Waiting For Nothing: Barry Bonds & The HR Record

This week finds me on jury duty here in the Bronx. I started yesterday, making my trek down to the Bronx County Courthouse, which is just a few blocks from Yankee Stadium. If you know anything about jury duty you know it's all about waiting. Waiting, in most cases, for nothing. You sit in a huge room full of strangers. You may or may not get your name called to be considered for a seat on a jury. If you get called, you sit in a courtroom and, you may or may not get your name called to sit in a jury box. After all that, you may or may not be accepted as a juror. If you are accepted, and you're on a civil case, the parties may settle before any evidence is even presented. If you're on a criminal case, the defendant may plead guilty before any opening statements are made. Hence, you have done a lot of waiting for nothing.

Well I obviously had way too much time on my hands yesterday, because my mind wandered around until it come up with an analogy about all of this to Barry Bonds. Next month the wait begins. We'll all start waiting for Bonds to break Hank Aaron's all-time home run record. At some point this season he'll do it, and it will be like waiting for nothing. That's because we're all sitting around like jurors, hoping to be able to find him guilty of using performance-enhancing drugs. We drink up stories about his increased jersey size, his big head and his huge feet. We listen as he says that death threats are the reason he acts like an arrogant son-of-a-bitch all of the time (Yeah, right.). We shrug our shoulders and think about something else when a few people talk about the government's Barry Bonds Witch Hunt. We don't care about that. We just care about the waiting. The waiting is not the hardest part when it comes to Barry Bonds. The hardest part will be when he breaks the record and when the witch hunt ends, because it will end eventually, and Barry Bonds will throw his head back in laughter and drag his fat, arrogant ass around the bases for the 756th time. Hence, we'll have done a lot of waiting for nothing.

The Lady