Love and baseball . . .

I feel like someone made a deal with the Devil on my behalf, but no one bothered to tell me about it. I've had what I consider to be tremendous good luck across the spectrum of my life. Too many examples to even start reciting them. There's been a lot of good luck. There's been some bad luck too, some of it disguised as such until it finally revealed itself as good luck. But I think, overall, I've had much more good luck than bad luck.

That having been said, part of that bad luck is that I've never been able to get something that I truly wanted. I get close (not unlike Sisyphus and his big rock) but then whatever it is that I'm pursuing somehow gets away.

I've been in serious love three times in my life, but those relationships always ended. I once thought that I knew exactly what my dream job was, and even better, I thought that it might be within reach at one point. But it wasn't. And now that chapter of my life is so distant and removed from where and who I am now. What happened?

Even my dog is named after the great anti-hero in Pittsburgh Pirates history. So close, but not quite there. And to have it snatched away from me so suddenly and so violently. Damn you, Sid Bream!

And ever since that fateful night in Atlanta, the Curse of Sid Bream has followed the Pirates into the team's 16th year of losing futility. And there was a time not so long ago, that the Pittsburgh Pirates were one of my great, great loves. And now I don't attend games in beautiful PNC Park, even if the tickets are free, and I can hardly bear to watch the games on TV. It seems as though all of my great loves are taken from me. And I quite simply want to know why. Why can't my lifetime of good luck spill over into these crucial areas of my life that have left me, in some ways, empty and desolate? Whose idea was this? I'd like to renegotiate my contract, please.