The Internetting Gentleman may have encountered tawdry hearsay that the Miami Marlins, denizens of the Sunshine State, where everything — save for the weather, people, housing market, and milieu — is great, recently dropped a new theme song like something that is on the verge of scalding the very hands that bear it. Recognize:

But then the story, like an indolently raveled thing, began unraveling. The Marlins did not, in point of fact, grant their imprimatur to such a malodorous tune! Jeffrey Loria is a professional aesthete, so how, pray tell, would he green-light such an Up-With-Peopled mess?

Here’s how: the world is shit, and yet it manages to spin. This may not be the Marlins’ theme song, but, for me and mine — so all of us, really — this is the Marlins’ theme song.

In the Sunshine State, it turns out, everything is mothertrucking great.

Like most of us, I knew him only as the almost spectral presence who delivered sex-drenched commands and remorseless taunts from on high. He paid us in corsair’s doubloons. He claimed to have invented new smells and colors. He lifted not barbells but paid whores left pliant from hours of driving coitus. He carried a razor in his sock. His voice was so gravelly that actual gravel spewed from his maw. If a man is something dimensionless and awful to behold, then he was man. He was David Appelman.

This past weekend, in the deserts of America, I met him. By way of introduction, he beat me with a cactus and then kissed my fresh wounds. Such is his power. Such is his malaise. Like someone from a Garcia Marquez novel, Appelman is followed everywhere by a pack of menacing tarantulas. “My spider-sons,” he calls them. His appetite for illegal drugs and sex as locus of control is both boundless and without bound. As he ravishes you on whim, the only consoling knowledge is that whatever he’s doing to you at that moment is but a taste of the horrors ahead. You can always buy another bodice, he tells you. I saw him brawl with Christ. David Appelman is an animated urge.

We are not equipped to remember our births, which is a necessary survival device. We are also not equipped to remember the precise things that David Appelman does to, at and on us. We cannot, lest we combust from vice and rot. Every so often, though, the gossamer parts, if only for a moment, and you remember something about him. He is hairy beyond plausibility. His member is untold and prehensile. It turns out there is an eighth deadly sin.

I am in need of physicians.

Without question or doubtless doubt, you’ve been waiting, breath bated, for the next episode of “The World According to Gross.” On this point, I have wonderful news: the next episode of “The World According to Gross” is embedded below, and the subject, it so happens, is the sport that binds us …

Some observations regarding the multitudes to which we have borne awed witness:

0:15 – That’s a fake voice.

0:29 – The man who murdered Mr. Gross with a cargo hook and, under cover of darkness, buried him in a shallow grave has just entered the frame.

0:49 – Dámaso García!

0:59 – Ol’ Hard Luck Stieb!

1:28 – Mr. Gross is lying to Julie from “The Love Boat.”

1:30 – Mr. Gross is going to have sex with Julie from “The Love Boat.”

1:50 – The people, they barely care.

2:02 – The young man in the striped shirt sports a haircut, one rarely seen in captivity, that connoisseurs call “The Inundation.”

2:08 – You are witnessing a young lady paralyzed by the bedroomy musk of a local television-news personality.

2:29 – That’s a fake voice.

So what have I missed?

Former base ball-ist Elijah Dukes, whom various style books insist we refer to as “embattled,” has perhaps done something wonderful:

Tampa police pulled over Dukes’ orange Chevy Camaro for a routine traffic stop at Nebraska and Sligh avenues at 1:08 a.m. today, according to an arrest report.

When officers approached him, they saw flakes of marijuana on Dukes’ shirt, the report said. Dukes, 27, who played for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2007, was also trying to eat a small bag of pot, police said.

Oh my. When something contains such multitudes as this and these, we are of course duty-bound …

A daguerreotype and then 10 observations regarding that daguerreotype …

1 – Gary Carter really was happy all the time, even while being mobbed by the Québécois.

2 – Mr. Carter is in the midst of what you might call “The French-Canadian Captive Embrace.”

3 – The kid atop shoulders is wearing a mime’s shirt.

4 – That other kid is wearing Ron Kittle’s glasses.

5 – You can’t buy those kind of cameras anymore.

6 – The kid in the Playboy shirt raises three possibilities with regard to his upbringing: his parents are burdened with a cultural ignorance of dimensionless dimensions; his parents have a robust sense of humor, or; his parents give not a shit.

7 – The cackling young lady to Mr. Carter’s right, the one with the coconuts smile of a mega-church organist, is surely a disembodied head.

8 – Mr. Carter was not a “velvet rope” type of guy. Hence the bull rope.

9 – That is an actual sunbeam you see. Mr. Carter was followed by them everywhere.

10 – The roof of Stade olympique is actually closed in this photo. What you see is not the sun but rather a heavenly and riverine glow. Mr. Carter was followed by it everywhere.

Football is dead and buried, and the grave containing the withering corpse of football is being danced upon. More specifically, it is being homered upon and then danced upon by Rickey Henderson and Jimmy Rollins, men who are as beautiful as they are multitudinous. Bear humbled witness:

GIFSoup

We shall get through this, you and I. Baseball is coming for us. I just know it.

Add the following to the running list of things that will quite possibly murder you in your sleep tonight:

In addition to the trail of dead, you will know Fell and Murderous Baseball Clown by his jester’s tassles-prison jumper-jorts-FMBs (latter not pictured) ensemble and Buttcheeks of Villainy. This is the last thing you will see before you are brutalized in your nightclothes. Fell and Murderous Baseball Clown is a killing machine and thus at the mercy of his factory settings. In all other regards, the word “mercy” is lost upon him.

Tonight you shall die.

Once upon I time, in these very pages, I posted an RBI Baseball recreation of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. This would be a very Internetty occasion to link back to that post, but I don’t feel like searching for it. Apropos of this, this way comes an electric rendering of the famous home run by Kirk Gibson, one of our most hilarious MVPs, in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series.

What follows is a thing that delights. What follows is a Thing That Contains Multitudes:

The highlight, you may have noticed, is not the home run itself, but rather what occurs at 8:16, when Gibson, in the words of Vin Scully, makes his leg “quiver like a horse trying to get rid of a troublesome fly.”

The simile, it inspires …

Young Kevin Youkilis is the only varsity athlete to be bullied by an asthmatic National Merit Semi-Finalist.

Young Kevin Youkilis uses flash cards to remind him of his deepest regrets and of the specific ways in which he will one day show them all.

Young Kevin Youkilis will not be voted “Most Handsome” or “Most Likely to Succeed”; Young Kevin Youkilis, in an informal and unsanctioned straw poll, will be voted “Most Likely to Try Too Hard. So Hard It’s Almost Adorable.”

Young Kevin Youkilis, if he’s honest with himself, is probably too old to identify so strongly with the full complement of male Peanuts characters. But sometimes he does so much it hurts. “Linus, man, I know,” he says at night while reading his tattered copies.

When Young Kevin Youkilis needs to half-smile for photos, he thinks of that time he saw Meghan Connelly’s bra. And baseball.

Young Kevin Youkilis’s hair has been called “frustration’s pelt.”

Although Young Kevin Youkilis’s hair is the only thing holding the sweat in, he still wishes his stupid hair would just go away.

It shall.

On Young Kevin Youkilis’s Trapper Keeper, which is festooned with images of geometric shapes and planetoids in determined orbit, he has written, “My heart and will are too big and mighty for Cincinnati.”

They are.

(Thank you[k]: Ducks on the Pond and my man Navin)

Wait, I definitely recognize one of them. Maybe that other guy seems vaguely familiar.

Buried in the Minneapolis Star Tribune story titled “Ex-Twins Dickey, Slowey scale Mount Kilimanjaro” is this nugget:

While Mets management tried to discourage Dickey from the arduous pursuit, the Rockies were fine with Slowey going ahead.

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