“I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.” ~ Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America (1967)

Friends die. Democracies crumble.

This world, I’m sure you’ve noticed, is unfair. It takes no prisoners. (Unless it’s taking them to hidden prisons in far-off lands.)

I asked a friend who was in his final days in hospice to choose some music. (I was far away and wanted to feel connected.) Via text, he said, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. I knew that album would never be the same. It’s no longer a Beach Boys album. Now it is the music of my friend who passed away two weeks ago. He will be as wrapped up in that music as Brian Wilson. In every song, every time, from here on out.

You probably have people in your life like that – friends who leave themselves behind in songs that still spook you a little whenever they pop up unbidden on the radio.

As for democracy crumbling? If it’s still standing when you read this, let’s just count it as a win and move on.

I’m supposed to be here to tell you that baseball is coming. I shouldn’t have to lean on baseball for solace. It’s not going to save a damn thing. But in its stupid, sweet way, it’s going to try.

But before it does, we have to spend a few more hours, days, weeks, in the Purgratorium.

Yes, I invented that word. I’ve had time on my hands.

Other words I’ve invented recently:

Happanesiest – someone who tries to make you happy on a day when you’re down to your last nerve.

Hippanesiest – someone who tries to make you a hippie that same day.

Mathmagician – 20th century: someone who balanced their checkbook to the penny. 21st century: someone who can round up once the pennies are gone. (Come to find out, it’s a real word. Dammit.)

Sportlorn – a day when there’s no baseball game to take your mind off all the suck in the world. (Actually that one might have been a typo.)

The Purgatorium is where baseball goes when the games stop and players become fulltime “trade chips” and collateral.

It’s as if Mr. Moneybags from the Monopoly game started running his business like a scene from Gladiator, with players battling for their jobs as powerful team owners decide who to trade, who to pay, and who to send away. Without the bloody fights to the death, of course. Probably.

Nope. Not.

(OK, so another starter in Baltimore would be nice. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, of course.)

I hate the off season. Not only because there are no games.

I hate people being treated like things. Things to be traded, shuffled, given away, scrutinized in uncomfortably weird ways, or abandoned on the side of the off-season road with no job and a mortgage coming due.

A reader recently told me I should write about something other than baseball during the off season because there’s nothing going on.

Oh, there’s plenty going on.

Baseball’s off season isn’t like a light switch. It’s not that kind of “off.”

It’s “off” like the open carton of milk that’s been sitting in my fridge for quite a while — a good long “quite a while” — and now I’m a little afraid of it.

I hate the off season.

It’s offensive. See? “Off.” Right there in the word.

(For those of you who worry about me, I tossed the milk out this morning.)

All of this to say, there’s a lot going on in baseball. But it’s all happening in the miserable world of the Purgatorium.

I hate the off season.

I hate losing my friend even more.

In memory of my friend Randy.

“I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times,” The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds (1966)