No, for real, ask your grandpa—can I have his hand-me-downs?

I have a cold.

I've had it for four or five days now. I have a fever, a sore throat, I am blowing my nose constantly, sneezing, and coughing so frequently and so hard that I had to duck out of The Night of the Hunter (1955) at the Coolidge with rushthatspeaks on Monday because I did not want to be that one person in the theater who provides their own soundtrack (unless it's a picture about TB, it just doesn't go). I had to converse with adrian_turtle primarily by e-mail this morning because I was losing my voice. I have just wasted a box of Kleenex and cannibalized another from the kitchen.

Naturally, what I did with my evening was attend a baseball game at Fenway with derspatchel.

It was a hideous meltdown on the part of the Sox at the top of the ninth (no, seriously, I'm glad to have seen a grand slam over the Green Monster, but I didn't need it to go to the Baltimore Orioles*), but I think that's part of the joy of the sport. There was a rain delay between the fifth and sixth innings. I was so cold my jaw kept popping and my shoulders locked up—Rob, bravely trying to give me a backrub through corduroy jacket and sweater, said that I felt like shale. (That felt about right: stiff, ridged, faintly damp with blown spray. We were at the top of the grandstand seats, with one or two rows and then open air behind us; the wind came down our collars and some of my fingers went white-tipped numb. But under a roof, which is the significant thing. We had not brought umbrellas.) We had our hearts set on weird dessert after pre-game dinner at The Salty Pig and the whole debacle barely drizzled itself out of its misery in time for us to walk to Finale in Park Plaza before they closed. Because my sinuses are an even more appalling place than usual, I was very quickly out of the tissues I'd brought from home, the napkins I'd stolen from the Fenway concession stands, and I ran out of Finale's toilet paper on the train home. I cannot determine whether I am light-headed from general exhaustion or because blowing my nose this much is inducing a sort of hyperventilation.

I regret nothing. The park organist played David Bowie during warm-up and Kurt Weill randomly between innings. The rain delay was a beautiful Cirque du Soleil-like exercise in unrolling the largest advertisement for L.L. Bean I have ever seen. I do not actually care that much about singing "Sweet Caroline" with thirty thousand other people, but hearing Rob shout "SO GOOD! SO GOOD! SO GOOD!" at the relevant space in the chorus is really endearing. And I had not seen an actual baseball game at an actual park in years and my last set of interactions with the Red Sox were mentally fraught by now anyway; this was an effective exorcism. And the Salty Pig had a new presentation of bone marrow split lengthwise with a garnish of lemon peel and parsley (which I described as "meat butter" when the server asked for our reactions, since apparently we were the first people to order it) and a shocking ash-ripened goat cheese that had better stay on the menu and a cocktail by the name of Bloody Monks, yellow and green chartreuse with lime and lavender topped with Sangiovese. And Finale's entire block had lost internet, so we were at first told they couldn't take cards tonight (and they never accept checks, and neither of us could offer more than a couple of dollars cash without hiking back to the ATM at Boylston), and then it turned out they could run a debit card by hand after all. And I am going to take a very hot shower, after which maybe my shoulders will consent to rejoin the rest of my body as opposed to remaining a sort of sandspit micronation somewhere very cold.

I got to watch a classic baseball arc: friendly indifference to fragile hope to fingers-crossed superstition to holy Katie Casey, how did you fuck that up? Damn Yankees was quoted liberally throughout. Also, "Damn it, Mr. Noodle!" I was not expecting a microcosm of mythos when I went out this afternoon. In that respect, sadly, it was right in line with the one Red Sox game of my childhood, which they lost. Archetypally, though, it was pretty sweet.

* [edit] Rob has just informed me that we did not in fact see a grand slam, although we both thought so at the time: it was a wild pitch allowing a run home from third followed by a homer that brought in runners from second and third. Honestly, there are ways in which I think that is even stupider. At least it means we might see a Sox slam yet.

(Title of this post courtesy of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis' "Thrift Shop," which Rush introduced to me on Tuesday as evidence that the hipster trend of dressing out of vintage stores is coming to an end, because the practice has now gone mainstream: they heard the song first on non-internet radio. It's been stuck on and off in my head ever since. I meant to post some other things of similarly unrelated interest, but they will have to wait till tomorrow. I am sneezing too much to stay at this computer, and besides, this post is about baseball. When I got up this morning, that was not how I thought my summary of the day would end.)