I Want to Believe

Dearest Rachel –

You might dimly remember this slogan; it was the motto of “The X-Files,” which, for all your love of the science fiction and horror genres, you never seemed to get into. Maybe it was just having our hands full with a new baby; maybe it was the fact that we could only give our attention to one or two favorite television shows, and with “Northern Exposure” filling the ‘new series’ role and “M*A*S*H” taking the ‘syndicated rerun’ role, we just didn’t have the space in our schedule for another. Whatever it was, this was never really on our radar.

However, pop culture has a way of investing our lives, and this particular phrase should still be slightly familiar. Of course, the expression could be interpreted one of several ways, and, not being a fan of the show, I don’t think either of us knows exactly how it was meant within that context. I can assume that it particularly refers to Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and his desire to prove the existence of aliens and their affect on humanity. But even that seems to cut two different ways; is this a request for more faith, like the father of the epileptic child in the Gospels: “I believe; help my unbelief!”? Or is this a case of clinging to a belief in spite of all the odds and evidence, like a grown man wanting to continue to believe in Santa Claus or somesuch?

Interestingly, I’ve heard certain rumors over the past couple of years that suggest that the government has actually admitted to alien encounters, only for the news to get buried under the weight of ‘more important’ news, such as the pandemic, the economy, police ‘brutality’ and ‘racism’ (and the riots that followed the most celebrated example of this), and the political fallout resulting from all this chaos. If aliens can’t help us with our current crises, what good is finding out they exist? Sorry, Agent Mulder; we’ve got bigger fish to fry right now.

I bring this up in light of several things today. One is a dream, and one might be reality.

The weird thing is, I didn’t even witness my own dream. That may sound odd, but hear me out. Essentially, I was doing something else (and what that was, I can’t remember – look, not all dreams are that memorable) when I heard the news that the Cubs had won yesterday’s ball game against the Pirates. To be honest, I don’t even know if they were actually playing Pittsburgh yesterday in real life, and while them winning the game is less likely than not this year – yeah, it looks like they’re back to being the lovable losers of yore – the score I heard about was absolutely ridiculous: ninety to four, or maybe five. Not nineteen (which is fairly uncommon as a baseball game score goes already), but ninety. That’s an absurd score even for the likes of football, which routinely has scores on both sides in the double digits. This would be a month’s worth of runs for most teams, and probably nearly two month’s worth for the Cubs.

It left me wanting to believe that it had happened, but knowing full well that this was absolutely impossible. Sure, baseball has no time nor score limit; the inning doesn’t end until the third out, no matter how long it takes to get there, so theoretically, anything can happen in that time frame. But realistically, there are limits to what humans – and teams – can do before making those three outs. And, quite frankly, our Cubs have a reputation for being particularly limited, as you recall, being every bit as aware as those of us who grew up with them about the significance of the 2016 season.

Still, upon looking it up this morning, it’s nice to know that they did win last night, four to three over the Marlins, and let’s be honest; a win is a win, no matter the score. But in a season where they’re not doing very well, it would be particularly impressive for them to pull off this feat, and buff their individual stats to make them into a more remarkable team overall in the history books.

With all that being said, let me move on to real life – or what I hope could be real life. You’ve heard me tell you about the flood of sudden contacts over the weekend, and my attempts to juggle the conversations – including a brief allusion to one that I had to block, for having the gall to ask me to help set up a bank account for her (in the middle of Sparks, no less! I don’t blame her for not knowing when I would be busy, but after telling her as much, and she continued to push, I saw no reason to let her go on). Strangely enough, this dried up completely by Monday morning, although there were several conversations that have actually managed to keep going.

One of these is a girl who calls herself Alexa, and I have to assume that’s her real name – who would admit to having that as a moniker in this day and age? The ribbing she must have gotten over the past decade or so has had to have been unpleasant: how many times has she been asked to ‘play “Despacito”,’ I wonder? She claims to live up in Lake County with her grandmother, and works four days a week, being off on Fridays. Well, admittedly, the girls are coming over on Friday, and Kevin will be here for next week and a little beyond… but hey, I could ask her to lunch. So I did.

She’s said yes.

And while she’s given me a few moments pause, claiming that she needed transportation (and then backing down when I offered to pick her up at her place, albeit making it clear I was reluctant to simply because it put me at an advantage over her by knowing where she lived) and then later, that she needed to get someone to watch over her grandmother while she was out (I protested that it wouldn’t be likely to be more than an hour or two, but she insisted), it seems like this is going to happen tomorrow.

At least, I want to believe it’s going to happen. There have been too many disappointments with the dating app, and I have no idea how Alexa managed to find me online. To be honest, I’m expecting this to fall apart, just like every other opportunity that’s presented itself. Ironically, that probably wouldn’t be so tragic from my perspective; I’m always writing to you about my day, and as I’ve said so many times about ‘adventures,’ the truly interesting times are when things go wrong, not when they go right. It’s why ‘may you live in interesting times’ is a curse, rather than a blessing. So if it all goes wrong, I’ll have that much more to tell you (and the girls, tomorrow evening, come to that); but if it goes right, well… who knows?

Anyway, keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck. As you can tell, I’m going to need it.