This here's a jungle, ain't no lie,
Look at the people, terror in their eyes.
Bad business comin', can't be denied,
They're running with the dogs, afraid to die.

Beat the drum and hold the phone. The sun came out today. But the Mets refused to see their shadow.

Six more weeks of sucking? We'll see.

The weather was better than what those of us who have schlepped to Shea in cold winds and under threatening skies had gotten used to this season. The weather was glorious, actually. The weather was everywhere. It was CW 11 Weather Education Day with Mr. G and Linda Church. I don't know what that is, precisely, but it gets thousands of kids out of school and it happens every year at this exact juncture since 2007. I will never, ever forget the first CW 11 Weather Education Day with Mr. G and Linda Church. It was the day Carlos Delgado came up in the ninth and capped off a miraculous winning rally whose memory gives me chills while it envelops me in warmth.

It was so fucking long ago.

The just-completed seven-game homestand against the sincerely second-division Reds and Nats should disabuse us of the notion that Mets are a good team. They are not good. They're not necessarily bad. I'd call them ungood.

Ungodly ungood.

Now you could have gotten warm and bothered about it on the first legitimate shirtsleeves afternoon of 2008. Or you could have removed your Starter satin jacket and your Cooperstown Collection hoodie and soaked up the sun and hoped for the best. Your hopes would come up a little shy in the baseball victory department but there was the sun and other reasons to be glad you were outside at a game, not inside at your computer.

Even still...

I was at today's game through the courtesy of Matt Silverman, whom you may remember from such excellent projects as Meet the Mets, Mets Essential and 100 Things Every Mets Fan Should Know & Do Before They Die. Matt scored field boxes for himself, me, his MTM co-editor Greg Spira and the incomparable author of Mets Fan Dana Brand. We were a quartet whose collective Met experience dates back, respectively, to 1962 (Dana), 1969 (me), 1973 (Greg) and 1975 (Matt). If you can't have fun with all that Metsiana in the air — and the great weather — then you're just a dolt.

But the bright sky and the loud kids and the heavy Metsian I.Q. and Gary, Keith and Ron peeking down from far over our shoulders and Mike Pelfrey bidding for immortality...it doesn't disguise how ungood your 2008 Mets are. They're just nothing special.

Maybe the tact to take is not to go nuts about it. Maybe the thing to do is accept their ungoodness and expect nothing more. I'm forty seasons into being a Mets fan. There were plenty of seasons when I thought maybe something good would happen, but anticipated little. Those were the teams I grew up on. '69 was my entree but the real education came in '70, '71, '72 when the Mets were also pretty ungood. Those Mets played a variation of the kind of game I saw today. Those Mets got effective, often awesome pitching and it would be undercut regularly by inept offense. They didn't run themselves out of rallies because they rarely started rallies. But it was what it was and they were what they were.

We're probably too sophisticated to laissez-faire away a .500ish team today. The .500ish team makes too much money to win barely more than they lose in our estimation. But the damn truth is that's exactly what they do and their salaries aren't going to change that. A new manager might. Sometimes a new manager does. Sometimes another team in the same division makes your own maneuvers moot. Should the Phillies or Braves or Marlins get legitimately hot for three weeks, and the Mets remain ungood, that may be it for the competitive portion of '08.

And ya know what? Oh well. Seriously, oh well. I want the Mets to win as much as any Mets fan. I want the Mets back in the playoffs as much as any Mets fan. I want the Mets to win a third world championship as much as any Mets fan. Yet I sat back in the wake of my sunsplashed afternoon and pondered the 39 seasons that led me to the field level today. The successes have been sporadic. I come back anyway. After 13-1 drubbings, I come back not two weeks later first chance I get. After a 10-4 humiliation on an Arctic blast of a Monday night, I walk around on Tuesday thinking without an ounce of sarcasm, "Oh good, I get to go the game Thursday."

Why should I let the Mets being ungood get in the way of my good time? Why can't I just enjoy the final season of what I truly believe is the most beautiful place on earth if all you do is look at the field and the seats and the fences? Why can't fun be fun in a world in which there is so little at large to feel cheery about?

I'm disgusted that the Mets lost 1-0.

I'm disgusted that Pelfrey's finest outing was wasted.

I'm disgusted we're still lacking that initial no-hitter

I'm disgusted that Reyes attempted to go first to third on a bunt.

I'm disgusted Reyes has devolved from shortstop gone wild to a showy Dick Schofield.

I'm disgusted Beltran was doubled off third.

I'm disgusted that Delgado is in a two-year slump and couldn't pause it long enough to rekindle the magic of the inaugural CW 11 Weather Education Day with Mr. G and Linda Church.

I'm disgusted that Willie Harris isn't turned back at the players entrance by security.

I'm disgusted that a last-place team just won three of four from our alleged contender.

I'm disgusted that in games started by Odalis Perez, Tim Redding and Jason Bergmann, the Mets scored all of seven runs.

I'm disgusted that Billy Wagner publicly sniped at several of his teammates afterwards.

I'm disgusted that several of his teammates absolutely earned Wagner's wrath by apparently hiding from the press.

I'm disgusted that Willie Randolph manages like an NFL coach staring at one of those go-for-two/don't-go-for-two cards.

I'm disgusted at the four years handed Luis Castillo and the deterioration of Aaron Heilman and everything else that disgusts us all.

I'm not made of cotton candy, for crissake. But I can't stay disgusted for the last year of Shea Stadium, for my fortieth year of being a Mets fan. I like being a Mets fan too much.

The Mets are ungood. Maybe they'll be better this weekend. That would be great.

Actually, that would be awesome.

Claudio Vargas pitched. Moises Alou got himself ejected. Endy Chavez replaced him. Brian Schneider homered. Ryan Church didn't. Fernando Tatis stood on-deck to pinch-hit in case the ninth inning continued. Pedro Martinez threw 55 pitches in a simulated game.

Hard to believe that the team at Shea Stadium Wednesday night that is a direct descendant of the Montreal Expos isn't the New York Mets.

Did you know we have more ex-Expos than do the Washington Nationals, a franchise that actually used to be the Expos? Did you know that while we've been rolling our eyes at and having our collapses enabled by the Nationals that they have stopped being remotely recognizable as Expo heirs?

I don't recognize them as such any longer. For my Canadian money, the connection was truly severed when überExpo Jose Vidro split for Seattle the offseason before last. Vidro was the last what you'd call star to survive the trek from the dismal Big O to the dreadful RFK (or was that the dreadful Big O and the dismal RFK?). Vidro actually started an All-Star Game as an Expo as recently as 2002 when knowledgeable fans from every land voted him in ahead of Roberto Alomar. This was after the Expos were already placed on the endangered species list, so you knew Vidro had to be pretty good — and Met import Alomar had to have turned amazingly dismal/dreadful — to rate that kind of attention.

With Vidro gone in the best tradition of essentially every Expo of external note, the only Montreal mainstay who remained in Washington was Brian Schneider. Schneider had been an Expo all the way back to 2000, before it was abundantly or at least officially clear there wouldn't be Expos into eternity. Brian Schneider backed up Michael Barrett. Michael Barrett, who departed Quebec just prior to 2004, the last year there ever were Expos, had been an Olympic Stadium staple, sort of like smoked meat, ever since 1998. In 1998, the Expos were chock full of Expos as I had come to know, understand and fear them: Rondell White, Mark Grudzielanek, Brad Fullmer, F.P. Santangelo (no need to ask what the 'F' stood for). Sure, there were Vidro and Vlad and future world champion Red Sock Orlando Cabrera, but they were simply top-notch baseball players. Any team could have top-notch baseball players.

The Expos had pests.
The Expos had lethal pests.
The Expos had hateful lethal pests.

And they played in another country with another language and they drove the Mets crazy. Drove me crazy anyway. Ten years ago, those Expos were commencing upon their long and willful decline that would send them reeling southbound, first to the cusp of contraction, then part-time to Puerto Rico and at last to the capital of a nation in which they weren't born and never called home. Ten years ago, those Expos had swapped out to Boston the best pitcher they ever had and the biggest contract they couldn't afford, Pedro Martinez. One of the pitchers they received in return was Tony Armas, Jr.

Guess whose Triple-A affiliate he pitches for now?

I needed the better part of 2005 to kind of get over the Expos. I formed a late-life infatuation in their direction, out of disgust for Bud Selig's diabolical plan to dismantle their franchise and sell it for parts and out of respect for the little-remarked rivalry they had going with the Mets. It was little-remarked, perhaps, because few knew it existed. It was there, however. It was there and it was bizarre and it was bilingual. It was cosmopolitan Montreal vs. Metropolitan New York. It was Expo 67 vs. the 1964 World's Fair. It was Rusty Staub and Gary Carter vs. likable versions of Rusty Staub and Gary Carter. It was Jeff Reardon vs. Ellis Valentine, damn it.

It was 36 seasons of crossing paths and being pulled over by customs. It was a hundred odd little incidents, including Jeff Kent literally being pulled over by customs agents when he forgot he had packed his handgun for the Montreal trip (Jeff Kent was not a popular teammate). It was invocations of Parc Jarry on every Olympic Stadium broadcast and explanations that the good folks up north would be paying for Parc Jarry's crappy successor for generations to come. It was the big empty of the Big O, its lumber yard beyond the center field fence in its early seasons, the hypnotic Plexiglas behind home plate later on. It was tri-color caps and the mascot of no discernible species and slick turf and horns that gave headaches and the feeling that we should be beating these guys more often but weren't.

It was the first game of the Expos' existence at Shea and the last game of the Expos' existence at Shea and the nearly 600 in between and a lifetime series that was absolutely even until the Mets hosted Montreal for all the mythical marbles on the last day of 2004. When Endy Chavez (who absolutely killed us when he was one of them) grounded to Jeff Keppinger (who absolutely kills us now that he is somebody else) to end what were the Expos, the Mets could be crowned kings of the St. Lawrence Seaway Series, 299-298.

How is it possible two teams could play 597 games between them and neither could win 300?

By that final weekend of extant Expos, we had already plucked their general manager. Omar Minaya would go on to rebuild the Mets, for short-term better or long-term worse. He keeps them afloat nowadays with Expos, Expos and more Expos. I'm beginning to think we're turning into the Expos, and not just because we are their most reliable alumni society. The Expos were comers; the Expos heartbreakingly missed the postseason; the Expos heartbreakingly missed the World Series, the Expos disappointed everybody who cared about them. We've screwed up the order, but we seem to be nailing the substance. Plus we've got Brian Schneider who backed up Michael Barrett who came up one year after Pedro Martinez reached his National League peak three years after the 1994 strike wiped out...ah, you know how that went. Give me two paragraphs and I'll be on Coco Laboy like smoke on meat on rue Sainte-Catherine.

The Mets, thanks to the pile of bricks creating the wind tunnel in center, aren't going anywhere (you can also thank some swift managing and relief pitching for that inconvenient figurative truth of May 2008). The Expos never had the scratch nor the support to build an actual baseball facility and expired. The Nationals pull off the unique trick of acting the role of perpetual expansion team without ever having been one in their own right. Someday, maybe, they'll beat somebody besides us half the time. Someday, maybe, they won't seem like a halfway house for somebody else's wayward prospects. Someday, maybe, they'll have a starting rotation. The franchise can claim at last a serviceably shiny new ballpark in tandem with stability in ownership for the first time since Razor Shines cut their predecessors' rug, yet a total semi-pro feel attaches itself permanently to the Washington Nationals, which is probably why losing games to the Nats makes the Mets seem uncommonly amateur. In the National League East of my mind, no matter the many tragicomic Youppian missteps they took toward oblivion, it is somehow the Montreal Expos (1969-2004) whom I will hold in the higher regard.