Nov 9, 2016
Mr Drumpf,
It is Wednesday morning, post-election Tuesday, and I am scared. Very scared. Deeply frightened for my country, community, my family and myself. For the last year and a half I have watched you shamble across the landscape, bellowing your fears and racial epithets, and listening to the roar of the answering crowds. My heart darkened, but never my belief that justice and truth would win out, that enough of my fellow citizens would unite to throw back the nativist racism you represented. And, now, on this sunny morning in the Pacific Northwest, I am finding that my worst fears are realized.
It all started with your candidacy, the escalator descent into a crowd of paid extras, to the tune of martial music. Some of the very first words out of your mouth were words of racial hatred and fear, and then you promised to build a wall. A wall. Which is not only a ludicrous notion, but flies in the face of centuries of the American tradition of welcoming immigrants from all over the world. Roundly criticized you doubled-down and moved on to recommending a religious test for immigrants, which again, spits in the face of honored American tradition. What you offered for political discourse was ugly, bullying bombast, without a shred of rational discourse; your usual stump speech was a mash of made up words, nonsensical sloganeering, and the blatant hustling of your fucking brand. In other words, what we got, from you, was the shrill huckstering of a carny barker.
But it seemed it wouldn't last. Surely in the primaries you would get bumped off by a more disciplined, more "reasonable", and articulate candidate. And so it went, and got worse by the day.You were absolutely correct when you bragged that you could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and your supporters wouldn’t care.During the course of your campaign you pretty much insulted just about every political and social constituency there is. The disabled, women, veterans (which includes me), people of color, LGBTQ folks, and even your own core, white constituency. Your performances during the primary televised debates were a travesty, an embarrassment and wretched preview of what was to come, as you lied about your record, your opponents records, interrupting anyone who spoke against you while lobbing insults at your opponents and the debate moderators. You proceeded to break every single rule of political decorum, with such arrogance it was astonishing. No, this does not make you some kind of political maverick, bucking against the Washington establishment and elites, it makes you a boor. And how could we take you seriously as a candidate when its terribly obvious you have zero respect for anyone, and certainly not our political process. Your rallies were open hate-fests as you dog-whistled racism, when you weren't openly speaking hate speech. You whipped up your followers, openly encouraging them to bring violence and physically attack those who spoke out against you. You seemed to be saying "Lets bring back an America where African-Americans, Gays&Lesbians, and women know their place", while trumpeting an appropriately vague slogan, "Make America Great Again", that could be taken to mean just about anything, but what you really seemed to be saying, and what your followers heard, "Lets make America Jim Crow land again; let's make America dangerous for Gays and Lesbians again; lets make America the land of 2nd class citizenship for anyone not white, male, heterosexual AGAIN".
So the only public good you offered was sending that milk-sop wet-brained weasel Ted Cruz screaming and crying into the weeds, waving his arms and sobbing like the petulant child he is. Its no wonder he is the most reviled member of Congress, per a straw vote of his peers, but I digress. However I am serious, that really is the only public good you have done this entire election season. Usually election seasons not only consist of rallies to whip up the base, robocalling and endless television ads, speechifying and sloganeering. Its all that and its position papers. Its all that and meetings with policy advisers to hammer out strategic foreign policy positions and then announce those positions in order to spark a civil discourse with the populace, to foster a debate on the great and important issues of our time. None of which you did. Absolutely nothing. Because you have nothing of import to offer, apparently. Given ample opportunity to discuss, substantively discuss, say....global climate change, or our position regarding the Middle East, or our trade policies in the Pacific Rim, what we got is that global climate change is a Chinese hoax, or that our trade policies are all bad, or....nothing. So, to sum up this point, you offer nothing of useful debate, instead filling our civil discourse with, again, insults, twitter tirades, braggadocio, and hot air. Why? Because apparently you cannot be bothered to pay attention long enough to listen and absorb the issues.
And dont get me started on your convention. Or would you rather have it referred to as your "coronation". Certainly you exhibited all the hallmarks of the demagogue and dictator, as you piled on the hate of your opponent and any other scapegoat that came to mind, such as "terrorists" or "immigrants"; really any bogeyman you could hang hate and fear on. So it became not so much a political convention as a shitshow of non-stop xenophobia, religious bigotry, negativism, nativism, sexism, and outright racial hatred. Which, sadly enough, became your template for the debates, where you continued your disgusting trend of bullying, outright lying, obfuscating, deflecting, and projecting your own worst sins onto your opponent. Better that than actually be truthful and honest, because as we all know by now, if you were to actually tell the truth, the honest truth, there would be no way you would have been able to squeeze out enough votes to win you the Electoral College.
You attacked a Gold Star family. You attacked a former beauty queen. You were caught, on tape, admitting to being a sexual predator, and then dismissed it as simple "locker room talk". Way to go sir, we are now in a age where sexual assault can be dismissed, by the president-elect, as boys behaving like boys. I am sure your daughters and women across the land can sleep soundly knowing that you have their best interests in your heart.
And so now it has come to this sorry and pathetic state of affairs. We have, as president-elect, a proven liar, a bald-faced hypocrite, a venal huckster too lazy to study up on the issues, a megalomaniac with an outsized ego, who will have access to the nuclear codes, while missing the empathy, intelligence and the patience needed to match these awesome responsibilities. And people are scared. Folks across this country, your fellow citizens, are frightened of what the future will hold for them, as already we are seeing reports from all over with gay bashing, attacks on minorities, women, and anyone looking different from what is perceived as the norm. And we all remember your promises to lock up your opponent, and we all remember that you keep enemies lists in your head. So know this, sir, and keep it close: if you come for immigrants, you come for me; if you come for the gays and lesbians, you come for me; if you take away the rights of women around healthcare and abortion, you also take away my rights, and I hate having my rights taken away. As you stand for everything that this country is not, I stand against you.
As I finish this up, its now Friday evening, November 11. Veterans Day. As a US Navy vet myself, I proudly served to protect the liberties and rights enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. You promise to do away with much, if not all of it. So, today, I am proudly standing with the majority of the electorate who voted against you. So when you are looking for someone to add to your enemies list, please add me. Nothing would make me prouder.
Daniel Johnson
Seattle WA
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Friday, November 18, 2016
Stuff I read
Nov 18
All apologies to Nick Hornby.....
I read some terribly interesting stuff. Mostly fiction and poetry, with a healthy smattering of histories (political, economic) and other non-fiction thrown in. But, yes, mostly fiction. And I love it. I am constantly smitten with book titles when I walk into bookstores, having spent many a happy hour curled up with a book or mag, in libraries, coffee shops and at home.
For instance, I can roll my chair over to the bookshelves (hells yes its plural) and open books by Murakami, Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, Paton and Annie Proulx, just to take a few M's thru P's.
So what am I reading lately?
"Look Homeward, Angel" by Thomas Wolfe, published 1929.
Thus the extravagantly baroque tale of a Southern American family, spanning two generations. Its main beginning is with the birth of the protagonist Eugene Gant, and thus far, as I am still reading it, goes up to his seventeenth year. Its very much of a examination of the internal life and emotional struggle of Eugene, "He was in agony because he was poverty-stricken in symbols: his mind was caught because he had no words to work with". This situation becomes magnified as he grows older as he comes to grip with the weight of familial expectations and the bald fact that his own family does not possess the language to express their own feelings, "We do not want to call things by their names, although we are willing to call each other bad ones".
And what a family. The father who shortens the family name from Gaunt to Gant, who is Elizabethan in his drunken speech, works as a carver and seller of grave stones; the mother is almost mute in her expressions of love and support, opens a boarding house much to the eternal shame of her children; the eldest a dissolute drunk, the second son a stutterer who's real genius is emotional deflection, the eldest daughter who, when not enabling her father's drunken sprees, is blaming her mother for every conceivable sin, and so on and so on.
Surrounding all this internal tension is the external world, which beats with its own rhythm and heart. Nature surrounds and suffuses Eugene, and the pressure of its beauty sometimes drives Eugene mad,with the madness every boy goes thru. Its also in the description of the natural world that gives rise to some of Wolfe's best language, the lovely soaring cadences of praise of the world around us. "The day was like gold and sapphires: there was a swift flash and sparkle, intangible and multifarious, like sunlight on roughened water all over the land. A rich warm wind was blowing, turning all the leaves back the same way, and making mellow music through all the lute-strings of flower and grass and fruit.....The boy grew blind with love and desire: the cup of his heart was glutted with all this wonder". As is mine, when I read this. Wolfe's especial genius is getting us into Eugene's head, day by day, season by season, as the babe turns boy turns teen turns man. As he experiences the daily slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, alongside the unexpected joys and blessings that make existence worth living.
However, be forewarned. This is not a casual book. It demands of the reader one's full attention, along with easy access to a dictionary. It carries a rhythm that has long since vanished from American letters, so it can be heavy lifting until one gets the hang of its very particular and peculiar jargon. It really wasnt until about page 120 that I felt I was in it for good, and this is my second time around with this book. And I can only read a few pages at a time, 10-20 or so, before I have to put it down, and think about what I have been reading, as this is very deep stuff. Its also taken me a few months to read; I started this time this last July, but I am in absolutely no rush, as reading this is akin to eating rich, dark, chocolate: small bites here and there go a long ways. But I had to come back, transfixed as I was by sentences like this: "Eugene was now loose in the limitless meadows of sensation: his sensory equipment was so complete that at the moment of perception of a single thing, the whole background of color, warmth, odor, sound, taste established itself so that later the breath of hot dandelion brought back the grass-warm banks of Spring, a day, a place, the rustling of young leaves, or the page of a book, the thin exotic smell of tangerine, the wintry bite of green apples; or as with Gulliver's Travels, a bright, windy day in March, the spurting moments of warmth, the drip and reek of earth thaw, the feel of the fire."
Nov 29
'The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis' by Jose Saramago, published 1984, opens with a description of Lisbon, Portugal, as a grey anonymous city deluged by a constant rain. We are on a ocean liner tying up to the docks, and like a steady-cam film shot, showing first a crowd and then slowly zooming closer, we are not introduced to the titular character until he has disembarked and is going thru customs. The rain continues as a backdrop, suffusing the story with a liquid melancholy, until the reading of the narrative has taken on a watery quality of its own: it surrounds, seeps, moves to its own rhythms and threatens to drown. "When Ricardo Reis awakens, the room is plunged in darkness, the last glimmer dispersed on the windowpanes, in the mesh of the curtains. An enclosing heavy drape blocks one of the windows. There is not a sound to be heard in the hotel, now transformed into the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, where Beauty has withdrawn or never was." Surely, for it is 1936, neighboring Spain is about to be plunged into bloody civil war and all Europe stands on the precipice of holocaust.
What little we know of our protagonist is that he is back after a self-imposed Brazilian exile, 16 years long, he is a doctor, but doesnt seem to have any intention on setting up his practice and receiving patients. Instead he spends his time walking the chimerical streets of Lisbon, at times remarking on the historical events that occurred at various spots, "Doctor Ricard Reis reads.....near the place where a man was hanged, as everyone knows, almost two hundred and twenty-three years ago....They hanged a Genoese swindler who for the sake of a single piece of cloth killed one of our countrymen, stabbing him in the throat with a knife, then doing the same to the dead man's mistress, who died on the spot."
I am always struck by these works of overwhelming creativity. What is the deep well the authors draw from? What is their muse? As I am writing this I have a picture up on another monitor, a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope of a portion of the Veil Nebula, which is the remnant of a supernova. Even though the picture is a closeup of one arm of the nebula, the structure pictured spans lightyears; blown out in the supernova rupture, the structure has formed a tight spiral of gas and dust, colored by NASA to enhance our understanding....and yet, there is no understanding. Yes, we can run spectrum analysis on the gases and minutely define what gases are there and why, and what was the chemical composition of the star before it blew itself apart, and what was its age. But, yet, there is something that is still beyond our understanding. The picture is stunningly lovely, a diaphanous gauze of swirling yellow, gold, red, pink and blue, on a black background speckled with stars. And I understand completely the forces that went into this...creation....and yet there is still the mystery, of not just why, but the sheer size and scope defies my best intent to wrap my conscience around it; its too big, too beautiful, and too far away.
Dec 8
Italo Calvino, the Italian fabulist writer, has a story of a halved-knight. "The Cloven Viscount" was published 1959, and is purportedly the story of Merdardo, a Viscount who was bisected cleanly in half by a cannonball during battle with the Turks. One half of the former whole Viscount manages to make it home to his castle where he embarks on a life of lavish evil, terrorizing the countryside and its denizens with his capricious acts of cleaving the living into two. "A group of servants was sent out through the countryside to follow the Viscount's path. The servants, hastening along, passed under a pear tree which they had seen the evening before loaded with tardy, still unripe, fruit. "Look up there", said one of the men; they stared at pears hanging against a whitish sky, and the sight filled them with terror. For the pears were not whole, but were cut in half, down the middle, and were still hanging on their own stalks...As they went on the servants met half a frog, still alive and jumping with the vitality of frogs. "We're on the right track!" and on they went".
And because this is Calvino, events such as the above are given the weight of truth. Yes, its a complete work of imaginative fiction, rather macabre in tone, with tongue firmly planted into cheek. So what I mean by these unrealistic events given the weight of truth, is that it strikes me that of the time that Calvino is writing about, late 18th century Italy, there were still published, and verbal stories circulating, that described the most fantastic of events, as being real; that the civilian populace was for the most part very isolated, with little knowledge of the outside world, the "fact" that a man could be cut in two by a cannon-ball and live, is taken as accepted, albeit unusual by the other inhabitants of the story.
But its also a essay on the inherent duality of human existence. "That's the good thing about being halved. One understands the sorrow of every person and thing in the world at its own incompleteness. I was whole and did not understand, and moved about deaf and unfeeling amid the pain and sorrow all around us, in places where as a whole person one would least think to find it." These words are spoken by Merdado's good half, aka "The Good 'Un". That's correct, the other half of the cloven Viscount has returned home also, although having spent his time doing good deeds along the way. The Good 'Un is as focused on doing good as the bad half is intent on doing evil. While the Bad 'Un spends his days dreaming up ever more elaborate methods of torture and death, the Good 'Un is working to not only heal the lepers but save their souls. "And he was forever among them, moralizing away, putting his nose into their affairs, being scandalized and preaching. The lepers could not endure him...But it was not only among the lepers that admiration for the Good 'Un was decreasing. "Lucky that cannonball only split him in two", everyone was saying. "If it had been done in three who knows what'd we have to put up with!" Thus the days went by at Terralba, and our sensibilities became numbed, since we felt ourselves lost between an evil and a virtue equally inhuman".
All apologies to Nick Hornby.....
I read some terribly interesting stuff. Mostly fiction and poetry, with a healthy smattering of histories (political, economic) and other non-fiction thrown in. But, yes, mostly fiction. And I love it. I am constantly smitten with book titles when I walk into bookstores, having spent many a happy hour curled up with a book or mag, in libraries, coffee shops and at home.
For instance, I can roll my chair over to the bookshelves (hells yes its plural) and open books by Murakami, Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, Paton and Annie Proulx, just to take a few M's thru P's.
So what am I reading lately?
"Look Homeward, Angel" by Thomas Wolfe, published 1929.
Thus the extravagantly baroque tale of a Southern American family, spanning two generations. Its main beginning is with the birth of the protagonist Eugene Gant, and thus far, as I am still reading it, goes up to his seventeenth year. Its very much of a examination of the internal life and emotional struggle of Eugene, "He was in agony because he was poverty-stricken in symbols: his mind was caught because he had no words to work with". This situation becomes magnified as he grows older as he comes to grip with the weight of familial expectations and the bald fact that his own family does not possess the language to express their own feelings, "We do not want to call things by their names, although we are willing to call each other bad ones".
And what a family. The father who shortens the family name from Gaunt to Gant, who is Elizabethan in his drunken speech, works as a carver and seller of grave stones; the mother is almost mute in her expressions of love and support, opens a boarding house much to the eternal shame of her children; the eldest a dissolute drunk, the second son a stutterer who's real genius is emotional deflection, the eldest daughter who, when not enabling her father's drunken sprees, is blaming her mother for every conceivable sin, and so on and so on.
Surrounding all this internal tension is the external world, which beats with its own rhythm and heart. Nature surrounds and suffuses Eugene, and the pressure of its beauty sometimes drives Eugene mad,with the madness every boy goes thru. Its also in the description of the natural world that gives rise to some of Wolfe's best language, the lovely soaring cadences of praise of the world around us. "The day was like gold and sapphires: there was a swift flash and sparkle, intangible and multifarious, like sunlight on roughened water all over the land. A rich warm wind was blowing, turning all the leaves back the same way, and making mellow music through all the lute-strings of flower and grass and fruit.....The boy grew blind with love and desire: the cup of his heart was glutted with all this wonder". As is mine, when I read this. Wolfe's especial genius is getting us into Eugene's head, day by day, season by season, as the babe turns boy turns teen turns man. As he experiences the daily slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, alongside the unexpected joys and blessings that make existence worth living.
However, be forewarned. This is not a casual book. It demands of the reader one's full attention, along with easy access to a dictionary. It carries a rhythm that has long since vanished from American letters, so it can be heavy lifting until one gets the hang of its very particular and peculiar jargon. It really wasnt until about page 120 that I felt I was in it for good, and this is my second time around with this book. And I can only read a few pages at a time, 10-20 or so, before I have to put it down, and think about what I have been reading, as this is very deep stuff. Its also taken me a few months to read; I started this time this last July, but I am in absolutely no rush, as reading this is akin to eating rich, dark, chocolate: small bites here and there go a long ways. But I had to come back, transfixed as I was by sentences like this: "Eugene was now loose in the limitless meadows of sensation: his sensory equipment was so complete that at the moment of perception of a single thing, the whole background of color, warmth, odor, sound, taste established itself so that later the breath of hot dandelion brought back the grass-warm banks of Spring, a day, a place, the rustling of young leaves, or the page of a book, the thin exotic smell of tangerine, the wintry bite of green apples; or as with Gulliver's Travels, a bright, windy day in March, the spurting moments of warmth, the drip and reek of earth thaw, the feel of the fire."
Nov 29
'The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis' by Jose Saramago, published 1984, opens with a description of Lisbon, Portugal, as a grey anonymous city deluged by a constant rain. We are on a ocean liner tying up to the docks, and like a steady-cam film shot, showing first a crowd and then slowly zooming closer, we are not introduced to the titular character until he has disembarked and is going thru customs. The rain continues as a backdrop, suffusing the story with a liquid melancholy, until the reading of the narrative has taken on a watery quality of its own: it surrounds, seeps, moves to its own rhythms and threatens to drown. "When Ricardo Reis awakens, the room is plunged in darkness, the last glimmer dispersed on the windowpanes, in the mesh of the curtains. An enclosing heavy drape blocks one of the windows. There is not a sound to be heard in the hotel, now transformed into the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, where Beauty has withdrawn or never was." Surely, for it is 1936, neighboring Spain is about to be plunged into bloody civil war and all Europe stands on the precipice of holocaust.
What little we know of our protagonist is that he is back after a self-imposed Brazilian exile, 16 years long, he is a doctor, but doesnt seem to have any intention on setting up his practice and receiving patients. Instead he spends his time walking the chimerical streets of Lisbon, at times remarking on the historical events that occurred at various spots, "Doctor Ricard Reis reads.....near the place where a man was hanged, as everyone knows, almost two hundred and twenty-three years ago....They hanged a Genoese swindler who for the sake of a single piece of cloth killed one of our countrymen, stabbing him in the throat with a knife, then doing the same to the dead man's mistress, who died on the spot."
I am always struck by these works of overwhelming creativity. What is the deep well the authors draw from? What is their muse? As I am writing this I have a picture up on another monitor, a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope of a portion of the Veil Nebula, which is the remnant of a supernova. Even though the picture is a closeup of one arm of the nebula, the structure pictured spans lightyears; blown out in the supernova rupture, the structure has formed a tight spiral of gas and dust, colored by NASA to enhance our understanding....and yet, there is no understanding. Yes, we can run spectrum analysis on the gases and minutely define what gases are there and why, and what was the chemical composition of the star before it blew itself apart, and what was its age. But, yet, there is something that is still beyond our understanding. The picture is stunningly lovely, a diaphanous gauze of swirling yellow, gold, red, pink and blue, on a black background speckled with stars. And I understand completely the forces that went into this...creation....and yet there is still the mystery, of not just why, but the sheer size and scope defies my best intent to wrap my conscience around it; its too big, too beautiful, and too far away.
Dec 8
Italo Calvino, the Italian fabulist writer, has a story of a halved-knight. "The Cloven Viscount" was published 1959, and is purportedly the story of Merdardo, a Viscount who was bisected cleanly in half by a cannonball during battle with the Turks. One half of the former whole Viscount manages to make it home to his castle where he embarks on a life of lavish evil, terrorizing the countryside and its denizens with his capricious acts of cleaving the living into two. "A group of servants was sent out through the countryside to follow the Viscount's path. The servants, hastening along, passed under a pear tree which they had seen the evening before loaded with tardy, still unripe, fruit. "Look up there", said one of the men; they stared at pears hanging against a whitish sky, and the sight filled them with terror. For the pears were not whole, but were cut in half, down the middle, and were still hanging on their own stalks...As they went on the servants met half a frog, still alive and jumping with the vitality of frogs. "We're on the right track!" and on they went".
And because this is Calvino, events such as the above are given the weight of truth. Yes, its a complete work of imaginative fiction, rather macabre in tone, with tongue firmly planted into cheek. So what I mean by these unrealistic events given the weight of truth, is that it strikes me that of the time that Calvino is writing about, late 18th century Italy, there were still published, and verbal stories circulating, that described the most fantastic of events, as being real; that the civilian populace was for the most part very isolated, with little knowledge of the outside world, the "fact" that a man could be cut in two by a cannon-ball and live, is taken as accepted, albeit unusual by the other inhabitants of the story.
But its also a essay on the inherent duality of human existence. "That's the good thing about being halved. One understands the sorrow of every person and thing in the world at its own incompleteness. I was whole and did not understand, and moved about deaf and unfeeling amid the pain and sorrow all around us, in places where as a whole person one would least think to find it." These words are spoken by Merdado's good half, aka "The Good 'Un". That's correct, the other half of the cloven Viscount has returned home also, although having spent his time doing good deeds along the way. The Good 'Un is as focused on doing good as the bad half is intent on doing evil. While the Bad 'Un spends his days dreaming up ever more elaborate methods of torture and death, the Good 'Un is working to not only heal the lepers but save their souls. "And he was forever among them, moralizing away, putting his nose into their affairs, being scandalized and preaching. The lepers could not endure him...But it was not only among the lepers that admiration for the Good 'Un was decreasing. "Lucky that cannonball only split him in two", everyone was saying. "If it had been done in three who knows what'd we have to put up with!" Thus the days went by at Terralba, and our sensibilities became numbed, since we felt ourselves lost between an evil and a virtue equally inhuman".
Friday, November 4, 2016
I have always been a evening person. There is something about the eventime that puts me in a more relaxed, yet lively mood. All the heat and monsters of the day have disappeared. When I was young my days could be populated by bullies, and running and dodging them was hot, sweaty work; but when the sun goes down they cannot get to me. People slowed down in the evening, due to having completed their work for the day, the adults relax and are easier to approach, especially if after a couple of cocktails. Everyone older than me always seemed cooler, more interesting, smarter, prettier, when the sun was going down, the shadows lengthen due to the sun lowering towards the horizon, the colors deepen. The green of the lawns darkens and softens, the blue on lakes and oceans turns from robin's egg to cyan. The heat of the day cools down to a softer ambiance, making riding my bike less of an exercise in sweltering heat than a cooling bath in softer, cleaner air. Radios would be heard from car and house windows, playing the Top 40 hits, or the blessed harmonious voice of Vin Scully broadcasting a Dodgers game.
With the shrinking of daylight comes the attendant darkening and lengthening of the human spirit; secrets that could not be whispered in the bright light of noon will be bandied between mouth and ear, I know of what I speak. Group games, consisting of neighborhood kids would last on, after a rushed dinner, until our mothers would come yelling for us to come inside, take a dreaded bath and then be confined to our beds until the process begins again with the rising sun. Many was the time when I would beg and plead to stay up later because, "Its still light out!", only to be denied again due to my age ("I cannot wait until I am old enough to stay up until 9!").
As I got older and was able to stay up later, past the bright demarcation of 9pm, I would take long bike rides and walks, thru the neighborhoods, as the evening's gold and reds would fade into dark blues and black. I would often make my route go past the house of a girl that I was in love with, on the very off-chance that she would be out in the yard; in such a way we would have some kind of accidental encounter wherein she would discover my inherent heroism and goodness and then fall in love with me, and we would live out our days in loved bliss. At least that's what played out in my imagination; reality was never so accommodating, as these chance encounters never happened in a way that satisfied my un-named and misunderstood longings. I also liked to look at the different houses and wonder what kind of life was being lived behind the closed doors and windows; were they happy, sad, in love, in rage? As much as I wanted to be the fly on all of their walls, I never took steps to spy, as that was a line that I could never cross, as afraid as I was of not only being caught, but the consequences of being apprehended loomed so large in my mind as to crowd out any desire for mischief.
I always wanted to be walking with my love, in scented gardens, under cool tall trees by babbling streams, glinting bright in the evening sun, smiling at her, her smiling back. That it only happened once was a source of embarrassment and disappointment, as much as I wondered how to make it happen I could never hit upon the magic formula for success.
Now that I am so much older that those days, with rivers of time having passed between me then, and me now, I remember those days with gold-tinged nostalgia, for the bright innocence of youth and a smile for the amount of pure fun I had. I still very much enjoy the evenings, but now as an adult I get to spend them in many ways denied to me as a youth, specifically relaxing over cocktails on the veranda of a dockside restaurant, crunching thru the snowy woods in my snowshoes, or even, taking simple walks and listening to the wind sighing thru the trees. Evening is still my favorite time of the day.
With the shrinking of daylight comes the attendant darkening and lengthening of the human spirit; secrets that could not be whispered in the bright light of noon will be bandied between mouth and ear, I know of what I speak. Group games, consisting of neighborhood kids would last on, after a rushed dinner, until our mothers would come yelling for us to come inside, take a dreaded bath and then be confined to our beds until the process begins again with the rising sun. Many was the time when I would beg and plead to stay up later because, "Its still light out!", only to be denied again due to my age ("I cannot wait until I am old enough to stay up until 9!").
As I got older and was able to stay up later, past the bright demarcation of 9pm, I would take long bike rides and walks, thru the neighborhoods, as the evening's gold and reds would fade into dark blues and black. I would often make my route go past the house of a girl that I was in love with, on the very off-chance that she would be out in the yard; in such a way we would have some kind of accidental encounter wherein she would discover my inherent heroism and goodness and then fall in love with me, and we would live out our days in loved bliss. At least that's what played out in my imagination; reality was never so accommodating, as these chance encounters never happened in a way that satisfied my un-named and misunderstood longings. I also liked to look at the different houses and wonder what kind of life was being lived behind the closed doors and windows; were they happy, sad, in love, in rage? As much as I wanted to be the fly on all of their walls, I never took steps to spy, as that was a line that I could never cross, as afraid as I was of not only being caught, but the consequences of being apprehended loomed so large in my mind as to crowd out any desire for mischief.
I always wanted to be walking with my love, in scented gardens, under cool tall trees by babbling streams, glinting bright in the evening sun, smiling at her, her smiling back. That it only happened once was a source of embarrassment and disappointment, as much as I wondered how to make it happen I could never hit upon the magic formula for success.
Now that I am so much older that those days, with rivers of time having passed between me then, and me now, I remember those days with gold-tinged nostalgia, for the bright innocence of youth and a smile for the amount of pure fun I had. I still very much enjoy the evenings, but now as an adult I get to spend them in many ways denied to me as a youth, specifically relaxing over cocktails on the veranda of a dockside restaurant, crunching thru the snowy woods in my snowshoes, or even, taking simple walks and listening to the wind sighing thru the trees. Evening is still my favorite time of the day.
7 Nights 8 Days in Mexico
(A post I never finished, or published.)
I just got back, last Sunday night, from a week in Mexico. Specifically Cabo San Lucas, on the very southern tip of Baja California. I have always found Mexico to be such a interesting, deeply fascinating, and beautiful place, and I have seen so little. I've traveled extensively thru Baja and have been to Cancun, a couple of border towns in Texas, but little elsewhere. Still, enough to get something of the flavor of the place. And as this was my first trip to Baja I was looking forward, as I always do, to seeing as much of the place as possible, learn about the culture and the history.
After a 4 hour direct flight from Seattle, Baby and I touched down in Cabo International airport, a flight that was thankfully drama free, as was the short journey thru Mexican customs. Its always a blessing when you can say your flight was uneventful; not only that SeaTac has finally wised up and does not require travelers to remove shoes for the body scans, a practice that was both counterproductive and stupid. Anyways, that all behind us, we landed in a cool afternoon of scattered clouds, warm temps and a cool breeze. A drive from the airport took us thru the desert countryside, which consists of saguaro cactus, mesquite trees, sagebrush, and scrub plants; its a desert, but a lovely one, especially coupled with the view of the local mountain range, hovering close by, all rocky and pointed peaks. The road brought us to the coast at San Jose del Cabo, a tourist town of modern hotels and shops much damaged by last September's hurricane; we noticed that the McDonalds was still gutted, one of the very few businesses that hasnt been rebuilt or started on a rebuild; there is a God and He does watch over Mexico.
Now the reason for this trip was the opportunity to repeat a trip taken by my family, without me, last year at this time, to the same resort. My family, all living in Sonoma County CA, with the exception of my brother in Brooklyn, are fans of the SF Giants (a story of such horrible apostasy and heresy that it will have to wait for another time, needless to say, Go Dodgers), and are friends with a local radio sports commentator Marty Lurie. Every year Marty likes to come to this resort, this time of the year, relax in the sun for a week and chat baseball with invited friends. So this was my year to join.
We arrived at our resort as the sun was setting, on a warm and lovely day. The resort, La Estancia, is fairly nondescript, low-key establishment that was still exclusive and built for the well-to-do, but still managed to pull off a understated, albeit immaculate, ambiance. There is a small army of staff attending to guests needs, the grounds are very well-kept, the suites are well appointed and do not have a anonymous cookie-cutter feel to them, the way too many hotel rooms do. It was a sublime pleasure to be able to walk on stone floors barefoot, and the thick adobe walls help keep the temperatures down. We had a package deal that included all meals (free booze!), so we were free to eat at any time the restaurants were open, the food was delicious, overall and my favorite cocktail was a Mezcal/watermelon juice concoction that I drank frequently and liberally. It would be a ridiculous understatement to say that staying in this resort was relaxing, lovely, and dreamlike, as its hard not to fall under a spell when you fall asleep and wake to the sound of the surf, when a half-mile away from your balcony is the rock arches that mark where the Sea of Cortes meets the Pacific Ocean.
That being said, to truly travel (in my book anyway) one has to deliberately step out of one's comfort zone and get to know your surroundings. For me this could mean walking thru the night market in Kowloon (1983), river kayaking the Rogue in Oregon (1998), biking thru the Irish countryside (2006), hitchhiking across the US (1990), wintercamping on the Gunflint Trail, upstate Minnesota (1993 and '94), and dancing along the banks of the Seine in Paris, under the moonlight (2013). All of which I have done, deliberately so, to create memories and experiences. My point being is that real travel begins when we step off the established tourist trails and push the boundaries. With this in mind Baby and I made a concentrated effort to absorb as much of the local flavor and fauna as possible. Wednesday was spent snorkeling and kayaking off a local beach cove, surrounded on two sides by rocky cliffs. The water was clear and warm, I had forgotten the simple and sublime pleasure of floating in the water, face down, mask below the waterline, watching schools of tropical fish swim around and below, nibbling my fingers in search of food. After a short break Baby and I kayaked out to the mouth of the cove and floated in the tide, with a clear view of the shoreline for miles in either direction. After making it back to shore the guide offered to take me on a short snorkel, to which I readily accepted. Paddling slowly towards some rocks, he turned in the water, ahead of me about 10 yards and started shouting words at me, words I was never able to make clear because at that exact instance I was stung on the arm and lips by a jellyfish. Imagine being punched and stabbed by knitting needles in the arm and you get some idea as to what it feels like. Despite having never been stung by jellyfish before, known locally as "badwater", I knew immediately what it was, yelled, tore my mask off and immediately swam towards shore. On the inside of my left forearm was three blue dots surrounded by angry red skin, my guide, also stung, suggested urinating on the bites, and if we had the beach to ourselves I would have immediately agreed, as urinating on poison bites is a known way of immediate treatment. The pain was shocking, there was no position of holding my arm that was comfortable and I was having radiating pain up my arm all the way into my chest. Once back at the hotel I was able to gain relief from a bag of ice and a piece of aloe vera, which grows everywhere in the region. Fortunately my lips were lightly stung and that pain quickly went away. To this day I still have healing skin on my arm from the sting, and this will not stop me from snorkeling in the future.
The next day Thursday we wanted to take a local bus to the town of Todos Santos, about 90 miles away up the Pacific coast. Unfortunately that day was also the start of the national holiday to celebrate the birth of the Virgin Mary so local buses were not running on normal schedule. We rented a van and piled my family, sans mother, brought a friend from the baseball group and drove up to Todos Santos. The countryside, again scrub desert all the way down to the sandy beaches, stretched open for miles to the mountains. We arrived in Todos Santos about noon and spent the next few hours shopping in the local shops. Its a much more quiet scene than Cabo San Lucas, yes there are tourist spots, including the Hotel California (billed as The hotel made famous by the Eagles), but overall it was much more relaxed, which suited me just fine. Arriving back in Cabo gave us time to relax, bathe, have a lovely dinner, watch the sun go down and then about 8pm Baby and I drove back into Cabo San Lucas to the local cathedral for the celebration of the birth of the Virgin. Arriving at the cathedral we encountered a very large crowd in a relaxed and celebratory mood. Hundreds were filling the pews of the church to receive blessings and give their thanks, hundreds more were outside watching dancers in native costumes, enjoying the street vendor food, watching the trapeze artists in native costume, and buying up religious icons. We seemed to be the only gringos in attendance and it was just about the most fun I had all week.
I just got back, last Sunday night, from a week in Mexico. Specifically Cabo San Lucas, on the very southern tip of Baja California. I have always found Mexico to be such a interesting, deeply fascinating, and beautiful place, and I have seen so little. I've traveled extensively thru Baja and have been to Cancun, a couple of border towns in Texas, but little elsewhere. Still, enough to get something of the flavor of the place. And as this was my first trip to Baja I was looking forward, as I always do, to seeing as much of the place as possible, learn about the culture and the history.
After a 4 hour direct flight from Seattle, Baby and I touched down in Cabo International airport, a flight that was thankfully drama free, as was the short journey thru Mexican customs. Its always a blessing when you can say your flight was uneventful; not only that SeaTac has finally wised up and does not require travelers to remove shoes for the body scans, a practice that was both counterproductive and stupid. Anyways, that all behind us, we landed in a cool afternoon of scattered clouds, warm temps and a cool breeze. A drive from the airport took us thru the desert countryside, which consists of saguaro cactus, mesquite trees, sagebrush, and scrub plants; its a desert, but a lovely one, especially coupled with the view of the local mountain range, hovering close by, all rocky and pointed peaks. The road brought us to the coast at San Jose del Cabo, a tourist town of modern hotels and shops much damaged by last September's hurricane; we noticed that the McDonalds was still gutted, one of the very few businesses that hasnt been rebuilt or started on a rebuild; there is a God and He does watch over Mexico.
Now the reason for this trip was the opportunity to repeat a trip taken by my family, without me, last year at this time, to the same resort. My family, all living in Sonoma County CA, with the exception of my brother in Brooklyn, are fans of the SF Giants (a story of such horrible apostasy and heresy that it will have to wait for another time, needless to say, Go Dodgers), and are friends with a local radio sports commentator Marty Lurie. Every year Marty likes to come to this resort, this time of the year, relax in the sun for a week and chat baseball with invited friends. So this was my year to join.
We arrived at our resort as the sun was setting, on a warm and lovely day. The resort, La Estancia, is fairly nondescript, low-key establishment that was still exclusive and built for the well-to-do, but still managed to pull off a understated, albeit immaculate, ambiance. There is a small army of staff attending to guests needs, the grounds are very well-kept, the suites are well appointed and do not have a anonymous cookie-cutter feel to them, the way too many hotel rooms do. It was a sublime pleasure to be able to walk on stone floors barefoot, and the thick adobe walls help keep the temperatures down. We had a package deal that included all meals (free booze!), so we were free to eat at any time the restaurants were open, the food was delicious, overall and my favorite cocktail was a Mezcal/watermelon juice concoction that I drank frequently and liberally. It would be a ridiculous understatement to say that staying in this resort was relaxing, lovely, and dreamlike, as its hard not to fall under a spell when you fall asleep and wake to the sound of the surf, when a half-mile away from your balcony is the rock arches that mark where the Sea of Cortes meets the Pacific Ocean.
That being said, to truly travel (in my book anyway) one has to deliberately step out of one's comfort zone and get to know your surroundings. For me this could mean walking thru the night market in Kowloon (1983), river kayaking the Rogue in Oregon (1998), biking thru the Irish countryside (2006), hitchhiking across the US (1990), wintercamping on the Gunflint Trail, upstate Minnesota (1993 and '94), and dancing along the banks of the Seine in Paris, under the moonlight (2013). All of which I have done, deliberately so, to create memories and experiences. My point being is that real travel begins when we step off the established tourist trails and push the boundaries. With this in mind Baby and I made a concentrated effort to absorb as much of the local flavor and fauna as possible. Wednesday was spent snorkeling and kayaking off a local beach cove, surrounded on two sides by rocky cliffs. The water was clear and warm, I had forgotten the simple and sublime pleasure of floating in the water, face down, mask below the waterline, watching schools of tropical fish swim around and below, nibbling my fingers in search of food. After a short break Baby and I kayaked out to the mouth of the cove and floated in the tide, with a clear view of the shoreline for miles in either direction. After making it back to shore the guide offered to take me on a short snorkel, to which I readily accepted. Paddling slowly towards some rocks, he turned in the water, ahead of me about 10 yards and started shouting words at me, words I was never able to make clear because at that exact instance I was stung on the arm and lips by a jellyfish. Imagine being punched and stabbed by knitting needles in the arm and you get some idea as to what it feels like. Despite having never been stung by jellyfish before, known locally as "badwater", I knew immediately what it was, yelled, tore my mask off and immediately swam towards shore. On the inside of my left forearm was three blue dots surrounded by angry red skin, my guide, also stung, suggested urinating on the bites, and if we had the beach to ourselves I would have immediately agreed, as urinating on poison bites is a known way of immediate treatment. The pain was shocking, there was no position of holding my arm that was comfortable and I was having radiating pain up my arm all the way into my chest. Once back at the hotel I was able to gain relief from a bag of ice and a piece of aloe vera, which grows everywhere in the region. Fortunately my lips were lightly stung and that pain quickly went away. To this day I still have healing skin on my arm from the sting, and this will not stop me from snorkeling in the future.
The next day Thursday we wanted to take a local bus to the town of Todos Santos, about 90 miles away up the Pacific coast. Unfortunately that day was also the start of the national holiday to celebrate the birth of the Virgin Mary so local buses were not running on normal schedule. We rented a van and piled my family, sans mother, brought a friend from the baseball group and drove up to Todos Santos. The countryside, again scrub desert all the way down to the sandy beaches, stretched open for miles to the mountains. We arrived in Todos Santos about noon and spent the next few hours shopping in the local shops. Its a much more quiet scene than Cabo San Lucas, yes there are tourist spots, including the Hotel California (billed as The hotel made famous by the Eagles), but overall it was much more relaxed, which suited me just fine. Arriving back in Cabo gave us time to relax, bathe, have a lovely dinner, watch the sun go down and then about 8pm Baby and I drove back into Cabo San Lucas to the local cathedral for the celebration of the birth of the Virgin. Arriving at the cathedral we encountered a very large crowd in a relaxed and celebratory mood. Hundreds were filling the pews of the church to receive blessings and give their thanks, hundreds more were outside watching dancers in native costumes, enjoying the street vendor food, watching the trapeze artists in native costume, and buying up religious icons. We seemed to be the only gringos in attendance and it was just about the most fun I had all week.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Redemption, Resurrection & Root Beer : The August Baseball Letter
August 2013: To err is human, to forgive is divine, and root beer is the taste of summer. Sinners all, we look with a jaundiced gaze on the glorious spectacle that is Major League Baseball as the usual gang of cutthroats, pirates, heretics, and rogues parade their talents - warts and otherwise - on a national stage. As usual the hopes and dreams of a virginal spring are dashed on the rocks of the season, as age and unexpected injuries take their toll and once sound-looking predictions are shown to be the rantings of false prophets. The days become shorter once the seasonal equinox has passed, next month the leaves will begin to change color and drop from the trees, announcing the advent of the World Series. But for now we are bogged down in the dog days of August pennant races, and it is the happiest of places to be. Every game becomes crucial in the standings, every at-bat and out has the possibility of swinging a game, and momentum, either positive or negative, in the standings. For the Pirates, seemingly blessed by simple dint of owning the best record in baseball, no sin or heresy has been too great to overcome, but the Astros are doomed and abandoned by the gods, obviously cursed for sins committed in past lives to eternally playing in one of the circles of Hell: the possibility of another season of 90 losses. Meanwhile, over in the National League West the resurrection of the Dodgers, is a sight glorious to behold, as it has been accompanied by the trumpets of angels (*not* the Angels) and hosannas in the local press; of course owners spending the previous winter committing hundreds of millions of dollars to the team is one of the best sacrifices that can be offered to the gods of baseball, maybe not as effective as burnt offerings, but....And the apostate Ryan Braun has begun his tour of purgatory, who knows if he will ever be able to redeem his once stellar career. In this issue: dem Bums and all things Dodgers; news from The Damned Yankees Desk; a posting from a purgatory of a different sort: Seattle baseball; a rundown of the pennant races, which includes the useless prognostications of some lunatic prophet; all that plus the chronic cast of wreckless idiots, fumbling half-wits, and heroes with feet of clay. Pay attention as there will be a test following.
Da Bums: Not seen since those bygone halcyon days of "Mannywood", excitement and hope has returned to Chavez Ravine. Even after last night's (July 26) 5-2 loss to the Cincinnati Reds, the Dodgers are 23-6 since June 20, the second-best mark in MLB over that time. In just over a month, dem Bums have improved from 30-42 and 9.5 games back in the NL West to 53-48 and a half-game lead ahead of the D'Backs for the division lead. Bolstering that are the wild and wicked rumors of a trade with the Phillies that would send 2009 Cy Young winner Cliff Lee and All-Star 2nd baseman Chase Utley to the Dodgers. However inside word has it that the Phillies consider Utley not for sale, and apparently Utley doesnt want to leave either. Or it may be that the Phillies asking price of the Dodgers, Andre Ethier, is a far higher price than LA wants to pay. However! Baseball being, if nothing else, a truly bizaare game regarding trades, where the villians of the opposing team become your heroes when they land on your team. I am thinking of Sal Maglie, Juan Marichal and the Beard. Stranger things have been written, but I never thought I would see the day to write these: Former Giants closer Brian Wilson, the man who made the last out in the World Series just signed a remainder-of-the-year contract with the Dodgers. As the LA Times puts it "there is only upside to this deal" as Wilson, coming off of surgery, will be a stabilizing veteran presence in the bullpen. Nicely done Dodgers.
Still, as the Dodgers begin to pull away from the NL West with a 3.5 game lead (as of July 31) one might look ahead to the post-season....and be worried. Both the Braves and the Pirates, atop of their respective divisions have better records, as do the Cardinals who are locked in a dogfight with the Pirates for 1st, in probably the most exciting pennant race of the summer. But as I have often written, baseball is a very streaky game, especially so when you are playing a schedule that lasts from April 1st to October 30. In other words the post-season is often times won by whatever team is hot at the moment, as sometimes pure dumb luck in the form of the walk-off homer, or the lucky catch, or just striking out the side can make the difference between advancing to the Big Show or going home for the winter. The standings are indicative of both how a team plays over time and a rough gauge of its talent, nothing more; the Mariners won a record 116 games in 2001, beating the AL record, but still lost to the Yankees in the playoffs. But I will go on record here about one thing: Clayton Kershaw is a effin stud and is putting up Bob Gibson-like numbers, he's a shoo-in for the Cy Young.
From the Damned Yankees Desk: As usual the entertainment is never lacking here at the Damned Yankees Desk: If its not A-Rod feuding with the Yankee ownership over how injured he is then its A-Rod about to be suspended for taking steroids and lying about it. "While 50 games is the standard for a first offense, the stiffer penalties for some players are tied to other alleged violations, including not being truthful to MLB investigators....The Yankees expected him to be accused of recruiting other athletes for the clinic, attempting to obstruct MLB's investigation, and not being truthful with MLB in the past when he discussed his relationship with Dr. Anthony Galea, who pleaded guilty two years ago to a federal charge of bringing unapproved drugs into the United States from Canada." Wow. Sounds like A-Rod is about two steps away from a major-league bitch slap. Couldn't happen to a bigger loser either. Over the course of his...career....Alex Rodriguez has proved himself to be hugely talented, but also immature, selfish, self-centered, petulant, and a liar. He's pretty much alienated teammates, every baseball journalist and most of the baseball public. And lets not even get started on how many times he's choked at the plate in crucial situations for the Yanks, in both the Playoffs and the Series (why do I even care??). Its so bad for him that even the revelation that he was trying to recruit fellow ballplayers to the Biogenesis clinic is met with a cynical shrug of the shoulders and the thought "well, that's A-Rod, nothing new". He may be even more reviled than Barry Bonds. There is a circle of Hell warmly waiting for this man.
Of course that's not even the best news from the Damned Yankees Desk. The better news is that the Yanks are in 4th place in the AL East, 8.5 games out, and sinking fast. The late season addition of 37 year-old Alfonso Soriano, while adding some much needed right-handed punch, is still a case of far too little, too late. CC Sabithia looks to have finally blown out his arm, and the rest of the pitching staff is not exactly striking fear into the hearts of AL batters. Expect the Yanks to limp to a 3rd place finish, at best.
Speaking of Being Publicly Reviled: Poor Ryan Braun, the Hebrew Hammer, gone from being a widely admired, 2011 NL MVP winner, to being suspended for 50 games for steroids, the hits just keep on coming. Former teammate Zack Greinke publicly shames Braun, and runner-up 2011 MVP candidate Matt Kemp thinks Braun should be stripped of the award. What I find is most interesting is this trend, exemplified by Kemp and Greinke, to speak ill of another player in this fashion. For quite some time, even thru the Barry Bonds debacle, active ballplayers generally observed a code of silence when it came to the subject of fellow teammates abusing steroids; for retired ballplayers such a code was non-existent, yes I am looking at you Jose Canseco. It strikes me that nowadays most ballplayers, or at least a vocal minority, are as sick of this steroid scandal as the public is. I know I am. Sick of it. I am taking this new trend as a good thing, that hopefully more ballplayers will speak out on how corrosive to the game taking steroids is.
A Posting From Purgatory, aka Seattle: Well sure as hell its not LA (thank you Baby Jesus), and its sure as hell not NY either, and for that we can be thankful, as Seattle is a lovely town, but has a fairly craptastic history in regards to baseball. The first iteration of pro ball in Seattle was the Seattle Pilots, who played all of one (ONE) season in Seattle, 1969, before being relocated to Milwaukee to become the Brewers. Incidentally, that one Pilots season was forever immortalized by Jim Bouton in his hysterically funny memoir "Ball Four", and if you havent read this great book on baseball...well then you are dead to me. Pro ball was resurrected in Seattle in the form of the Mariners, who first took the field in 1977 and then proceeded to field losing teams for 13 years, until the hiring of Sweet Lou Pinella started turning things around in 1993. Sweet Lou righted the ship and piloted the M's to winning seasons, even going so far as to tie the record for most wins by a team in 2001. However Sweet Lou walked after the 2002 season, citing managerial lack of commitment to doing what it takes (Big Monie$) to field a consistently winning team. He wasn't wrong either, as the ownership has consistently stated that they will not participate in the yearly spending orgies that goes along with free-agency signings, preferring to keep costs down, profits up, and a "competitive" team on the field, and by "competitive" they mean a team that plays around .500, correctly judging that fans will still come out to see a team finishes 2nd or 3rd year after year after year, hoping that every once in awhile lightning will strike and the team will get hot and play above their level all the way into the playoffs. Unfortunately what this has translated into is a team that has never finished higher than 2nd since 2002 and has twice had seasons of 101 losses. The sole highlights of these sad sad years has been the supreme pleasure of watching Ichiro hit (and hit and hit and hit) and seeing King Felix Hernandez turn into the dominating pitcher his talent projected him to, capitalizing in winning the 2010 Cy Young (with a losing record!) and pitching a perfect game in 2012. This year its been more of the same old tired bullshit: management talks up the happy talk during Spring Training, of how this team will be different, winners all of them, finally a pack of hitters to strike terror into opposing pitchers.....and then the season starts. Meanwhile over in Oakland Bob Melvin (aka The Manager Who Got Away) is beating the pine tar out of the rest of the AL West, and doing it with Billy Beane's usual mix of low draft picks and cheap castoffs (Bartolo Colon, again?!?). Which has really got to stick in the craw of the Angel's management as they see less and less production from the $200 million dollar man Albert Pujols, who is out for the rest of the year with a bum foot. And pathetic as it is the only reason the M's are not in last place in the AL West is because there is one team that is even more wretched: The Houston Astros. Still there are glimmer of hopes, as the M's are pulling some very interesting prospects out of their farm system, and they do pitch well pretty consistently; the core of their problems is that they don't, and haven't for years, hit consistently for shit. Its frustrating as all bloody hell to be sitting in the stands or watching on TV and see Mariner hitter after hitter after hitter, come up to the plate with runners on, or against a obviously bush-league pitcher...or both...and immediately get two strikes on them. Which makes me think that the Mariners have, for years, had a committee of horses asses for hitting coaches. Surely M's manager Eric Wedge must think the same.
The upshot is that for the immediate future the prospects for a winning team in Seattle are slim to horseshit. Best case scenario for this year is that they finish with a .490 record and 3rd place. Next year more of the same. Frankly I have very little reason to pay any attention to this team any more, which is sad. Consistently losing coupled with ownership indifference will do that to a fan base. So the only real hope we have here in Seattle is that things get soooo bad that fans stay away in droves, forcing the ownership to drop some real coin on the team. How cynical and sad is that?
Ok, check the standings one more time: Hrmmm....ahhh...yes. Dodgers up 3.5 games ahead of the D'Backs. Ok, we can sleep now, everything is alright in the world. Until next time keep it between the lines and on the road.
Da Bums: Not seen since those bygone halcyon days of "Mannywood", excitement and hope has returned to Chavez Ravine. Even after last night's (July 26) 5-2 loss to the Cincinnati Reds, the Dodgers are 23-6 since June 20, the second-best mark in MLB over that time. In just over a month, dem Bums have improved from 30-42 and 9.5 games back in the NL West to 53-48 and a half-game lead ahead of the D'Backs for the division lead. Bolstering that are the wild and wicked rumors of a trade with the Phillies that would send 2009 Cy Young winner Cliff Lee and All-Star 2nd baseman Chase Utley to the Dodgers. However inside word has it that the Phillies consider Utley not for sale, and apparently Utley doesnt want to leave either. Or it may be that the Phillies asking price of the Dodgers, Andre Ethier, is a far higher price than LA wants to pay. However! Baseball being, if nothing else, a truly bizaare game regarding trades, where the villians of the opposing team become your heroes when they land on your team. I am thinking of Sal Maglie, Juan Marichal and the Beard. Stranger things have been written, but I never thought I would see the day to write these: Former Giants closer Brian Wilson, the man who made the last out in the World Series just signed a remainder-of-the-year contract with the Dodgers. As the LA Times puts it "there is only upside to this deal" as Wilson, coming off of surgery, will be a stabilizing veteran presence in the bullpen. Nicely done Dodgers.
Still, as the Dodgers begin to pull away from the NL West with a 3.5 game lead (as of July 31) one might look ahead to the post-season....and be worried. Both the Braves and the Pirates, atop of their respective divisions have better records, as do the Cardinals who are locked in a dogfight with the Pirates for 1st, in probably the most exciting pennant race of the summer. But as I have often written, baseball is a very streaky game, especially so when you are playing a schedule that lasts from April 1st to October 30. In other words the post-season is often times won by whatever team is hot at the moment, as sometimes pure dumb luck in the form of the walk-off homer, or the lucky catch, or just striking out the side can make the difference between advancing to the Big Show or going home for the winter. The standings are indicative of both how a team plays over time and a rough gauge of its talent, nothing more; the Mariners won a record 116 games in 2001, beating the AL record, but still lost to the Yankees in the playoffs. But I will go on record here about one thing: Clayton Kershaw is a effin stud and is putting up Bob Gibson-like numbers, he's a shoo-in for the Cy Young.
From the Damned Yankees Desk: As usual the entertainment is never lacking here at the Damned Yankees Desk: If its not A-Rod feuding with the Yankee ownership over how injured he is then its A-Rod about to be suspended for taking steroids and lying about it. "While 50 games is the standard for a first offense, the stiffer penalties for some players are tied to other alleged violations, including not being truthful to MLB investigators....The Yankees expected him to be accused of recruiting other athletes for the clinic, attempting to obstruct MLB's investigation, and not being truthful with MLB in the past when he discussed his relationship with Dr. Anthony Galea, who pleaded guilty two years ago to a federal charge of bringing unapproved drugs into the United States from Canada." Wow. Sounds like A-Rod is about two steps away from a major-league bitch slap. Couldn't happen to a bigger loser either. Over the course of his...career....Alex Rodriguez has proved himself to be hugely talented, but also immature, selfish, self-centered, petulant, and a liar. He's pretty much alienated teammates, every baseball journalist and most of the baseball public. And lets not even get started on how many times he's choked at the plate in crucial situations for the Yanks, in both the Playoffs and the Series (why do I even care??). Its so bad for him that even the revelation that he was trying to recruit fellow ballplayers to the Biogenesis clinic is met with a cynical shrug of the shoulders and the thought "well, that's A-Rod, nothing new". He may be even more reviled than Barry Bonds. There is a circle of Hell warmly waiting for this man.
Of course that's not even the best news from the Damned Yankees Desk. The better news is that the Yanks are in 4th place in the AL East, 8.5 games out, and sinking fast. The late season addition of 37 year-old Alfonso Soriano, while adding some much needed right-handed punch, is still a case of far too little, too late. CC Sabithia looks to have finally blown out his arm, and the rest of the pitching staff is not exactly striking fear into the hearts of AL batters. Expect the Yanks to limp to a 3rd place finish, at best.
Speaking of Being Publicly Reviled: Poor Ryan Braun, the Hebrew Hammer, gone from being a widely admired, 2011 NL MVP winner, to being suspended for 50 games for steroids, the hits just keep on coming. Former teammate Zack Greinke publicly shames Braun, and runner-up 2011 MVP candidate Matt Kemp thinks Braun should be stripped of the award. What I find is most interesting is this trend, exemplified by Kemp and Greinke, to speak ill of another player in this fashion. For quite some time, even thru the Barry Bonds debacle, active ballplayers generally observed a code of silence when it came to the subject of fellow teammates abusing steroids; for retired ballplayers such a code was non-existent, yes I am looking at you Jose Canseco. It strikes me that nowadays most ballplayers, or at least a vocal minority, are as sick of this steroid scandal as the public is. I know I am. Sick of it. I am taking this new trend as a good thing, that hopefully more ballplayers will speak out on how corrosive to the game taking steroids is.
A Posting From Purgatory, aka Seattle: Well sure as hell its not LA (thank you Baby Jesus), and its sure as hell not NY either, and for that we can be thankful, as Seattle is a lovely town, but has a fairly craptastic history in regards to baseball. The first iteration of pro ball in Seattle was the Seattle Pilots, who played all of one (ONE) season in Seattle, 1969, before being relocated to Milwaukee to become the Brewers. Incidentally, that one Pilots season was forever immortalized by Jim Bouton in his hysterically funny memoir "Ball Four", and if you havent read this great book on baseball...well then you are dead to me. Pro ball was resurrected in Seattle in the form of the Mariners, who first took the field in 1977 and then proceeded to field losing teams for 13 years, until the hiring of Sweet Lou Pinella started turning things around in 1993. Sweet Lou righted the ship and piloted the M's to winning seasons, even going so far as to tie the record for most wins by a team in 2001. However Sweet Lou walked after the 2002 season, citing managerial lack of commitment to doing what it takes (Big Monie$) to field a consistently winning team. He wasn't wrong either, as the ownership has consistently stated that they will not participate in the yearly spending orgies that goes along with free-agency signings, preferring to keep costs down, profits up, and a "competitive" team on the field, and by "competitive" they mean a team that plays around .500, correctly judging that fans will still come out to see a team finishes 2nd or 3rd year after year after year, hoping that every once in awhile lightning will strike and the team will get hot and play above their level all the way into the playoffs. Unfortunately what this has translated into is a team that has never finished higher than 2nd since 2002 and has twice had seasons of 101 losses. The sole highlights of these sad sad years has been the supreme pleasure of watching Ichiro hit (and hit and hit and hit) and seeing King Felix Hernandez turn into the dominating pitcher his talent projected him to, capitalizing in winning the 2010 Cy Young (with a losing record!) and pitching a perfect game in 2012. This year its been more of the same old tired bullshit: management talks up the happy talk during Spring Training, of how this team will be different, winners all of them, finally a pack of hitters to strike terror into opposing pitchers.....and then the season starts. Meanwhile over in Oakland Bob Melvin (aka The Manager Who Got Away) is beating the pine tar out of the rest of the AL West, and doing it with Billy Beane's usual mix of low draft picks and cheap castoffs (Bartolo Colon, again?!?). Which has really got to stick in the craw of the Angel's management as they see less and less production from the $200 million dollar man Albert Pujols, who is out for the rest of the year with a bum foot. And pathetic as it is the only reason the M's are not in last place in the AL West is because there is one team that is even more wretched: The Houston Astros. Still there are glimmer of hopes, as the M's are pulling some very interesting prospects out of their farm system, and they do pitch well pretty consistently; the core of their problems is that they don't, and haven't for years, hit consistently for shit. Its frustrating as all bloody hell to be sitting in the stands or watching on TV and see Mariner hitter after hitter after hitter, come up to the plate with runners on, or against a obviously bush-league pitcher...or both...and immediately get two strikes on them. Which makes me think that the Mariners have, for years, had a committee of horses asses for hitting coaches. Surely M's manager Eric Wedge must think the same.
The upshot is that for the immediate future the prospects for a winning team in Seattle are slim to horseshit. Best case scenario for this year is that they finish with a .490 record and 3rd place. Next year more of the same. Frankly I have very little reason to pay any attention to this team any more, which is sad. Consistently losing coupled with ownership indifference will do that to a fan base. So the only real hope we have here in Seattle is that things get soooo bad that fans stay away in droves, forcing the ownership to drop some real coin on the team. How cynical and sad is that?
Ok, check the standings one more time: Hrmmm....ahhh...yes. Dodgers up 3.5 games ahead of the D'Backs. Ok, we can sleep now, everything is alright in the world. Until next time keep it between the lines and on the road.
Saturday, July 20, 2013
My Dark Days
Anxiety is a bitch. A cold-hearted bitch who doesnt care what time of day or night it is, the whispers go on. That little voice in the back of your head, the cold butterflies in your stomach, the nagging fear that no matter what you do, or where you are, it will all go wrong. Its the gerbil on the wheel, the broken record, constantly repeating its take-down message, wearing a groove on the inside of your skull.
Depression is a motherfucker. Depression comes on like a pile of bricks, a smothering blanket. It covers you over and tries to block out all light. Sometimes it succeeds. Sometimes it succeeds for days, weeks....years....
I seem to suffer from both anxiety and depression. I say "seem" because I have never been officially diagnosed but I sure display the outward, and inward, symptoms of both. Suffering is also relative, some days I am...mostly....fine, when there is that spring in my step, I smile at strangers on the street, I am optimistic about my future. Sadly those days are the small exception. Mostly what happens is that I have a constant on-going unfocused anxiety, which manifests itself as "butterflies in the stomach". We all know that feeling. Now imagine its your constant companion. Even on my good days this feeling is with me, right there in the pit of my stomach and will not leave. There have also been too many days that its a struggle to get out of bed, that to get up and face the day with all its attendant possible situations that could potentially visit pain and heartbreak are too much to bear; this is what depression tells me. And then there are the days where I cry, that it all catches up with me, all the anxiety and depression and negative messages I have been carrying around since child-hood, it all comes crashing down on me and I just weep. Lately there has been a lot of crying as it looks like I have accidentally hurt someone very close to me, unintentionally, because of my negligence and lack of paying attention to simple social cues. These situations bring back all the self-loathing labels that my childhood peers so successfully drummed into my head, "I am so stupid. How can I be such an idiot?? I constantly do this. Why dont I learn to stop?!?"
Where does this all begin? What is the initial incident that started this hard road? Who knows and I am not sure I really care. No I take that back, I do care, very much, but I am not here to point fingers and pass blame; maybe I was just born with the bitch and motherfucker on my back, grown right into my spine in the womb. Some of the facts as I understand them are that I was a very happy and laughing kid, but when I started going to school some odd combination of personality and stupid fortune combined to make me the target of my peers taunts and teasing. This truly started in the 3rd grade when I was the new kid in the class and continued up to the 11th grade in High School. It was a situation where I was afraid, constantly, of going to school, that I would be teased until I cried, or beat up, or both. This was my daily life for years, a true crucible for anxiety. The depression component....I have no idea where it started, maybe its the simple culmination of all the negative messages I received growing up gelled into one package of self loathing and non-existent self-esteem.
It oftentimes felt as if I was trapped in a horror film of not my own making, that somehow I was being slapped around by life for something that was not my fault and out of my control to stop. I would spend days agonizing over why my life was in this state, asking the universe at large for answers and not receiving any. There were a few adults who sympathized and offered a bit of guidance, but for the most part I was left to my own devices, feeling abandoned, to fumble through. Growing into a teenager did little to alleviate the situation as all the previous years of negative messaging along with feelings of abandonment and loneliness coupled with the raging hormonal stew that goes along with typical teenagehood manifested itself in me as a boy who was utterly awkward in every environment he found himself in. Thus I spent alot of those years self-medicating with marijuana and alcohol, desperately hoping that I would be accepted as cool by my peers; the drugs seemed to offer a solace and escape that everyday reality was witholding from me.
Somehow I managed to hold it all together to graduate from High School, served 4 years in the military and then went on to receive a BA from a university. Along the way I also started realizing that my attempts at forging relationships with the opposite sex were almost always not working. It seemed that the frequent complaint that was being voiced at me was that I was too intense, too much to take, too grasping. Maybe this was because of the way emotions were expressed at me, oftentimes, from others, in such a negative fashion that I grew up believing that if I expressed love in a intense way it would be reciprocated. This situation caused me endless amounts of pain as all I truly wanted was to be in a healthy loving relationship; it felt like it was the only thing that mattered and being rejected again and again took me right back to grade school where I was, all over again, the little lost boy, trapped in a hell he had no way of controlling or stopping.
And now, 30 years and two divorces later I still feel like I am trapped in a hell I cannot control nor stop. To be honest its not nearly as bad as it was in grade school, one reason being that if anyone treats me the way I was treated back then I would probably stomp the shit out of them. I also walked away from all of that past with a gigantic ball of anger wrapped up around my insides, as I learned that to best defend myself from anyone who might cause me pain was to maintain an almost constant emotional defensive posture, thus I could be prickly and aggressive when meeting new people, a situation almost guaranteed to drive people away thus increasing my isolation and loneliness. I've learned to put aside most of that anger and I believe, and hope, that I have been mostly successful, but old habits truly die hard.
What also dies hard are the internalized and ugly messages that were pounded into me by my school peers and others: you are not worthy of love, you are stupid and a idiot. In my head these last few days these messages have coalesced into a tidal wave of despair that washes over me and buffets my very soul, turning me into a small and miserable person.
However in all honesty its tough, but not hopeless. I have a family that loves me deeply and unquestioning. I have a circle of friends who care about me, roots for my successes and commiserates with me over my failures. After years of therapy I have come to realize that very little of this was my fault, to lay the blame where its due, take responsibility for my own feelings and finally put down my anger, that constant dark shadow. I now take meds for the anxiety, which helps stop the constant chatter and worry in my head; I had previously resisted taking any medications as I wanted to truly experience the depths and heights of my feelings so I could understand them, but after years of that kind of work I came to be exhausted, worn out by the constant anxious knot in my stomach.
And so my life goes on. The struggle of everyday existence, all the hopes and fears available to human existence. What I have come to realize is that the one of the best things I can do with my life is to create memories, so I try to collect unique experiences: hiking across the volcanoes of Hawaii, dancing along the Seine in the shadow of Notre Dame, sleeping on the deck of a ship traversing the South Seas, smoking opium in Singapore, exposing myself to as much art as one person can stand, snow camping in the frozen Minnesota woods, bicycle camping across the state of Minnesota, hiking the Cascades on both sides of the border, kayaking in the San Juan islands, and so many others too numerous to mention. What I also realize is that the worst thing that the bitch and motherfucker can do to me is make me think that I am completely alone, that I am cutoff from simple human relationships, and make it difficult for me to reach out to others. I think that we humans are social animals, we love being around each other and its part of our natural state, so its completely unnatural for me to spend days alone, locked away in my house, in my head, running thru the movies of my memories replaying again and again those scenes of failure. The bitch and the motherfucker are never going to truly leave me, they will continue to be my life-long companions, til death when we part.
Depression is a motherfucker. Depression comes on like a pile of bricks, a smothering blanket. It covers you over and tries to block out all light. Sometimes it succeeds. Sometimes it succeeds for days, weeks....years....
I seem to suffer from both anxiety and depression. I say "seem" because I have never been officially diagnosed but I sure display the outward, and inward, symptoms of both. Suffering is also relative, some days I am...mostly....fine, when there is that spring in my step, I smile at strangers on the street, I am optimistic about my future. Sadly those days are the small exception. Mostly what happens is that I have a constant on-going unfocused anxiety, which manifests itself as "butterflies in the stomach". We all know that feeling. Now imagine its your constant companion. Even on my good days this feeling is with me, right there in the pit of my stomach and will not leave. There have also been too many days that its a struggle to get out of bed, that to get up and face the day with all its attendant possible situations that could potentially visit pain and heartbreak are too much to bear; this is what depression tells me. And then there are the days where I cry, that it all catches up with me, all the anxiety and depression and negative messages I have been carrying around since child-hood, it all comes crashing down on me and I just weep. Lately there has been a lot of crying as it looks like I have accidentally hurt someone very close to me, unintentionally, because of my negligence and lack of paying attention to simple social cues. These situations bring back all the self-loathing labels that my childhood peers so successfully drummed into my head, "I am so stupid. How can I be such an idiot?? I constantly do this. Why dont I learn to stop?!?"
Where does this all begin? What is the initial incident that started this hard road? Who knows and I am not sure I really care. No I take that back, I do care, very much, but I am not here to point fingers and pass blame; maybe I was just born with the bitch and motherfucker on my back, grown right into my spine in the womb. Some of the facts as I understand them are that I was a very happy and laughing kid, but when I started going to school some odd combination of personality and stupid fortune combined to make me the target of my peers taunts and teasing. This truly started in the 3rd grade when I was the new kid in the class and continued up to the 11th grade in High School. It was a situation where I was afraid, constantly, of going to school, that I would be teased until I cried, or beat up, or both. This was my daily life for years, a true crucible for anxiety. The depression component....I have no idea where it started, maybe its the simple culmination of all the negative messages I received growing up gelled into one package of self loathing and non-existent self-esteem.
It oftentimes felt as if I was trapped in a horror film of not my own making, that somehow I was being slapped around by life for something that was not my fault and out of my control to stop. I would spend days agonizing over why my life was in this state, asking the universe at large for answers and not receiving any. There were a few adults who sympathized and offered a bit of guidance, but for the most part I was left to my own devices, feeling abandoned, to fumble through. Growing into a teenager did little to alleviate the situation as all the previous years of negative messaging along with feelings of abandonment and loneliness coupled with the raging hormonal stew that goes along with typical teenagehood manifested itself in me as a boy who was utterly awkward in every environment he found himself in. Thus I spent alot of those years self-medicating with marijuana and alcohol, desperately hoping that I would be accepted as cool by my peers; the drugs seemed to offer a solace and escape that everyday reality was witholding from me.
Somehow I managed to hold it all together to graduate from High School, served 4 years in the military and then went on to receive a BA from a university. Along the way I also started realizing that my attempts at forging relationships with the opposite sex were almost always not working. It seemed that the frequent complaint that was being voiced at me was that I was too intense, too much to take, too grasping. Maybe this was because of the way emotions were expressed at me, oftentimes, from others, in such a negative fashion that I grew up believing that if I expressed love in a intense way it would be reciprocated. This situation caused me endless amounts of pain as all I truly wanted was to be in a healthy loving relationship; it felt like it was the only thing that mattered and being rejected again and again took me right back to grade school where I was, all over again, the little lost boy, trapped in a hell he had no way of controlling or stopping.
And now, 30 years and two divorces later I still feel like I am trapped in a hell I cannot control nor stop. To be honest its not nearly as bad as it was in grade school, one reason being that if anyone treats me the way I was treated back then I would probably stomp the shit out of them. I also walked away from all of that past with a gigantic ball of anger wrapped up around my insides, as I learned that to best defend myself from anyone who might cause me pain was to maintain an almost constant emotional defensive posture, thus I could be prickly and aggressive when meeting new people, a situation almost guaranteed to drive people away thus increasing my isolation and loneliness. I've learned to put aside most of that anger and I believe, and hope, that I have been mostly successful, but old habits truly die hard.
What also dies hard are the internalized and ugly messages that were pounded into me by my school peers and others: you are not worthy of love, you are stupid and a idiot. In my head these last few days these messages have coalesced into a tidal wave of despair that washes over me and buffets my very soul, turning me into a small and miserable person.
However in all honesty its tough, but not hopeless. I have a family that loves me deeply and unquestioning. I have a circle of friends who care about me, roots for my successes and commiserates with me over my failures. After years of therapy I have come to realize that very little of this was my fault, to lay the blame where its due, take responsibility for my own feelings and finally put down my anger, that constant dark shadow. I now take meds for the anxiety, which helps stop the constant chatter and worry in my head; I had previously resisted taking any medications as I wanted to truly experience the depths and heights of my feelings so I could understand them, but after years of that kind of work I came to be exhausted, worn out by the constant anxious knot in my stomach.
And so my life goes on. The struggle of everyday existence, all the hopes and fears available to human existence. What I have come to realize is that the one of the best things I can do with my life is to create memories, so I try to collect unique experiences: hiking across the volcanoes of Hawaii, dancing along the Seine in the shadow of Notre Dame, sleeping on the deck of a ship traversing the South Seas, smoking opium in Singapore, exposing myself to as much art as one person can stand, snow camping in the frozen Minnesota woods, bicycle camping across the state of Minnesota, hiking the Cascades on both sides of the border, kayaking in the San Juan islands, and so many others too numerous to mention. What I also realize is that the worst thing that the bitch and motherfucker can do to me is make me think that I am completely alone, that I am cutoff from simple human relationships, and make it difficult for me to reach out to others. I think that we humans are social animals, we love being around each other and its part of our natural state, so its completely unnatural for me to spend days alone, locked away in my house, in my head, running thru the movies of my memories replaying again and again those scenes of failure. The bitch and the motherfucker are never going to truly leave me, they will continue to be my life-long companions, til death when we part.
Friday, June 7, 2013
Shocky Prays For Us
Last Wednesday I had to put my cat Shocky to sleep. Shocky was a 13 year old female calico, mostly white with tan and black spotting across her face and body. About 3 weeks ago I noticed that she was acting more high-strung than usual and this is the cat that defines high-strung; living with her was akin to sharing quarters with a sugar-hyped teen. So she seemed a bit more antic than normal and was rubbing her face and talking about it. I looked more closely and noticed that her face seemed swollen and her lower lip discolored, it had turned almost a purplish hue. Having had other older cats that experienced impacted teeth this seemed to be a natural conclusion, so I thought. I took her to the vet as soon as I could.
However the vet had other ideas. He felt along the right mandible of her lower jaw and noticed a lump; he saw a swelling on the right side of her mouth, on the inside. His thinking was that this might be a cancer. Uh oh. This is quite a bit different from a impacted tooth and has all kinds of other consequences and brings up a whole host of other thoughts, immediately, including mortality and death. We agreed to have her come back in a couple days to get a biopsy and x-rays to see exactly what was going on.
Shocky had only come to live with me last August when her former owner/parents moved to Fiji to take a job. Not wanting to have their 3 cats go thru a 2 month quarantine upon arrival they sadly decided they had to give up the cats, at which point I stepped in and assumed ownership.
Shocky was a big girl, weighing about 10lbs but carried it well across a large frame. She was solidly built and moved like a graceful linebacker. She could be intimidating if she wanted and spent a goodly amount of time with a frown on her face, as if contemplating murder most foul. Coupled that with a personality that goes from good mood to downright spitting mad in no time, she could be positively bi-polar, if not possessed by Satan. However I think that most of this schizo type behavior could be explained that I was a new entity to her and she needed to learn me as much as I needed to learn her. Then there was the matter of her praying. When in a good mood, and truthfully, this was most of the time, she would sit on her hind legs, lift her front paws up, and wave them at me to get my attention. Her former owner/Mom explained it to me as "Shocky pray prays". Simple as that, heartbreakingly adorable and stunningly hysterical. Imagine this behavior going on all day, every day; I wake up in the morning, stumble into the bathroom, face the mirror, Shocky runs in, jumps on the back of the toilet and proceeds to pray pray; I sit down to enjoy some Netflix, Shocky jumps on the arm of the chair and pray prays; I sit at the computer, working or writing, Shockie sits on the other desk, to my right and pray prays.
In any case on the agreed upon day I dropped Shockie off at the vet, 8:30am. They called me about noon to come and pick her up. At the same time I was able to view the xrays they had taken of her mouth. It was not pretty; in fact it was downright appalling: her lower right mandible was missing a piece of bone about the size of the end of my index finger. Which is not an inconsequential amount for a cat. In other words the cancer was eating away the bone. The vet and I discussed options, all of which amounted to just being able to make the rest of her life as comfortable as possible, because essentially this was a death sentence. I didn't need to hear the results of the biopsy to know that her life expectancy had dropped dramatically. So I was sent home with a round of antibiotics and liquid pain meds, and Shockie came home with a permanent grimace, as she had to have 3 teeth extracted, and the right side of her mouth was swollen. She also picked up a new name, "Cancer Face".
Why do we let these cats turn us upside down in this way? Why have we, as the dominant species on this planet, open our homes and hearts to this other, more primitive animal? What base instinct are we feeding by allowing cats to live with us? For the most part they are aloof, sleep 20 out of 24 hours, sulky, and lay down some stinky shit. I cannot answer any of these questions, and I have been around cats my whole life as I was raised in a family that had cats, dogs, guinea pigs, ducks, chickens, horses, birds, and fish as pets. Cats shed, covering houses and clothes with a fine patina of fur, they puke almost constantly. But I've also learned alot about cats, not so much anatomy or physiology, but behavior; I've learned to watch the pace of their tail movement to judge mood; I've learned to let them come to me when I am meeting a new cat, let them come to me and sniff my fingers, if they rub my fingers I can then pick them up; and they communicate alot with their eyes. Cats will spend alot of time watching you and following you with their eyes, the more they watch you the more they like you. If you wish to punish your cat, ignore it, this will drive the cat mad with anticipation and worry. Shocky was no different in any of this regard, the more she got to know me the more she looked at me, and the more she prayed at me.
And so, a few days after the x-rays and teeth extraction I got the phone call from the vet with the biopsy results. It was not anything that I hadn't expected: aggressive sarcoma cancer of the mucosa membranes. It was expected to spread quickly and the vet admitted that if cost were no object the best treatments would only give us, on average, another 240 days of life. The feeling that comes over is helplessness, coupled with an abiding sadness. We call these animals into our lives, give up food, shelter and affection, asking back their engagement and love, if love can be returned by cats. But they are also stoic, they are unable to tell us when they are in pain, or if they suspect an illness; in fact they will instinctively hide pain and disease so as to not alert any potential predators of their weaknesses. So there was no telling how long Shocky was in pain, or if indeed she was in pain at this moment; what became distressingly obvious was her rapid decline.
In the days following the teeth extraction Shocky stopped eating and drinking water. She would spend most of her time either under the bed, or at the bottom of the closet. The one day I let all the cats out on the deck to enjoy the sunny warm day, it was....shocking....as to how wasted she was becoming, her fur was lank and bedraggled, the skin was hanging off her, her eyes sunk deeply in her head. Her right lip was starting to bulge out and some kind of infection was spreading on it. Returning to the vet last Wednesday for a scheduled follow-up felt like carrying out a death sentence. After talking it over and showing me the inside of her mouth, bulging and turning blue on the right side, tongue and gum, the vet and I agreed that it was for the best that it was time for her life to end. A sedative was administered, to relax and slacken the muscles; after a couple of minutes a overdose of anesthesia was administered to Shocky, putting her into a permanent sleep. She will be cremated and her ashes spread on a garden in back of the clinic. Up until she lost control of her muscles and was unable to continue, as the sedative took effect, right up to the end, Shocky was purring. I came home and got drunk.
Shocky Prays
However the vet had other ideas. He felt along the right mandible of her lower jaw and noticed a lump; he saw a swelling on the right side of her mouth, on the inside. His thinking was that this might be a cancer. Uh oh. This is quite a bit different from a impacted tooth and has all kinds of other consequences and brings up a whole host of other thoughts, immediately, including mortality and death. We agreed to have her come back in a couple days to get a biopsy and x-rays to see exactly what was going on.
Shocky had only come to live with me last August when her former owner/parents moved to Fiji to take a job. Not wanting to have their 3 cats go thru a 2 month quarantine upon arrival they sadly decided they had to give up the cats, at which point I stepped in and assumed ownership.
Shocky was a big girl, weighing about 10lbs but carried it well across a large frame. She was solidly built and moved like a graceful linebacker. She could be intimidating if she wanted and spent a goodly amount of time with a frown on her face, as if contemplating murder most foul. Coupled that with a personality that goes from good mood to downright spitting mad in no time, she could be positively bi-polar, if not possessed by Satan. However I think that most of this schizo type behavior could be explained that I was a new entity to her and she needed to learn me as much as I needed to learn her. Then there was the matter of her praying. When in a good mood, and truthfully, this was most of the time, she would sit on her hind legs, lift her front paws up, and wave them at me to get my attention. Her former owner/Mom explained it to me as "Shocky pray prays". Simple as that, heartbreakingly adorable and stunningly hysterical. Imagine this behavior going on all day, every day; I wake up in the morning, stumble into the bathroom, face the mirror, Shocky runs in, jumps on the back of the toilet and proceeds to pray pray; I sit down to enjoy some Netflix, Shocky jumps on the arm of the chair and pray prays; I sit at the computer, working or writing, Shockie sits on the other desk, to my right and pray prays.
In any case on the agreed upon day I dropped Shockie off at the vet, 8:30am. They called me about noon to come and pick her up. At the same time I was able to view the xrays they had taken of her mouth. It was not pretty; in fact it was downright appalling: her lower right mandible was missing a piece of bone about the size of the end of my index finger. Which is not an inconsequential amount for a cat. In other words the cancer was eating away the bone. The vet and I discussed options, all of which amounted to just being able to make the rest of her life as comfortable as possible, because essentially this was a death sentence. I didn't need to hear the results of the biopsy to know that her life expectancy had dropped dramatically. So I was sent home with a round of antibiotics and liquid pain meds, and Shockie came home with a permanent grimace, as she had to have 3 teeth extracted, and the right side of her mouth was swollen. She also picked up a new name, "Cancer Face".
Why do we let these cats turn us upside down in this way? Why have we, as the dominant species on this planet, open our homes and hearts to this other, more primitive animal? What base instinct are we feeding by allowing cats to live with us? For the most part they are aloof, sleep 20 out of 24 hours, sulky, and lay down some stinky shit. I cannot answer any of these questions, and I have been around cats my whole life as I was raised in a family that had cats, dogs, guinea pigs, ducks, chickens, horses, birds, and fish as pets. Cats shed, covering houses and clothes with a fine patina of fur, they puke almost constantly. But I've also learned alot about cats, not so much anatomy or physiology, but behavior; I've learned to watch the pace of their tail movement to judge mood; I've learned to let them come to me when I am meeting a new cat, let them come to me and sniff my fingers, if they rub my fingers I can then pick them up; and they communicate alot with their eyes. Cats will spend alot of time watching you and following you with their eyes, the more they watch you the more they like you. If you wish to punish your cat, ignore it, this will drive the cat mad with anticipation and worry. Shocky was no different in any of this regard, the more she got to know me the more she looked at me, and the more she prayed at me.
And so, a few days after the x-rays and teeth extraction I got the phone call from the vet with the biopsy results. It was not anything that I hadn't expected: aggressive sarcoma cancer of the mucosa membranes. It was expected to spread quickly and the vet admitted that if cost were no object the best treatments would only give us, on average, another 240 days of life. The feeling that comes over is helplessness, coupled with an abiding sadness. We call these animals into our lives, give up food, shelter and affection, asking back their engagement and love, if love can be returned by cats. But they are also stoic, they are unable to tell us when they are in pain, or if they suspect an illness; in fact they will instinctively hide pain and disease so as to not alert any potential predators of their weaknesses. So there was no telling how long Shocky was in pain, or if indeed she was in pain at this moment; what became distressingly obvious was her rapid decline.
In the days following the teeth extraction Shocky stopped eating and drinking water. She would spend most of her time either under the bed, or at the bottom of the closet. The one day I let all the cats out on the deck to enjoy the sunny warm day, it was....shocking....as to how wasted she was becoming, her fur was lank and bedraggled, the skin was hanging off her, her eyes sunk deeply in her head. Her right lip was starting to bulge out and some kind of infection was spreading on it. Returning to the vet last Wednesday for a scheduled follow-up felt like carrying out a death sentence. After talking it over and showing me the inside of her mouth, bulging and turning blue on the right side, tongue and gum, the vet and I agreed that it was for the best that it was time for her life to end. A sedative was administered, to relax and slacken the muscles; after a couple of minutes a overdose of anesthesia was administered to Shocky, putting her into a permanent sleep. She will be cremated and her ashes spread on a garden in back of the clinic. Up until she lost control of her muscles and was unable to continue, as the sedative took effect, right up to the end, Shocky was purring. I came home and got drunk.
Shocky Prays
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