The Captain Is Out to Lunch

9/11/91 1:20 AM

I should cut my toenails. My feet have been hurting me for a couple of weeks. I know it's the toenails yet I can't find time to cut them. I am always fighting for the minute, I have time for nothing. Of course, if I could stay away from the racetrack I would have plenty of time. But my whole life has been a matter of fighting for one simple hour to do what I want to do. There was always something getting in the way of my getting to myself.

I should make a giant effort to cut my toenails tonight. Yes, I know there are people dying of cancer, there are people sleeping in the streets in cardboard boxes and I babble about cutting my toenails. Still, I am probably closer to reality than some slug who watches 162 baseball games a year. I've been in my hell, I'm still in my hell, don't feel superior. The fact that I am alive and 71 years old and babbling about my toenails, that's miracle enough for me.

I've been reading the philosophers. They are really strange, funny wild guys, gamblers. Descartes came along and saind, there fellows have been talking pure crap. He said that mathematics was model for absolute self-evident truth. Mechanism. Then Hume came along with his attack on the validity of scientific causal knowledge. And then came Kierkegaard: „I stick my finger into existence – it smells of nothing. Where am I?“ And then along came Sartre who claimed that existence was absurd. I love there boys. They rock the world. Didn't they headaches thinking that way? Didn't a rush of blackness roar between their teeth? When you take men like these and stack them againts the men I see walking along the street or eating in cafes or appearing at tv screen the difference is so great that something wrenches inside of me, kicking me in the gut.

I probably won't do the toenails tonight. I'm not crazy but I'm not sane either. No, maybe I'm crazy. Anyway, today, when daylight comes and 2 p.m. arrives it ill be the first race of the last day of racing at Del Mar. I played every day, every race. I think I'll sleep now, my razor nails slashing at the good sheets. Good night.