17th and Irving

Thursday, April 27, 2006

subway horror

Today on the subway I watched in horror as this woman picked her nose and then rolled the booger around in her hand and then appeared to put said booger on the guy next to her's jeans.

It was totally crowded and I was on the other side of the subway and I thought about it. What do you do in that situation? Yell. Look the other way? Say something aloud like some kind of tacky moral crusader: "Man! I would never ever pick my nose in public! And then place it on the person next to me's jeans. Ever." And then look out the window as if I was checking my hair in the fluerescent reflection.

She looked pretty indy, had a camera around her neck; she didn't look like she'd ever tried odd drugs or did dares. This is something I'm definately asking the studenten about.

Otherwise the day was pretty quiet and I'm blissfully unaware of what's happening politically this week. I've been making discs of 1920s and '30s music for my kids and watching pretty bad movies. I know the Fox News Guy Snow is now the Bush Administration Guy, but the only thing that's changed really in that equation is who his paycheck is from and how many people he'll reach. Less now. But the Democrats were enormously stupid again, trying to paint him as a critic of Bush which only might help to give Bush a dose of much-needed credibility. The Democrats are so incompetent they can't even work the satire of the Bush Administration turning to Fox "news" to their advantage. How do you fuck that up?

It's like spelling your name wrong.

I got a new phone. It's cool and all, but I haven't put people's numbers in it yet...the kids are obsessed with it. They've been telling me I need a new phone all year, and they had a point, the corner of the old phone kind of fell off, the numbers wore out and the frame was kind of separating, on the other hand, it was so functional. This one isn't quite as user-friendly, the phone-book is lame. But it has iTunes. Soon bread will have iTunes.

I've been listening to Love's Forever Changes pretty often. That album is spooky, but really brilliant. I like the horns, it really is the best Los Angeles record I can think of. You feel Los Angeles when you listen to that record. It's kind of like Wilco's Being There and Chicago or Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights and New York for me. Or the Velvet Underground and Nico or the Ramones or whatever for New York.

San Francisco to me is always Beulah's When Your Heartstrings Break because it's what I was listening to all the time when I was first there.

Back to looking up pictures for the history classes. It's almost a hobby.

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Thursday, April 20, 2006

thursday

As far as a shake-up, McClellan's resignation and Roves "reduced" role was hardly an earthquake, and really, not even a tremor. There isn't going to be anything that ever fundementally changes about this administration because never has there been a more misguided presidency so certain that it alone knew the correct path.

Rove's position was taken over by one of his top disciples, a man who made his reputation by orchestrating a fake riot during the Florida confusion of November/December, 2000 and really, what more could you expect? And we can be sure that Rove will be attempting to play doctor to the ailing hopes of House and Senate Republicans as we appraoch the 2006 elections. The man is simply an oozing puss of slime, and he will spread his message of hate to willing and desperate ears throughout the country.

The great sin of this administration is hate. It believes in division and conflict. It believes in principles that are antithetical to a free society and nowhere is this more obvious than in the relatively small issue of homosexual marriage. I believe that the reason this caused such a firestorm politically over the last few years is a window into how those in the Bush Administration have managed to wrestle control from, if not people who believed in democracy, at least people with rational minds.

Most people support the administration's view on homosexual marriage, that it's wrong and an affront to morality. That's hate. Every American afraid of homosexual love is complicit in the war in Iraq because it's their fear which allows people like these to capitalize on the resulting hate and run it to its logical conclusions.

It's tortured logic that fears homosexuality and tortured logic that has chosen the policy of confrontation in a region that begs for engagement instead.

Some point to the Bible as the basis of their hate in much of the same way the administration pointed to the documents Colin Powell waved on the floor of the U.N. The Bible, as beautiful as it is, was written by men, perhaps occasionally enlightened by the Will of God, perhaps not. That is a mystery for God or the Lack but what is obvious, on any examination of the Bible is that even there God exists in many Forms as is not a coherent God for creating an ethic that can stand on its own. Everywhere in the Bible there is prejudice and fear, and that conclusion is only one possible interpretation of Christ's parable of the Samaritan, a man from a group much despised in the Bible. Man is responsible for his beliefs and cannot point to the Bible to excuse any hate that he has. It is his.

It's amazing how people select parts from the Bible that support their prejudices and say "there, that's the Bible", the entire damn thing. And because they have audiences, because they have power and because they don't challenge the traditional hatreds of humanity, they are believed. The Christian Right should be ashamed of itself for encouraging such hate. And in a world that demanded even all of Christ's courage (Gethsemane), for encouraging such fear.

And they talk about Muslims? They talk about Secular Humanism?

If poetry is imaginary gardens with real toads in them, as Marianne Moore wrote, then the Christian Right's world is a real garden full of imaginary dragons, but as Rilke pointed out, the dragons of myth need only love to be revealed as they are, the persons of our better half.

My uncle died. Much of his life was self-loathing, even self-revulsion, another part of it was fear, simply because he was gay. As Gandhi and Christ both showed, no matter how much love you show, there's always somebody there to insist on the triumph of hate, fear and ignorance. Those bastards, so self-righteous and disgusting, so able in spreading fear, have found a vulnerable group, and from focusing their hate on that group (of course, they wouldn't call it hate, they would say "we disagree with their choices" -- choices...wonderful) and from that agreement on hate and fear (the fear of being identified as "the other" which is why so many people that could give a fuck about anybody's "choices" are silent, because they DO care about being labeled as an other) it's easy to create a pattern. What right do they have to define my uncle's life according to their stunted standards of truth?

Millions of people in this country who nodded their heads at the words hammering home the idea that "sanctity of marriage" rested on the fact that it would involve sex between a man and a woman because after all in the apocryphal story of Adam and Eve there was "no Steve" as they like to point out, were also told, in the same days of this current mess that is engulfing the Mideast (Iraq, bin Laden still at large, the prospects of nuclear Iran and our own uncertain and unengaging policy, the call for European Muslims to go to Israel to blow themselves up, etc.) that what was happening needed to happen in terms of U.S. policy. We were confronting evil after all, and it could be trusted that we were thus "the Good". Confronting evil and making a stance for our "values" was the same theme of both messages, and both messages depended on the other for their logic.

In the days of the homosexual marriage controversy (February, 2004 - June, 2004) about the same percentage of people believed that the war in Iraq was misconceived as believed that homosexual marriage was acceptable. While faith in the war has eroded steadily with the continuing situation steadily deterioriting, support against gay marriage has reamained steady, which only shows you how little we have learned about the policies of hate as a people.

I despise the Christian Right because of its embrace of hate and division. It's belief that it is oppressed and it's self-righteous and Pharisaic approach to God which it believes justifies its prejudiced and hateful actions, for this reason most religious extremism is contemptible. Having said that, I despise no individual, but I reserve the right to despise the movements they follow. Religion is policy.

Outside of my parents, nobody taught me how to be a human being more than my uncle, I will hate forever any manifestation of that hate which forced him to feel such shame for his desires. There are so many Gods in the Bible because there are so many images of God; if there is divinity in the Bible, I like to think it is this, it is not what we desire to be that God is, but what we love. The other thing I like to take from the Bible is rather New Testament and it is this: there are no dragons. Evil, after all, is only made up of those things that take us away from love.

****************'

A lot of good and bad for the Cubs last night. D. Lee is obviously the big story, and I'm hoping his wrist is just bruised or else I don't want to think about what it means for the Cubs. Don Aardsma's disappointing appearance also was a major downer as well. He has great stuff, but he seems to freeze up when he's called up and suddenly he's wild or throwing flat. This is not a player you figure will blossom under Dusty, unfortunately.

Playing the Dodgers in a tight game is always nerve-wracking, because of that speed they have, it always seems like your a walk and a flare away from disaster.

*******************

"If I had sinned terribly the night before, next morning, well before dawn, you would see me crawling on my knees through the Stations of the Cross. I choke, I weep, I strike my face, my breast, my arms and legs, my hands. I bleed, I make the Sign of the Cross with my tears. At the end, God is taken in." --Max Jacob, in a letter to Marcel Jouhandeau
****
Present among us, giving tone to the little group, was Max Jacob, pessimistic and full of verve simultaneously, the Italian ceramist and sculptor Giovanni Leonardi, the painter and conservator at the Museum of Brest, Jean Lachaud, the writer and doctor Pierre Minet, my sister Henriette Bauguion, and myself, poet.

Now and then, Max Jacob, bitter, glancing back at his past and pining for his youthfulness of those years, would take from his breastpocket a worn daguerreotype photograph. Exhibiting it with emotion, he would say: "And here's the young man I was at 20!" He wasn't far from shedding tears, and ours as well were on the verge of overflowing our eyelids, knowing to what an extent life effaces all innocence.

Max Jacob had the fine head of a monastic bishop, and yet there nonetheless flashed forth at times, from behind his lorgnon, an incisive gaze, searching always for the fault in his interlocutor's speech. He was not at all only a little proud of his hands, saying that an artist must ostentatiously display these noble parts of himself. If for Dr. G. Desse the hand is a claw, for Max Jacob it was a kind of scepter, able to bless, create beauty, direct, command--a kind of device to uplift the soul toward God, in an offertory gesture.

One problem Max Jacob did not like to enter upon was the problem of Love. At those times he became silent, as if folded into himself, withdrawn. However he resolved this problem, it is certain that he never loved anyone absolutely, passionately and decisively. The Love of God was for him the only basis for the problem, human love being but an accident--and perhaps unfortunately for him, deviating from its normal course. Women had nothing to fear from him in this area--he treated them always as comrades, amiably.

This curious man, whose fashion of moving about through life was so original (and I am not only speaking of his physical comportment--which was the butt of laughter for the Quimper bourgeois, when they saw him strolling about on the city quays in a silk shirt and ragged shoes, for example--but also of his moral, intellectual and spiritual bearing), this man whom Paris was not far from considering a buffoon--for he put so much of the fantastic and occasionally such cynicism into his speech in order to ward off questions, in order to demonstrate the inanity of everything--was in the last analysis a very serious man, profound, mystical, and almost in despair because he could not demonstrate the proof of God before the skeptics, which proof was nevertheless demonstrated in his unquiet and tormented life. --Clotilde Bauguion

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

fun fun fun

I was jumping up and down today because I had coffee on eight hours of sleep and thought wow, I can still jump pretty well, then I stopped and my right ankle started throbbing. Ah, prospects of the grave, the slow atrophy of the body and original sin.

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Otherwise, it's been a pleasant day spent thinking about the prospects of the Republic and the earth in general. It was depressing to think about but it was sunny out.

Polar bears are getting thinner, oil is $72 a barrel (why? asked cnn.com -- well, do the math geniuses...what's Exxon's profits these days? How much oil is left...about three years to go before non-OPEC nations will be unable to keep up with their current output while demand will rise to about 90 billion barrels per day by the end of the decade and a few years down the road OPEC, which will have a couple decades of market dominance will also begin to find itself unable to keep up with demand) and Rumsfeld is proud of the decisions he's made as Secretary of Defense. What decisions could he be proud of? Does he give himself points for not wetting himself? Polar bears are drowning, we're running out of oil while whistling in the dark and Rumsfeld, the dark himself, thinks he's the cat's pajamas.

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There's a lot of whistling in the dark these days, but it's getting shriller, more determined. It could be argued this is progress. With more people asking harder questions, it makes it all the more disappointing that there is no true opposition party in the United States. With the Democrats looking everyday more and more like the bloated Whigs of the 1830s and '40s and the major anti-Republican organizations like moveon.org offering only cautious rebuke of the plutocracy it appears that a potential turning point in progressive politics is being pissed away.


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Kind of like the 1960s.

There is a sense in this country, and it runs deep, that if a person has money, they must not be that big a fool. Friends, Dick Rumsfeld is a rich, rich man. And Dick Cheney is enormously wealthy. And enough with the evil genius comparisons. It pays him too much credit. The man is an ass.

“The plan was criticized by some retired military officers embedded in TV studios. But with every advance by our coalition forces, the wisdom of that plan becomes more apparent.”
Dick Cheney

There's the evil genius on Iraq in the early days. Later on he had this one to say:

"I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." --Vice President Dick Cheney, on the Iraq insurgency, June 20, 2005

Genius, it can be argued, is the marriage of vision and understanding. The best that can be said of Cheney is that he has a decidedly strong survival instinct.

The day is sunny, Greg Maddux is still Greg Maddux and yesterday was a masterpiece at Dodgers Stadium, there's genius. Once Maddux was winning against the Astros 8-0 in mid August a few years ago. He grooved a pitch to Bagwell in the bottom of the 8th on a 2 and 2 count. Bagwell ripped it. A home run, not just a home run, a staggering shot, a little satellite of love to summer and the Braves won 8-1. A few weeks later Maddux faced Bagwell again in a much tighter game with all kinds of play-off implications, it was 3-2 Braves in the seventh or eighth inning and the Astros had two on. Again it was 2-2 and Maddux dropped a little hammer on Bagwell and made him look like a pig at a swan convention. Bagwell shook his head all the way to the dugout. Later he said he'd been looking fastball middle-in. When Maddux was asked about that at-bat, the key at bat in the game, he smilled a little but didn't say anything. Leo Mazzone did though, a bit later, on that at bat he mentioned that Maddux had set up Bagwell for it in AUGUST, weeks before that key at bat. He'd grooved that fastball on purpose to get Bagwell in a certain frame of mind. Bagwell is a smart hitter, and Maddux knew he'd remember what he hit on that 2-2 count. And weeks later, for that satellite of love, Bagwell paid heavy. There's genius. There's the greatest goddamn pitcher that ever walked out into the center of a diamond.

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Friday, April 14, 2006

Happy Birthday Greg Maddux!

I thought I was flying American Shuttle but I was actually flying Shuttle America and whoever heard of that? Down the hatch, up into the dark clouds and across the Lake and we landed with five kids yelling and me mouthing Hail Marys. It was a bumpy ride and I don't fly well.

Earlier I'd run around Brooklyn trying to make sure I had everything for the trip home but all the grand plans turned into a bunch of dirty laundry but I found this amazing sandwich place and the sun was warm and the leaves spring-small more radiated their color than were their color along the streets. A lot of people were off work today and were walking around looking at everything without any rushed sense of winter.

By the evening I was back in Andersonville with Corms talking about how much I hate Eric Milton and there was this cool thunderstorm, so Midwest and sudden, the wind blowing through the Edgewater and the lamps swaying, the specials cards flipping over and as suddenly it was over. The bark on the trees slick and the lights blurring the wet streets the only reminders of the storm. Late now, the air was still and you could feel the time. Driving home along Peterson it seemed like nothing had changed, the same hamburger joints and long rows of businesses with timelines that seem to have stopped around 1978, the same $4.99 Video sign, the same stupid light sequencing around Lincoln, it was mildly depressing and comforting.

Anyway. a lot of Neocons are comparing Iran's non-weapons grade enrichment of uranium to Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, for instance William Kristol in the Weekly Standard, however this is a tenuous analogy at best. I think there are very legitimate questions about Iran's motives, however, to call this moment one akin to 1936 presumes several dangerous assumptions. First, Hitler's action of occupying the Rhineland was actively infringing on France's nationhood, Iran's actions so far are not affecting borders or sovereignty (unless you can argue that they are asserting their own sovereignty). Second, Hitler's war machine was much closer to readiness in 1936 than Iran's nuclear energy policies are to producing a bomb they keep saying they don't want (but how much is their word worth?). The most dire predictions are three to five years (which would be about where Hitler was...), but most experts say that if the Iranians actually are looking to create a bomb, they're more likely at least 15 years away. Third, that Iran is actually another fascist Germany but all evidence about Iran points to Iran as being far more divided about what its government should look like than the Germans were in 1936. How consistent is Iran's policy actually going to be over the three to fifteen years? Germany's resolve was steady and fanatical, whereas Iran's actually is more difficult to read (though it is delicious to see the National Review arguing for support of labor unions, be they Iranian or otherwise in their shrill call to action).

Then there are the reasons to suppose this is a potential 1936. First, one can suppose that Iran, by announcing it has enriched uraniam to the point that it could be used for nuclear power, is testing the waters of Western response to its gently turning up the ratchet on its nuclear program. If we do nothing now, will the Iranians then be emboldened to act more forcefully to create nuclear weapons? Second, their government has been quite comfortable in supporting enemies of the United States and expresses often its wishes to destroy Israel. With nuclear weapons, they could exert a lot of force in the Mideast and we could see our first nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran. Third, just as the Germans capitalized on the tumultous political environment in the France of 1936, which was bitterly divided and politically self-destructive, so too are Iran's announcements and actions coming just as the United States is bitterly divided and politically self-destructive with the opposition party lost and without ideology and the ruling party with an ideology so inconsistant and illogical that it is quickly becoming a model of incompetence as well as being simply mean and contemptible.

Quickly, the actions of the Iranians are going to create a response by the United States which will further define Bush's presidency. Having shown absolutely no subtlety or diplomatic abilities so far, it is scary to contemplate the coming months and the Iranian situation. The idea of a nuclear Iran is terrifying, yet while America has been content to let European countries make attempts at diplomacy with Iran while staying in the background mumbling threats and then saying, like a true bully, "I never said that..." but now, as it considers taking more drastic steps, it is imperative that there be direct diplomatic contact between the two countries.

Iran's defiance is odd and its stated goal of nuclear energy seems ridiculous in a country that swims in oil, but how long oil? And what of the image of itself standing up to the United States and Israel for the average Iranian to have? On the other hand, offering Iran something dangerous to lose, might make them less callous and less aggressive in pursuing nuclear goals.

I should sleep now, I keep nodding off...the wind has picked up again and it is late, late night.

Monday, April 10, 2006

quickly

Judas was only following orders it turns out according to a gnostic scripture everybody in the business of finding scrolls has known about for awhile. Borges even creates the idea of Judas as the Savior in his as usual pristene puzzle of a story "Three Versions of Judas". If one has not found Judas's loneliness after his betrayal awful to contemplate, the tree branch snapped over the abyss, if one has not found compassion for that lost soul, then what of Christ do they understand?

A note had survived hinting at whole worlds of intrigue and drama, left by a known heresy hunter, a priest determined to root out the gnostic heresy of this holy Judas, and that to me is the most exciting part of the whole story. What anger of belief, what councils were held under the dark skies of early first milennial Europe, Asia and Africa as the basis of Christian belief was hammered out in arguments of ephemera, arguments in the end that meant everything because they elucidated the hows and whys of belief in their pursuit of the what.

Meanwhile, Scooter only followed orders and it looks like in the non-plussed surprise of the century, Bush himself was helping to orchestrate the leak of information justifying his attack of Iraq back in 2003 all the while hiding information that might cast doubt on the wisdom of attack in Iraq. It's starting to take shape that proving illegality will be difficult, however, the ethics are, at best, beelzebubbian...and if I recall, Beelzebub's chief sins were pride and gluttony. In the end everybody finds the dots they're supposed to be so everything can connect. What sense is there to be found in this?

Scooter's here, George is there, Rummy over there and in the middle like a big fat fly or a glutted heart is Dick himself, the webs should be prison bars but if you wear a suit, start a war and proclaim democracy you got a good chance of getting off with only a little bit of disgrace, and even Nixon eventually wiped that off like it was lint. Harder to wipe off a head wound or a severed tendon. We're hitting 2400 dead in Iraq, Afghanistan has beauty schools in Kabul and the Taliban everywhere else and meanwhile, it turns out it might all be preliminary to Iran.

On the Sunday before the Friday He was to be crucified, Christ entered Jerusalem to the awe and amazement of His people who waved palms to welcome Him and His apostles. This is the only image that could have led Dick Cheney to think of roses and welcomes from the crowds of Iraqis he imagined watching as the saints came marching in. That's their Christianity, tiresomely literal, full of anger and the justifications of their desires and beliefs which are firmly temporal.

For Christians it's Holy Week, but for the Bush Administration, it's another week that promises lies and the culminations of lies, unfortunately, too many of those culminations will be the random lacerations of violence. That's why Scooter matters. Sadly, that's the only reason a weasel like him ever does.

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Tuesday, April 04, 2006

about to sleep...

Just now I started thinking about "the future", so that was it: I'm awake and so much for sleeping. Rain against the building, sudden thought of childhood and on into insomnia.

I wonder how the Pizzas' show went. Dreazy was a little nervous about choice of footwear, but with this rain, let's face it: whatever gets you through the night is best.

Or I could be wrong. to think about it in practical terms: Goofus doesn't care at all what he wears to the wedding. ("Ah, I like these tennis shoes they can go on and smell me!") Gallant wears the right shoes to every occasion. ("With these blue Chucks on, all the indie kids will think I'm cool!")

In my mind I'm always beating myself up for this one time I was with my friend the Beej and my Uncle Mac. We were going to a railway museum in the northwest suburbs of Chicago in the early spring of my 8th grade. Soon would be high school and adult responsibilities like horrible part time jobs that were either 1 to 9 on Saturdays or all Friday night. I'd found this hat with a big fluffy bear-face on its front. I wanted to wear it.

The Beej was in a nice polo and Uncle Mac was out of a 1954 Macy's catalogue as usual. Railroads were a big deal to my uncle and he had bought me some tremendous books, the best one was about train wrecks in the 19th Century, fully illustrated. "Someone's gotta be the personality in this group" I mumbled when my Uncle Mac told me I looked retarded and he was not taking out a child dressed apparently for a sad parade or the end of youth. When your closest friend is embarrassed to catch your eye, you know you've fucked up, but what shames me still is that sense of righteousness and oppression when I went to take that hat off. Only after, of course, a listless argument on my part and a quite spirited one by my uncle defending his right not to be judged by others on my account. In his argument were aphorisms, in mine, the choked illogic of the provincial.

My uncle, because his heart is kind and he is good, was especially attentive to me as we wandered the grounds looking at the retired engines and passenger cars that had once carried the long-dead and the now-retired to their jobs. He knew all the stories, what lines these rode, what cities those had been in. He knew about the people that had taken them all and imagined their lives out loud. He had a gift for cutting to the quick of a sullen teen and getting us to respond to something outside of ourselves. He was always helping out somebody or other while hardly realizing it. When I was younger he told me how mortar rounds sounded, he called Reagan a fool and talked about the failure of communism with genuine regret.

So that's the bear-hat story anyway.

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a bear hat similar to mine
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Monday, April 03, 2006

watching baseball

Today I stayed home and watched baseball. I thought it would be restful. The game itself a promise of summer and ease, of warm breezes and the langorous afternoons drifting through the middle innings of meaningless games. The sudden shock of a homerun, the slow work of a shutout: hammer curves and fastballs that catch the corner. Baseball: a hint of the golden sun in the midst of this sun of chalk. Following is a little on-line diary of watching the game:

1:22 p.m.
Paul LoDuca's batting. How I hate this overrated bastard. Zimmerman just threw him out on a weak grounder.

I have to watch the Mets, ESPN's blacked out. Listening to Keith Hernandez and some schmoo isn't as bad as the Yankee morons -- there really is nothing worse though. Anyway, I can't get into New York sports teams, maybe the Jets a little.

Beltran continued his descent into the upper reaches of mediocrity: he popped out to first in foul ground. Actually, that sucks.

1:31
Zimmerman, batting 5th, has Royce Clayton batting behind him. He still managed a walk. It must be Glavine, Soriano walked just ahead of Zimmerman. Being protected by Royce Clayton is like having Barney Fife as your bodyguard...or it's like being Bob Dylan and opening for Tiny Tim.

1:34
Clayton just struck out.

1:35
The schmoo just called Brian Schneider "perhaps the most underrated player in the league". This about Schneider from rototimes:
Brian Schneider and the Nationals agreed to a four-year deal Tuesday worth $16 million, according to the AP. "Brian is one of the best defensive catchers in baseball and we're glad to be able to keep him in Washington for at least the next four years," general manager Jim Bowden said. "It is the goal of any organization to sign, develop and then retain their own homegrown players, and this is what we've accomplished with Brian's contract." Schneider hit .268 with 10 homers and 44 RBI in 369 at-bats in 2005.

Schneider just grounded out to the catcher.

1:41
Livian Hernandez just threw the ol' fuck you curveball to strike out Carlos Delgado.

1:55
Ryne Sandberg just doubled off of Gooden. Yep, rain delay.

2:18
The Cubs are winning 1-0, but try finding them on television -- besides the 1988 team, Chico Walker was leading off in that game. Ah, New York, I hate you.

2:43
The Cubs are up 5-1 and I'm watching LoDuca do his usual impression of grit which is going to last the papers the whole year. Meanwhile, I don't give a fuck, he's just not that good.

2:57
Livian's beginning to hang his curves.

2:59
David Wright just homered. Really.

3:00
Tony Womack just doubled off of Zambrano in the Cubs game. Well, he's not as bad as Jose Macias after all. Still, it's kind of a slap in the face to competence.

3:42
Soriano thrown out at the plate with no outs on a double by Johnson. Catcher dropped the ball...but the stupidity of that move by the 3rd base coach almost begs the call. How come I have to teach and this moron collects thousands sitting around the third base box sucking. Horrible. Now the tying run at third and two outs. Way to go idiot. Flushed that down the toilet like a Labor Day goldfish on Thanksgiving.

5:44
Some entries got erased...but really, you didn't miss much. Mostly a long rant about something.

5:46
I'm pretty annoyed by ESPN's coverage of opening day. I think next year I'm just going to let opening day "happen". I'm watching some boring baseball.

5:48
Man...It's almost time to the showers for me. One of the idiots just said about a player: "he is just a professional hitter". Yep. He's said that a lot already.

5:50
Will Ohman pitched 1/3 an inning and got the win against the Reds today. In a 16-7 game that's as good as any. Meanwhile, tomorrow it's back to teaching and thinking about immigration and etc. If they call anybody "a professional hitter" ever again I'm going to start screaming and never stop.

5:57
Yep. It's about time to go and leave.

***
So that was it. Opening day. It sucked but I don't care. The game needs its weight, the numbers to start giving us the skeleton of the season, it takes time. The players are still a little rough around the edges and ESPN sucked in terms of giving us some choice in our games as well and most importantly.

Anyway, last night I took the 4/5/6 back to Brooklyn from Harlem, I was reading this book Cloud Atlas. It was so good, even though I was on the local when we hit Union Square I couldn't believe it. The doors opened and I looked up and then had to sprint for the doors a couple seconds later when it all came together for me. It was late at night at that point, only a few people on the train. On that train, me and those few people and me with my book, it felt more like night than it had felt like in a long time, there in the tunnel where it could have been noon or midnight you could tell that it was two in the morning.

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