Find Your Distractions While You Can

You will need them.

In October 2011, the United States marked its 10th year of war in Afghanistan, Muammar Gaddafi was murdered by rebel forces amidst the deadliest stretch of the Libyan Civil War and an earthquake in Turkey killed more than 400 people. It was a bloody month, with pain and sadness and strife, like all the rest of them.

But I didn’t notice any of that. In October 2011, I was engulfed in my own world, entirely occupied by two parallel experiences that would change my life entirely. The first was that the St. Louis Cardinals were trying to win the World Series. I spent nearly every night that month at Foley’s, the New York City bar for expat Cardinals fans, watching our team with hundreds of red-clad screaming people who, for that month, were best friends. Foley’s, the since-shuttered baseball ball in midtown Manhattan, had hosted Cardinals fans for years, and in October 2011, it got so crowded with them that Foley’s had to hire security and extra doormen, which still didn’t stop us all from spilling out onto the street. It was a fortnight of toasted ravioli, buckets of Bud Light, rally squirrels, vanishingly little sleep and an endless succession of moments of frenzied delirium.