HOUSTON ASTROS (3-4) vs. TORONTO BLUE JAYS (3-4)

Rogers Centre
One Blue Jays Way
Toronto, Ontario, M5V 1J1
America’s Hat

One good thing about being a really bad team with not much hope of getting any better any time soon – when you start the season against two mid-to upper-level AL opponents and come out of it 3-4 … even if it was all home games, that feels pretty damn good.

On the other hand, if you go 3-4 to open the season and are at best a mediocre-to-average team, in the AL East … well, you are probably going to finish in fifth place, anyway. If you have spent a lot of money – or loonies and toonies, as Adam Dunn once called Canadian dollars – over the last few years, trying unsuccessfully to vault yourself into the AL East conversation, to no avail … that isn’t so good, either. And, if you look around and realize you play your home games in a pretentious little country with a huge inferiority complex, namely Canada, well … that is three strikes, and you’re fucking oot.

Apparently, Alan Ashby quit his announcing gig with the Blue Jays to join Bill Brown on Astros TV broadcasts and replace the departing Jim Deshaies. Prior to last season. TV broadcasts, hmm? I wouldn’t know.

The Blue Jays start all the games in this series at 6:07. Not 6:00, or 6:05, or 6:10, but 6:07. They also misspell the name of their stadium. Must be one of those Celsius-Fahrenheit things.

Their street name is pretty cool, though.

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SCHEDULE
Tuesday April 8
Houston vs. Toronto 6:07 p.m. CDT

Wednesday April 9
Houston vs. Toronto 6:07 p.m. CDT

Thursday April 10
Houston vs. Toronto 6:07 p.m. CDT

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

I can’t stay knowing what’s going down
I can’t stay, darkness on the edge of town
Streetwise kids in an act of defiance
Out to defeat what’s already behind us
Rattle and shake their political cans
Giving directions without any plans

It is late at night when the darker thoughts come in. I am usually asleep by then; but every once in a while, I’m not.

I used to wonder what it was like, to be older. Well, not too much, to tell the truth … One of the greatest gifts the benevolent creator ever bestowed upon me was the self-awareness to know that wherever I was and whatever I was doing at any given time when I was young, it was probably one of the best times I’d ever have. I knew it right then, while it was happening. So I never had to worry, later on, that I didn’t realize how good I really had it, way back when. Oh, yes I did. Oh, yes I did.

I remember my brother and I had this ongoing conversation/running joke when we were in our late teens-early twenties. We would be sitting in our lawn chairs on the beach, a big 50-something quart Igloo cooler between us. The sun would be high, and glistening off of our coconut oil covered skin. The deep copper color of our hides was made even deeper when filtered through the polarized Wayfarers I always had on my face, back then. There were attractive young women in skimpy bathing suits and bikinis all around us. Actually, a lot of people would be around us … some were doing what my brother and I were doing, just kicking back, and being reflective; others would be throwing Frisbees back and forth, or just walking along the edge of the water, flip-flops in one hand, canned beer in a foam coo-zee in the other. There might be a few Sunfish sailboats skipping across the waves a little ways out and, closer in, people doing various things in the shallower water. And, all the while, the waves from the Gulf of Mexico would come washing in, in rhythm, one after another; and one could hear the noise the waves made, all along … over, in, and in between the noise from the car stereo, blaring out the ‘Stones or Aerosmith or Van Halen or whoever was being played on KLOL-FM that day.

The scene was a near-perfect portrait of what the late 1970’s in America were like, for me and my kind, anyway.

And somewhere in there, after we were both half lit, my brother would lean over to me and say, “I wonder what we’d be doing right now if we lived in Russia? Or Czechoslovakia?”

It wasn’t an idle question, entirely. The people on my mother’s side had only relatively recently immigrated to these shores. My maternal grandmother, who was Czech, was first generation American. My maternal grandfather came to this country at the age of 15, from Russia.  So, theoretically, if one or another thing had gone a little differently along the way, my brother and I might not have ever been there at all that day, on that beach, enjoying the all those wonderful aural, visual and tactile sensations. We might have been born and lived instead in one motherland or another, back in Eastern Europe, perhaps under one of the stultifying Communist puppet regimes that were so popular out that way, back in that time. We would have trudged through our mundane, oppressive lives, never having known about coconut oil or babes in bikinis or listening to the Stones and the ocean’s roar simultaneously, slouched in a lawn chair, out in the shining, glistening sun.

I would lean over to my brother and reply, “Probably shoveling coal somewhere, in the snow.”

And we would both laugh. We knew we had it damn good, then and there. Even if we were a bit haughty about it.

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PITCHING MATCHUPS
Tuesday – HOU Obie Oberholzer (LHP 0-1, 4.76) vs. TOR Mark Buehrle (LHP 1-0, 0.00)

Wednesday – HOU Lucas Harrell RHP 0-1, 15.00) vs. TOR Brandon Morrow (RHP 0-1, 7.20)

Thursday – HOU Dallas Keuchel (LHP 0-1, 7.20) vs. TOR Dustin McGowan (RHP 0-1, 13.50)

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

I can’t stay staring down a .44
I can’t stay dying on the killing floor
A man in blue and he’s drawing a gun
A child in the shadows, too scared to run
A crack in the mirror of a teenage dream
Like a lost generation on LSD

On the odd occasion that I am awake now, late at night, in the strange hours, as Loren Eiseley called them … the strange hours, when the darker thoughts come creeping in, when men have their most personal conversations with themselves … when, after having gone ‘round all day or all year with a sunny outlook, and spreading good cheer everywhere they go, they will that same night, in the strange hours, question their very purpose, their very being, whether the time they are spending here has any meaning at all. Would it even matter a bit if they did not wake up the next morning, and go about their positive rounds, spreading their good cheer?

I think it would matter. As I have grown up and matured a little, I have noticed that I have slowly moved away from my younger days, when I surrounded myself with cynical and negative or at least extremely fatalistic folks. Back then, I kind of looked askance at my perpetually cheerful peers. Maybe I thought one had to be moody and dark to really experience the meaning of life. It wasn’t always easy for me, feigning the moroseness. To be honest, moodiness and darkness were not part of my natural disposition. I had a reservoir of it in me that I could draw on, but I wasn’t inclined to immerse myself in it. I think I have come to realize I am something like my father was, in that way. He could be very dark, but normally only in brief, episodic bouts. For the most part he was funny, and he appreciated life’s absurdities quite a bit.

My father didn’t suffer fools gladly, but he didn’t mind being foolish himself from time to time, if it served a greater comedic purpose. He was a wonderful, truly gifted storyteller and physical caricaturist. It was his Irish heritage, I guess. All I know is, my brothers and I would beg him to tell us stories – about his youth, about amusing people he’d come across along the way, about family members and friends … from the time we were kids until we had grown up, we were always requesting new yarns, or asking for a replay of our favorites. If he was in the mood, he might launch into an intricate characterization, about one of our uncles, say … Perhaps our Uncle Don, who was a decent guy and had good qualities and all, but who could also be hopelessly pretentious. My dad would start telling us about the time Uncle Don, normally a chinos and t-shirt and Converse Chuck Taylors kind of guy, got involved in a small community theater in his town in the 1970s, and soon started going around everywhere in a black turtleneck sweater and horn-rimmed glasses, with a serious look on his face, and smoking a pipe. It was very much like some of the townsfolk/thespians in the film Waiting For Guffman, only this was many years before that fine movie came out.

You would had to have known my Uncle Don, and have seen my dad’s characterization of him, puffing thoughtfully on his pipe and scratching his chin while struggling to elucidate his ideas on method acting, to really get it. All I can tell you is, it slayed us. He would have my brothers and I literally rolling around on the floor in helpless laughter. The man had a gift.

It was a shame that the darkness in him won out in the end. I don’t know everything about that, but I know that darkness must have been very powerful; to be able to overwhelm all the good and fun that was in him, also.

When I was younger, I was harder on him than I should have been. I had the haughtiness of youth going for me, and I thought less of him for his failures, back then.

I don’t this less of him for it anymore, I don’t think. I am older now.  I know how fucking hard it all is.

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INJURIES
HOU – Nobody important. Dexter Fowler has been under the weather, but is supposed to return for this series.

TOR – J.A. Happ, LHP is on the 15-day DL with a sore back; Casey Janssen, RHP is on the 15-dqy DL with a sore back; José Reyes, SS in on the 15-day DL with a sore hamstring.

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

I can’t stay knowing what’s going down
I can’t stay, darkness on the edge of town
The brain’s still twitching but the eyes are closed
My best friend’s dying of an overdose
A red light flares unaccounted for
It’s happening now and it’s happened before

When one is young, one simply doesn’t have a long enough experience of living to see the incremental good that accrues in one’s favor, just by getting up every day and not being a negative prick about everything. When we were young, it was so easy to fall into a facile, faux-existentialist stance – you know, the live fast-die young attitude. Cheap fatalism. Don’t worry about the future; you might not have one anyway. It felt so cool to be that way, just wake up every day and roll yourself out of the biscuit and pull on some clothes, and go out and face the world like a junior Jean-Paul Sartre, or maybe a still wet-behind-the-ears Albert Camus, at least. I shudder when I think of that now; but it felt real enough then. The sheer stupidity of youth – I don’t suppose very many of us were entirely immune to it. I certainly wasn’t.

And now … and now. I go to bed earlier, and soberer, for one thing. So I miss the strange hours, mostly, which is probably just as well. I get pretty bored pretty quickly with darkness and brooding and lightweight existentialism these days. I realize, too, that by this point, I have mostly surrounded myself with cheerful people, some of them relentlessly so. Good for them. I tell them stories, and make them laugh. They make me feel good, and lift me up with their energy. I am not a Pollyanna and never will be, but I have a longer view with which to operate from now. And I see the value in living life in a good and cheerful way.

I remember at my father’s funeral several years ago, so many people came up to me afterward, just wanting to talk about him a bit. It was odd in a way, because he had flamed out rather spectacularly some years before, and had left town – his hometown, the scene of all his triumphs, and tragedies. And he had never once come back. Until that day, when we buried him, I mean.

But various old colleagues and friends, male and female, some of whom I knew, and many who I didn’t know at all … all these people came up, and introduced themselves, and then said a few things … how it sure was a shame about the old man, he was a brilliant guy, etc., etc. Too bad things ended up the way they did. And then, to a person almost, they would begin to lighten up a bit. You could see some brightness come back into the features, maybe a small smile, and before long I would hear one or a couple of tales about my father either doing something hilarious or, in a few cases, quite good and altruistic, for all these people in his universe I had never really had any idea of. It was a little overwhelming to me; but I stayed until the last person left. I listened to every anecdote, or recollection of an act of kindness, and I didn’t hurry anyone along. I had a sense it was good for these people who knew him and in some cases loved him, to work back from their sorrow to a state of gentle happiness, thinking about how much fun or just how good the old man was, when he wanted to be.

I think it was good for me to hear it, too. And it makes me smile, thinking of it now.

My father’s life, from the beginning of it to the end, was not all there was to his story. I can see that now. The fact that his son could not fully appreciate all the nuances of it, and all the good in it, within his life span was not his fault, and I don’t think it was mine, either. That is just the way it works, sometimes. Thankfully, the memory of him and his spirit outlived the flesh and blood. I have made my peace with all of it and then some, by now. That is just an extremely gratifying thing; I don’t think I am eloquent enough to express how it feels to finally get to that place.

And the funny thing is, I would guess it will be the same for my boys someday, after I am gone.  Whatever happens to me after that morning that I don’t wake up, I am pretty sure they will hear things and have things related to them – especially if I last here for a while and they are a bit older than now when it happens – they will hear things about the old man that will make them smile when they hear them, and when they think of me. The same way I do when I am reminded of my father, now.

Meanwhile, the strange hours come, and the strange hours go. I am usually snoozing through them nowadays, dreaming of everything from hitting the game-winning home run to diving deep down into the deep, blue sea. And on the odd night I am still awake when they come, I might muse about things a bit; how I have come through so little and so much, so much darkness and so little light, and vice-versa. Only to find, having made it to the middle of middle age, when men are supposed to be brooding on their lives and their mortality and things of that nature, particularly in the strange hours … only to find myself totally unable to brood very much on anything, even in the strangest hours. I have been startled awake … and have found myself, in the middle of middle age, to be mostly at peace, and content, and very happy. Somehow or another.

Somewhere out there, I hope the old man is smiling at this. I get you now, man. I hope you can get me now, too. And so it is, as the world turns and keeps turning, spinning through the endless darkness. And yet somehow, the force field that is comprised of the endless darkness and the world spinning endlessly through it; and comprised of my father and his father, and of me and my sons, and of everything else we have ever thought of or ever could think of, and of all the people we have known and not known, all along the way, on our endless, spinning journey … somehow, just briefly, almost imperceptibly, the darkened void we are all spinning through is brightened just slightly, has just been made the tiniest bit better, by one man’s laugh, and another man’s smile, just at the thought of it.

As we hope it will always be brightened, by little things such as this.

There’s a new kid on the block
And he’s taking my place
Walking on my grave

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

Astros win the series, 2-1.

Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.