(this probably isn’t how the gentleman above saw himself returning to prominence)
The world is changing, and it is changing quickly. Youth revolutions have unseated long-tenured autocrats in Cairo and Salt Lake City in the last 24 hours alone. It’s natural to feel alien in this new place, this familiar and unfamiliar environment — the streets are the same, but the air is different, the people are different. Glenn Beck’s teary, dunderheaded fantasy of a caliphate that stretches from Moscow to Dayton is no less floridly retarded for the events of the last few days, but it is, perhaps, easier to feel a sort of distant empathy for it — we do not know this world anymore, and as exciting as that can be, a very human and very reasonable terror cuts the exhilaration. We are running in the dark.
But then… relax. This world is still this world, and there are some things that have not changed, even as the pillars shake and the structures fissure and strain. People are still writing erotic slash-fiction online about pretty much any pairing you can imagine — Lemmy Kilmister and Laura Ingraham; Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Adlai Stevenson; Leisure Suit Larry and Verne Lundquist. Everything and anything can change, but that will not. And as Emma Span reports at Baseball Prospectus, these brave literary guardians of the permanent are writing erotic fiction about guys last seen on your (non-sexual) fantasy league’s waiver wire four years ago:
I thought that over the years I’d seen most of the dark corners of sports fandom, but as it turns out, I still was not fully prepared for baseball fan fiction. If you’ve thought about it at all, you might expect to find quite a few tales of Jeter and A-Rod, and those are certainly there. But I was less braced for just how prominently players like, for example, Doug Mirabelli feature. You just do not ever expect to encounter the phrase, to quote one story, “Doug Mirabelli’s huge, unlubed…”
Well—Doug Mirabelli’s huge, unlubed anything, really. Let’s leave it at that.
Equally unexpected were the following slash fiction subjects, which I found on sites like “The Boys of Summer” and the “Baseball Fanfiction Archive”: Kyle Farnsworth and Pudge Rodriguez; Jason Varitek and Nomar Garciaparra; Pat Burrell and Aubrey Huff; Bubba Crosby and Chuck Knoblauch (posted in November 2010, so someone was thinking about this one for a while); and Melky Cabrera cheating with, of all people, Jaret Wright:
Jaret licked the cheekbone closest to him. “Melky?”
“Yes?”
“I … I don’t …”
“Yes.”
“What about Robinson?”
Oh, man, that was an idea that I wish I’d come up with. I’ve been anticipating the inevitable first openly gay rapper because you know the lyrics will be pretty shocking for a genre that ran out of shock a decade and a half ago. This will have to tide me over.