FIRE Chats #002 - Collapse Looks Like Baseball at 3AM
by NiKO — Typing like hell before the soul disappears into newsfeeds again
My English teachers in K-12 always ripped my writing because it was funny and used words to shred their fragile attempts at language conformity. Eventually, I wore them down one by one — with subversive love, perseverance, and finding ways to be funny-as-hell using nothing but fingers on keys.
I was the kid who whispered jokes under the table in class, hoping you’d laugh when nobody else was looking. If you were the shy one, or your friends told you to stay away from me, hello again. We might’ve been best friends if detention didn’t eat half my week. We can be that now — digital pen pals, time-traveling sandbox friends, passing notes beneath the table of this big broken machine.
If you’ll allow it, I’d like to smear a few greasy fingerprints across grammar’s crystal plate. Not to vandalize, but to see better. To break the museum glass between thought and feeling.
Because honestly? It’s probably more gripping than the doomscroll drip you’ve been marinating in since you woke up today.
So — mic taped, soul open — anyone still out there?
No? Cool. It’s safe to begin.
⚾ I Have to Say This Fast
I’m hunched over my beat-up 2016 MSI laptop — black electrical tape holding its cracked hinge together. It flops around like an elephant ear in a wind tunnel, and it only survives because I refuse to let go of the first device I ever called “mine.” It’s ugly. I’d never take it out in public, even as a man trying to lose the whole world just to save his soul.
But it works. Kinda. And tonight, that’s enough.
⚾ The Best Game of Baseball Was Played Last Night
And you didn’t see it.
Not your fault. You were probably asleep — and that’s kind of the metaphor.
The game went 18 innings. Over 7 hours. A World Series epic that started at 5PM in LA, which meant 8PM in Toronto on a Sunday night. By the time it ended, it was nearly 3AM for East Coast fans. And let’s be real: if a Blue Jays fan actually stayed awake that whole time, they weren’t parenting, teaching, policing, or functioning on Monday. That’s a week-losing decision in this economy.
But what if that was the point?
What if the greatest game of baseball became the perfect metaphor for everything we’re missing?
What if we’re all so tired, so buried, so scheduled and screen-fried and post-collapse fatigued that even the miracles sneak past us like late-night push notifications?
⚾ Stats That Don’t Lie (But No One Watched)
The Dodgers’ pitcher got on base 9 times — 4 hits in his first 4 at-bats, 2 doubles, 2 homers
He was intentionally walked 5 straight times after that. They were too scared to pitch to him
The game-winning home run came from the same guy who hit a walk-off in Game 1 of the World Series last year — the only person to ever do that twice
This is now a World Series classic. And you’ll only hear about it through Reddit threads and replays
⚾ Sleepwalking Through Collapse
This wasn’t just about baseball. It was about being too exhausted to witness your own moment.
We live in a country where parents fall asleep during bedtime stories because their second shift started at 5AM. We’re watching teachers with two degrees deliver UberEats to pay for glue sticks. We’re watching a government run by the equivalent of a retirement home council — on fire.
The world is up late playing 18 innings.
And most of us aren’t watching.
Because we’re too tired to witness anything except our own unraveling.
⚾ What If Canada Had Run an Ad?
This is where it gets wild.
Let’s say Canada had run a controversial ad during Game 1. Maybe something that stirred up tariffs, trade debates, diplomatic tension — the kind of thing America doesn’t like before election season.
What if — instead — they reran that same ad in every inning from the 10th to the 18th?
Think about the symbolic absurdity: an ad repeating in the dark, unwatched, longest night of baseball history — only witnessed by the few who couldn’t look away.
That ad becomes the story.
It gets etched into the myth. The only people awake to see it are the fringe weirdos, ND night crawlers, garage prophets. People like us.
That’s power. Not just of baseball. Of attention. Of what we’re willing to look at when the whole system is collapsing from overexertion and nobody’s even noticing.
⚾ Collapse, Community & the Cost of Watching
You know what struck me?
That it’s only Game 3.
This World Series — if it keeps going like this — might become a time capsule of spiritual and cultural exhaustion.
Because this isn’t just sports. It’s a city-vs-city proxy war. It’s family tension, political unrest, and geopolitical stress all wrapped in the false neutrality of “America’s pastime.”
But maybe it’s time we start calling the game what it is:
A reflection of who we are when no one is watching.
The dads screaming at umps because they’re scared of their own failures.
The moms in the stands doing silent math to afford gas home.
The kids wondering why everyone cheers when the flags come out, even though they don’t feel free at all.
🧠 This Is the Metaphor
It’s all a metaphor.
The 18 innings? That’s the endless extension of collapse.
The pitcher who no one would pitch to? That’s the truth, so scary it gets intentionally walked every time.
The 3AM ending? That’s how it feels to live now — alert while the world sleeps.
🔥 Final Inning Thoughts
If a baseball classic happens and nobody’s awake to watch it, does it still echo?
Yeah. It echoes in places like this.
In garages and basements and notebooks and dispatches. It echoes in broken laptops and night-shift dreams. It echoes through words that can’t sit still because there’s too much world burning and not enough people willing to write about it without a brand deal.
You’re not alone if you missed it.
You’re not broken if you slept through it.
You’re just human in a system that feeds on your fatigue.
This is me saying: wake up when you can.
And when you do, tell someone what you saw.
Even if it was just 3 innings before your eyes gave out.
Even if you’re not sure it matters.
Write it anyway.
To read deeper on how capitalism breaks the soul and how we take it back — with faith, with community, with raw honesty — read my book Capitalism Crossover. It’s a battle cry, a love letter, and a survival manual stitched into one.
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No doomscroll, no ragebait — just stories, experiments, and the occasional middle finger to the algorithm.
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