Tonight’s the All-Star Home Run Derby, and Manny’s stepped aside to give David Ortiz his spot. El Jefe’s taken batting-practice pitcher Ino Guerrero with him to Houston as his secret weapon, but can’t find his groove. He hits a girder beneath the roof, a titanic shot, but it doesn’t count. He’s got five outs on him before he sticks one into the upper deck and ends up with three, not enough to make the semis. Manny jogs over and sticks a Yankee cap on Ino.

July 13th

Tonight is the All-Star Game, and I find that working on this book has turned me into a kind of ex officio ballplayer in at least one way: because my team isn’t playing, I have almost no interest in which show horse wins the make-believe contest.[27] Like the less stellar ballplayers, I’m just kicking back, watching some VH-1 (also some All My Children reruns on Soapnet) and enjoying my three nights off. Chillin’.

I had intended to write some sort of midseason summary, and find I have little to write. That’s a good thing. Boston ended the first half winning five out of six and putting all trade rumors (except for that sweetly wistfulone that has Randy Johnson in a Red Sox uniform) to rest. Their won-lost record is almost exactly what it was at the break a year ago, when they went into postseason as the AL wild-card team, and indeed they lead the wild-card race this year by a game (over the Oakland Moneyball boys).

But still… the gloom. Why?

Because that Reverend Dimmesdale–Hester Prynne jazz in The Scarlet Letter isn’t just romantic bullshit, that’s why. There is a very real streak of dour pessimism in the New England character, and it runs right down into the bedrock. We buy new cars expecting them to be lemons. We put in new heating systems and expect them not just to go tits-up but to do it stealthily, thereby suffocating the kiddies in their beds (but leaving us, their parents, to grieve and blame ourselves for at least fifty years). We understand we’re never going to win the lottery, we know we’ll get that unpassable and exquisitely painful gallstone on a hunting or snow-mobiling trip far from medical help, and that Robert Frost was fucking-A right when he said that good fences make good neighbors. We expect the snow to turn to freezing rain, rich relatives to die leaving us nothing, and the kids (assuming they escape the Black Furnace Death) to get refused by the college of their choice. And we expect the Red Sox to lose. It’s the curse, all right, but it has nothing to do with the Bambino; it’s the curse of living here, in New England, just up that Christing potholed I-84 deathroad from the goddamn New York Yankees.