I’m riven with anxiety triggered by latent agoraphobia. This situation began nearly as soon as I agreed yesterday to go to a baseball game with Caroline as part of what was organized by her company as an employee and family outing.

Tensions grew as I fell into the half-mile-long line of cars waiting to park. For a moment I relaxed, as on the walk to the entry I was nearly alone. Once in the park, I started having glimpses of panic. I’m in enemy territory.

Jocks, lunkheads, idiots, bros, angry old white men, skanks with enormous immovable blobs of plastic barely contained on their chests, muscle boys, the obese, and fanboys. They all add up to a menagerie straight out of the worst circus or theater of the absurd. Please excuse my unbearably biased generalization as I certainly am well aware that it is petulant and that many many people in the crowd do not deserve my ugly descriptions.

Instead of enjoying the show, I’m feeling that I’m being gut-punched by every Jersey Shore specimen of peculiarity that seems to be employed here as a kind of stadium mannequin just for that purpose. The display from the margins of society is conspiring to make me squirm.

Just as I get situated out in the grassy outfield resigned to my misery, an old friend drags me over the 1st row behind home plate. I’m in the belly of the beast and it threatens to consume me. I try looking at the players but my interest is running so negatively that I want to see anything else, except everywhere I look I see signs of baseball.

It’s the top of the 7th with the home team being crushed by the foe that also spends this time of year in Arizona for spring training. I collect Caroline who I’m certain was more comfortable with me out of sight as I’m not one to hide my disdain.

I do have to heap a ton of gratitude on Caroline’s employers as I believe these types of activities are great for company morale. Not only were we their guests, but they shared a generous amount of Salt River Fields Bucks good for food, drink, or merchandise. I cannot thank them enough for their effort and feel somewhat ashamed at my inner dialog of hostility. I last attended a baseball game in 2008 when I took my mother-in-law for the sole purpose of getting a photo of her at the event with a beer and hot dog. I tend to think that a large part of my anxiety was due to the fact that there’s a high likelihood that many in the park were of a particular political persuasion I’m not currently gelling with.