The Afternoon of Magical Thinking

It's another playoff season, which causes both sadness and philosophical musing in the Feemus household.

The Mariners, of course, are not playing in the playoffs.

This is as it should be, perhaps. It restores a kind of order to the world--there was 20 years of sucking, then a kind of fluke from '95 to '02 (I call it "The Seven Year Glitch"), and now they're back to sucking. So now I watch just for the agonism of it, without all that pesky competition intruding.

"Good hustle, boys!" I like to say when I watch the Mariners. "Just try your hardest!"

But this post isn't about the Mariners. It's about another team which sucked this season, a team whose losses I take even harder than those of the M's.

I mean, of course, the Wichita Linemen. My poor, ill-managed fantasy baseball team (just when you thought I couldn't get any geekier...). Although I gave them many rousing pep talks, they just couldn't seem to rally.

But this isn't really about my poor Linemen. It's about fandom and the magical thinking that's almost necessarily a part of it. I got to thinking about this one night a few months ago as I was working late and checking the games on mlb.com's "gameday" feature, which allows you to see the games live and play by play. Omar Vizquel was up. Vizquel, in addition to being the best defensive shortstop in the the last twenty years, is also a Wichita Lineman. Whether he knows it or not.

I'm sure that somewhere in his tragic and lonesome soul he knows it.

At any rate, he was up against Joel Piniero, a Mariners' pitcher (must've been during interleague play--ugh). And I felt the bad faith that every fantasy baseball "manager" has felt: I wanted the Mariners to win, but I really wanted Vizquel to get a hit. Maybe an RBI double. Hell, maybe a home run.

And then I felt guilty.

Which is stupid, from any rational point of view. My wishing and willing and wanting doesn't have anything to do with the outcome of the game. Of course. But I still felt guilty, dishonest. And I realized that being a fan is to willingly engage in magical thinking. It is to willingly invest yourself in some event that is wholly unconnected to you and to ascribe to it a psychological value that is entirely irrational.

If we don't actually believe that we control the outcome of the game (although there are some who do, judging by how loud they yell at the tv), we do believe that our lives are enhanced by a positive outcome of the game.

I realize that this is a dry-as-dust way of saying that I like it when my team wins, but I was really quite surprised by my moment of bad faith and what it says about the almost necessarily anti-rationalism of fandom.

So I've started taking note of other types of magical thinking that have slipped under the radar. I'm moderately OCD, so I have a lot--but I'm not going to count these (well, I mean, I *will* count them, and then round them up until they're divisible by three and then I'll alphabetize them. Then I'll count them again. I'm just not going to list them here).

I think I've already mentioned on this blog that I keep certain books without really intending to read them just because I think that owning them will somehow make me more knowledgeable.

I have a friend who eats a grapefruit after indulging in too much rich food. She says she thinks on some level that the grapefruit will counteract the fettucine alfredo. Although, she is quite trim and in very good health, so maybe it is working...

If the bus is late, I close my eyes to make it come faster. It doesn't make sense to me either.

If I'm reading a novel during a period when I have a lot of unfinished work to do, I won't finish the novel, even though I only read novels late at night when I wouldn't be working anyway. I will, however, start another one. Right now, I have three novels by my bed--the last twenty pages of which I have not read.

I sure hope those Hardy boys can figure out all those mysteries.

Other examples of everyday magical thinking?

addendum: In France, the acronym for OCD is TOC (trouble obsessionnel compulsif). Their older, pre-medicalized word for it was, as in English I suppose, a "tic." I have a French friend who, whenever I do something obviously compulsive will say in an exaggerated French accent "tic toc, tic toc." I always thought this was pretty clever (even the self-parodying accent is kind of funny) if not terribly nice. Then I learned that this is a stock joke in France. But I'm not going to obsess about it...