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So the world, at least this little Northeastern province of it, has been turned upside down, reality has strangled invention, etc., and by this I mean we are all flabbergasted, mainly at Pitchfork's review of the new Le Tigre. (I cringed to read that it includes "... a dance anthem made up of samples of anti-war speeches by Susan Sarandon, Al Sharpton, and others..." Although I have, twice in my young life, cast semi-protest ballots for Sharpton, I wish him proximate neither to dancing nor to anthems.)

But it was strange and surreal, like a fever dream, to walk the streets of Manhattan Wednesday night and Thursday morning and see Red Sox caps and jerseys everywhere, to gaggle outside the Riv on Seventh Avenue, where a few hundred hardy souls were chanting, in succession, the names of each of the Sox, from A (Arroyo) to Y (Youkilis). Someone mentioned that a bootleg T-shirt had cropped up with the legend, "Who died and left you Mark Bellhorn?"

I had watched the game at Kim's old apartment with a gang of Bostonians, who, perversely but properly, reacted inversely to the score: as things got better and better, their mood became more and more dire, as though this were merely the run-up to the final twist of the knife in their entrails. When the bottom of the eighth ended, a lengthy debate began over whom to use to face Hideki Matsui leading off the bottom of the ninth, Mike Timlin or (lefty-lefty) Mike Myers, with the lead at seven runs. I confess I joined with earnestness and gravity in this conversation. Side note: my friend Amy refers to David Ortiz as "Tizzle." This makes me fully and unabashedly happy.

Earlier in the day, this astounding thread cropped up on Sons of Sam Horn, and it vivified what 86 years of failure, frustration, humiliation, and so on, mean in human terms. Mikey from Waltham, Bobby from Southie, we feel your pain.

I was reminded of the 1955 Dodgers, who had accomplished something similar in the seventh game of a playoff series on that hallowed piece of earth in the Bronx. Red Smith wrote then that Game 7 was "... the impossible -- the fourth and final conquest of the Yankees which would accomplish the thing that had never happened, which perhaps never could happen in this world." Later, Smith added, "One has to pause a moment and consider, before the utter implausibility of this thing can be appreciated. First, the Dodgers had never won a World Series, and especially they had never won one from the Yankees ... Unprecedented to begin with, it became impossible after the Yankees won the first two games. No team in history had ever recovered from such disaster within the limit of seven games."

And I began to wonder why, when I meet old New Yorkers, I hear war stories about the Dodgers -- my uncle grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, down the block from Gil Hodges, he likes to mention -- or the Miracle Mets but very rarely the Yankees, who nonetheless stand as synecdoche (or is it metonymy?) for the city in the popular consciousness. Maybe there is something of the contrarian or the dissenter hard-wired into everybody who lives here, something that causes a deep-down, instinctual rejection of those who revel in their privilege, who exude entitlement. Not that the Red Sox, built with the second-highest payroll in the game, are charity cases either, a canard that should be interred with the curse. But that in the hoary battle between power and power's disenfranchised aspirant they represent, at least for now, the latter, as the Dodgers or the Mets did but the Yankees never have.

OK, enough foggy rumination for a Friday morning. Ostensibly, I cover this sport for a living, so here's a Series preview, in iambic-pentameter-doggerel, for some reason:

Anathema to Cards, ground balls through holes.
And pitchers, brave and meek, all fear Pujols.

Too long has Boston grieved, to feint or tease.
From Quincy to Revere, they pray, "Ortiz."

Now a piece of required reading in my ceaseless and, I fear, futile jeremiad against the bad guys (because, as Kobe says, "That's my thing, right there"):

Andrea Mackris' lawsuit against Bill O'Reilly. Read it, and I defy you to eat falafel again.

Finally, since my last blog, Jacques Derrida died, and so I say, this therefore will not have been a blog.