I love the churches in Milwaukee

I left my camera in Brooklyn. I can see where it is in my head, right next to the desk on the second shelf in the corner, just below the shoebox with the shoehorn and all the tax papers from last year in it.

Today Milwaukee felt like late October or early November, everything gray, the wind blowing across the choppy endless water of Lake Michigan. I love Lake Michigan so much, it looked like the past today.

I went to see the Cubs play the Brewers, left a day's work on the damned thesis (today it would have been the lit review) and ignored the fact that my computer suddenly won't run iTunes without crashing. Who needs it when Soriano is leading off and Rich Hill is throwing curve balls that hang on a string and then drop to the earth like so many anvils. It was good to be away from Chicago and New York, where I am all the time it seems, even if it was just 85 miles north.

I love Milwaukee because the churches jut out at all angles toward the sky, they are the skyline really. I mean, there's this kind of half-assed thing of a skyline just off the Lake, but coming up 94 you know you're in Milwaukee when you start seeing these beautiful silhouettes that are especially beautiful against a fading gray sky.

It made me want my camera but it's in my head pretty good. It was there even before I got there, but I liked that it didn't disappoint, that view of the city.

Yesterday I saw Adam for dinner on Milwaukee and Kimball back in Chicago. We talked a bit about baseball and he said he enjoyed the idea of it, the narrative and strategy of it, but not necessarily watching it. He likes to listen to it when he gets home from the hospital, a break from NPR. Meanwhile, for me, or for some others I know, watching it is a great pleasure. I have always felt that there is an exactitude in baseball well-played that is even more precise than poetry, and because it is so exact, when it slips, it surprises, creates tension and devolves into narrative. But narrative is also satisfying. As well there are so many ways to define baseball, so many different levels on which to measure it, that it can be approached from infinite directions and lead into many different kinds of thoughts, so that it is also endless replicable as an event. Baseball is an infinite crossroads. I think this more than other sports, more so than most things.

I feel that way about the Crusades too I guess.

I have to go back to New York on Monday, not really ready for that. I need a few more days just to work and get my brain back together. It's been a long year and the last couple months are going to be even tougher. Mostly I want to be back in San Francisco for awhile, and just walk up and down all the hills and end up in half-remembered neighborhoods. Instead, I think I'm going to start running again.

It's something.