I am a lifelong Mets fan. Literally: I was born on the day they clinched the National League East in 1969. My father was present for both — hospital in the morning, Shea Stadium that evening. Talk about being born under a good sign: a three-month stretch in which man would walk on the moon, half a million people would gather for Woodstock and the Mets would win the World Series. Life, you might have figured at the time, would be one long ticker-tape parade through the Canyon of Heroes.

But as 1969 was drawing to a close, the Grateful Dead unveiled a new song, “Uncle John’s Band,” in which they warned: “When life looks like Easy Street, there is danger at the door.” Sure enough, the Miracle Amazin Mets were terrible for the better part of my childhood.

It took me somewhat longer — 20 years, to be exact — to become a Deadhead. But lately it has occurred to me that getting on the bus has helped me to better understand my life as a Mets fan. They may be the two most irredeemable tribes in American popular culture, cultish in their devotion and often pitied for it by those with more respectable passions. In loving both the Mets and the Dead, you are willingly choosing “the other” over the establishment. But where many might see only inefficiency, sloppiness and directionlessness (take your pick), we see the potential for a shambling kind of glory, the ability to summon form out of chaos and the reward in loving something not in spite of its imperfections but because of them.

Life, for a Mets fan, is mostly a matter of waiting for other shoes to drop — late-season collapses, dropped pop-ups, blown saves. It’s a life of giving your payroll to a swindler; your star lefty snipping off the tip of his finger with hedge clippers; your All-Star outfielder and your Gold Glove first baseman throwing punches at each other while posing for the team picture. It’s Bobby Bonilla’s contract and the Seaver trade and the Dykstra trade and a 3-2 curveball that jelly-legs Carlos Beltran with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth.