Infinitive Splitter

Is there anything more relaxing than watching a baseball game from great seats on a warm-ish April night?  Nothing comes immediately to mind.

But hey, fellow in the seat in front of me, what's the deal with your perfect posture?  Do you know how hard it is to watch a baseball game behind someone with perfect posture?  From where I sat, your head interrupted the space between the pitcher and the catcher.  That was not acceptable, so I moved two seats over.

Next time you go to a baseball game, sir, please do your fellow fans the service of slouching like everyone else.

This is going to be a bit like improvisational comedy, in which the subject matter comes from ideas shouted by members of the audience.

There are several differences:

• No shouting
• No audience
• No comedy (this last one isn’t really much of a difference)

For this first attempt, helpful reader “Allan” suggested that I write about SUVs. When I hesitated, he offered another idea.

“Write a blog about how your blog sucks,” he said, “with a bunch of quotes from me.”

That was the only quote, so here’s a bit about SUVs:

Have you noticed that many of them are driven in the suburbs by people who don’t appear terribly interested in the sport utility of their vehicles? I have observed that to be the case. Isn’t that interesting?

Also, those SUVs look quite a bit larger than necessary. I don’t suppose many SUV owners encounter frozen tundras (tundra? tundrae?) or thick, hilly forests on their way to the office parking garage every morning. Isn’t it strange how such seemingly useless automobiles are so popular?

I mean come on.

A botched execution may be a cause for celebration among the family and friends of the condemned, but it's an odd foundation for a serious personal worldview.

I am most of the way through Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, the middle of which describes a number of probable, unpreventable events that would kill all of us very quickly (asteroids, solar flares, volcanic eruptions, toxic gas emissions, and so on, to say nothing of more gradual calamities like viral outbreaks or carbon imbalances or antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens).

On the way home from work the other day, I read a particularly vivid section that discussed the unsettling frequency with which the Earth nearly misses collisions with "asteroids big enough to imperil civilized existence" (several times a week, probably); the speed at which they would hit us (so fast that the air under them could not get out of the way); and the amount of warning we might have ahead of time (a little less than a second, if you happened to be looking up at the right moment).

I read that, then wrote this:

It is difficult to read about the very likely end of the world and in the next moment work up any real concern about the sort of trivial disputes and contrived rivalries that have tended to punctuate the various episodes of my life.  Existence is fleeting — wildy, unpredictably so — and there's little reason to dwell on ultimately inconsequential hiccups.

A bit of big-picture context is always helpful.