So about two days after posting all about My Triumphs in D League Gay Softball, I hit a slump. At our last game of the regular season I struck out twice and eked out a couple of anemic singles. At our next practice, one of only two before play-offs, I swung and hit only air, and let more than a few grounders bounce past me on the manicured grass of the lonesome right field.

It was more than a little humiliating. Understandable, yes: common, no doubt. But still humiliating. The next morning I woke light-headed and thunder-pulsed, a dizzy sensation that would cling to me for the next seven days. My dreamy doctor prescribed an echocardiogram and then ran off to Bear Week in Provincetown. I holed up, ate massive plates of pasta for the first time in months, wrote nothing, and watched reruns of Veronica Mars, missing the final practice before play-offs.

I woke the first morning of play-offs still light-headed and quick-pulsed, but determined to at least show up for moral support. The winner of the play-offs would qualify for the Gay World Series in glamorous Columbus, Ohio. But our team had finished the season fifth out of seven teams. To win playoffs we’d have to win six out of seven games over the next two days, a doubtful proposition.

Our first game was against a team we’d been 0 for 2 against during the season, so I figured I’d rest my dizzy head while warming the bench, shouting out the occasional Inferno cheer and offering my condolences afterwards.

Yeah, right. We fucking won.

And watching that felt so good that I played the next three games, poorly again, though the rest of my team did well enough that we won two of them. We still had a shot the next day. The adrenaline seemed to knock the dizziness from my head, and I went home that night feeling pretty damn good.

I came back the next morning, the Manly Fireplug in tow, just as dizzy as before. Worse, in the intervening night I’d had a Mildly Traumatic Event. I need to stay vague about this Mildly Traumatic Event for various reasons, so my apologies to you for kinda sorta leading you on.

I say mildly because no one was killed. I was not hurt. The Manly Fireplug was not hurt. No family or friends or little red terrier were hurt. But the memory of the event clung to me over the night and through the next day, the second day of play-offs. And between the memory of the event and the return of my dizziness, I was one bummed dude. I was sick and scared and stuck in my head, and I did the one thing I’d never done, all season long.

I gave up.

I told the coach the dizziness was back, keeping the other details to myself, and spent the rest of the day avoiding her eye. I hung back.

And watched my team win the whole fucking thing.

Yep, we won the next three games, the last two in a row against the top-seeded team, and we routed them.

It was thrilling. It was heartening in a way I can hardly describe. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve ever had with another group of people, and I’m so glad that I was there.

The thrill, of course, was tempered, for all the reasons you might expect. I had wanted so badly to take part, to pull my weight and help my team reach that unlikely victory. But I couldn’t do it. I went home that night with a complicated heart.

The dizziness cleared. My dreamy doctor is still, as I write this, at Bear Week, and I have yet to learn the results of my test, but my symptoms have cleared up, and yesterday I drove down to the batting cages and swung until the sweat flew from my arms.

And next month I will travel with my team to Coumbus where no doubt I will spend most of the week warming a bench or two, something I will be happy to do, cheering on my team.

Thank you, D league softball, for giving me a little more confidence, even if I sometimes lose track of it. And thank you Inferno, my team, my comrades, you unlikely band of rag-tag misfits, for proving that you can still come from behind and kick some major ass. Flame on!

Since then I’ve stayed stuck in my head. Sometimes something hurls at you through the cover of night, colliding with you and jarring you awake. Last weekend was like that. I had somewhere somehow once again lost my way.

I’d stopped working on my book, had taken up with softball and the gym and looking good. I get that way sometimes. It’s hard for me to balance the physical and the cerebral, the short-term gains of hot pecs with the long-term gains of creative expression. I don’t do balance well, but then one does not develop a daily affection for crystal meth, say, if one has a talent for moderation. I find it easier to lift weights than to write a paragraph, and sometimes I get lazy.

And though I’ve become a better softball player, in secret I know the score. I will never be a better player than a writer. And I need to write. Which is rather too bad, in matters of paycheck and practicality. But it’s too late now, that die was cast way too long ago.

It took me a few days to get back to this, to get less scared and less stuck. To turn off Veronica Mars and sit down and log off and open a new document, a blank white screen, the blinking cursor that I chase with one word, then two.