Houston Astros (6-10) at Milwaukee Brewers (7-9)
The Piece Of Shit House That Bud Built
One Brewers Way
Milwaukee, WI 53214
“C’mon, it’s Czechoslovakia. We zip in, we pick ’em up, we zip right out again. We’re not going to Moscow. It’s Czechoslovakia. It’s like going into Wisconsin.”
“Well I got the shit kicked out of me in Wisconsin once. Forget it.”
MILWAUKEE (SnS) – Plainly put, the Milwaukee Brewers suck cock.
They always have, and they always will, I suppose. And while the opening line to this overlong series preview doesn’t come close to a classic opener, like “Call me Ishmael”, or “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, I’ll bet if there were some way you could look up ol’ Herman Melville, or Charles Dickens, they would be quick to tell you the Brewers suck cock, too. Everybody knows about this, it seems.
Then again, what would you expect from an operation that was conceived and brought to fruition by a (we now know) cross-dressing former car salesman/baseball executive from fucking Wisconsin, after all?
Also, I think the Brewers have frittered away their window of opportunity. A few years ago, it looked like they had put together a dynamite collection of young, emerging talent that might help them dominate the NL Central, if not the whole National League, for years to come. And by now, they have precious little to show for it. They play in a shithole ballpark and have perennial problems with their pitching, and managing. Now they are entering that familiar part of the cycle, where all the young talent is growing up and becoming more and more expensive to keep around. Prince is already gone, and Hardy and McGee and guys like that. And more will follow. Unless they have another group of very good young players ready, it doesn’t look so good for the Bud Selig Milwaukee Fucking Brewers.
Could happen to more deserving bunch.
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SCHEDULE
• Monday April 23 at 7:10 CDT
• Tuesday April 24 at 7:10 CDT
• Wednesday April 25 at 12:10 CDT
(all games on Fox Sports Houston)
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Where have you gone, Exene Cervenka?
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you
Woo-woo-woo
It was 1983 sometime. It was mid-morning, edging toward noon. I was laying on my side in the queen-sized bed, my head dug down into the cool, goose down pillow laying underneath it. I was in the bedroom of my apartment. It was time to get up, I guess. Half of me wanted to get up, half of me didn’t. I was hungover as hell, which was one reason I didn’t want to. I’d gone out the night before with this girl I was seeing and some other people we knew, and we’d hit the whiskey pretty hard. And then we hit the MDMA sometime after that. More than once.
My . . . what? I didn’t consider her as my girlfriend, not really . . . My then current female companion, I guess you could call her, was sitting on the other side of the bedroom, slouched across an armchair, looking stylishly disheveled and a bit like Anita Pallenberg, c. 1967 or so, before the rot set in. She was eyeing me accusingly. “Get up, lazy ass. I want to go to the beach today.” I rolled over onto my other side, so I wouldn’t have to look at her while she was mildly vilifying me; but she continued with the nagging, “You’re so lazy . . . you’re so lazy . . . you have a lazy life.”
“I’m lazy? R-i-i-i-ght,” I was thinking to myself. This chick was a borderline speed freak, and she stayed up to ungodly hours, chain smoking cigarettes and watching the dreck that passed for all night television programming in those days. And that was about all she did. Oh, she did make herself available to me when I wanted, and she seemed to participate in the subsequent goings-on with something approximating passion, which is probably why I had kept her around as long as I had. But I always knew she was just temporary, that she wasn’t long for my increasingly dark little fucked up world.
She was right about the me being lazy part, though. I had lately been overcome by a powerful lethargy I could not shake. It dominated my life for months. My limbs felt inordinately heavy, and I would sit and think for minutes or even hours before deciding to do something as simple as getting up to go turn down the air. I had lost interest in the things I used to be interested in, and I’d neglected most of my friends and family for months. And I never really wanted to go out and do anything anymore, at all.
I still don’t know exactly why I’d become so listless; but I suspect some of it was the temporary onset of clinical depression. And also the fact I was shoveling down unknown quantities of alcohol and pharmaceuticals every night, and well into the next morning. That may have had something to do with it, too.
And now this tweaker chick I was dating said she wanted to go to the fucking beach. Great. Understand, going to the beach was something I would normally be ready to do at any time, at the drop of a hat. The sand and the ocean and the waves held powerful meaning for me, and had a spiritual and intellectual and emotional hold on me as basic and primal as the teachings of the church I had been born into and had given my lifelong adherence to (with varying degrees of devotion over the years, mind you.) I went to Mass when I was in the mood to, and thought I probably should. I was always ready to go to the beach. But on that morning, my girlfriend’s insistence that I get up and take her was more annoying than anything else. I rolled over in the bed, away from her, so I could lie there in peace for awhile, and think about it.
By that time, this girl and I had been together about a week, I think. Maybe two. I’d met her one night in a bar my crowd and I frequented in those days. It was just a dive, really. A place to drink and play pool and shuffleboard, and not much else. It was not a place one immediately thought of if one was looking to go out and score some acceptable if temporary female companionship.
The night I hooked up with my speed freak girl was an exception, I suppose. I’m not 100% sure, though; because I don’t remember any of it. My friend Tony had to recount the whole romantic story for me.
What’s that you say, Mr. Hamilton?
Ms. Exene took her drugs and went away
Hey-hey-hey … hey-hey-hey
“You were playing shuffleboard, and kicking ass,” Tony said. “Seemed like every third puck you slid hung over the edge at the other end. Those guys were bluffing you, saying they weren’t hangers, and you challenged ‘em every time, and won. You were out of your head, and playing like a demon. Winning tons of free beer. It was awesome.
“Somewhere in there this chick just kind of showed up. I don’t know where she came from. She wasn’t all that attractive to me – kind of skinny, and her hair was long and straight and almost stringy. Tits, yes, but nothing really to make a big deal about. She had on a pair of worn out jeans and tennis shoes, and a baseball undershirt with dark blue sleeves. Three-quarter cut. Nothing to get your attention, really. But she stood there alongside the shuffleboard table for awhile, admiring the way you played. And before long I guess you noticed her admiring you, and after that we could tell from the look in your eyes what was going to happen next.
“Sure enough, before long you had your arm around her, and she was drinking some of the beers you’d won, and smoking your cigarettes. It wasn’t that much longer until you guys looked like you’d been together for years. I didn’t get it. Not your usual type. If Diane had seen her, she’d have laughed, right before she kicked you in the stones. The guys and I thought it was funny … Mike said you’d finally found yourself one that looked like Tom Petty, with tits. Ha ha.”
I was a big Tom Petty fan back then. I’d got into him soon after his first LP came out. I’d come across it by chance. He and his band were basically unknown at the time, at least around here. They recorded for Shelter in those days. The Tulsa scene. Some of the band’s early cuts employed Dwight Twilley and Phil Seymour as background vocalists, Twilley and Seymour playing Flo and Eddie to Petty & The Heartbreakers’ T. Rex. It sounded really good and different at the inception, both retro and new at the same time. You’ll have to take my word for it . . . but anyway, this chick was better looking than Tom Petty with mid-sized knockers. And I wasn’t fucking her because she bore a resemblance to one of my rock ‘n’ roll heroes at the time. I wasn’t that screwed up. She was a decent-looking chick, okay? Starting to show the effects of persistent drug use, but … I know she wasn’t Farah Fawcett or anything, but she wasn’t that bad.
In retrospect, though, through fuzzy recollection, I can kind of see how my friends made the Tom Petty connection. She did kind of look like Tom Petty, in a certain light. Tom Petty, with tits. Maybe I really was that screwed up.
Oh, and the ‘Diane’ my buddy Tony referenced was a girl I loved, the true love of my life, a beautiful, wonderful, gorgeous woman I’d had an on again, off again relationship with for nearly two years by that time. Diane was nothing like the somewhat torn and frayed skag I’d hooked up with playing shuffleboard. At the time, Diane and I were in one of our “off again” phases, I guess. But I don’t want to get off into that, here. Anything to do with Diane is a whole different story.
***************
Me and the Devil was walkin’ side by side
Me and the Devil was walkin’ side by side
Ooh, I’m goin’ to beat my woman until I get satisfied
While my girl sat there telling me what a lazy-ass I was, I started drifting off into reverie, if not quite outright sleep. I could hear the dude downstairs’ stereo playing. The Police. The rather haunting sounding opening bars to “Wrapped Around Your Finger”. That album hadn’t been out long, but dude (his name was Doug or something) played the fuck out of it, all the time. Including when he was fucking his girl, which I could hear sometimes, the sounds coming up through the floor between us. He also beat his girl to that song. I could hear that sometimes, too. He swore he didn’t, and she swore he didn’t, but I could hear it, sometimes; the girl’s piercing wails of pain stabbing through my mind, and my heart. After that, every time I heard that Police album I thought of Doug’s girl crying in pain, and me upstairs, doing nothing about it. Unable to do anything about it. It made me hate that LP after awhile, which was okay, because I never liked The Police very much, anyway. Back then, some retarded Rolling Stone critic went so far as to classify them as “punk.” Fucking moron. Andy Summers could play a little bit, okay, but come on . . .
It was kind of hot and sticky in the apartment that morning. I’d decided that spring to save money to buy a truck, a Silverado I liked, so I scrimped wherever I could. I’d taken to setting the air conditioner’s thermostat at 78 or 80, and turning it off altogether at night. I usually just wore a pair of gym shorts around the apartment most of the time, anyway – no shirt, no shoes. I’d leave the windows open in the evenings. In the early part of spring, it was a workable plan. But as it got on from April to May, and then on into summer, I knew I would have to shelve my plan before long. It would get too fucking hot and humid in the apartment, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Or, alternately, it would make me drowsy-sleepy during the day and, as my girl said, lazy. Before long I would have to shut the windows for the summer, and crank the A/C down to 72 or lower, and just let that motherfucker run, for months on end.
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PITCHING MATCHUPS
Monday April 23
Houston Lucas Harrell, RHP (1-0, 2.55) – Lucas has been impressive so far, which is a surprise. To me, anyway. Or, as Kinky Friedman once put it, “Ol’ Ben Lucas/Had a lot of mucus/Running right out of his nose/He’d pick and pick/’Til it made you sick/But back again it grows.”
Milwaukee Zack Greinke, RHP (1-1, 5.09) – Greinke looks scary. Actually, he is what is called “butt ugly” in your more refined circles. He probably doesn’t care, though. He’s a successful MLB pitcher, he makes big money, and I am sure when he gets up in the morning and looks in the mirror, he sees Cary Grant looking back at him.
Tuesday April 24
Houston Bud Norris, RHP (1-0, 4.26) – Bud hasn’t had a really dominating outing yet, but he hasn’t really pitched badly, either. The crux of the biscuit is, he needs run support. Or, as Kinky Friedman once put it, “Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed/That’s what I to my lady said/This women’s liberation done gone to your head/Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed.”
Milwaukee Randy Wolf, LHP (0-2, 8.80) – Randy Wolf, former short-time Astro. Was a pretty decent starting pitcher, once. Not any time recently, though.
Wednesday April 25
Houston J.A. Happ, LHP (1-1, 4.00) – Happ is still frustrating, and sometimes scary to watch, but I think I detect the slightest indication that he is beginning to get it … to understand that less is more, that if you can do in 75 pitches what you did in 100, you get to play longer, and can move up from the boy’s room to the mens’ room. Or, as Kinky Friedman once put it, “I saw a picture the other day/In a mens’ room in L.A. … “ No, no, I can’t do this.
Milwaukee Shaun Marcum, RHP (1-1, 3.79) – Marcum owned the Astros last season. He wasn’t the sole owner, a lot of guys owned the Astros last season … but Marcum backed up his portion of the claim by going 2-0, 1.80 in three starts against the woeful 2011 Houston team.
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I’m gonna tear your playhouse down
I’m gonna tear it down pretty soon
I’m gonna tear your playhouse down
Room by room
The mid-1960s were a great time to be young and alive and American. That is what we thought, anyway. I was only a grade-schooler then, but even I knew things were great. I lived in a great country, and we were kicking the commies’ asses in SE Asia, and kicking the Russians’ asses in the space race. The evening news told us so. If you were middle class and, well, white in that era, and lived in a nice little subdivision with a dad who worked and a mom who stayed home, you had it made, seemingly. Things were great, and we were happy and, most of all, we felt safe. Nothing bad could touch us. Safe. Yes.
I was riding my bike down my street toward the northern end of the 100 block. I was 9 or 10 years old, and it was summertime. A weekday. I was by myself, and have no idea where I was headed. It could have been anywhere. I had the terrific luck – no shit – to grow up in a great neighborhood, for a kid. Lots of youngish families just starting out, which meant lots of kids to play with. My elementary school was on my street, and it had a huge schoolyard, with endless things to do there. There was a big drainage ditch that ran past the edge of our neighborhood, too. We were not supposed to play there, but of course we did. What kid could pass up a place like that? We caught tadpoles in the shallow, brackish water, and brought them home to see if they’d turn into frogs. We had hand-to-hand combat on the big pipeline that emerged from one bank of the ditch, ran above the water, and then disappeared again into the other bank. We rode our bikes up and down the well-worn trails in “hills” alongside the ditch. The hills were piles of spoil left over from when they originally dug the ditch, and were overgrown and fun and mysterious. We called the area around the hills, The Jungle. There was no place in our jungle that was more than 50 ft. from somebody’s house, but to us and our imaginations, The Jungle was remote and exotic.
Perhaps I was going to The Jungle that summer day on my bike. I was headed in that general direction. There weren’t any kids out playing in the street that I could see, or anyone else for that matter. The dads were all at work, and the moms were inside being 1960s moms, cooking and cleaning and reading Redbook, or perhaps sneaking a peek at the TV soap operas with the domestic maid. The kids were probably already playing on the hills and in The Jungle. That is probably where I was headed. I cannot remember for sure, though.
As I got to the end of the block – my elementary school on one side, houses on the other – I was riding along the curb on the right side of the street. There hadn’t been any traffic, but then I sensed a car coming from behind me. Then I saw it in my peripheral vision as it edged up beside me, and I think maybe I started pedaling a little faster. Then the car, a 1960s sedan of some sort, kind of metallic blue-ish green, a two-door … then the car pulled slightly ahead of me, then veered to the curb ahead. I was pinned in. I glanced through the open window on the passenger side and saw an average-looking man, 30s to 40s, dressed in chinos and a white T-shirt. He was sliding across the bench seat from the driver’s side toward the passenger side, and the next thing I knew he’d flung the passenger-side door open, trapping me even further. Then he grabbed my left wrist, hard, and began to pull me off of my bicycle and into his car. I noticed a big, gold wristwatch on his left wrist, for some reason. I had no idea what he had in mind for me, but I did have the sense it probably wasn’t good. But he had a good grip on me and was much larger and stronger, and I could feel myself coming up off of my bicycle seat as I was pulled further into the front seat of his car.
We never heard much about pedophiles and child abductions in those days. I am sure things like that happened, but no one I knew openly discussed it. Our parents instructed us in the age old bromide about not taking candy from strangers, etc., but that was about it. And I doubt they were very concerned about potential dangers when they instructed us. That sort of thing just wasn’t on the radar back then.
As an aside, the place where the guy ran me up the curb and grabbed me was right across the street from my now vacant for the summer elementary school. The house we were in front of, whose yard my bike and I had been run up into, was the Lietzke’s house. You know, Bruce Lietzke, the golfer. He grew up down the street from me. I guess I grew up down the street from a famous athlete, but I don’t remember it ever making much of an impression on me. All I remember was Bruce and his sister used to babysit my brothers and I sometimes, when they were in high school and we were little. I don’t remember anything specific about that, though. And all we kids really cared about then was football and baseball. Golf wasn’t really anything we thought about. By the time Bruce Lietzke went to college and then joined the PGA tour and started having success, I was old enough to appreciate it, and I am sure I did, a little. But by then, my family had moved from that neighborhood, as had Bruce Lietzke.
I have always been pretty strong for my size. Still am. It is a natural thing, it must be; because I never cared very much for working out or lifting weights. One of the things I liked about playing baseball in high school was that, unlike football, they didn’t make you go to the weight room and lift. At the time, the thinking was that it reduced your flexibility if you bulked up. Judging from some of the ballplayers we’ve seen in the last 25 years, I am guessing that philosophy has been modified somewhat.
But anyway, I have always had natural strength. Not freakish strength, just more than average for someone my size. It has come in handy at times, but about 95% of the time I never thought about it at all. That day on my bike, I doubt I was thinking about it. I was in full panic mode. I think by then the man had pulled me far enough into his car that I could actually see the interior. I have the faintest slip of a memory of briefly looking up and noticing some of the felt on the interior of the roof was worn and tearing. I was very scared by then. And I am not sure what made me do it, but all at once I gathered my strength and twisted my left arm violently – so violently, I heard my shoulder pop. This momentarily loosened the man’s grip on my wrist enough that I was able to jerk my arm free. He looked at me like he was a little startled, and very, very angry.
I didn’t hang around to find out how angry, though. In a second, I jerked my arm free, pushed the door out of my way, jumped off of my bike, and started tearing through the Lietzke’s front yard, headed for the backyard. Back in those days, privacy fences were not in vogue, luckily. In fact, there were no fences at all in the backyards on that side of the street, which I knew, and I started hauling ass through those backyards, one after the other; past patios ringed by tiki torches, Japanese paper lanterns hanging in the trees of one. I was booking. And I never looked back, so I don’t know for sure if the guy tried to pursue me or not; but in retrospect, I doubt it. He was probably trying to get out of there as fast as I was. For a long time after, I had a fear that guy would come back for me, and that this time he would be ready for evasive action. I headed for cover anytime I was out playing and saw a sedan that blue-ish green color. I wasn’t tormented with fear, but I was mindful.
But even my mindfulness faded in time, and just as well. In retrospect, again, there was probably very little chance that guy would ever come back to our neighborhood, knowing I’d got a good look at him and his car, and had probably told everyone about it. He was right, too; except for the part about me telling everyone. In fact, I didn’t tell everyone. In fact, I didn’t tell anyone, not even my parents. It was just something I kept to myself.
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PROMOTIONS
Monday April 23 – Career Fair. I kid you not.
Tuesday April 24 – Nothing. And, of course, you’ll like it.
Wednesday April 25 – Nothing, again. The Brewers have long been known as the cheapest of the cheap when it comes to promotions and fan giveaways. Nice to see they are keeping that tradition alive. Or maybe they think the Astros are such a great draw, they don’t need promotions for this series.
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And I’m on my own, I’m on my own
(And, kid, you’d better get the picture)
And I’m all alone, I’m all alone
And I can’t go home
I could say I kept my near-miss abduction to myself out of nobility, in order to spare my parents the retroactive fear and anger and self-recrimination such an admission would have brought on. And maybe I did think of that, a little. But I know my primary motivation for not telling was selfish. If I told my parents, my mom would start being more restrictive, and would curtail my freedom, my freedom to just go out and play. And she would tell the other moms, and they would crack down on their kids, too. I knew if I told, it would get a whole lot less fun in that neighborhood, right away. For everyone.
So, I didn’t do it. I didn’t tell. I filed the whole thing away, maybe with a vague sense I’d have to deal with it again on some level in the future, maybe not. I was, like, nine years old at the time, and not all that sophisticated. And really, after filing it away, I pretty much went merrily along; granted, with a temporary phobia for metallic blue-ish green sedans and the men that might be in them.
In later years, I thought about it more. I wondered what the guy would’ve done to me. I am pretty sure he wouldn’t have killed me. That sort of thing really was pretty rare back then. But dying wasn’t what really concerned me, anyway. It was the other stuff that might have happened, had I been in his control. And I didn’t like to think about that, at all.
And so I didn’t. I don’t really know how the whole experience affected me later on, if it did at all. I am pretty sure it did in some way, but not greatly, I don’t think. I am just not the sort to be traumatized. Stuff rolls off of me. That is a plus sometimes, and a minus sometimes. In this case, I count it as a plus. The only thing that really bothered me, later – and it bothered me a lot, for awhile – was wondering if that guy continued with his activities, after he fucked up my abduction. Did he refine his technique from the things he learned in his failed attempt to grab me? Did I, inadvertently and unintentionally, help him get better at his “craft”? What if he went on to abduct, and even kill, other kids?
I never knew, and I decided a long time ago not to pursue it. Some things really are better left unsaid, some secrets really should be taken to the grave. It’s what we don’t know that makes our lives livable.
***************
Your mind might think it’s flying, baby
On those little pills
But you ought to know it’s dying, baby
Because speed kills
I finally got it together enough to get my ass up out of the bed; and take a shower, ice down some beer, and pack up the truck. All because Amphetamine Annie wanted to go to the beach that day. It pissed me off that I was coerced into taking her, but once I got down there, I was fine.
It was an average summer weekend at Bolivar – not too crowded, but far from empty. We secured a good spot to park and set up, not far from where Swede’s Rd. (Crystal Beach Dr.) emptied onto the beach. I set up our lawn chairs and cooler and this 8’ x 8’ canvas canopy I had, for shade if it got too hot. I was up in the bed of my truck, setting up the external stereo speakers, when my girl walked over and asked me to slather her down. So I stopped what I was doing, and proceeded to cover the parts of her body not covered by her bikini, which was by far most of it, with a thick coating of Coppertone Savage Tan, the kind with coconut oil in it. I was aroused a little by the sight of her barely dressed and all oiled up, with the sun glinting off of her. But my girl sensed it, and got out of range before I could do anything about it. I shook my head and went back to setting up the stereo.
Once I’d got everything the way I wanted it, I settled down into my lawn chair and did one of my favorite things in the world to do – I got pleasantly smashed, while meanwhile contemplating the ocean, and the waves, and the horizon. And eventually, I slipped off into a daydream . . .
It was 2011. Mid-summer weekend day. I’d been out working in the yard earlier, but now I was lying on the sofa in the living room, half watching a ballgame on the television, and half dozing/daydreaming. It was a pleasant feeling, to lie there and know I had taken care of my weekend around-the-house obligations, and now could snooze and half-ass watch a baseball game, with no guilt or recriminations. The guilt would have been self-inflicted, as would have the recriminations, by then. The soon-to-be ex-wife had moved into a townhouse with my youngest son weeks earlier, and my older son and I were left at the house, on our own. And he didn’t give a shit about the yard, or household chores in general, obviously; so the only person left to bitch at me about putting off doing what needed to be done around the house was me. And I was rarely in the mood to do it.
As I lay there between innings of the game, staring at the ceiling and pleasantly zoning out, a car commercial came on the TV. I don’t remember what brand of vehicle it was for, but they were using music in the background that I found out later was from a then popular pop song. I’d never heard it before that. Some European-sounding female singer, singing to music that sounded vaguely like electronica, or maybe trip-hop. To be honest, I wasn’t 100% sure I knew the difference. But anyway, this music was going on during the commercial, and I was barely aware of it, or of the commercial itself. Until the Euro-girl sang a lyric that just jolted me to attention: “You’re so lazy, you’re so lazy, you have a lazy life.”
It is startling how strong a memory trigger popular music can be. As soon as I heard that lyric, I was transported back 28 years, back to laying around my hot apartment with this kind of pretty but admittedly Tom-Petty-with-tits-looking chick, who was eating amphetamines like candy and babbling a bunch of shit I had no idea of. Trying to get me to get up and take her to the bed and fuck her, which wasn’t normally that hard for her to do, really. But I felt almost too lethargic, too lazy, to even stir myself for raw, jagged sex with a terminal junkie; something that had been a lifelong ambition of mine, for quite some time.
The whole period I was remembering was one of the worst and most difficult of my life. But here I was, nearly three decades on, remembering the surroundings and events and the speed-addled chick I was sleeping with wistfully, almost. In some ways, no matter how much I reflect and try to work things out . . . there are some parts of me, and some things I have done, that I will never understand or be able to explain to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all my own.
I’d misheard the song lyric in the car commercial, of course. The girl was actually singing something about an amazing life. But it hardly mattered. Once I heard it the way I heard it, well, it was going to be that way in my head forever. Up there in my mind with the lethargic days, the drug taking and the listlessness and the settling for a tweaker girl who vaguely resembled a rock star. With the appropriate female accoutrements, of course.
Sometimes I think it really is an amazing life.
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INJURIES
Milwaukee – Brandon Kintzler (RHP), has discomfort in his elbow and was put on the 15 day DL last week … but if dude wants to know what real discomfort is, just wait until seven or eight months from now, when all the evil planets align and a king-hell sized solar flare causes the magnetic poles to shift, fucking up our cellphones and causing us all to die painful, horrific deaths . . . now, you want to tell me about the discomfort in your elbow again, asshole?; Chris Narveson (LHP), has a tear in the rotator cuff in his pitching arm, and will seek a second opinion on whether to have surgery or not … he is not expected to return until sometime in 2013 … If you want an opinion … first thing, forget 2013 … I think whether you get an operation on your sore shoulder or not is really secondary, since in December we are all going to die, fucker, in a huge conflagration that will wipe out all human life … except for those people living in ICBM missile silos in North Dakota and Kansas and shit, which they converted into their houses … down there underground with a bunch of beef jerky, some cans of black-eyed peas, and a 55-gallon drum for a toilet/septic tank … so anyway, in light of all that, fuck your fucking shoulder, motherfucker.
Houston – Sergio Escalona (LHP), has a tear in his pitching elbow and is a candidate for Tommy John surgery (he will return in 2013 die, along with the rest of humanity … a horrible death on December 21, 2012, so the TJ surgery is kind of superfluous, don’t you think, Sergio?)
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All my achievements in days of yore
Range from pathetic to piss-poor
But all that’s gonna change
Because here comes sunrise
Yeah, here’s your sunrise
I was driving along, late at night, with nothing serious on my mind. Just a vaguely pleasant feeling of having accomplished something, of having done well and of seeing satisfying results come from my efforts.
I was coming from the hinterlands, from one of the outlying towns that was ancillary to the city I was now driving back into. Earlier that night in the city I had met an outlier chick, from one of the outlying towns. She had a sweet smile and gorgeous pale green eyes. All legs and hips and tits and semi-long blond hair, and these fucking eyes that just mesmerized me, and drew me in closely to her.
After a time, we had ended up back at her place, back in her outlying town. Just one side of a duplex, with two small bedrooms and a living area/kitchen, one bathroom I think, and not much else. I heard the not unpleasant sound of freight trains rumbling by in the night, somewhere nearby, at regular-seeming intervals. There was a full sized bed, in a smallish bedroom. My outlier girl was in the bed, lying on her right side, with her face up very close to mine on the pillows. She was looking at me intently, into my eyes, while I stroked the smooth skin on her back gently with the tips of my fingers. It was as if she was trying to discern something, I couldn’t imagine what, as she lay there, staring into my eyes.
It was weird, but when we were really up close like that and I looked back at her in the semi-darkness, her face and eyes and visage in general took on a somewhat different appearance than normal. The feeling I got observing this was very pleasant and intense, and I seemed to see it especially if she was being brought to some level of pleasure at the time. I had the oddest impression that she was a chameleon of some sort. Her entire being seemed to change in some slight but basic way when she was brought to the brink of physical ecstasy.
I was thinking about that as I drove along in the night. Soon, I approached the Purple Heart bridge that would bring me back into the city. As I began to make my way up the incline of the bridge, my heart was beating evenly, and I felt pleasant and happy and at peace.
Then, as I was crossing over the bridge, I caught a glimpse of the great, black river flowing in the darkness underneath. Ambient light from the city was playing off of the surface of the water here and there. It startled me a little at first. The river was basically benign in appearance, but at seeing the vast blackness beneath me, and the mysterious, unknowable river flowing through it, I was quickly robbed of my feelings of pleasantness, and peace. Instead, I was filled with a vague sense of dread. All our superficial happiness is forever being eroded away, by a silent black river that flows and flows down beneath us, out of sight and out of mind. A great, black river that can occasionally be spotted, when a bit of light glints off its surface. It is always a bit chilling to be reminded that the river is down there, always flowing, always eroding.
As I came up over the crest of the bridge, I spotted the city laid out below, and saw on the distant horizon the earliest hint of dawn. Because of the odd combination of streetlights and lighted advertising along the highway mixed with the natural light just beginning to eke its way into the darkness, the city seemed to look a bit softer than it normally did. And upon noticing, my mood began to soften, as well. I had crossed the great black river, and was descending into a zone of familiarity and relative comfort.
Oh, I might from time to time consort with an outlier girl, and lie with her for awhile in her bed in her house in her outlying town, out in the hinterlands. But in the end, even if it was the very end of the night, I always made my way back through the darkness, back across the wide, black river. Back to home.
It is funny how a seemingly random arrangement of concrete and steel, glass and wood, blight and indifference and ugliness, can become so familiar over time they become pleasing to us, almost beautiful in their way. These cold materials, arranged as they are and as we have seen them arranged for years and years, take on an aura of intense familiarity, and comfort, and safety. As I descended to the foot of the bridge that night, and then continued on, to make the long curve around downtown, and out toward the residential areas on the west side of town, the dread I had so recently felt when crossing over the great blackness below was receding. A warm feeling of comfort slowly came over me to replace it. I was home. I had made it home, once again.
And somewhere out across the great black river, on the other side, in one of the outlying towns out in the hinterlands, there lay a beautiful outlier girl, her beautiful green eyes glistening in the semi-darkness of her small bedroom, in her half of a small house. Her eyes were moist, but she was not crying. She was in fact smiling, though mostly to herself; but if one looked closely, one could see on her lovely face, framed by her long, blond hair, a hint of her beautiful smile. She was smiling, inside and out, because she knew that at about that same moment, this guy she’d met that night, and had brought home with her for awhile, was returning to his place in the city, beyond the great river. And he was thinking that he’d returned safely to home.
To home. Of course, home is where the heart is, as they say. And at the thought of that, the beautiful outlier girl smiled to herself again, and then rolled over onto her side and pulled the covers up over the naked top half of her as she sank her head into her pillow. She was happy, and at peace. She slowly closed her eyelids over her beautiful eyes, robbing the universe of their light, at least for a little awhile. And she fell gently to sleep, to the sound of a lone freight train rumbling by, somewhere out in the darkness.
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Astros lose the series, 1-2.
You can follow the action in real time in the Game Zone
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