Swinging for the Fences

     Full disclosure on this--it's been a long day, I'm tired, emotionally drained, and just a little bit drunk, so if this doesn't make any sense, I'm sorry.  I'll probably read it tomorrow and delete it.  Or I'll leave it as it is for posterity--it's honest.  I've been sitting in front of a blank computer screen for nearly 3 hours now, and only the last 15 minutes have I been able to type anything that I didn't back-space into oblivion immediately thereafter. 

     I've been watching Marek play baseball again the last few weeks.  At the end of last season I didn't think he would play again, so I'm glad he decided to.  It's a genuine joy to watch him.  But here's the thing--when he's gotten up to bat the last few games, he's been particularly choosy about the pitches he wants to swing at.  Often those pitches are strikes, and its frustrating, because I know that he can hit them.  I've seen him step up to the plate and knock the snot out of the first pitch he sees.
     I was talking to him about that after his last game, and he had every reason under the sun why he didn't swing; the wind kicked dust up, the pitch was too high, or too low...  and maybe he's right, to a degree.  But when the umpire is calling them strikes, they're strikes.  No instant replays or reversing the ruling on the field in baseball.  So I told him to swing at anything and everything close.  Because I know he can hit them, even when he doesn't think he can.

     Been thinking a lot the last couple of weeks about my own metaphorical at-bats.  I got thrown a curve ball or two, and I had my own excuses as to why I struck out looking--wanting the perfect pitch, and not seeing them when they were thrown.  But the reality is that I when I stepped up to the plate, I wasn't swinging the bat the right way (get your minds out of the gutter--I'm still talking baseball, sort of).

     So, dear reader, you may be asking, what's my point?  I guess it's that I'm hoping for another pitch; that there can be joy in Mudville again.

Gray's Sports Almanac

     You know how they say that about the only thing less interesting to discuss with other people besides the weather is one of your dreams?  I'm gonna step all over that social boundary with this one, just because it got me thinking about a question I wanted to pose to the occasional reader.

     I dreamt that I'd walked into my old job, about 12 years ago.  The catch is that I knew that my mind wasn't from the past; everything that has happened in the last twelve years, everything I know now, I was aware of.  It was like my present-day mind had traveled back in time to my 28 year-old body.  In this dream, I walked past a friend at work, and he asked me if I shouldn't have more gray hair (I started going gray in my 20's, but it's gotten exponentially more so in the last two years).  He was the only other one besides myself to realize that I wasn't in my current time, and it validated my dream-self that I really had time-traveled in thought.

     So I spent the rest of the dream weirded out by the idea of reliving the next twelve years again, and trying to figure out how to do it while fixing or avoiding the mistakes I've made in that time, while making sure I didn't f*ck up the good stuff in the process.

     And then I get to thinking that it would be really handy if I could remember what teams had won some of the major sports events in the last (next??) twelve years so I could make bets on them and not have to worry about money anymore.  You know, like Biff Tannen did in Back to the Future II with Gray's Sports Almanac, (without creating a dystopian future in the process).  But I'm not a sports guy--I don't remember who won the Super Bowl or World Series in 2013, let alone anything further back.  It was pretty frustrating, for a dream (I did come to the conclusion that I needed to invest in Starbucks, Apple, and Google, maybe create Facebook--that stuff I do know about).

     So here's the question--and you can answer on here or FB if you want, or you can just ponder it in the car or while you're on the toilet after a night of particularly spicy Thai food.
     If you found yourself back in time, with all of the knowledge that you have now, and could change one, single thing--what would it be, and why? 
     Speaking for myself, I don't have an answer to my own question, but I think I have a couple of ideas.