Coping With Loss

The phone rang while I was catching up on my Nashville — Juliette Barnes is quite the handful — after I finished watching whatever it was I watched the bulk of Wednesday evening. It was the copy desk calling. Apparently I was keeping them waiting.

“Yeah?”
“Where’s your recap?”
“What recap?”
“It’s your night to recap the Mets game.”
“No, I only do wins.”
“What do you mean you only do wins? You do games.”
“I do winning Mets games.
“Yes, when the Mets win, you do those. And when the Mets lose…”

“I don’t know what that is.”
“Don’t know what what is?”
“That phrase you used. ‘The Mets lose.’”
“Stop kidding around. The Mets lost to the Marlins, 7-3, Wednesday night. It sucked, but it’s your turn to write it.”
“I told you, I only do wins. I haven’t done a loss since April 8, which was the second game of the year, and I was pretty prickly about it then. I don’t think I know how to do that kind of game anymore.”
“Don’t give me that. You’ve been doing losses forever. They come with the territory.”

“That was the old me.”
“The old you?”
“Yeah, the one who could relate to the Mets losing, the one who’d figured the Mets were more likely to lose than not, the one who sometimes was vaguely disappointed when a win would get in the way of what I was planning to write about a loss. That’s not me anymore.”
“It’s not?”

“Hell no. The new me has been writing up wins and nothing but wins for eleven consecutive game recaps. The new me writes from a position of elation. The new me walks around in a state of bliss, accepting observations from strangers who see my Mets jacket and say things like, ‘You must be loving this,’ to which I say, ‘Oh, I definitely am!’ And I definitely have been. Now you want me to go back to moping around and nobody saying a thing to me when they see my Mets jacket or saying something like, ‘Tough break for you guys’? You want me to go back to that losing mindset after weeks of practically uninterrupted winning?”
“I want you to write about the game is what I want. Cuddyer homers, Leathersich debuts, Ichiro ruins everything. Plenty of angles to pick apart. Win or lose, it’s what you do.”
“But I like the new thing I do, where I write about the win and everybody reads about the win and we all congratulate each other on the win and then there’s another win. The Mets on a two-game losing streak? That’s beyond my current scope of comprehension.”
“Enough with the excuses. We need your recap. The Mets lost, deal with it.”

I hung up on the desk, finished watching Nashville and a couple of other things on the DVR, then fell asleep not wanting to think about the Mets not necessarily winning every single game, which I swear I had begun to think of as the norm, contrary to precedent, evidence and logic that said it couldn’t go on forever like that. That’s how I dealt with it.

Then I woke up and they still lost. Oh well, gotta deal with it eventually.