking after our men and women who are out defending our freedoms, so I stood in for Him” [sic]. The sickly irony aside, this story is obviously a lie, and I suspect that many people who shared it around didn’t have any illusions as to its factuality. But it confirmed the way they thought about the world: professors and atheists bad; soldiers and Xians good. It may not have been factual, but it was true, as far as they were concerned. Encountering this on the Twitter and Facebook feeds of my more conservative relatives drove me crazy; but more pernicious by far, at least in the Life of Liberal Joseph, is the mirror image of that story, one in which the atheist is tolerant and triumphant, and the right-wing macho man is served justice. Such stories exist, I am certain of it. But I may be too blinded by my biases to properly ferret them out.

11. Liberals loved Nate Silver as long as he was was reassuring them that Mitt Romney wasn’t much of a threat to Barack Obama. Those feelings have become much more complex now that he seems to think the Senate will flip red this fall.

12. Change your passwords. They know.

13. Yeah, but who are they?

14. THE SYSTEM IS BLINKING RED THE SYSTEM IS BLINKING THE SYSTEM IS THE SYSTEM

15. What was I driving at? Oh, right — there does seem to be a semi-radical consensus going around that the way we live now is somehow difficult to take, in a way that it didn’t used to be. I’m not sure I find that particularly persuasive (living in the age of data is certainly not worse than living, for instance, in wartime Europe, or Soviet Russia during the famines, or really medieval anywhere), but does it seem to anybody else that we are all somehow far from home? I think I’m comfortable stipulating that the way we live is qualitatively difficult in a different way, in that there is a shattered, unfocussed, drowning quality to day-to-day life (combined with a stultifying unstimulated stillness of the body); but I’m not prepared to say that life is more difficult to tolerate than it used to be. I think the feeling I’m trying to describe, which is nebulous and which I don’t completely understand myself, comes from an intolerable clash between the fact that there is a core identity to each of us and it’s struggling to combat &/or process an oceanic amount of input in order to fashion a self. We live in postmodern times but do not possess a postmodern I, in the convenient, destabilized, meaningless, ultimately quite wrong way that Lacan and his many acolytes, students, scholars, fellow-travelers and dipshits would have us believe.

16. But what does this mean? Should you read The Information? Yes, I suppose you probably should, if my experience of it — that it was accessible, fascinating, and completely full of thoughts that seemed new to me — is one that can be generalized. Should you read Eat the Document? That’s a more complicated question. Eat the Document is about how the shredded remains of a life story cannot be completely disregarded or disposed of, though its execution sometimes seems more intellectually sound than — what’s the word? — oh, satisfying, that old critic’s saw. It’s a collage of voices and sorts of documents, which is interesting; but ultimately Spiotta fails properly to inhabit all the voices she’s telling her story in: a teenage boy writes in much the same way that his 40-something mother does, and it’s a problem. Her next novel, Stone Arabia, avoids this, sort of, by narrating itself in a weird amalgam of the first and third persons, so the voice makes more sense, but the book ends arbitrarily and is probably a hundred pages too short for its own good (not a common complaint in this day and age, but there you have it). Should you read On Moral Fiction? Yes, if you’re an aesthetic reactionary, or maybe if you’re participating in a bit of ancestor-slaying like what I’m doing here; otherwise, no, of course not, it’s a silly book, overfull of generalizations about what art is and what it’s for and why one should pursue it and . . . I don’t know, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Maybe if I annoy you, if after reading this little bit of post-post-(post)-modernist dithering you find everything I have to say stupid and silly and objectionable (an entirely reasonable reaction, if you ask me, as I am a bit of a pain in the ass), then it’s the book for you, and you should go off and buy it and read it and write modernist, realist, moralist fiction that my friends and I can sneer at and write dismissive reviews of and then send links to said reviews to one another via our Twitter accounts and then you guys can review what we write and poke fun and nobody will listen to anybody else and we’ll all just live as one big unhappy family in a choking atmosphere of self-arranged, self-reinforcing data that can mean whatever we want it to mean. I don’t know, guys. Who am I to tell you what to do?

Some Complaints

Physical

Ankle, dull consistent pain, as of a tendon

Foot, left, numbness when running in new shoes

Foot, right, purple toenails tending toward falling off

Back, left, soreness, as of a bruise, but no bruise visible

    Sub-complaint: absence of wings

Eyes, both, vision noticably worse than just a few years ago

Hair, too gray, too long

    Sub-complaint: I don’t like going to the barber but I met a cute girl the other day and she         told me she was a barber at one of the local hip places but I can’t remember which one              and I risk going to the barber and leaving with only a haircut

Weight, too high as always

 

Political

Congress, intractability of

    Sub-complaint: the inexorable tendency of national parties to radicalize

    Sub-complaint: the untenability of nationalized party system without a parliamentary                 system in which it can work

    Sub-complaint: the heavily Republican character of my congressional district

President, current, imperfectly liberal on foreign policy

    Sub-complaint: reflexive assumption of liberals that free trade is evil

    Sub-complaint: radical militarism of said President’s opponents

President, future, lack of interesting candidates for

    Sub-complaint: Hillary Clinton seems like a perfectly competent person who would probably     do a reasonably workmanlike job as President, but her visceral distaste for the campaign trail     will probably cost her any election in which her opponent is not Donald Trump or Ted Cruz

    Sub-complaint: Bernie Sanders is a classic lefty stalking horse but his internet fans seem             to think there’s a conspiracy against him

        Sub-sub-complaint: being President is not about having perfect ideas

    Sub-complaint: Worry that Marco Rubio will be the last man standing on the Republican side     and will trounce Hillary Clinton in the general

    Sub-complaint: Donald Trump’s ascendancy says worrying things about white people

    Sub-complaint: Ben Carson’s ascendancy says worrying things about white people

    Sub-complaint: etc, etc, etc about white people

Gen X, conservatism of

Baby Boomers, conservatism of

Internet, tendency of to exaggerate offense and privilege outrage

    Sub-complaint: tendency of young internet commentators to demand ideological orthodoxy     (see also: Aesthetic complaints)

 

Aesthetic

Novel, mine, lack of faith in ability to complete

Jonathan Franzen, continuing outsized fame

State of criticism, its consisting mostly of political fault-finding and condescending Stalinism         masquarading as liberalism

The Bugle Podcast, declining quality / possible cancellation

Harmontown, extreme decline in quality

The Americans, not currently airing

Superheroes, their vapidity and omnipresence

Geeks, their fetishization

Austism, its fetishization

Classic rock, its continuing domination of airwaves and restaurant playlists

 

Sporting

Oregon Ducks football, terribleness

Seattle Mariners, terribleness

    Sub-complaint: unwillingness of some M’s fans to admit this

Boston Red Sox, terribleness

    Sub-complaint: ditto

Tennis, no more majors until January

Tennis, domination of Novak Djokovic

    Sub-complaint: Andy Murray’s inability to break out completely

    Sub-complaint: Rafa’s injury woes

    Sub-complaint: Roger’s inability to beat the Djoker

Tennis, racism in

Cricket, my inability to buy a baggy green hat

Basketball, how much less interesting it is to watch than play

Arsenal, ongoing futility

 

Personal

Impermanence, insistent feeling of

Singleness, persistence of for the last few months

    Sub-complaint: Inability to stay with one person for more than a few months. I swear to             God, I am not your garden-variety committophobe. Or am I? I actually don’t know.

Boredom, consistent

    Sub-complaint: embarrassment over feeling bored

Social anxiety

 

Existential

I AM GOING TO DIE ONE DAY

Short and Stupid: Another Aleatory List

1. Yesterday morning, I lifted my cat off her perch to put her in the car, and one of her claws got caught. No real drama; she came quietly, though she doesn’t really like the car very much. But once we got in, she sat on the front seat and began biting her left paw. I watched until she hooked one of her claws in her teeth, and yanked it off. It was simultaneously fascinating and gross.

2. It occurred to me today that my cat is familiar with three places: the first is my apartment in Portland, and the second is the place in Bend that I own with my brothers to and take her to a lot. The third is the car. But she has no real idea what the car does, does she? All she knows is that every now and again we go and sit in a shaky box for a few hours, and when we get out, we’re at a different home than before. She probably has no idea why I won’t let her get out of the box for a long time, and then suddenly I will. It must be very confusing to be a cat.

3. I was out running today — wait. No, I had run about 500 feet today and my foot started hurting so I decided to stop and walk the rest of the 3 miles. Normally I would be disappointed in myself, but right now this feels like the best decision of my life. After running 29 miles last week, and spending my off days loading a U-Haul, I think my body may have been on the verge of a breakdown.

4. There is a certain class of person who bitches about how hard to drive it is in Portland. Often I find that these people have either never driven anywhere else, or only driven in smaller towns. Yes, driving sucks in Portland, but this isn’t Portland’s fault, it’s driving’s fault. There are idiots everywhere. There’s shitty traffic everywhere. There are potholes everywhere. It’s like people are afraid to admit that they just hate driving. Admit it, people! It doesn’t make you un-American. It just makes you human.

5. Today I learned that a guy I know has a cat named Brian Downing Kaat. Baseball people will understand why this is funny.

6. Baseball-related names I might give a cat: King Felix; Papi; Andres Galarraga (known as The Big Cat in his playing days); Scratchiro!; Jim “Catfish” Hunter; Catalanotto; Johnny Mize (also known as The Big Cat).

7. Baseball-related names I have given pets in the past: Nomar (cat), Kirk Gibson (dog), Edgar Martinez (goldfish).

8. Cute names for pairs of pets: Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect; Butch & Sundance; Walter and Jesse; Hammer and Horrible; Leslie and Ann; Mick and Keith; Thing 1 and Thing 2; Barack and Hillary.

9. Literary names I have given cats: Phoebe (Catcher in the Rye), Hana (In the Skin of a Lion).

10. Historical names I have given cats: Oliver Cromwell; King Charles II.

11. The one name I would like to give a cat some day, if said cat lives up to it: Stately, Plump Buck Mulligan.

Beardless Dustin Ackley

I have things in the offing this evening, so there won't be a long post today. Instead, I will show you a picture of former Mariners 2B/OF Dustin Ackley.

That's a cherubic face.

That's a cherubic face.

Ackley was once an emblem of what was supposed to be a new era for the Mariners. He was taken #2 overall in the first draft under new GM Jack Zduriencik, a guy poached out of Milwaukee to replace the sweet-natured but dim-witted Bill Bavasi. Jack Z was going to overhaul the scouting department, institute statistical analysis, and make the Mariners relevant again after many years in the wilderness. He even bamboozled Fangraphs with his pitch.*

*Note: that article was written by David Cameron, who may work for Fangraphs but is the worst baseball "analyst" to come up through the sabermetric ranks.

It tuned out that Jack Z was a charlatan, just another old-school aging white dude, much more gifted at selling himself than anything else. The team has struggled to draft and develop players, put effective rosters on the field, or really do anything other than alienate its fans.

Ackley was traded to the Yankees today, basically for nothing. It's a mark of how abused M's fans feel that they've been mourning his loss, despite the fact that he's been one of the worst players in the game this year and has exactly one half of one good season to his credit in a 4-year MLB career. There's no way to know if Ackley failed because he was coached poorly, or if he failed because he simply wasn't good. Either way, Zduriencik is at fault. The only good thing that may come out of this, one day, is that Jack Z must surely follow his protege out the door.