Itch and Scratch

In this week's New Yorker is a long piece on the mechanics and treatment of itchiness. It's actually pretty fascinating. Among a lot of stuff about phantom limbs and mirror therapy, there was this: a fair amount of what we think is just a natural reaction to skin conditions is mental, and that you can, provided you are exposed to the right mental weather, make yourself itchy.

Here, I'll prove it. I want you to imagine a mosquito walking up the back of your right leg, just above the ankle, then slowly lowering its head towards the skin. Now it's opening it's jaws, and moving closer... and now it plunges its teeth into your skin, engorging itself with your blood. Really concentrate now, and see the mosquito on your defenseless skin. Clear your mind of everything but the mosquito on your leg.

Now, imagine a second mosquito landing next to the first one.

Seeing how as I've made some of you as bothered as you've been on this blog since the WNBA post, now try this. Visualize a soft terrycloth bathrobe coming out of a dryer, which you fold with your hands. It's warm, smells good, and feels expensive and luxuriant. You can even bring it to your cheek if you like; no one's watching.

In studies with not just my plodding words but also full sound and video, test subjects in a theater were observed to scratch more to the first scenario, and to be clearly soothed and made more calm and still by the second. Unlike, say, tickling, itch/scratch has no social component; you can make yourself itchy whenever you want to, and, perhaps, also stop it. (Hell, I'm scratching more just from the self-edit.)

I'm in the sixth paragraph now, which means I have to bring this back to sports, right? (In earlier drafts, this kind of mosquito dithering went on for a lot longer, just to prove some sadistic meta-point. Anyway, moving on.) Well, it's pretty obvious to me -- sports radio, sports bloggers, sports writers and sports networks all exist on an itch/scratch continuum. SportsCenter soothes more than it irritates; when it does so, with Braying Jackassery, the powers that be think it's a good thing, because an active audience is better than a reactive one. They'd see it as a spice to the main meal.

It is the nature of Art to mete out Itch with Scratch, Carrot with Stick, Pleasure and Pain. (Hey now. My image search for this post just got a lot more interesting.) But that's not what sports coverage is usually about. Sports coverage is pure Scratch; it's an arena where we pay to see events that don't really matter, so that we can avoid thinking about things that really do matter. (And if you don't believe that, consider the existence of the Post-Game Gloatathon that every NFL team telecast provides to its local market. Scratch, scratch, scratch.)

When we do bring in things that matter into sports, we have to do so carefully, and we lose a portion of the audience. If you are, say, a Yankee fan, you'd much rather watch Alex Rodriguez hit than hear about his contract, but since his contract defines other aspects of the team (say, their inability to have mid-salary performers on the bench, or the chance to bring in other big-salaried free agents), most people will go along under the feeling that it's something that they have to know. But no one, with the possible exception of Hank Steinbrenner, wants to see the full cost-benefit analysis of Rodriguez with the Yankees to see if he's bringing in more than he costs. That level of reality / itch is not welcome.

This also gets to the crux of why The Lemur bothers me so much and so often; it is a mosquito. It is an ever-increasing amount of Itch. It is Commerce masquerading as Art, a slow pollution of the purity of our drugs, a bastard child that decent men and women should not accept nor easily tolerate. In a better world, there would be competition that delivers nothing but Scratch Goodness, so that we don't have to endure all of the mistakes they foist on us.

Some might read this as simply a cranky old man rant, since the mosquito is something the young'uns are just used to by now. But, um, no. In the end, the Lemur likes to make us itch, just as many other players in the space do.

And yes, that makes them reprehensible, at least intermittently... and it means that most of the people who do this hobby of mine have reprehensible moments.

But it also means that I'm culpable for letting them get to me, and I can get them to stop whenever I like, by just thinking hard about a nice soft cloth. Maybe being held over various mouths...