Insanity
By Jeff Crum, middle reliever for the Ketchikan Salmon
8/20/2009: Kalamazoo, MI: My leg muscles are tight from kicking pebbles. I don’t have a target in mind, but it’s my escape from the dreariness of the complexities of my mind. The most common question that I hear is, “What are you doing?” I turn my head in the direction of the voice, straighten out my back and shoulders, drop my head and then continue kicking; trying with all my mental strength to stay focused on the stones.
If I answered the question, the torture would resume. It’s a deep physical pain when I cannot escape myself. When I think, each stone I kick inherits an issue in my mind and their random paths across the dirt transforms into a long-confusing string of prepositional calculus. My thoughts would spin out of control, echoing incomplete answers to an infinite amount of unanswerable questions, and all the while saying nothing.
This madness is driving my performance, or more appropriately stalling my career. I have been haunted by this faulty wiring since being drafted by the Kalamazoo Badgers. That night, in the heat of the biggest celebration of my life, I began to change.
My life used to be perfect. I wouldn’t choose to have anyone’s instead of mine as a pitcher for University of Southern Mississippi. Every morning I woke up next up to the finest southern belle, and we talked about our future of having a house and kids all being paid for by a fat PEBA contract. My roommates and I made the best group of buddies. Almost every night in the offseason we would get together at The Bottling Company and loudly share our life’s happenings, overall dominating the campus night life. Now, on August 19th, 2009, I sit alone with no future in the perpetual sunlight of Ketchikan. My girlfriend left me because I did not say a word to her for two weeks despite living with her, and my friends have all vanished for the same reason. Most regretfully, my family too has become an afterthought because of the forced purgatory where I have to keep my thoughts. And like I said before it happened, on what was supposed to be the greatest day of my life. Thankfully, in my present state I can recall everything perfectly.
At the moment I got the phone call from the Badgers I became incredibly nervous. There is no way to illustrate the overwhelming feeling that came over me. But I was entirely consumed by it. I couldn’t hear what my friends and family were saying to me, I did not even see them; they were just things that existed around me. Amongst an apocalyptic swarm of random thoughts and questions, the only one I could get to stick was to look straight ahead. These moving, colorful things kissed, hugged and slapped me on the back as I tried to find a certain place. No answers came to me from the place in which I was looking. Only questions of why was I walking, and what was I searching for? An uncertain amount of time passed, and I found myself standing still in front of our backyard’s chain link fence staring at Orion’s belt. It must have given me some solace because I finally blinked. My eyes stayed shut for awhile to soothe the harsh dryness of my surely bloodshot eyes, and I stood there thoughtless in paradise.
I could simply answer, “I am kicking these stones away,” but it’s not that simple.