Derrek Lee and I are brothers long separated by race and lack of hair and my stupid uppercut swing … I know what it feels like to have the expectations and desires of a whole city or town projected upon your shoulders … when I played little league and was “league superstar,” it was hard for me to carry my teammates when they weren’t playing well … and the same applies with music, the salve that makes this existance worth living … it isn’t easy when Jim DeRogatis is trying to get your goat for being popular and talented … watching his jowls flap and sweat drip from his fingered shanks as he derides your soul-searching melodies as “melodramatic bombast” … when you’re as good a hitter as I am a musician, you know the transformative power of that instrument in your hands … when Derrek Lee steps up to the plate and hears Jimmy’s heavily reverbed drum intro of my hit song “Cherub Rock” echoing through Wrigley Field … I know he feels my struggle … despite all his rage, Derrek Lee is a .350 hitter playing for a 54-58 team…

when I was with the Pumpkins the first time around it was tough … I would be in the studio with Jimmy writing great music and laying down killer tracks that would change music and save teenagers lives … and D’Arcy and Iha would be in the studio bathroom doing lines off each other’s asses … that’s why I wrote “Silverfuck” … and also “Live Through This” (for Jimmy) … to purge the hatred for humanity that blossoms inside my soul like a flower of knifes … I wonder if that’s what Derrek feels every time Neifi or C-Pat grounds out or pops up … or when Kerry Wood comes up lame after throwing 150 pitches … when Mark Prior gets the gout … that frustration of knowing it’s all on your shoulders to get the job done … that million of fans are looking to you like a nation looked to Paul Simon singing about the great Yankee Jolting Joe DiMaggio … and that it’s up to you to bring it home … to keep the sun from dying in the ocean of fate that is life … to save a city from itself …

I heard from my good friend Bill Pulsipher that Gary Sheffield said a lot of nasty things about Derrek while in Florida … about how he’s no ballplayer … about how he’s just a switch-hitting chump that needs to learn how to be a team player like Gary … and that’s why they traded him to Chicago even after they traded away Sheff … because Florida didn’t believe in the strength Derrek had within him … the strength that the history and grandeur found in every strand of ivy within Wrigley … found in every hat stand vendor and brat seller out on Waveland … found every time a celebrity sings “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” … every time a fan throws a homerun back onto the field as if it is a Christian being thrown to red and blue lions licking their razor-sharp teeth in anticipation of more meat …

don’t give up Derrek … this city needs you and believes in you … just as it needed me after Machina failed to go platinum … I tried with Zwan and sad little fucktard indie rats like Sweeney and Pajo, and now I am going it alone because they suck … all to save music and Chicago, like you … you can bring pride back to the Cubbies and to baseball … don’t listen to hollow shadows like Sheff and DeRo … they don’t know you like I do, like the spirits of the world do … we are one and the same … we laugh in the eyes of the jackal and scream KABOOM! when we hit the effects pedal or a hanging curveball … yin / yang tadpoles conjoined in a sphere bound by white leather and stitched tight with the blood of those that blazed the trails we walk … Derrek, you are an unstoppable fire that will set this sport ablaze in glory … and the embers of Derrek Lee’s Triple Crown season will bear witness to our unique greatness!

Multi-platinum recording artist Billy Corgan published Blinking with Fists, a book of poetry, in late 2004. Blinking with Fists debuted on the New York Times’ Best Seller list. It was also the best-selling poetry book in the United States in its first week of release.