Spring

I find it...amusing, I suppose...how some things never change.

This is the beginning of March. Aside from the fact that it was bloody fucking cold Monday, the weather is finally starting to resemble something I can tolerate again. And Daylight Savings Time begins this weekend, too. (I actually don't care that much about the time change, since I don't keep "normal" hours. It's the total length of the daylight hours that matters when it comes to me not being crazy, not the clock.)

Pretty much everything in my life is completely different, both from how it used to be--which is to be expected--and from how I always thought it would be. But still, to this day, when this time of year rolls around, I am filled with this deep, inexplicable need...to go out and play softball.

Yes, I'm aware that it's fucking retarded. Yes, I'm aware that I haven't seriously played in about 12 years and that I haven't even picked up a glove in 4 or 5. But still, every year, without fail, I want to hit the diamond so bad that I can taste it in the back of my throat.

Alas, no matter how badly I want to, I can't. Even if I weren't in the worst shape of my life, even if I weren't too old for such things, I couldn't play. I blew up my shoulder--my fucking throwing shoulder--nearly 9 years ago, falling off a horse. The saddle was loose, the horse went around a curve, the saddle slipped, and I got too overbalanced to stop it. So down I went, and the only thing that kept me from landing on my head and cracking my own skull open was this bizarre sense of self-preservation that I apparently have that made me throw my shoulder out to take the brunt of the fall. I still wonder if that was a mistake....

I wish I had done what I wanted to do and gotten my shoulder repaired while I was still in college. There's a hole in the soft tissue big enough to drive a truck through. (I've seen the MRIs.) The humerus will slide right out of the hole with very little provocation, and suddenly, my whole shoulder is subluxed.

I have not been kind to my body over the years.

So I'll do what every washed-up old has-been does and sit back and think of my glory years when I wasn't an obese crazy person with a body that's falling apart and a mind that goes on the blink regularly.

But even so, even if I can't do what I want to do...spring will be here soon, and it'll all be all right once again, just for a little while.