The prodigal Bruins fan

The puck I caught at a game at the Boston Garden in 1988. It came into our section off Gary Galley's stick.

I've been following the Bruins very closely these past few years, but very quietly. Mostly out of shame that I couldn't face everyone who has been with the team through these rough years. I feel like the hockey equivalent of those Pink-Hat crowds that showed up at Fenway in 2003.

But it still feels great to be back. And to have that unusual feeling, first time since 1990, of caring about the Bruins' season when it is 90 degrees outside.

The reasons I drifted away are quite common around here, as hockey in general and the Bruins in particular went through a pretty rough patch. Foremost, I had a lot of qualms with the direction Gary Bettmann took the league -- trying to turn a regional passion more like candlepin bowling into a ready-for-primetime mass market entertainment product. This was quixotic at best. When I was younger I developed a theory that you couldn't watch hockey on t.v. unless you played hockey yourself -- this was the days before huge plasma screen HD t.v.'s. I remember watching games with my uncle, a basketball fan, who would leave the room. "I don't even know what you're looking at," he would say. Bettmann's effort also came with a desire to pull the game from its heartland and force it on the Sun Belt. I've always maintained, and frankly, I still do, that hockey doesn't belong in places that don't have naturally occurring ice.

There were a host of aesthetic problems as well with the game in the 90s. The dreaded neutral zone trap was as bad a problem as we all remember. The league's effort to clean-up the goonishness may have gone too far, taking away a lot of the game's personality. And the fact that every team suddenly decided it needed teal and a cartoon character on its jersey made it a giant circus.

But ultimately, there are a number of reasons why Boston fans in particular might pull away. The Jacobs family, the consummate skin-flints they were, were unable to put a decent product on the ice. I loved the Garden, flimsy seats and obstructed views and all. I only went to the TD Bank Fleet Center Whatever-you-call-it one time, and it was more than enough. And we lost a great rivalry when the Hartford Whalers moved.

More than that, we fans had gone through a lot. We'd lived through Cam Neely's freak injury, and watched loyally as Ray Bourque's career fruitlessly ticked away. When the team hit hard times, it was really hard to go through emotionally. Don't forget, we were all tortured Red Sox fans as well. And the Celtics were going through the very hard post-Bird, McHale, etc. years. And the Patriots, though already on showing signs of life, were still the comprehensive laughing-stock of the NFL. At some point, there's only so much you can put up with.

So many things combined to restore an idea of what the game could be. The most important was my daughter. I've been conscientiously bringing her to all manner of sporting events at Williams, getting her to understand what they are and hopefully begin to decide what looks right to her. Her favorite by a wide margin is hockey. She can happily plant herself on my shoulders and get through an entire game, which knowing a preschooler attention span is remarkable.

And this past winter, I started playing again. Just pickup hockey around the rink a few times during the week. Just enough to get my legs back and remember how bad I was at it. Still, it's been great. It reminds you of how fun life was up in New England when hockey is a part of it.

Life after napalm

It was with profound, profound interest that I read Jack Shafer's story in Slate about great moments from journalists on the way out of newsrooms (such a rich topic, it managed a part two). A few years ago, I had my big bridge-burning moment, with a letter that I still think about a lot, and which might be some of my best work -- I didn't even have to resort to profanity. What's surprised me most, is how long after the fires have died and been forgotten by everyone else, I still can't make peace with it all.

I should say from the start that I have never, not for a moment, regretted what I did. I wrote the truth, to the correct person, with the precise amount of force the situation warranted. It got me out of a very crumby situation, and perhaps for a few moments forces another human mind to think with a little more depth about a situation and the choices they made. It also forced me not to settle for easy decisions, and though it is the most transient and base aspect of all this, it made me feel better after months of feeling helpless.

But eventually, the very brutal reality set in: it didn't accomplish anything. This effort, this sacrifice, didn't change anything for anyone except me (and my family, for better and for worse). It's a terrible irritant: the story here that resonates the most with real life, alas, is Ron Rosenbaum's famous departure from the Voice ("Who was that?").

While Shafer pokes fun at the idea of the journalist that "works through his anger by killing chipmunks and other small game," I'm not sure there is a lot to laugh at. Journalism, or "Journalism" if you must, is suffering because of those "paper-pushers" and "quacking mallards," though maybe that's easy to forget when you have a steady paycheck from the Washington Post Company. And of course, if you look at the state of late-model, corporate capitalism, it is pretty clear that every line of work is being debased by this new feudalism of a handful of wealthy bosses and a vast army of peons. Only difference, perhaps, is that journalists are usually better writers.

There is a pattern to the lives of journalists. The thing that has dismayed me the most about the business, the point at which the high-minded rhetoric of J-school is in too stark contrast with the reality of the newsroom, is how... well, meek working journalists can be. Oddly, people who have no trouble asking the grieving mother how she "feels," who can shout embarassing questions at a press conference about a congressman's privates, who can shrug off any number of nasty arrows and cheap-shots from Internet trolls, seem unable to constructively engage with the reality of how little control they have over their own careers. And the methods for dealing with it are pathological. In the day to day, it looks like this: Bitch bitch moan complain bitch complain and bitch some more. Some decide to carry on and get by, others quietly slip away (hopefully to something more lucrative), but for whatever reason, I didn't care for either option. And when that happens, things catch fire.

Obviously, I could write about this all day, even though I realized long ago, consciously at least, that madness lies in that direction. Whenever it comes up in conversation, I tend to shrug and make a small joke and try to signal that I've moved on. But really, I haven't as much as I would have liked. And the fact that I'm still mad this made me mad makes me mad.

There is wisdom out there though. I'll refer to Joseph Brodsky's Michigan speech, which I wrote about last month, and which had an interesting take on the angle of forgiving and forgetting:

"Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those -- in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can't escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists... By himself, no individual is worth an exercise in injustice (or for that matter, in justice). The ratio of one-to-one doesn't justify the effort: it's the echo that counts. That's the main principle of any oppressor, whether state-sponsored or autodidact. Therefore, steal, or still, the echo, so that you don't allow an event, however unpleasant or momentous, to claim any more time that it took for it to occur." 

Great advice. Very hard to live by.

At Play in the Fields of the Word

Perhaps best not to ask why, but I spent a little while this afternoon reading Rhoda Koenig's lengthy feature in New York magazine about the PEN conference Norman Mailer organized in January 1986. It was a bonfire of the vanities, with every big name in literature showing up to make a point, shake their head, or simply cut a dashing figure through the proceedings.

They argued about politics, oppression, the writer's duty. About sex and gender and alienation and censorship. There were public arguments, bitter recriminations, hurt feelings, frighteningly hilarious anecdotes about Albert Speer, Robert Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. John Updike makes a fool of himself, Saul Bellow confirms his reputation as a difficult person.

The observations along the way are fascinating -- Susan Sontag's tweed trousers, Isabel Allende's paisley shawl, Czeslaw Milosz's eyebrows, Danilo Kis' pointedly casual homophobia. All this plays out against the reliable baseline of Norman Mailer's more than ample ego. I'm convinced that time will be kind to Mailer's legacy, especially considering that his ample faults leave us something like this ("Mailer was laughing with a couple of reporters, saying that he got the bruise under his right eye 'sparring,' and telling one journalist not to ask him general questions. 'You should say, 'What do you think of Susan Sontag's remark that Norman Mailer is a mean-spirited dog?'")

At some point, some of the attendees complain that there was too much talk about politics and not enough about books and literature. But you know, I'd take that. What do we have today? Jonathan Franzen mooning over his new BlackBerry, that's what.