Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, March 19, 2020, 9:23 a.m.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling sorry, but there’s no purpose in feeling sorry for ourselves.

Things are tough all over. Everyone’s got a tale of woe. Everyone’s got someone to blame.

Stop it. We’ve got the right to lash out at who or what is the target of our ire, but it’s not going to solve anything.

Kris Kristofferson wrote (“Jesus Was a Capricorn”):

’Cause everybody’s got to have somebody to look down on

Who they can feel better than at any time they please

Someone doin’ something dirty decent folks can frown on

If you can’t find nobody else, then help yourself to me

No one is innocent. No one is guilty. We all have a gripe. We all get frustrated. We all got whupped upside the head by something we weren’t expecting. We all didn’t see it coming. We all were wrong, and we all were right. We all have to stick together – not literally — and we all feel like tearing something apart.

We’ve all got to keep things together, but there are going to be times when we feel angry.

Steven Fromholz wrote (“Singin’ the Dinosaur Blues”):

Me and my friends are getting long in the tooth

After three or four decades of seekin’ the truth

Trying to recover from a misspent youth

And gradually givin’ in to knowledge

The song, popularized by Jerry Jeff Walker, also contains one of my favorite sentences:

Life is mostly attitude and timing

I lost my timing, but I’ve still got my attitude. I laugh at myself at the magnificent decision to start up a sports website at the time that there are no sports.

It’s funny as hell. I need a laugh, man.

Yesterday I needed to get away, and Southwest Airlines wasn’t a practical consideration. When this website, Laurens County Sports, launches – think bottle rocket, not Saturn V – I’m going to fill it with information, even though there are apparently going to be no ballgames and fight songs. I drove around the county and took photos of empty ballfields, tennis courts and the dirt track.

If I’ve got COVID-19 tucked away in my system, it didn’t come from the afternoon trip. At Clinton High School, four kids were leaving the softball field. I spoke to them but didn’t broach the 3- to 6-foot protective shield of deadly air. We exchanged pleasantries.

A man was jogging around the track that surrounds the football field at Bailey Memorial Stadium. A few men from the physical plant – that’s what it was called when I was in college – were tidying up outside the soccer field. A Laurens High, a man was giving two kids – 11, 12 years old, I’m guessing – tennis lessons. All the gates were locked except the one he had opened in the courts. I used the walkway in the middle to reach a camera angle for the football and baseball stadiums. I stopped at Laurens City Parks and the YMCAs of Clinton and Laurens, The last stop was at Laurens Academy.

It was as haunting in its way as the video on TV of nearly vacant Times Square.

But, folks, we can do this because, folks, we’ve got no choice. Everyone’s got a tale of woe, and most of them are legitimate.

A mother’s heart grieves that her son isn’t going to enjoy the rest of his senior year: the prom, the trip, the graduation. A woman frets for her health because her job involves service to the public from behind a counter, and if she leaves, the line to replace her will be longer than the line at the counter.

Gas is cheap, and there’s no place to go. Ain’t that typical? It might be all that’s typical.

Whatever the help, it won’t be enough, but we’ll just have to get by the best we can.

Controlling the attitude is easier than controlling the timing.

Don’t get mad. It don’t do no good.

 

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