#people hate on missionaries for a lot of incredibly justified reasons

[shamelesslymkp]

this is my second experience with missionaries in this area and I really do get the impression almost that they are deliberately getting set up to fail; I had to explain to the two male ones a year or so back that waylaying a woman on her way to the dumpster in the early darkening evening was actually something that most women would not respond well to and today I felt obligated to point out to the very nice very young women at my door that possibly they’d have more luck if they were. wearing masks.

considering. y’know.

the whole. pandemic. thing.

[deehollowaywrites]

Every now and then, a meme in the vein of “what was the first video game you played?” travels around social media. I have a reasonably cool answer for this: GoldenEye. That is also the last video game I played, because I sucked at it, wasn’t old enough to care about James Bond, and my mother thinks to this day that video games are trash.

I note this only to provide context for my brief obsession with Twine, a free online platform for creating text-based computer games and interactive stories. You can probably guess what sorts of games I wrote in a 24-hour fugue state of thinking about nothing but the fragile web of possibilities that comprises a horse race. Frankly, when I wrapped my little math-deficient noggin around what Twine actually is, my first thought was racing. It seemed like a match made at Lane’s End. Why would anyone write an adventure game on Twine that wasn’t about the two minutes of time between gate and post? The incredible volume of minutiae undergirding Thoroughbred sport is perfect for the sorts of games Twine enthusiasts create. Every last bedeviled detail of a day at the races is up to chance, a toss of the dice, a click of the mouse. A jock switch, or a gate scratch. A horse that looks super live, but is also named after your ex. Something as minor as a rider three pounds over, or as major as a horse breaking down in the stretch. This is what makes playing horses so fascinating, such a tease; what drives people to comb over the PPs and scrape for tips and place another bet, one more, so sure that this time they’ve outwitted fortune, that the wind is theirs to kiss. It’s all very butterfly effect.

There’s no glory in a simple, silly story game. It doesn’t make me a dime, and it isn’t high art. It is not, as the saying goes, actionable.

The only beneficial remnant of my Mormonism is the belief that every member is a missionary. It’s no longer necessary to answer questions about CTR rings or gracefully decline a Coke with scripture quotations, but the method itself gets ingrained. In progressive circles you hear a lot about making the space you’re in progressive. Influencing the biome of a sport seems like small potatoes in comparison to affecting civic change, but these are differences of scale, not type--and recently, in response to major upset and tidal change, certain voices are charging participants directly to carry the sport’s water. It’s not clear to me what exactly that entails--do I wear a button that says “I love horse racing! Ask me how”? do I add NYRA to my list of concerns when I call to nag Cuomo’s office?--but I also don’t mind either way. On the one hand, no one is paying me to be racing’s hype machine, or an officer of its apologia. On the other, it gives me joy to think, talk, and most of all write about racing, and to shove it into the long-suffering eyeballs of people who became my friend because once upon a time I talked about other things. In this mode, occasionally one of them will text me and say, Hey Diana! I got a pub trivia question right because you never shut the fuck up! You’re welcome.

Small potatoes! The tiniest and humblest potatoes. At a conservative estimate, 560,500 written words’ worth of diminutive spuds. One thing that can never be overestimated is joy. 

A book I adore, Station Eleven, uses as a motif the Star Trek Voyager line “survival is insufficient.” In cases of basic survival, the ends don’t justify the means: they’re the same thing. In times of famine, the body consumes muscle before burning fat. It’s tempting to look at racing’s probable future and scramble, reach for anything concrete, any proof of results, any actionable course at the expense of all else. Thoroughbreds are a marginal sport; I don’t think anyone is arguing that point (marginal is not the same as dying). Romance, one of my preferred literary vehicles, isn’t a marginal genre but neither is it overly respected. Trying to convince the average romance reader to pick up a racing title or the average horseplayer to pick up a romance is somewhere up there on the eternal hillside with Sisyphus. Pure, refined congrats-you-played-yourself bravado and pipe dreams. The Venn diagram of “nope” is a circle. But now and then, someone outside the sport does read a story. And they say something like, I don’t know anything about racing and this made me interested. 

Now, I’ve never done coke but I assume the rush is similar. 

The thing is, if some reader does trip further down the rabbit hole, they’re already forewarned--because those stories, they have warts. Sometimes I think people hear “racing” and “romance” and think, Well, she just wants to talk about pretty ponies and fancy hats and rich men. Would I be forgiven for this bent, if it existed, considering that the face of racing marketed to women consists of just that? Will I be forgiven for observing a wave of attractive, wholesome defense couched in lifestyle and passion and love? In our time of instant information, this type of promotion is useless, even if I understand the knee-jerk impulse behind it (beauty is the most immediate of compulsions; a thing is unlovable if it’s not above critique). But romance is political, as sport is. The public face of any field is a political choice. Whose stories are privileged and given weight, who is tasked with defending their own existence at one turn and an entire industry’s at another, it’s political.

Meanwhile, I like to think of the sport as a Google Trends display: the line on the graph marked “And Believe It Or Not, There Are Actually People Who Ride The Horses” moseying along, at a constant low ebb until 2016, where a sudden spike pops up and keeps climbing. I am here to love the things you hate. No one would have bet on me being here, and in reality the needle-shift is infinitesimal, certainly not actionable. But there’s something to be said for coming to racing not by family birthright, or particular raising, but through as solitary and collaborative a channel as research. I didn’t fall in love with a horse; I fell in love with a sport. 

Too bad love is not the question at hand.

Oddly, a majority of the stories populating #IAmHorseRacing are women’s, where “women” stand in for bloodlines, families, continuance. If you’ve been paying attention, this isn’t odd at all.