“Astros decline $18m option on Bagwell”: Oh word? What if we came down to 17m?
topics for further investigation:
:: running away to become a submariner
:: one-year anniversary of my becoming a fake adult
:: sociological inquiry into why the f*** people like scarface so ********* much.
:: getting your hair cut down to “1″
:: why i am moving out of hyde park (swear to fuckign god i’ll do it) (hint: involves restaurants. hint: the world ‘restaurants’ is doing double duty for a) actual restaurants b) something else)
:: moneymaking schemes. i haven’t heard anything, so i’m assuming everyone is hard at work thinking about them. we should arrange a meeting of some kind. let me be stridently clear that these are less like honest entrepreneurship, and better characterized as scams or confidence games. even if that winds up not being true (it’s going to)
:: living with sport coats. it’s better this way. i am at the foot of the oldtimey stone bridge to dressing like either a sort-of almost adult or a scuzzy grad student or some combination thereof, all i need is leather shoes. but scuffed ones.
Yr voyageur is going to Vancouver tomorrow morning for a week, so he will too busy riding a bike on Kitsilano beach and eating free meals and standing a table at a conference to get to typing much. We relay this information to you A) to point out that the last two work trips i have taken have been to places where the Grizzlies play or did play B) because I am sincerely geeked about Vancouver and want people to share (by which I mean, not share) my grizzly about all of this. I will bring you all baubles and tales of mer-men from the pacific NW. until then consider me a thuggedout naked green guy hiding in your swamp, and tap some forests otherwise bad shit.
OK, this is my problem(s) with your 2006 campeones del mundo St. Louis Cardinals:
i) Tony LaRussa. Dude needs to ditch the Dr. Strangelove sunglasses and collie-fur wig stapled inside his hat. The country needs you to confront your mortality.
ii) Live, St. Louis-based Cardinals fans, as depicted by television cameras, appear to be 100% antsy white people who will get childishly upset if the Cardinals don’t win. This makes them the baseball equivalent of Steelers fans, except whiter, and the Steelers only play 16 times a year.
iii) Albert Pujols and his creepy precision-trim facial hair. Even when he smiles he looks like the unhappiest successful millionare in the universe. He makes A-Rod look like goddamn Regis Philbin in comparison. Scott Rolen even seems to be having more fun, and he spends his free time reading Notes from the Underground and holding his fingers in candle flames.
Now, moving past bile to ad rem attacks against the idea of the Cardinals winning (obviously as an Chicago-by-way-of-NE-Ohioan i can’t be accused of being bicoastal, although I might be somewhat demanding, when it comes to sports fulfilling my peculiar tastes in democratic vistas):
1. The whole point of “playoffs” encompasses the promise of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, as the w calls it. it doesn’t matter how good your team is in strat-o-matic…how much your team cost to assemble … how many all-stars you have… &c. all that matters is that you can beat the other teams with a conferred right to challenge for the title, right? you can marry the charming princess of the Louisville gentry; you can steal her away from her rich, cruel Yalie husband who only gets distracted from cheating on her by his hardon for keeping wife as property. You can try anyway. What actually happens is, you wind up dead in your swimming pool. Except the Cardinals never wind up dead in the swimming pool. as max fischer would say, don’t fuck with my play, this is important to me.
2. Especially frustrating, beyond having to watch a World Series where at least two and maybe three games turned on fielding/throwing/not-falling-down errors, was watching a World Series between two teams that basically don’t belong in the playoffs. The Tigers might have won 95 games, but they couldn’t hold onto a huge lead in their division. as has been pointed out, both teams were sub-.500 after the all-star break. parity is fun, when it means no Yankees dynasty. parity is less fun when it results in essentially a giant game of spin the bottle at the end of the season with only the ugliest, fattest kids not invited. The Cardinals won *83 games in the entire regular season out of a possible 161*. I accept the point that the Cardinals, circa 2002-5, which is more or less the same team with downgrades in the supporting roles and some new faces in the bullpen, were really good, and if Edmonds, Rolen, etc etc etc, healthy all year, the Cards would have won more like the 90-100 games you would expect from a non-exceptional playoff team. The thing is, they won 83 games. they didn’t belong in the playoffs, and it’s only because they play in a bad division in a bad league that they managed to get into the playoffs. And again, this isn’t an ad hominem knock on the Cards; they played great in the clutch, took advantge of an opportunity to knock off a hollow Pads team, outlasted the broken Mets, and jumped on Detroit’s throat when they were down. Impressive execution. But terrible drama. “Killer instinct” isn’t something you look for in an American myth. You look for it in a fighting rooster or whatever. The Cards aren’t the issue; it’s the threat of having to watch another series like that last one; leveraging small advantages into a technical knockout might be fun in terms of user-end experience but it’s not fun to watch, although i guess maybe the new Facebooked Horatio Algers out there think otherwise. No one likes strivers, and the Cards didn’t evince enough shame at their willful grabbiness (particular that David Eckstein fucked-up individual). Except for Scott Rolen, who is like the HP Lovecraft of borderline hall of fame third basemen.
3. which brings me around to another issue. I don’t see the logic in criticizing the push to read this WS as a busted cultural narrative. This World Series painfully echoed some recent lowlights in the american enterprise (not that it was not all beer and tropical skittles 1607 to 2000). the best teams, the teams with the most wins/votes in the popular election/qualifications to be president shot themselves in the foot until there was no foot left, and a familiar brand name walked away with the keys to the free world. fast forward six years, we *blew up an entire country because we were paranoid* and america will never have its treasured moral exceptionality, our selfinvented birthright for leadership, because of the way we’ve disgraced ourselves abroad, at home, and elsewhere. now, obviously, in 2012, tony larussa isn’t going to be saving abused poodles while the people of east st. louis wage a IED-filled civil war between baptists and pentecostals, and at the end of the day, baseball still brings a smile to my face, unlike um, the rest of the newspaper.
but, anyway, to no especial point, we can’t maintain this unruly batch of national myths: social darwinism, Algerism, earlybirdism AND faster-running-further-reaching arms AND a self-chosen people AND the actual good America will eventually need so much oxygen, the place could burst into flames if somebody shuffles their slippers on the way to the toilet. or maybe we can maintain (that seems like a nice idea), but either way the sheer overload of freak-lit curlicues (it’s like Gravity’s Rainbow but there are 300 million characters and its real and we have nukes…) going to push this shit to the unreadable side of the shelf. maybe we’re just another europe, now more than ever (see below). the fresh green breast of the new world, and all its promise, came to nothing more than a chopped and screwed remix of empire. the fun answer, for my money is compassionate-Stalinist pogroms against people who disagree with me. but you catch more flies with sugar or whatever. the restricted-calorie adult answer is to start giving a shit and responsibly consolidating political power to make those pogroms a reality for our grandchildren’s America. i hate ambiguity, and in such small portions.
i’m not saying, just saying.*
* which is now a f***ing ad tagline for Hummer?
** also the racist commercial for the USPS with the japanese lamp talking to the afro-am USPS parcel? i also blame on hipsters. glad to see that the physical violence masquing as commedia is now transmuting into emotional violence dressed up as absurdity.
just got done with Blood Meridian. i think some of it went through my ears, and other bits of it went straight into a file that i think most people aren’t supposed to have open on their desk (files like “america is interrupted pageant of shame and hatred”). not really sure what to compare this to, in terms of cars or positions on a basketball team or bob dylan records. it’s likely the handiwork of an angry, dyspeptic genius. i want to subscribe with two hands to the Blood Meridian pamphlet but i can’t imagine what that pamphlet would say, other than “you can be the last man living if you play the right way, but eventually the giant naked guy will find you.” are there McCarthy books better/comparably good to this? if so i would like to hear about them. if there was maybe one that was less good but had slightly more of the weird humor (buzzards riding down a river on a dead man’s back), could someone tell me. this book ran my life. felt like getting that out there. i will try to get to providing regular mushmouthed assessments of life at year 25 and strange pictures of domestic sightings of darth vader for you all although i am in the process of sorting out life decisions that don’t seem terrible pressing at the moment but are actually extremely pressing all the time everyday daily.
when i was in college, someone told me that the five years after college are the worst time of your life; before you figure out one or all of things (job money family girls drugs, which way to wear your pants or whatever). later on someone else said that it was more like ten years, the bad part. someone else also told me that life is bad pretty much the whole way out from here. actually more than one person has told me that. its not at all clear why i would respect the opinions stated above, since i have a hard time taking anything seriously unless it’s in a novel. maybe that has something to do with it. maybe i should get a dog or a oxycontin habit to keep me busy. i dunno. baseball on now, i have to go.
Writing about Infinite Jest in the introduction to the story collection The Burned Children of America – a kind of literary equivalent of USA Today – Zadie Smith also recognised that, post 9/11, “Underneath the professional smiles there is a sadness in [America] that is sunk so deep in the culture you can taste it in your morning Cheerios . . . You can be unsatisfied in America, or unfulfilled, you can be unrecognised, unappreciated, you can be unbalanced, unemotional, unnutritionally satisfied and un-numerically rewarded, you can be unrepresented and unspoken – but you cannot be unhappy … And yet there remains this sadness … Wallace identified it: many, many people followed him.”
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Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. population will pass 300 million today, propelled by a wave of immigrants who make up the largest proportion of the nation since the 1920s.
The Census Bureau population clock adds one person every 11 seconds and will reach 300 million at 7:46 a.m. New York time, spokesman Mark Tolbert said in a statement. The count includes one birth every seven seconds, one death every 13 seconds and one new immigrant every 31 seconds.
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Zadie Smith: how it can be bullshit to state an opinion
300 million people! I hope some of them leave. Hint: it’s not the immigrants. Or me.
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First line of Rod Blagojevich’s creepy skullface campaign ad:
“According to my opponent, I am the worst person in the world, and I do everything wrong. Come on guys.”
