I played little league. Well, I mean... I had a glove and a uniform and I was on the field at the same time as my friends. But they were really playing the game. I was more... experiencing the game. In right field on a warm summer day, I spent more time focused on picking blades of grass than on the count, the outs, the force at second, the score... the inning. I came to many conclusions about life while standing inert, glove limp at my side, slug of Big League Chew in my mouth and the sun warming my face. I came to the conclusion that baseball isn’t about winning or losing. It’s about not losing. And there’s really only one way to lose: care about winning. 

     All sports are simulated tribal warfare, a settling of differences between nation state metro city village community tribe peoples who otherwise might just strike each other on the head with the nearest blunt objects. The games we play are manifestations of our progression from brutish apes with opposable thumbs and sticks killing each other over food, mates and patches of land to brutish apes with opposable thumbs and much more effective sticks killing each other over food, mates and patches of land, but not quite as frequently. We are civilized, kinda. We are peaceful, in a way, maybe. At the very least we have societal constructs -- laws, ethics, and consequences -- that keep us from harming one another. These are the rules of the game that we, for the most part, abide by. And we have instead channeled that pent up aggression into sports. Instead of striking, we play ball. 

     But many of us still have yet to take that next leap in our cognitive development. It’s not just important for us to play the game. We must win. We must defeat our enemies on the field of battle, and therefore, if we don’t win, we... lose. We feel bad. The game isn’t fun anymore. It’s a struggle. I, too, was like this once. I can remember earlier in my little league career when I HAD to get a hit... but I just couldn’t. Weeks were spent with dad in the back yard hitting tiny plastic practice golf balls of different colors. I had to call out the color before I swung, teaching me to see the ball all the way to my bat. So many trips to the batting cages. So many practice swings. Hours of coaching. All of it, for naught. I could not hit.

     I remember tightening my pointless batting gloves before stepping in the batter’s box, that chest crushing weight of impending failure pressing into my solar plexus . Chants of “easy-out, easy-out” would rain in from the outfielders as I readied my bat for the first pitch, readied it for a swing that was guaranteed to miss, readied it for the forgone conclusion of my impending out. Finally, I’d face the pitcher, stare directly at the dictator, the tyrant of my childhood, as he went into his wind-up, about to deliver strike one. 

     Baseball itself is the most peaceful of all games. Born of a pastoral setting, on farms with sun dappled fields of fresh cut grass, it is played at a leisurely pace. There’s even a built in nap time in the middle of the 7th inning, "stretching" as we wake up and return to the game. The whole point of the game is to make it round the bend and safely home. It’s a peaceful game for a peaceful people that became popular right when we needed something peaceful the very most.

    In 1857, 16 New York baseball clubs formed the National Association of Baseball Players, NABBP, a predecessor to Major League Baseball. This was only months after Congressman Preston inning, “stretching” as we wake up and return to the game. The whole point of the Brooks used his cane to STRIKE Senator Charles Sumner repeatedly in the head in a dispute over slavery rights and conduct unbecoming a gentleman. Senator Sumner wished to abolish slavery, but Brooks, his cane and his cohorts from South Carolina refused to play ball. Just a few years later, some of Brooks’ people-owning friends decided to STRIKE Fort Sumter April 12, 1961, inciting the Civil War.

     Over the next few years, Soldiers taking a break from all the warring would play baseball, and the rules from different states were unified to form one national game. After the war, Soldiers who made it round the bend and safely home spread the game far and wide. There were an estimated 100 ball clubs on record the year before the war, and nearly 4 times that amount the year following the war. 

     We needed the past time, the distraction -- in particular one so placid, so serene, so freaking boring as baseball. It calms the nerves. For the post-traumatically shocked, it’s better than Xanex. But even within the most peaceful of games there’s a remnant of tribal aggression. The pitcher. 

     It is his job to determine with his arm who lives and who dies, each pitch an attack, each strike a cutting blow, each out a little death. And there’s little baby Ryan Duke with a bat too big for his body scared to death of the tyrant on the pitcher’s mound about to determine his fate. That is, until I just stopped swinging. I stopped fighting  back. Pitcher versus hitter was not a battle I could win. So I rested the bat on my shoulder and took ball one. And two. And three. And my base on balls. And I had won. I was on base. And the next time up, the same tack, and so on, and so on, half the time getting on base without every even trying, and with the top of the lineup behind me, the real hitters, I would more often than not make it round the bend and safely home. 

     Where the strike is aggression, the ball is conflict avoidance, a peaceful resolution to the battle between batter and pitcher. To embrace the base on balls is to see through the façade of winning and losing that baseball drapes over its serene intentions and evolve beyond your need to win. Feel the sun on your face. Count the blades of grass.

                Many words are wasted on some false rivalry between Chicago and New York. But we need to focus on the real enemy: the menace to the west, that fiery mudslidey earthquakey Babylon: The entire state of California.

                There are many reasons to loathe that vile state, but let’s start with one people easily forget: they stole the movie industry from us. Granted that was like 100 years ago, but there are too many talented starving actors tending bar (or doing Paper Machete) for meager tips in this town for we Chicagoans to just “forget” where the jobs went. Thanks President O’Harding or Taft or, whatever, some old dead white dude. So never forget, Chicago is the original Tinsel Town.

                Hell, Chicagoans INVENTED the movie... kinda. Edison invented the kinetoscope, this wooden mailbox looking thing you would bend over and grind to see the pictures move. But a Chicagoan named George K Spoor figured out how to make those little moving pictures project onto a flat surface. Which means movie theatres. Which means by proxy, he’s also responsible for the hickey, the yawn stretch and squeeze, and the surprise popcorn handjob.

                So that guy Spoor teamed with this other guy, Anderson, and they formed a company using their first two initials. Essanay. If you recognize that name, you’ve earned yourself a shot of Malort true Chicagoan. Or if you’re not a Chicagoan, you’re probably a film history major, and all you’ve earned is a degree you can’t do shit with. Essanay’s studios were actually right down the block at 1333 West Argyle street here in Uptown. It’s not there anymore, so don’t like… walk over there after this or anything. There’s just an apartment building and a cemetery. Because everything dies. (take a sip)

                Essanay sold the invention, the Magniscope, all over town and even started shooting films to sell right along with it. They got pretty good at making films, some of which starred two folks who eventually became the biggest film stars of their day and maybe ever: Gloria Swanson and Charlie Chaplin. The Essanay team is even credited with inventing the “western” – which eventually proved to be the downfall of the Chicago Film industry. It turns out it’s better to shoot westerns when you’re… west. They started a “western division” out in LA and eventually moved the whole company out there to escape the unpredictable weather here in Chicago. Which is the same reason people we used to think were cool move to LA now. That and because they’re weak and sick of working for “free.” Psssh. Actors. So California stole our movie industry, our sunshine, probably, and all of our most attractive friends, or at least the ones most likely to bleach their assholes.

                And now, we have a brand new reason that California is the worst: This week Chicago got the George Lucas museum over LA and San Francisco. This new museum will house Lucas’s Collection of Star Wars Memorabilia, installations on the innovations of Industrial Light and Magic, and his Norman Rockwell Paintings. With a passing glance, this news seemed kind of cool. Yaaay, we beat out California to get it. And, Yaaay. We get the tourists who will come see this stuff, and, Yaaaay, we get the money that comes with the tourists who will this stuff. But do you know how we got the museum? The way Chicago makes anything happen: by compromising our morals.

                Let’s… discuss.

                When our city was first planned, there were to be only public lands east of lake shore drive and a massive green space in the form of Grant Park. That meant no buildings blocking the lake.

                Our city has held fast to that original plan with the few exceptions being grand temples of art and science: Our glorious museum campus. The Art Institute. The Field Museum. The Adler Planetarium and the Shedd Aquarium. And as of a few days ago, the George Lucas Museum of the Narrative Arts.

                And why not put the new museum there? Just one more to add to the bunch, right? Because this particular museum while housing some cool stuff makes no fucking sense. What do Norman Rockwell paintings have to do with Star Wars? They’re calling it the “Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts” which is marketing and branding doublespeak for “George Lucas had a bunch of shit in his basement so we’re going to put it on display and come up with some weak reason for it all but you’ll pay to look at it anyway, peasant.” But to try and stand this museum against the Cathedrals of Human Achievement in our museum campus is just laughable.

                But that’s the essence of the problem. Nobody involved sees it that way. This is seen as a gift from the Gods of the film industry bestowed upon one of the flyover states. And we are to bow, and say thank you sir for blessing our city with your garage sale museum.

                And besides all that, Lucas is pure California. He grew up there, he works there, and despite what he’ll say about having a home in Chicago, he lives in California. He might summer here, which is somehow worse. He hasn’t earned Chicago summers by living through Chicago winters. He’s come here to bask in our fleeting hours of sunlight and stake his claim right there on our beautiful lakefront with his name on a poorly planned museum of seemingly random stuff that flies as an insult to our own history of film, not to mention our history of sticking it the fuck out in a climate that wants to hurt us.

                So instead of this Cali bullshit, let’s help Mr. Lucas see the museum that should be: The Lucas Narrative Arts Museum could share space with the Harold Ramis and John Hughes Memorial Museum of Chicago Cinematic History. Walk into an old magniscope of Chaplin spinning his cane, in the next room, smoke pot with Emilio Estevez. You could crash hundreds and hundreds of police vehicles in the Mission from God simulator, then roll a baby carriage down a flight of stairs before you step onto a parade float and sing Danke Shein. And finally, for the real Chicago Cinematic Experience, stand for a few hours in a frozen locker in the “Waiting to get my tickets for Star Wars 7 scheduled to release December 2015” simulator. And then, only then, after you’ve taken your medicine, after you’ve earned it in True Chicago Fashion… then… you can step into the Star Wars section. Because, fine, whatever, who doesn’t want to see a life size Millennium Falcon?