There is much to admire in the talent that is on display in the American entertainment industry. I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the finest actors, of standing on film sets as they use body and soul to turn pages into a careful approximation of the human condition.

Some of these great talents I have come to admire, even love. And many have even managed to eschew the American fixation with celebrity and the culture of entitlement that the entertainment industry — and the ridiculous money that is layered over the industry — manages to nurture and exploit. Don’t think it doesn’t require professionalism and strength of character to stay true to yourself and to the work, when from every point on the compass, people are telling you how much more attention and cash and respect you deserve.

But just when I am ready to give all credit to those who labor in front of the camera, I find myself on set and I catch a glimpse of the assistant directors directing traffic, or the grips and sparks setting up, or the hair and makeup people rushing to last looks, or the propmaster sweating the details.  And doing it all for union scale, twelve hours or more a day, five days a week.

And it’s at that point that I am thankfully reminded, again, that this grandiose misadventure in visual artifice  is only possible through quiet, quotidian professionalism.  I have worked with a lot of great actors, many of whom have been delightful and thoughtful human beings. But I am most proud of having been a part of some of the finest television production crews ever assembled in New Orleans, in Baltimore and in southern Africa.  These folks are the ones who mitigate whatever shame a grown-up pretending to be a writer — or maybe a writer pretending to be a grown-up  — feels about a life misspent in make-believe.

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I can remember the specific moment when I swore off the sex lives of the famous as journalistic currency.  It was the case of a national sportscaster — I won’t name him, but, alas, most of those old enough will remember the name, which is regrettable — whose sex life had suddenly become the media chow.

This man had been involved in a consensual relationship with another adult and for reasons both ridiculous and obscure, the other adult thought it just and meaningful to reveal herself and her complaints, making explicit all of the unique and varied ways in which she and this man had expressed their sexuality.  And my, wasn’t he a weird one.  And wasn’t it funny.

When that story broke, I was standing in the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun and I remember my growing distaste watching reporters and rewrite men as they were sucked, joking and snickering, into the breaking news.  And no one had any doubt that it was news.  The man was a national sportscaster, for the love of god.  A more public figure this nation cannot muster.

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Friends, neighbors, fellow Baltimorons:

(And we can call each other Baltimorons, the rest of you can just back away from the term.)

I ask you to put down the torches and pitchforks on this obvious affront to the baseball gods.  When Sports Illustrated called and asked for an essay they said nothing — nothing — about the cover.  It’s a big magazine, with a lot of sports coverage.  And I undertook what amounts to a sidebar-next-to-the-main-baseball-piece.  And, hey, all of that runs inside the mag as a package right?

Had I known about the cover, I would have written half as long, and misspelled every other word, and scrawled it in crayon.

Yes, I am worried.  Yes, at this instant — if not three days ago — I believe the jinx to be an absolute threat.  An SI editor first mentioned the cover in a phone conversation with me on Monday, late afternoon.  The O’s had won the first game of the Monday doubleheader, they dropped the second.  And then they were shut out for the first time in almost two months last night.

Right now, I am so tight you couldn’t pull a pin out of my ass with a John Deere tractor.

Is there a better, more apparent argument for a return of collective bargaining and trade unionism as a core value in American life than the current NFL season?  I say this as a Ravens fan — and a secondary supporter of the Saints.  Have there been games played in which these scab refs haven’t butchered it at key points?  The season is fast becoming an irrelevant measure of anything.

And I say that having banked all the emotional equity from last night’s field goal.

Seriously.  It pays to go with the union label.