On the Nightstand

Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch."

Hornby relates his life amid the backdrop of soccer matches, which either provide an athletic Greek chorus to his moods at the time or a device for him to praise to rail against. I know nothing of the fanaticism that English soccer fans bring to the game, and the book does little to decipher the attraction. In the vacuum, I just equate it to how millions of American men park their duffs regularly on a couch for any given weekend for the seasonal litany of baseball, football, golf, basketball, hockey and so on.

The book takes the form of a memoir, which can be a mixed bag. There's a gentleman's agreement with any memoir that if you're writing about yourself, you'd better make it interesting. Plus, Hornby's still a young guy (born in the late 1950s), so a flat-out memoir based on him right now is kind of an arrogant reach, so he fills in most of the space with a metasocial analysis of the game, and how he and it have changed over the years. Again, if you followed English soccer, you'll probably get more out of it than I did. If you look carefully, you'll get to see shades of Hornby's characters from his novels, slivers of himself over the years that he hijacked and bent into a fictional persona.

I suppose what amazes me is the level of detail he brought to the book. His memory must be simply photographic, picking out nuances all based on certain dates decades ago. I'm not sure if he kept a diary of all his exploits to soccer matches or kept a scrapbook of big games, but it seems soccer matches (dates, players and scores) are all that he has in his "Rain Man" brain. Personally, I'm a bit jealous with all that recall considering I have a hard time remembering what I did last week...well, in great detail. To me, I have my writing, my wife, my blog (which is a diary capturing my thoughts), my cats and that's about it. The rest of life swarms around me in some sort of Imax film production, only grabbing my interest when something rubs against me in my writing/life bubble.

My therapist friend says I shouldn't be worried. She says it's not that uncommon to not have a photographic memory about the past, and new brain research reveals we may only remember what we have some emotional contact to in the first place. Deep down though, I crave a photographic memory or at least one that can keep two tracks: one for what actually happened and one with my emotional input. Both running at the same time on separate channel. A left/right brain DVD director's commentary of my life.

Either way, soccer is something quite emotional to Hornby...at least it's worthy of 240 pages of a fan's journey over three decades. It's interesting, but the culture is lost on me.

Today's Word: Yesterday

From One Word

It's an illusion, the ideal destination. The one place we want to go to more than the future these days. It's a fabled place of security, a place where you can go and be safe. I'd bet if you polled the people standing around you, they'd want the past...with the caveat that they could go back to then knowing what they know now. Yet the first thing they'd do is try to win the lottery, I'm guessing, Just a hunch.