Simulacrum

Stayin Alive dept.

Before podcasts, I used to stay awake on long drives by watching the oncoming traffic and assigning the following: a car was a win, a truck was a loss, a motorcycle was a tie.

With this simple formula, I would play football seasons out in my mind.

I was the head coach, usually of a Division 3 college football team.

A 9-2 record got you into the playoffs. An 8-3 mark put you into a tie for the conference title, requiring a one-game playoff.

Then, with your 9-3 mark or better, you played the “state” game, against the winner of the other big conference in the state.

Win that, and you are in the national quarterfinals. Win that, and it’s the semis. Win that, and you have won the national championship.

The best you can finish in a given season is 15-0, with a national title.

Winning a national title will keep you from getting fired for a few years, able to weather a few 3-8 or 4-7 finishes.

You can also use the same system to play out a baseball season, but with 162 games to get through, it’s a lot harder to keep track of things.

Football seasons are much shorter and it’s relatively easy to stay focused, unless traffic gets really thick.

Some interstate roads are mostly trucks, and it’s hard to get to even 6-5. A lot of coaches get fired on those roads.

On a really long drive you can play out a coach’s entire 20- or 25-year career, and then see how the new guy does.

Sometimes, on the more rural, two-lane roads, traffic will be light, and there will be quite a bit of time between passing vehicles.

This affords opportunities to interview the coach, and solicit his feelings about the upcoming opponent.

“Juniata has a quality squad, and can really run the ball. They’re 5-2, and aren’t gonna lay down for anyone.”

For some reason, the team I guided through these sessions was mostly an invented squad called the “Susquehanna Scarlet Haze.” There is a Susquehanna, in Pennsylvania, but I would wager every dollar garnered by this Substack that they are not called the “Scarlet Haze.”

But the “Susquehanna Scarlet Haze” sounds good. Try saying it yourself, in a confident, announcer-y voice.

The game is obviously a simulation, having very little to do with the actual game of football.

But, in the days before podcasts, it kept me alert and alive on many a journey.

While possibly fairly odd, my Approaching Cars Football game is, as these things go, pretty innocuous. It hurts no one, as long as keeping track of oncoming cars doesn’t keep me from paying attention to my own lane. Which it probably does, sometimes. But, so far, no great harm seems to have come of it.

A bigger, possibly more alarming Simulation is the one that is more and more often referenced by scientists—that is, that WE, and everything in our lives, are in fact being played out in a simulation.

AI now seems to be acting in its own self-interest, and if you go down this rabbit hole far enough, one can easily start to give the Simulation idea credence.

However, I don’t believe it.

I think we have no idea how big the Universe is, or how it works, or what the hell is going on, really. Was there stuff before the Big Bang? Will the Universe as we know it will expand forever, or snap back like a yoyo? Has it already happened trillions of times? Since there seems to be a supermassive black hole at the center of every Galaxy, is there a super-super-super-supermassive black hole at the center of the Universe itself? Are there in fact wormholes that we could theoretically shoot through to another part of the Universe? What’s the deal with time travel, once and for all? Is the distance to anyplace else so vast that to imagine going anywhere that might hold life, or any life coming here, simply ludicrous? Or are they here right now, or their remnants, and are the government wonks just waiting for the right moment to tell us?

I don’t know any of that stuff. And the Simulation thing? I don’t know that either. If you play on a computer a lot, or watch a lot of Instagram snippets after watching some Neil DeGrasse Tyson clips and Brian Cox and Brian Greene and that crowd, and your algorithm has been alerted that you dig that stuff—the Simulation starts to seem credible.

But there’s this: as soon as you go out in the woods, or ride a bike, or stand next to a wet dog, or even just sit in the sun and drink an Arnold Palmer while you grapple with Wordle—the notion of a Simulation seems like a load of crap. It makes you want to respond like you would to a philosophy student who tells you that you don’t exist: by punching him in the nose. “How’s that for non-existence?!”

It really feels like an insult, the Simulation thing. It really does.

Which brings us to baseball.

I try to get to at least one major league game a year, just so the game feels real. Sometimes I’m lucky and I get to see quite a few. Last year I had a great run, and saw games in Fenway Park, Citifield in New York, Yankee Stadium, Comerica Park in Detroit, Wrigley Field, Kansas City, Denver, Los Angeles.

Sandy Koufax

It’s not like that every year. But, again, I try to keep the game real for myself. So it’s not just on tv or radio. So it’s not a simulation. I like to smell the hot dogs. Hear the crack of the bat. See the outfield collision. Yell at the pitcher.

It seems like, more and more, there’s a divide between people who are passionate about baseball and those who don’t care about it at all. Sometimes I think I’m sliding toward the latter, but it always grabs me before too long, and I’m back to perusing the box scores like I’m a Talmudic scholar.

Whatever your passions, whatever your simulations, let’s just leave it at this:

Keep it real, pal.

Keep it real.

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“Road Trip”: