I am emotionally exhausted right now. Yesterday was Memorial Day, and Roger Clemens tried to win his 300th game at Yankee Stadium. I am sure Roger is even more exhausted than I am, but I am wiped out.

I could write about how the Yankees fan sitting next to me and the Red Sox fan directly in front of us started the game heckling each other mercilessly and ended up exchanging business cards. I could write about how record rainfall throughout the New York metro area soaked the field from midnight until two in the afternoon. I could use metaphors like the fact that as the Yankees took the field the sky brightened for the first time in days. But it wasn't sunny.

I could write about how, during the rain delay, we amused ourselves watching Yankees fans and Red Sox fans alike bowl at Stan's across the street from the Stadium. (The lane announcer kept egging on a group of Sox fans by saying 'Yankees Suck' and 'Nomar's Better' into the PA system to get them to cheer... but then, as the rain stopped and game time approached, he showed his true stripes: 'Ladies and gentlemen, the game will be starting in a half an hour. Please remember that two lanes are reserved especially for Red Sox fans. Lane 19, and Lane 18. That's 19, 18. BOSTON SUCKS!" That started a rousing "Nine-teen, eight-teen!" cheer from the Yankees fans (i.e. everyone else) and we were still chanting as we spilled out onto the street.

And I should be writing about the Yankees' slump, how they seemed weighed down, unable to get two good innings together in a row. Didn't hit a single home run. Didn't turn a single double play. Didn't give us much to cheer about.

But I'm going to write about depression. (It's my website and I'll cry if I want to, but trust me, there is a baseball connection). My current state of depression has a little to do with the Yankees and their woes, with Clemens and the disappointment of yesterday, and but it has more to do with September 11th.

I know Roger Clemens will get his 300th win. And the Yankees will come out of their swoon. But today I feel like I did the day after the 2001 World Series ended. Like something is seriously wrong with the world.

This feeling started with September 11th, of course, when the millennium turned, just a little late, when the happy boom time of the nineties was finally, irrevocably and symbolically ended. I remember going to New York. I did not go down to Ground Zero. Just walking through Times Square, through Grand Central Station, was enough. It was like being at a huge funeral, or maybe a wake.

It was still like that on the night of October 11th, the date of Game 2 of the ALDS. The heart-heavy Yankees had lost game one and a wearied city looked to the team to lift their spirits. I drove 200 miles to the game with a friend of mine and we immediately encountered the police-state-in-the-name-of-security mentality that was sweeping the country. Then the game itself was delayed by a half an hour as a live Afghan war address from President Bush was played on the Diamondvision. Talk about a downer. The Yankees could not get anything going that game.

You could see the moments when Yankee magic should have shone. Paul O'Neill fouling off pitch after pitch, trying to cash in the lead runs... only to pop up weakly.

Yesterday was like that, too. After Tim Wakefield, with one out, had walked three Yankees in a row... it was one of those opportunities that cried out to be a Yankee moment. Raul Mondesi, resurgent this year after spring tutoring from Reggie Jackson and the team's hottest hitter, strode to the plate. And hit into an inning-ending double play. Argh. Or the inning before, when the Yankees, down by five, scored three runs and had two on and two out for Hideki Matsui. In a similar situation at the home opener, he had hit a grand slam. Yesterday.... grounded to second on the first pitch. (My scorebooks for this season are littered with Matsui's "4-3 1P"...)

Is it a coincidence that it was also Memorial Day? We stood and removed our caps not once, as is traditional for the Star Spangled Banner, not twice, as we've done since 9/11 for God Bless America in the seventh inning, but three times, to include the 3pm "National Moment of Silence." All the way to the game we listened to the radio, trying to keep up on the city traffic, the weather, and news about the game's start time, and were regaled by pieces about Memorial Day parades, the president placing a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the latest American deaths in Iraq.

Before the game the national anthem was played by the Naval Submarine Academy Band and the colors were presented by members of the US armed services. Think back to how I cried every time I heard the anthem before games when I was driving through Georgia and North Carolina when the war was new in March. Yeah, okay, so I was probably already emotionally exhausted before the game began.

In the fall of 2001, the only balm that relieved the pain of New York's wounds was when the Yankees began to win. (Well, the Mets, too--remember Piazza's home run?--but they didn't play into October...) There was the Jeter miracle play that secured Mike Mussina's stoic 1-0 win in Oakland. That lead to the jubilant Game 5 at Yankee Stadium, where Jeter dove into the concrete camera pit to catch a foul pop... we chanted his name right through to the next inning. I was there for that game, too, and the city had transformed. The funereal atmosphere was lifting. Depression was replaced by determination. Game 5 of the ALCS was even more jubilant, as the crowd chanted "No Game Six," "Hip Hip Jorge," and anything else they could think of. (Sadly, I had to settle for watching that game on TV.) Then there were the two miracle home runs in the World Series...

And then Luis Gonzalez hit a broken bat bloop off Mariano Rivera and we returned to the smoking pit of a shattered city and a frightened nation.

Yesterday, maybe the only thing that could have salved my brittle state of mind from another patriotic depression would have been for the Yankees to win. They didn't. Ah well. So I am left on my own to cope with the dangers of the world, without the cushion of fresh victory running through my veins.

I'm not as fearless as I was when I was younger. I'm thirty six years old right now, and feel the anxiety over war and terrorism in a way that I didn't in the cold war and even Gulf War I. When you're young, you believe you're indestructible, you can do anything and the future is always bright. Well, my indestructibility has long since been disproved, we'll see if I can play second base, and I'm not really sure if the future's bright.

When I think of the larger picture regarding the survival of the human race, petty wars over ideology, economic systems, etc. don't matter that much. Humans are likely to survive even a nuclear war. But what is the quality of that life? Here I am back to the question of human striving. Beyond eating and procreating, what are we here for? Whether through evolution or divine plan, we have been given an intelligence which is not happy with a purely animal existence. We invent games. We make art. And we hold ideas dear, ideas and ideologies, theories and theologies.

I have not fully untangled where baseball ends and the American Way Of Life begins, but they are definitely tangled. I have not completely figured out where in that tangle I am, as a fan, an American, a player, a writer, a New Yorker. I'm not even sure I can say I know how winning, losing, and following the game influences my daily life or my feelings. All is not right with the world, but maybe it never is. Maybe the best we can hope for is some brief eras in our lives when we can pretend that it is. Baseball can't create world peace, but it can create peace of mind for me.

If the Yankees win.