"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins
in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the
summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill
rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on
it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine
and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when
you need it most, it stops."
- Green Fields of the Mind by A. Bartlett Giamatti
Another baseball season has come and gone. This is the first year since I graduated high school that the Yankees are not involved in post season play. For now, I'll have to use that old Brooklyn Dodger axiom: "Wait 'til next year."
Tonight I pour out a bottle of salad dressing for you. The Sundance Kids will miss you Butch.
I've got this creative energy inside me right now that I'm not sure how to let out. I have all these ideas about things that I want to do or say. However, it's almost like there are too many ideas or I don't have the skill to pull off certain ideas so I just say "fuck it" and give up. It's nothing new. I've done it for as long as I can remember. So I quit, give up, whatever and then get mad at myself for doing that (sometimes it may take months for the anger to show up) and try again, get frustrated (or bored) and quit.
I have no real hobbies to speak of unless you count watching TV and surfing the web a hobby. Oh, and photography but that's sort of been on the shelf lately too. I'm not happy with any photo I've taken in the last few months. I try to break out of my slump by taking more photos but I quickly get annoyed that nothing looks the way I want. I feel like I've lost my eye for photos.
I also feel like I don't have strong opinions about anything anymore. When I was younger I had opinions about everything. I had opinions about movies, music, books, people, politics…pretty much everything. Now I barely have an opinion about what bar I'd like to go to on a Saturday night. I don't know if this is a by-product of getting older or if it's my laissez faire attitude about life lately. The only thing I seem to be able to debate lately is sports and whether or not Jana's music sucks (it does, but she likes it and is entitled to her opinion). I feel like I'm losing part of what made me who I am. I was the guy that you could count on to have opinions about things. I would tell you whether or not a movie was good and why. I could listen to a CD once and form thoughts on what I liked and what I didn't. I find it harder and harder to care.
I read things online and want to comment on them. There's ideas I get for blog posts. I sit down, open up the window and stare at that little blinking cursor on the screen and the words won't come. The words are just out of reach. I feel like a person in a life boat grabbing for a rope that will bring me safely back on the ship but it's just too short. No matter what I do I can't reach. The boat keeps going and I'm left there, in the middle of the sea to fend for myself.
Tonight the lights are turned out in the "House that Ruth built". It's the end of an era, the beginning of another.
I was lucky enough to see a few games there. The first was special. I remember walking in and trying to catch the little glimpses of the field as Kristin and I made our way to our seats. Those pops of green with the midnight blue seats and walls. I could feel my heart beat faster. We entered the tunnel that led to our section. I had never seen a field as majestic, so filled with history. It was almost a religious experience. Everything looked bigger, grander, brighter. I have been to numerous ballparks but nothing compared to this cathedral. I stood there for a moment taking it all in. It was overwhelming.
And now it's closing. I'm watching the pre-game ceremony on ESPN right now and I think about all the great teams that stepped on that field. There are so many greats – Babe, Lou, Joltin' Joe, The Mick, Yogi, Lefty, Whitey – that roamed that hallowed ground, too many to name them all.
Yankee Stadium, I'll miss you. I can only hope that the aura and mystique (they aren't just strippers) follows to the new park. We may be leaving history and the ghosts behind, but here's to the new memories that will be made. I know I'll be there. Maybe some of those old ghosts will be too.
So. There is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer MMO (massively multiplayer online game) in the works. From the announcement:
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer: A massively multiplayer online game
based on the critically-acclaimed Joss Whedon television series.
Currently under development at Multiverse, 'Buffy' exemplifies a new
era of game design, allowing consumers to play it either as a fully
immersive 3D environment or as a Flash-based 2D game."
I imagine the game will take place after season 7 (spoiler coming) after the Slayers have been activated. You'll be a Slayer battling vampires, demons, and other hell spawn sent by some Big Bad. It only makes sense that way.
The nerd in me is all "OMG! Will you get to play as Willow? OOOO! What
about Spike?" The realist in me understands that this game is probably
going to blow big donkey wong.I hope it doesn't.
"All race long on Sunday, I was dealing with the unreality presented me
by his absence," said #16 3M Ford Fusion driver Greg Biffle, who won
Sunday's Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, the first race
in the Chase For The Cup, and would therefore have had the lead in the
championship. "I first read Infinite Jest in 1998 when my
gas-can man gave me a copy when I was a rookie in the Craftsman Truck
Series, and I was immediately struck dumb by the combination of
effortlessness and earnestness of his prose. Here was a writer who
loved great, sprawling, brilliantly punctuated sentences that spread in
a kind of textual kudzu across the page, yet in every phrase you got a
sense of his yearning to relate and convey the importance of every
least little thing. It's no exaggeration to say that when I won Rookie
of the Year that season it was David Foster Wallace who helped me keep
that achievement, and therefore my life, in perspective."
This American Life Episode 62
Act One of this episode focused on the Hands on a Hardbody contest in my hometown of Longview, TX. It was discontinued in 2005 after one of the contestants broke into a nearby Kmart, took a shotgun from the sporting goods section, and committed suicide. It happened during one of the breaks in the contest.
I think my favorite line in the interview with Benny Perkins is "you're standing next to the devil and you're riding a road to hell. I'll stand here until you die."
Important note: I do not have an accent like these people in the episode.
Take Tina Turner. Put her on an oil derrick in the Gulf of Mexico. Have her belt out "What's Love Got to Do With It." Ike will run scared.
Seriously though, all the projections I've recently seen show the hurricane skirting Austin yet again. There's a two percent chance of getting hurricane force winds on Saturday and Sunday. Looks like I won't have to break out the Scorpions after all.