Michael Glab moved to Louisville, Kentucky, early last year, but like many a displaced Chicagoan he found a way to stay close to the city and his family and friends through his connection with the Cubs.
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Was the writing therapeutic? “It kept me up with Chicago,” Glab says, “and moving to another state and city is a lonely experience. And it just made me think that I still had friends and family right with me. My Cubs were right there.”
Published electronically and available through ebookmall.com, Coping With the Cubs opens by offering “Hope for the Hopeless” in the form of the mantra, “I’m gonna kill myself.” Acknowledging that the pain could end is intended somehow to be comforting to Cubs fans. “Welcome to my weird, weird world of optimism,” Glab writes.
Where a self-help book might try to wean its readers off the thing that’s bringing them down, Glab doesn’t even try. He says Cubs fans are paralyzed by the knowledge that “the year we abandon them is the year they’ll win.” The book ends on the old “wait till next year” note, and in conversation Glab falls back on the religious parallel.
Coping With the Cubs: A Life of Depression, a Year of HopeMichael G. Glabebookmall.com, $6
