Watching the Nats fade

The Nats are winding down another sad season, with the team now a shell of the World Series champs of two years ago, and it’s honestly hard to see the path forward here right now. It looks like we’re going to walk in the wilderness for a while — hopefully without the aimlessness of the Baltimore Orioles, who do not appear to be aiming for anything other than MLB revenue-sharing and denying the Nats their long-overdue TV revenues.

I’ve followed the Nats through good times and bad since they hit town in 2005, although it took me a few years to drop my Cardinals allegiance and become a true fan. That happened because of a series of moments I saw in person:

Strasburg’s first game

Games 4 and 5 of the 2012 playoffs

Max Scherzer!

The 2019 wild card game

And now here we are. The Nats’ starting pitching is depleted and the team is saddled with big contracts for Strasburg (multiple injuries and only a handful of innings pitched since the 2019 Series) and Patrick Corbin. The bullpen is an embarrassment. Carter Kieboom’s career batting average remains under .200 after MLB stints over three years. Victor Robles now shows all the signs of being a bust. We’re not going to keep Josh Bell, whose stats have bounced back to his very solid mean this year and who bet on himself by only signing a one-year contract.

Poor Juan Soto. Unless Strasburg bounces back (I would not bet on it at this point), he’s going to face a very depressing baseball existence next year. And if this team is as bad as I fear it will be in 2022, he may not be here at season’s end.

Vegas soul-cleansing

I have a Vegas Crew of guys. They’re all friends of an old high school buddy of mine, and that’s initially how I got into this crew, and I’ve been going to Vegas with them every couple of years for the last 15 years or so.

COVID put a stop to that. One of the truly hardcore members kept going to Vegas anyway, even in the pre-vaccination days, betting (so to speak) that some personal care and a mask would keep him protected (and they did). But once I got vaccinated, one of my first thoughts was, “How can I make this happen again?” I decided to put up with the mild hassle of wearing a face mask most of the time for a chance to hit Vegas and see the crew again.

And then things got impossibly better. Mask mandates were lifted in most locations for the vaccinated, and suddenly Vegas looked like it would be Full Vegas again. We even bought show tickets to see comedian Ron White — something we’d never done as a crew.

But you know what happened. The unvaccinated, predictably, chowderheaded around and the Delta variant became a menace. Clark County, where Vegas is located, became a coronavirus hotspot. And I debated canceling.

But I also could see the clear line between infections in the vaccinated and unvaccinated, so dammit, I decided to go to Vegas anyway.

The result was different, but still fun. What impressed me the most was the general compliance with wearing masks indoors. Oh, sure, there was a maskless foambrain here and there (and I was pretty confident that these same jaw-draggers weren’t vaccinated, either), but for the most part, people did what they should be doing. And as a result, I had a great time — and wearing a mask turned out to be far less constricting than I would have imagined. I visited 27 (!) hotels and casinos in four days, mostly discovering that my age is starting to really affect my ability to walk that much (and stay up late).

Vegas is my happy place. For decades, I’ve been going there for a little bit of soul cleansing. I know that lots of people hate it, especially the cheesiest parts of it (which have been fading away for years now). But that’s exactly why I love it. And this time, even with the health restrictions and precautions, I loved it again. A little look at a downtown scene:

Back on the road

I took my first post-pandemic trip recently, visiting family in Florida and Missouri, and promptly got sick. That freaked me out more than a little, although I tested negative for the coronavirus, but it also reminded me of what it was like to be sick at all.

I’ve been so isolated that I hadn’t even had a mild cold since 2019. This one was a payback, a virus that circulated through all the fun spots in my head — eyes, nose, ears, sinuses and throat — taking a swing at each. And it reminded me that travel is still a risk.

The airports I visited, especially in Tampa, were basically germ factories. Tampa was jammed to the walls with delayed travelers, many showing their machismo or superior health care knowledge by wearing chin diapers or nothing at all. The flight from Tampa to St. Louis featured an attendant reminding us over the PA not once, not twice, but three times to raise our masks — the last time noting that passengers agreed to do this as part of buying a ticket. (Interestingly, on the flight from St. Louis to DC, an attendant came on to think everyone for not having to be nagged about the face masks. She was obviously unaccustomed to this.)

Airports are just a creepy mess now. Airlines can’t handle the traffic they’re getting, but that’s not stopping them from taking everyone’s money, and that pent-up wanderlust coupled with unvaccinated kids and chosen-to-be-unvaccinated adults is a bad combo platter. I’m flying again next month and I’m already plotting the ways I can reduce the misery. I’m not optimistic.

The vibration

Sometimes I feel this little electrical vibration. It’s almost like a hum or crackle, and it’s raw and I can feel it in my fingertips and toes. Honestly, I sense it a little bit everywhere — the feeling that everything has sort of gotten a lot better, but something almost indefinable is definitely still off.

And then I remember the still-ongoing pandemic. I’ve been vaccinated, as has my wife and most of my friends and pretty much everyone I know. Face masks are disappearing, we’ve hit up our favorite bars again and I’ve played a gig. My wife is back in her office after a transition of zero days because her corporate CEO is convinced of the power of all the personal interaction without any sort of transition, which is a very ivory tower thing to think. We’re going to fly to two states to see family later this month, which will mark the first time we’ve been on a plane since November 2019. I went to a ball game Friday that was 90 percent like any other ball game I’ve gone to in my life. And the whole time, I’m still wondering: What the hell just happened?

That’s usually when the crackle shows up. There’s all of this normalcy and near-normalcy while only about half of the population has been vaccinated, and it’s entirely possible we’ll be battling COVID for the rest of our lives. But it’s also as though life took a long, long breather and has now fired up where it left off. For example, I’m getting ready to go to Vegas in August with my longtime Vegas boys’ crew as though nothing has happened, and this feels like something I need to do. But there’s a nagging guilt: Is returning to Real Life an insult to those who died or got severely ill? (There’s that crackle again.)

I’ve lived a lucky life. There’s been no real long-term, sacrifice-causing war since Vietnam, and that ended when I was a kid. 9/11 was off the charts, sure, but this pandemic is the only national event that has caused truly mass death in my entire life. Still, no one close to me died during this and only a couple got sick. We kicked that ridiculous fool out of the White House. There is reason for optimism, even pure hope.

But I feel that vibration, and I suspect it will be a long time before it calms down.