2004-10-29 - 12:43 a.m.

even the moon was afraid to look

The lunar eclipse last night was a nice touch, don't you think? I mean, wasn't that appropriate for a Red Sox SWEEP of the World Series? Omg, look at all the things I can say now and not be afraid I'm jinxing something! Let me say that again. RED SOX SWEEP OF THE WORLD SERIES. My goodness. The lunar eclipse was just a side effect. I mean, didn't you expect locusts and pestilence and horsemen and all that? Nope. Just floods of champagne.

I'll say this now even though you won't believe me. But right as the game started, I knew. I just knew. Same as I knew about the game at Yankee Stadium that started out with "Won't Get Fooled Again." I won't claim I knew that about every game - I absolutely did not. In fact, I kind of half expected them to lose game three in St. Louis Tuesday night. On someone else's field, no DH rule, Cards momentum of being in front of their fans, all that. I figured they could very well drop that one and then we'd see where it went from there.

Another reason I was worried they'd lose game 3? I wouldn't be watching. I've been watching all the winning games since game 4 of the ALCS. Tuesday night I was seeing my band. To kind of appease the baseball gods, I was wearing a red shirt, had red fingernails, rented a red car - whatever I could do. Because that crap matters, you know.

Here's something cool that happened to me Tuesday (to wrap up a day of VERY cool stuff happening to me). When I walked back into my hotel after the show, it was just past 11pm. I figured the game wasn't over yet. As I stepped off the escalator from the parking garage into the main lobby, I noticed that across the way, in the caf� that had just closed, the television was still on, tuned to the game. It was one of these restaurants that isn't walled in; it's a bunch of tables just separated from the main walkway area by a fence and some planters. So I made a beeline over to the TV, figuring I'd stop and pick up the score before I ran up to my room to catch the end of the game.

As I got closer, I saw that there was one guy, looked like a restaurant employee, standing in the darkened caf� among all the empty tables, watching the game. When I walked up, he turned and saw me, and I asked him, "What's the score?" He said, "Four nothing, Boston." I went through about sixty-two emotions in a second flat during that short sentence. When I heard "Four nothing," I was immediately scared that the Red Sox were losing - because that would be more in line with the way of the old world order - and I cringed. When the next word was "Boston," my eyes flew open, and I did one of those really attractive fist pumps and said "YESSS!"

I immediately remembered I was in Florida, not my own territory, and maybe this guy was a Cards fan, and I don't like to rub losses in people's faces, but before I could get through that thought, his face lit up like he was recognizing family, and he said, "You're a Red Sox fan?" I said, "Oh yeah," and I showed him my nail polish, red with the Boston "B" on the thumbnail. He liked that. I told him of my superstition that I might have jinxed them by not watching, and he said, "Oh, don�t worry, I have my lucky baseball!" I hadn't noticed it before, but sure enough, he was holding a baseball, and he went back to what he had probably been doing the whole time before I walked up, which was tossing the ball up in the air to himself and catching it, over and over. Whether Red Sox fans are more superstitious than most, I don't know, but baseball is truly a game of superstition. As the rule goes, never fuck with a winning streak.

He asked if I lived in New England, and I told him yes, and he told me he was from Webstah, Mass. The accent and the fact that he called it Mass was enough proof that he wasn't making that up. Having identified a fellow citizen of Red Sox Nation, he lowered his voice - because you don't say these things out loud where the gods can hear you - and said quietly with a big smile and gleaming eyes, "They're gonna do it." And I just smiled and shook my head and said, "I know. Maybe not in four games, might take five, but yeah. They are." Then we just grinned stupidly, watched our Idiots give the Cards their third out to finish out the inning, and he laughed and I slammed my hand against the marble planter, and we said hey, great talking to you, and I went up to my room. But that was a cool thing to happen. Blood knows when it meets blood of its own.

Then last night, at the beginning of game 4, right before the game started, I started to cry. Now it could be that I'm just emotional and cry a lot, especially when I'm really worked up and have a lot of energy to release. Or it could be that I cried for no reason at the beginning of every game that they won. So as weird as it seems, when I started to cry, at that moment I knew they were going to win. I just knew. I still got a little nervous and scared when things would go badly for a brief moment, but I stayed pretty calm. I knew.

And they did it.

Holy crap.

my mood -

the mood of the whole world wide bleepin' web -