giornata, 2/6/25

the key change in Invisible Touch

Changes! I’m flipping the divide between paid/free posts at Restorative Romance. I always want anything that I provide at a paid tier to be consistent, so it has been, up until this point, my non-romance, romance series. But I’ve done a month of these weekly media diaries, proving myself that I can be consistent with them. So, non-romance, romance is now all un-paywalled and going forward, giornata will be the paid subscriber benefit.

The History of the Seattle Mariners, (2020, dir. Jon Bois)

Surely a future non-romance, romance, probably in March for baseball’s opening day. I’ve written before about how romantic I find sports, specifically baseball. I’ve been meaning to watch this documentary for years, but the long run time put me off, though I always love Bois’ video essays.

The Seattle Mariners gives my Philadelphia Phillies a run for their money in their sea of mediocrity and failure. The Phillies are the losingest team in all of sports, but they have been around since the 19th century. The Mariners are an expansion team, so they didn’t even exist until 1977 and still have managed to achieve depths of sports despair.

But Bois makes it clear from the jump: this is a love story. I know I am always talking about squaring the concept of happily ever after ending in a story with the nature of life, which cannot be truncated so optimistically. Every year, 29 MLB teams experience unhappy endings to a season. The Mariners have never even been to a World Series, much less won one. And yet, baseball is romance. There are happy moments to end storylines that give a glimmer of genre fiction neatness, particularly around Ichiro Suzuki and Ken Griffey, Jr.’s arcs, but they are pinprick stars in a vast and deep sky of floundering. I cried a dozen times during this film. More to come!!