"Lost" and Baseball

My dad and I don't have very much in common. Not like there's a Freudian psychodrama or angry-asian-child syndrome; we get along fine, agree about everything political, disagree about nothing cultural, enjoy the same Hemingway books and Broadway musicals. But my dad's from another generation. That's not quite right, though - that makes it sound like it's the 1960s and I'm a longhair high on Bob Dylan and skunk weed. It's like we live in two very different dimensions. My days are spent on and within computers - surfing the internet, downloading music, playing video games, editing video, watching movies with disjointed chronologies and ambiguous narrative realities. I have friendships based entirely on facebook messaging, google chatting, and cell phone texting. There are at least ten web sites that I check once a day, and usually I check more than ten web sites more than once.

My father never learned how to type. He's gotten better, but his emails have a precise, stilted tone - you can tell that he still has to think about each letter, that every sentence is an undertaking. We just got him a new computer. I was his unofficial computer coach - helping him figure out how to open the internet, how to access his word processor. Things that took me a few seconds would take him minutes, if he didn't just get frustrated.

I used to think that I just had a fundamentally different sort of mind. I am devoted to the ever expanding arena of geek-pop culture. I grew up on "Star Wars," I play video games, I read comic books. He never saw the first, doesn't understand the second, and is entirely bemused by the third. A geek, basically. My dad's understanding of pop culture starts and ends with "Doctor Zhivago."

But my dad likes sports. He got TiVo mainly so he could record every hour of Sportscenter he doesn't already watch. In the mornings, when I steal the entertainment section of the newspaper, he's onto the sports. He has opinions about Barry Bonds, about his alma mater's football program. He was the manager of the basketball team in college; he was my baseball and basketball coach several years in a row.

I realized something one evening when I was having an excitable conversation with my friend Carlos. Carlos had just finished rewatching the season 3 finale of "Lost," and he had all kinds of theories that he wanted to swap - who is Jacob, what the hatch really was, the flash forwards, etc. This got us talking about next season. I had just been to ComicCon so I had some inside information. We were making predictions and bets about story points, trying to figure out who'd be the next to die, anticipating possible surprises the writers had in store for us.

Something clicked. This is exactly the way my dad talks to his friends about baseball. There's a new season starting, with new players in the midst (the people on the boat). The managers have announced a dynamic new strategy geared to bringing the franchise back to its original glory while moving it forward in an entirely new direction (flashforwards). They've trimmed some of the fat off the lineup (bye bye, Charlie) and brought back an old favorite to shore up the infield (hi hi, Michael!)

My dad and I talk exactly the same way about to very different things.

"D'you see the show/game last night?"