an expletive-filled rant

would have filled this space were I to have written yesterday. You see, my beloved Cleveland Indians lost to the asshole-ish Boston Red Sox (hmm, I can't seem to find any links) in the ALCS on Sunday night.

Here at Marginally Clever, I know my audience. I know my audience is made of mostly western Canadian women. Western Canadian women who (if their blogs are any indication) don't have much appreciation for sports obsession.

theMonica, is much the same (though I am slowly warping her). I mean, logically, there is no reason for me to drop f-bombs all over - "You fakking idiot. You're so fracking stupid! AflacDucker!!" - seemingly randomly, but actually controlled by really, really stupid baseball players. Granted this is reserved almost exclusively for playoff games, but still, even for me it is a bit much. Such is the rage, but that subsides and when the losing comes, the depression begins.

In an attempt to explain, the best analogy I can think of is that a sports team is like a pet dog. Maybe you trained him to do cool shit (fetch beer) and when he fails that surely angers you. Ok, you probably wouldn't swear at it, but you do get mad when your dog does dumb things. So there's that.

Then your team loses and is done playing for the season. Basically, on Sunday, my dog died. So I'm sad. I'm always sad when my dog dies, but this dog was with me a lot longer than the past, say 10 dogs. So it hurts all the more. My sadness is mitigated somewhat by the fact that I know my dog will return next April from the Pet Sematary that is the new baseball season. Sure, maybe it'll turn out that the new incarnation of my dog isn't as good as my dog this year and maybe next year's dog will cut my achilles tendon when I'm searching for him under the bed and say ominous things like, "First I played with mommy. Now I want to play with yooouuuuuu." But by God he'll be my dog and damnit, I'll love him all the same. But I will not name my dog Gage.