wether

i had the good fortune to be traveling a good part of the battle road this morning, and i noted that, unlike during last week's observances, i was seeing the fields and stone walls much in the same way they must have been beheld over 232 years ago in their first, best warm april sunshine. like recently waiting for rivers to recede and soccer fields to dry, i imagine gage's impatience must have been exquisite. (careful what you wish for...)

eisenhower waited out the june weather and came out a bit better for his patience. i suppose, irons being what they are, hot is hot. but it seems today less whether time might be right, but rather which star might be chosen to follow. considering the castrated and classically malapropped ovine leader, (wouldn't "belleweather" be just another sunny day?), and how dutifully the flock can be counted upon to follow regardless of the risk, i'm thinking that we choose our wethers at our peril.

some might be inclined to offer sympathy for a perceived "plight", (and some might be inclined to continue to see themselves in one), but clearer eyes must see more of the truth. the way i see it, freedom didn't need to be stopped in the same way that oppression did, and karma seems to have found its usual way to making the distinction. substitute faith (and faithfulness) and deception, and my last few years come into clearer focus.

fantasy

it was pointed out to me again today how "fantasy" sports are more ludicrous than anything else, and double for the people who play them. yep, we all ought to be doing, or at the very least appreciating the real thing rather than following a bogus facsimile and pretending we're "managing" the outcome. all agreed.

i just like knowing all the players, ya know? when bobby orr taught me to love hockey, i could name you the full rosters of all the teams in the league. (ok, there were only 6 in the "original 6", so not so hard, but you hopefully get where i'm going with this). there was nothing like understanding that, when keith magnusen climbed over the boards, that there was HISTORY there, and a truly rewarding meaning behind bobby's pummeling him senseless. watching jose guillen charge the mound opening day at fenway (for striking out, for chrissakes, donnelly didn't even hit him) it made everything much richer to know that he'd dimed donnelly the year before for pine tar on his glove and induced a bench-clearing incident against his old team, the angels, who, before that, had voted as a team to kick him off their playoff roster even though he was one of their best hitters, speaking volumes about his "character"... so how does a guy KNOW all this stuff???

me, i'd recommend a little fantasy sports. when we were kids, our vehicle was baseball card collecting, (and "stratomatic" baseball if we were really obsessive), and this isn't anything more sinister than that. nope, i don't go to the store to buy a pack every day to see if i can get ahold of dice-k's rookie card. but with him on my fantasy team, i'm more intimately aware of his performances, and those of hundreds of other major-leaguers, than i could be by just trying to make sense of those tiny little box scores in the papers. (late-forties eyesight is no picnic on the fine print). nope, it doesn't really take any time either (less than this blogging if you must know) because there are hours of down time in a week getting harangued on pointless corporate conference calls and the like.

so, did you know that bill hall and ivan rodriguez both hit grand slams yesterday?

finishing

taylor twellman went looking the ball in the wrong direction on a cross (from andy dorman) that he usually puts away with a smile, then he struck nothing but woodwork on a goal-scorer's strike from 20 yards out that just as easily could have put the revs into the win column. nobody is begrudging him the occasional miss, but there's a lot of muttering about finishing that goes on after games like these. (we'll set aside riley's own-goal cuz there's nothing good to come from discussing *that*).

baseball builds itself out of the law of large numbers, providing its managers with no end to the number of statistical games that they can play. football (the american kind) on the other hand simply lets the bigger guys beat the other ones up kinda like how prizefighters can go for knockouts just as easily as points and win either way. but soccer awards not nearly the number of chances that would let statistics serve as a useful guide, nor is it a game of anything other than finesse and the apparent whims of fortune. what's to do?

i'm struck today by the once-or-at-least-seldom-in-a-lifetime nature of the events of a lifetime, and how that glorious intersection of fortune is sometimes (most of the time) just that little bit out of reach. you still have to go full-in, and you have to hold your head high for trying, even if the try was wide, as it usually is. and anyone who's counting shouldn't be.

right for me

fads rarely find me, let alone the mainstream, and i neither know starbucks nor drink coffee of any kind. i do like tea occasionally, but i find earl grey noisome and herbals about as funny as many of the people who stock their cupboards with them. i simply don't fit in.

now someone of moral importance to my life (via influence on my wife) has diagnosed this separate-ness as a pathology, and tipped his hand that its eradication might be the sole proof of my "rehabilitation". feh.

i haven't listened to the radio in forever, greedily filling my passion for music with the amazing abundance of independent voices found on places like amiestreet.com, none of whom are known to anyone in my life, it would seem, but me. even said wife admits that some of it is truly remarkable, and remarkably good, but there's it in a nutshell: do we and/or should we, as a species, listen to music as a solitary or communal pursuit? i appear to have the odd position out...

just off the top of my head, in addition to coffee and independent music and among my other personal interests otherwise shunned by my "tribe", i like brewing and drinking my own beer, playing and following soccer, avoiding and even repudiating organized religion, reading and talking about local, national and world history, writing and reading hopelessly convoluted and complex (but to my mind proper) english, and, perhaps worst of all, keeping my own counsel about what is "right for me".

i think that would, but for my commercial vocation and familial responsibilities, make me most akin to an artist, more than any other type of whomever i know. sad part is that i've never been given, or, as i should put it, given myself the imprimatur, to pursue art in my life.

i think that's next.