ON YOUR OWN

The Super Bowl. The soon-to-be-cancelled NHL hockey season. Steroids in baseball.

Are you interested? Do you care?

Guess what? Millions don't. Scratch that -- billions don't. All popular sports, true, all obsessions that can lay claim to legions of militant followers. Millions of people follow these pasttimes carefully, debating the issues, posting on websites, proclaiming their indifference or allegiance to this, that or the other cause. It takes up time and space and money in all of the major media outlets.

Over here?

Um, not interested. Never heard of the Super Bowl. Ditto for the NHL. Baseball, well, people know of the game (some of them do, anyway -- okay, a few; alright, one guy, who lives down by the river, he's heard of it, I think), but nobody plays it.

What we become interested in. What we invest our hopes, dreams and passions in. What we consider essential to our character, our national yearnings, our fulfillment as people, living breathing organisms separate from our dull, workday lives. All of this means nothing to others. Absolutely nothing.

A little shocking, actually.

You live in a foreign land and you realize that the cultural touchstones you've grown up with are non-existent pretty much everywhere else on the entire planet. The sports that people live and breathe barely even exist. The entertainers are not mere has-beens, but never-beens, unknowns. (You think many Cambodians or Japanese or Hungarians or Russians or Swedes were mourning the death of Johnny Carson a few weeks back?)

What connects us to others and ourselves (however superficial our choices may be) is, voila, gone.

(What does voila mean, anyway? Is it French?)

You can't turn on the radio and hear that familiar DJ's voice. You can't flip on the TV and get comforted by your favorite newscaster soothingly laying out the world's travesties, twenty-two minutes at a time. You can't open up a newspaper and expect to see familiar faces, places, people.

All you can do is step outside and walk the streets and listen to the people and figure out what sports they do play and try to make sense of this world, one day at a time, on your own.