I had a feeling of disquiet all afternoon long.
Not that I didn't know why.
Sometimes you are offered several chances to fulfill a goal, but with any such scenario, there comes a final one. I'm not sure exactly how to put it, but there's that one last promotion board in which you might go from Lt. Col. to full General, or that one last season in the minors where maybe they'll pick you up for the majors, or maybe, or your last shot at the heavyweight title, or that last chance to be drafted by the NFL. In all of those circumstances, and many others in life, there's a lot of random fate at work.
This is particularly so in modern life, as we don't live in as much of a meritocracy as we like to imagine. We never really have. In earlier eras, connections of all kinds mattered a great deal, and to add to it a person's race and gender mattered a lot. I.e., if you were a white, protestant, male you were a lot more likely to "go places" than if you were anything else. If you were a black, or Native American, female, well your fate was pretty much picked out for you no matter what your talents or desires were.
And that wasn't right.
Currently, we oddly live in a bit of the reverse, although it is nowhere near as much of the reverse as some would like to imagine. In some fields, the emphasis on diversity now operates that if you are part of an old favored class, you are actually a bit disadvantaged now. There's an emphasis to correct the errors of the past demographically, and achieve societal justice in a hurry, all of which, ironically, means that injustice of a type can be meted out on an individual basis.
Monday seemed to go well at first, but by mid-afternoon it was obvious that it wasn't going to complete that way. Those swinging for the fences should expect not to hit at all, as that's the true, and therefore not be disappointed when the ball doesn't connect.
But that can still mean that there's no joy in Mudville, individually, so to speak.
So there was the disappointment.
By the following day, when the results were in, there was shock, and not just on a personal level. It was as if the Majors had gone down to semi pro teams, sort of. Nobody knew who they were. A person could somewhat guess the reasons, maybe, they'd been picked up, but only somewhat, and that was speculation. It was hard not to be mad, actually.
Tuesday morning I went and got my second COVID booster. I'd been meaning to for a while, and my wife had been urging me to. She wanted me to get it on a Friday on the basis that I'd be feeling under the weather the following day, but Tuesday was the day that worked, so I went. I didn't really expect a problem.
The following day I had to drive to a distant town and meet a witness.
This proved my wife's warning correct. By morning, I did not feel right, which has tended to be the case with the vaccinations I've received so far.
Now, I don't want to over exaggerate this, and I'll be frank that I absolutely do not grasp why people forego getting vaccinated. The vaccines are safe for the overwhelming majority of people, and COVID 19 is not a disease to be taken lightly. And my reactions to the vaccines have not been severe by any means. By the afternoon of the shots I have a sore arm, and the next day I just feel sort of not well. That clears up by noon.
But this is the first time that I opted to drive halfway across the state, early in the morning, after getting the shot. I never felt severely ill, but I felt somewhat icky, and I'm worried what sort of odd impression I may have made on the witness. He didn't seem to act as if I was suffering from the flu or that I appeared to have taken two shots of Jim Beam first thing in the morning (which I did not, of course), so hopefully it was noticeable only to me.
This morning, the dog got me up at 4:00 a.m. I've been sleeping later than that for several months, so that wasn't welcome.
All these, in context, are minor defeats. Indeed, in my analogy, maybe it's more like Al Smith not making it to President. He was a great man and is admired today, and you can't really expect to be elevated like that.
But all defeats are relevant only internally, really. So if they matter, it's the individual who determines that.
The movie Field Of Dreams is all about such defeats. The Black Sox and Shoeless Joe Jackson, etc. In the film, the protagonist Ray Kinsella at one points takes an author, who himself has suffered personal defeats, to a baseball game and receives the message that he's to go find Archibald "Moonlight" Graham. Probably most of the viewers of the film don't realize that Graham was in fact a real character, and just like the character in the movie, he appeared in a single major league game before leaving the game, albeit the next year in reality, going on to practice medicine in Chisholm, Minnesota. The actual Graham had completed his medical degree the same year as his single major league appearance. As a practicing physician, he worked to provide free glasses for the children of Iron Range miners. He was, therefore, much like the character that is portrayed in the film, first located by Kinsella in Chisholm in a time travelling night in 1972 (after the real Graham's death), where he informs Kinsella that he can't travel to the field due to his duties of a doctor. Kinsella replies that it would "kill some men" to be so close to their dream and not touch it, to which Graham replies that it would be a tragedy if he had only been a doctor for one day, rather than only have been a baseball player for a day.
I don't know. I must be too self focused, or too something else, as I always end up viewing the tragedy as being the opposite, which I guess is why I don't find It's A Wonderful Life to be heartwarming the way other people do.
Oh well.
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