Or: What WILL Aunt Martha say?

I have a confession:  I am thisclose to becoming a White Sox fan.  And I don’t mean that lightly.  I have been a Cubs fan for 33 of my 33 years.  I have lived and breathed the Cubs.  When I lived near Wrigley and drunken upper-middle-class assholes pissed on the wall right outside my bedroom window, I still supported the Cubs.  When, year after year, we looked at tickets and hoped for a reasonable price on our one free weekend to take Wallace to a game, only to find it sold out or each ticket outrageously out of our price range, I still bled Cubbie blue.

Year after year we endure the nightmare Old Style radio commercials just to listen to Pat Hughes and Ron Santo get their hearts broken again and again and again right along with us.  I hate those fucking commercials.

And, you know what I feel like this year?  I feel like a woman who has finally realized that, although her boyfriend is going, “Yeah, yeah baby. I’ll buy you a ring.  I’ll buy you the biggest ring the world has ever SEEN!  I’m just not quite ready”… I have just realized no ring is coming.

I have not believed in the Cubs since the jilted me in 2003.  They made me believe.  I believed, and when they did their classic belly flop, the fact that it was a post-season belly flop broke my heart.  I cried.  I wept, and I do mean that literally.  I was horribly embarassed, but I wept.  Like the woman told she’ll be getting a BIG present for Christmas by her boyfriend and it’s not a diamond, it’s a teddy bear.

The Sox are a good team.  They are a south-side team and we live just over the line on the southwest side.  You can afford to get into the park (hell, you can get TO the park) and it’s filled with working-class folks, not trust fund bleach blonde nightmares.  More importantly, as TT said, they’ve won a penant more recently than two world wars.

The Cubs are cute and funny and nice, but they also are living in my house, eating my food, not getting a job and show absolutely NO real signs, after a hundred years, of buying anyone a fucking ring.

I think it may be time to kick them to the curb.