Baseball Fans Love Numbers. They

No Story Is A Straight Line. The Geometry Of A Human Life Is Too Imperfect And Complex, Too Distorted By The Laughter Of Time And The Bewildering Intricacies Of Fate To Admit The Straight Line Into Its System Of Laws.

American Men Are Allotted Just As Many Tears As American Women. But Because We Are Forbidden To Shed Them, We Die Long Before Women Do, With Our Hearts Exploding Or Our Blood Pressure Rising Or Our Livers Eaten Away By Alcohol Because That Lake Of Grief Inside Us Has No Outlet. We, Men, Die Because Our Faces Were Not Watered Enough.

It Enclosed Us In Its Laceries As We Watched The Moon Spill Across The Atlantic Like Wine From An Overturned Glass. With The Light All Around Us, We Felt Secret In That Moon-infused Water Like Pearls Forming In The Soft Tissues Of Oysters.

It Did Not Look Like The Work Of God, But It Might Have Represented The Handicraft Of A God With A Joyous Sense Of Humor, A Dancing God Who Loved Mischief As Much As Prayer, And Playfulness As Much As Mischief.

Rape Is A Crime Against Sleep And Memory; It's Afterimage Imprints Itself Like An Irreversible Negative From The Camera Obscura Of Dreams.