I don't want to do this

I think it would be remiss of me to enter this season officially without making some effort to make peace with 2003. I'm not real happy about it, but today ESPN showed Aaron Boone's homer (for some ungodly reason) and I kicked my dog pretty hard, so it's become apparent that I'm not completely over this.

Luckily, I seem to be in good company. The wacky, obsessive folks at SOSH (see: Links to Insane People) recently started a thread called "Remembering Game 7". The people posting apparently have done as little to move forward as I have, as almost all their posting profess rage, anger, hate, and bloodlust for our deposed manager lovingly called "Gump" by the people writing about him. Perhaps it's time to chart my own progress through the seven stages of dealing with loss

Shock
A numbing paralysis when doubting that we have the resources to handle the change, so loss seems inevitable. This produces fear. Paralysing fear may appear as a free-floating anxiety about life.

I'd say I was in shock for about 3 hours afterward. Normally after a bad Sox loss I scream, throw something at the television (if it was a game against a tough team Dogbert the stuffed dog is often kept nearby just for such an occasion), blame whoever seemed handy at the time, and be done with it. Not after this loss. I merely slowly got up, went to my room, and stared at my computer screen for awhile.

Denial
The reaction , "If I ignore this it will go away." Denial may be used creatively for a while when we are too busy to handle the new but if we shelve loss reactions for too long the avoidance takes up mental energy and they begin to make us difficult to live with or prickly, without knowing why.

My denial stage was characterized by me putting up witty away messages such as "Why is everyone so sad? I went to bed in the 7th, we won right?" and "Yeeee haw let's go riot! NEXT STOP FLORIDA!!" It didn't seem like it was possible to lose a game in such a fashion, I was sure someone had merely made a mistake. I mean, the game was WON, and then 10 minutes later it wasn't? Impossible!

Anger
The first reaction when we truly recognise risk of loss is the drive to go out into the world and prevent loss . Anger in itself is thus a creative emotion. We all need a little anger to keep our environments organised for healthy living. But we may get problems handling it if we cannot see how to turn our anger to good effect, or once the loss has occurred. Some repress it so that it comes out as depression, some direct it inappropriately at others, some direct it at the person most loved or trusted simply to get it out.

I think I did pretty good in this regard. I didin't get all THAT angry. I spent most of the next day snapping at non-baseball people who asked how things turned out, and I vaguely remember throwing the tray of a friend across the table during lunch because he's made a snide pro-yankees comment. I also burned my picture of David Ortiz dressed in some ridiculous workout uniform he'd worn during a postgame interview. I'd like to say I'm making this up, but....

Guilt
Guilt is the price we pay for loving - an inevitable result of being bonded and committed. It is the step of questioning , (a) what we could have done to avoid the loss? and (b) what we might have done to have caused it? The drive to ask is irrational. This stage is important to survival as a way we learn. It drives us to reason. Unfortunately these questions come with that horrible sense of wrongdoing, and it is this which can send people on guilt-trips. To focus on the questions might help. The answers are usually simple, but because we do not like the questions we often bounce back to anger instead. The whirlpool of anger and guilt is a common trap in loss reactions.

Guilt? How the fuck am I supposed to feel guilty? The only thing I feel guilty about is not learning how to teleport instantly in the 5 minutes I had to stop Grady Little from blowing the biggest game I've ever had the misfortune of seeing. I skipped this step, it's not my fault Grady Little is an inbred retarded "Aw shucks guess we done losted, huh?" moron. The only aspects I agree with are that the answers to questions like "What could I have done differently?" simply lead back to anger, and somehow the phrase "Guilt is the price we pay for loving" seems poetically Red Sox.

Bargaining
We bargain when our yearning or longing makes us try to restore the loss . When each gambit to do so fails there is another mini-loss reaction with anger and guilt (which can make bargaining a very complicated and prolonged stage for some losses), plus a growing sense of our powerlessness.

I wasn't in much of a position to bargain, seeing how only the Almighty himself is the only person who could change anything. That or possibly Superman, who can apparently fly around the planet quickly enough to reverse its rotation, thereby somehow reversing the flow of time. I don't question that movie's logic because obviously the writers of large budget epic cinema like "Superman" know more than I do. Surely it wasn't just a group of idiots trying to find a cheap fix to solve the "Oops we killed Lois" problem. Anyways, neither God nor Superman were impressed by my pleas.

"Are you there God? It's me, a Sox fan"
"Oh wait, you can't even walk anymore. Never mind"

Depression
The true depression of loss is when we recognise our powerlessness over loss. Life becomes meaningless, valueless, hopeless, and we may lose our motivation and sense of worth.

Ahhh yes. Here's where I've been nice and comfortable spending the past few months. Depression is great for a Sox fan because it just feels so comfortable. Just because our default emotion, depression, is a "negative" one, and a Yankees fan's default emotion of "being a cocky smartass piece of shit" is "positive", does that make us worse people? Of course not.

Acceptance
We come to true acceptance of loss when we realise that we are indeed powerless over that particular loss, but that in other areas of life we are still creative and valued . It is a rich, mature state. Sadness over the loss remains, but this is restrained by a wider joy at reconciliation to life. The problem is that many people think they have accepted losses when they are really denying them. We can recognise the difference by what happens when the loss is remembered. In denial, instead of sadness, there will be a recurrence of the harder loss reaction emotions of shock, anger, guilt, longing or depression.

Wow, what a great feeling that paragraph explains. I can only hope someday I get there. The Schilling signing helped a bit, the Pokey Reese signing didn't take away ALL of the positive aspects of Schilling, and dammit, we OWN the Yankees in April-May. Don't you worry about me, folks, I'm gonna be just fine.