"This is the storyline now."

I used to get stray $hit about loving racing from people once in a great while - and a lot of that was more from old fuddy-duddys who thought gambling was the work of SATAN than people who cared if horses got hurt along the way. Mostly, people up here either were avid fans or at least grateful for what the track brought to the economy here. (For the record, despite a couple years spent in the Bronx during my diaper years, I was bred, born, raised, have lived most of my life, and for 100% sure will die and be buried in my beloved Saratoga County, New York). Upstate New York pretty much turned into a post-industrial shitscape fifty-ish years ago; the Spa coming back to life served a source of civic pride, and, starting in the early 1990s, as the main driver of ever-rising real estate values in Saratoga Springs and to a lesser but still important extent to most of the rest of the county.

People were either in to it or didn't care either way. But more and more over the past few years I have caught so many more negative comments from the didn't care either way crowd. Many of the born-and-bred natives would of course be horrified to see the value of their properties sink if/when the track closes shop, but just as I have my own cognitive dissonance about the track, they have their own about why the houses they own now would carry far less value than they do if Saratoga Race Course hadn't turned into the behemoth it is today.

But people now, up here anyway, are perfectly willing to bite the hand that has fed them well for the past thirty years. Even the local news outlets, once reliable sources of relentless track boosterism, now publish the latest equine fatality front and center, whereas they'd once ignore it. Horses died up here in 1992, too; but you'd never see a local news station or paper come out with a lead story like the one titled "Deaths in two earlier races cast a pall over over Travers Day at Saratoga Race Course" at the top of WRGB's page tonight. In 1992, the story would have been titled something like "Spa City swells by thousands as Arcangelo dominates Travers."

This - the disasters on the track - is indeed the story now. And like it or not we can't will it away by yelling "PETA LOONZZ" or whatever. People I know who wouldn't piss on PETA if it was on fire are coming to me asking, you like racing, so WTF is going on over there?