The Colt 45 Chronicle #43

This letter, number 43 from a collection that I retrieved from a storage space during halftime of last January's Seattle Seahawks playoff elimination in Atlanta, was written to a professor of mine for whom I had worked as a reader in a philosophy of history course. 

Arthur Quinn was the top professor in my department. He was there to write books, of which he published many, and do research. But he was also a standout lecturer, a winner of the university's Distinguished Teaching Award. My buddies and I looked up to him. The rumor was that he had played professional baseball in the Minnesota Twins farm system. Often you could find him playing an aggressive game of tennis on the courts near Edwards Stadium. He was a catholic and a family man with a attractive wife and handsome children. He was smart of course, but he was also kind and lively and he didn't tolerate bullshitters. I remember him just blowing up some guy who was reading a newspaper in class one morning. Art Quinn was the guy who every aspiring academic, like myself, wanted to be.

I think I wrote him a total of three letters -- I had to be careful: I didn't want to set off a volatile reaction to bullshit -- and the short one below was the first. I was suffering from the unexpected loss of the powerhouse Oakland A's to the weak-hitting Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1988 World Series; that, and I was quickly understanding what a wasteland the rat race offered.

Autumn 1988

You've got to die for your team. And I did. I sat there in NYC and spat blood back at the TV screen, blood that came from the heart. To see Canseco and Lansford and Henderson and McGwire whiff one after the other after the next was enough to ring my soul with a thousand LA tattoos. My only wish would be that big tragedies really do shoot off on the vault of heaven, that there's something that makes the big tragedy big, that separates it from every day, from all that quotidian waking-up-while-it's-still-too-dark-to-go-to-work suffering. But I suspect, as every young man must come to suspect, that there is no difference.