I've not written much the past two days because, frankly, I have been taken over by our house. Between the kitchen that is on hold until S comes home and the ceiling, which I fear we'll have to redo if we're to be able to sleep past 6 any morning, I feel like I need to get away from here just to get a good night's rest and to get a break from my repair obsessions. No doubt it's all made worse because S isn't here and he's feeling down too. He's back in Jalalabad today and soon he'll be returning to his small FOB along the border. The only thing we both want right now is to be together. If he were here right now, I'd feel fine and so would he, even if the kitchen remained half-baked and the neighbor continued to clip-clop across her bare floor.

The White Sox crept up on me this year. Suddenly half the cars in my neighborhood and across the north side have White Sox stickers, their drivers sporting matching caps. It's nice to see Chicago's home town team doing well and finally being appreciated by the north-of-the-loop city. S and I used to live in Wrigleyville and it was in that apartment that we developed a particular disdain for Cubs fans. It's not that the team, which is more a national team than a Chicago team, doesn't have it's charm (there's something adorable about the perennial underdog), it's just how utterly uncharming the fans are when they stagger to their cars loud and drunk, knock about on the street corners beneath trademark drafty windows, and piss on the sides of turn-of-the-century walk-ups. And that's after they've snatched all the prime parking spots in the neighborhood and clogged up traffic for hours before and after. Dressed in their matching Cubs caps and fraternity sweatshirts, they strut around the north side boistrously, and leave a trail of fender benders and worse accidents on their trails back to the suburbs. Back in the day night games weren't allowed, and I suspect it wasn't so bad living near Wrigley Field then. Those 1980s "About Last Night" yuppies used to have parties on their rooftops and watch the games from there, peering over the tarred ledges to see if any of the diehards on Waveland managed to catch a homerun ball. Now those three- and four-flats have been bought up by corporations and their roofs have been turned into x-bleachers custom made for x-burbanites. They reach up as high as the park lights in some places and have led to bullshit lawsuits from the Wrigley franchise. And did I mention the traffic?

I guess that's the difference between the Cubs and the Sox. The Cubs, sprayed across the country with their WGN broadcasts for years and years, have become more associated with fans outside of the city, either in the 'burbs or even farther afield, those folks who think of the north side as the "safe" side and see Chicago as this place for adventure and danger. They say they are "from Chicago" when people ask, but really they live miles and miles away from the mythical "City," that alien, frightening, out-of-control place that exists in their minds outside of the amusement park around Cub field. These fans come with their equipment and their toll money to see the game then disappear back into their perfectly symmetrical subdivisions, their towering expressway-side mansions and townhomes with open atriums and three-car garages.

The Sox, on the other hand, are the south side team, the team of the "big shoulders" city. Comiskey Park, now called "U.S. Cellular Field" (no more corporate than "Wrigley Field"), sits across the highway from the northernmost highrises in what was the country's largest concentration of public housing, the State Street Corridor. (There are still a handful of Stateway Gardens buildings just south of 35th Street, but that's it. The rest, including the notorious "Hole" of Robert Taylor Homes, are gone.) The park is in Bridgeport, the old neighborhood where Mayor Daley grew up, famous for its machine politics and sunken first floors (the sidewalks suspend a dozen feet above the houses, just as they did before the sewers were put in after the fire of 1871). The houses are tan and brown and utilitarian -- working-people houses -- and the streets aren't lined by fluffy trees or centered with majestic flower boxes as so many streets on the north side are. Holiday decorations are tacky, not tasteful, with plastic glowing Santas in the winter and painted-plaster Uncle Sams for the 4th. The diners are dull, the food standard. Even the alderman's office is flatly marked by a humdrum sign with small American flags painted in the corners. It's all just as it is. But walking through Bridgeport you imagine Carl Sandberg walking through there before you, or even Nelson Algren, or Upton Sinclair, and you see the Chicago of the past alive in the present, the "City That Works" working damn hard.

The Sox are the damn-hard-working team in this city. They are the ones who actually try to win because their fans don't drive home to four-bedroom ranches with expansive backyard decks. They actually care. After a game, Sox fans walk to the "El" and hop a train to their tired apartment, or walk home to their post-war bungalow, or maybe their turn-of-the-century walk-up, and go to bed early so they can get up early, and not because they've got an hour's commute to Schaumburg in their SUVs. (At least not all of them -- even Bridgeport is changing along with the rest of the city. Those desert sand city blocks of four-room bungalows are being razed and replaced with variable single-family homes with "designer kitchens featuring stainless steel appliances and granite counter-tops".) Most Sox fans are actual, bona fide Chicagoans.

If the Sox do badly, some fans go nuts and get violent and storm the field and demand the team do better. They get pissed. Cubs fans, on the other hand, love the Cubs even if they lose. They get mad at other fans (remember that poor kid who caught that ball last year and then received death threats?), but they rarely get mad at the team. Their loyalty is lauded and esteemed by many, shown as an example of true blue fandom. I've always thought of it as a sham. They love them unconditionally and the team has repaid them by playing like crap, year after year. Why win when the fans don't give a damn if they win or lose? Cubs fans have always struck me as being more in love with going to the game than the game itself, which isn't inherently bad, of course, but it does fit in more with the conformist, frat boy mentality and behavior S and I saw exhibited below our leaky windows in that one-bedroom apartment in Wrigleyville.

I admit I've never really liked baseball. This is another reason S and I fell in love so quickly, I suppose. He puts on baseball games if he wants to take a nap and he's too exhausted to sleep. The whir of the crowd is like white noise to him. Puts him out immediately. We met in karate class and fell in love watching pay-per-view boxing matches, New Jersey Devils hockey games, and college football. We both like contact sports. Neither of us understands the appeal of baseball exactly, except that it's fun to sit out on a beautiful summer day and drink beer with your friends. (Of course, it's more fun to sit out on a blustery, rainy fall day and drink beer with your friends, which is why one of my strongest sport memories is seeing the Bears in the Fog Bowl, bundled up and still freezing my ass off, the ball more an imagination than a physical thing as it billowed through the white air. I wasn't old enough to drink then, and I was sandwiched between my mom and my step-dad, but still. It was Walter Payton on the receiving end of that ball, one of the greatest athletes of all time.)

So if I don't like baseball, why am I rooting for the Sox this year? It's simple, really. I was born on the south side, and that's enough in this town. And the only baseball games I've been to in my life were Sox games, back when Comiskey Park was still Comiskey Park. My step-father, a native Rhode Islander, preferred the Sox over the Cubs, probably for the same reasons I do. He was a self-made man who grew up in east coast immigrant Irish tenements that were probably no different from the Irish tenements that once stood row by row on the streets surrounding Sox park. He worked damn hard too.

Last night my mom had a dinner party and my friends Luis and Diana were there. Diana was born on the south side like me and she's lived in Bridgeport her whole life. Luis moved to Bridgeport when he was nine or so from Texas. Last night he had on his lucky Sox shirt underneath his dinner party sweater. We had the game on in the kitchen on mute, and every now and then Luis would sneak back there, catch the score, and come back and tell everyone at the table. When I talked to S this morning and told him about the Sox, he said "It's about time," then ranted again about those annoying-as-hell Cubs fans. I told him about all the Sox stickers up north and about how Luis, Diana and I are going to have a couple of World Series-watching parties next week. I know if S were here he wouldn't sleep through those games!