1. I am in Kansas!
2. Kansas is not as flat as you think it is.
3. I am going to Manhattan, Kansas this evening, which I’m afraid will be very dull. It was really fun when I was there in 1987. I was an impressionable 7-year-old.
4. The Seattle Mariners have lost fifteen (15) games in a row.
5. I have not seen anyone I know for thirty-two (32) hours. It will be even longer before I see someone I know again.
6. I will be in Topeka tomorrow, a key setting in Loosely Based. I have not been there since I wrote said novel.
7. I used to regularly compare things to “the size of Topeka” to indicate their largeness.
8. “Largeness” is probably not a word, but Firefox has not red-squiggleyed it for spelling. Firefox has now chosen to red-squiggley “squiggleyed”. And “squiggley”.
9. I get a little punchy on the road. This mood is preferable to the incredibly sad/angry spells I get at least once an hour when on the road alone these days.
10. This list has more than ten facts.

Mariners’ record this year: 2-2
Mariners’ record this year with me watching: 0-2
Mariners’ record this year without me watching: 2-0

I might want to keep track of this over the course of a season, but it might be too depressing. There’s something very 2010-feeling about the above statistics, making the whole thing seem retrograde and unfortunate. I’m still getting mail from the Law Office of Trudi G. Manfredo, slowly training me to not let my heart leap when I see a large envelope or package waiting for me by the mailbox. No wonder so many adults used to hate getting mail. No wonder people have so robustly embraced e-mail and the postal service is having to run pyramid schemes to stay afloat.

Dissolution. There’s an apt word for you. The solution is getting dissed. Amen.

Got my copy of The Pale King today, the first new book I’ve let myself purchase since I started getting mail from Trudi. I am palpably excited about it, despite the fact that I know it won’t finish, perhaps especially because, since David Foster Wallace’s books never really finish and often almost die mid-sentence. They are about the journey and the exploration and in this case, about the descent into madness that accompanies a final chapter, a final submission, the narrative into suicide. Which is not to say, of course, that this book killed him, but it probably didn’t help. Electro-convulsive therapy is what killed him, of course, which I’ve discussed before. I’m now faced with a dilemma about abandoning or suspending my progress through Underworld to pick up the new tome, which feels somewhat compelling because my interest in DeLillo only came from running out of Wallace to read. However, there’s something to be said for savoring and delaying things, especially when they are the last of things. Once I get through The Pale King, there will be no more Wallace fiction in this lifetime.

What of apprehension, then, of surprise, of anticipation, of expectation? I have been on a new mantra lately, a big kick, something that stems from my interactions with Trudi and friends, yes, but also a longer scope of life writ large. It’s that what we can see coming is never that scary. Dental visits, deadlines, interviews, departures. We build them up in our minds to be cataclysmic moments of potential doom, but rarely does the actual moment even push the meter of our stress levels. They may not always be pleasant, may not always turn out, but not a one of them ranks as the top fifty worst days of any of our lives. It’s the surprises that count against us, the things we don’t see coming, the car accidents and sudden deaths and blindsidings and phone calls in the dead of night. There’s some relaxation and sobriety to be gained from all this, and I’m not even certain the sum of the information is reassuring. On the one hand, we’d be well served by just calming down about everything we dread. On the other, we must constantly look skyward in a more overarching dread for the calamities which may fall therefrom.

Of course the nature of surprise is that it can’t be anticipated, so the idea of this creating an overall aura of creeping dread seems silly in some ways. One could ruin every day one has remaining caught up in negative anticipation of death and I know many who do it (or would, or start whenever they come close). Some people even mistake my own hyper-awareness of mortality for this, though it’s actually the opposite – it’s a comfort with the concept designed to fuel energy into the living days, not a draining dread instead. (Incidentally, I know I keep overusing the word “dread” instead of synonyms, but it’s to hammer it home… and isn’t there an onomatopoetic beauty to the word? Does anything sound like “dread” so much as that solemn dead syllable itself?) No wonder we love surprise parties and surprise gifts and surprise whirlwind trips to the Bahamas. It corrects our vision of where the badness comes from, reminds us that positives can come from traditionally negative sources. That the clear blue sky is not just waiting to kill us, but perhaps also to elate us, that the random cacophony of wills involved in shaping our world can be on our side as well. No wonder I chose to delay telling the Rutgers team some particularly excellent news I have for them tonight so they could savor the nature of positive anticipation as well, so they could suspend their lack of faith in the notion of surprise.

Of course this last is a dual-sided sword, for in having time to anticipate so-called surprises, there is the inevitable churn of disappointment that correlates quite cleanly to the relief of surviving dreaded events. How many Christmases, birthdays, long-planned dates lived up to the expectation, the savory sweetness of mental pre-hyperbole? If someone tells you to go into a room and imagine the best thing you can, what are the odds of that getting exceeded? We are an imaginative species and capitalism trains us to be disappointed with whatever we actually have available to us in the face of what we could have. This is why we are so unhappy as a society. This is why we have drug and alcohol problems. This is why, yes, marriages so often dissolve into mailed paperwork as a replacement for one-time dreams. Reality is almost always short of our expectations, our best hopes. And it is all too easy to trade in reality for a lottery ticket, literal or figurative, suspending the idea that one’s chronic disappointment is a product of the very nature of expectation itself rather than merely unlucky circumstances that could hypothetically be changed. All too often, the unhappiest people learn far too late that it is their mindset, not their means, that have led them to disappointment.

My creative pursuits have found massive suspension against the backdrop of unexpected employment and intensified responsibility. The May 15th deadline for the fourth novel is entirely laughable at this juncture, long ago mentally erased if not literally so on my year-long plastic wall calendar. The summer arises as a possible boon to the creative and imaginative pursuits, a resurrection of quizzes and novels and the things I spend my life promising myself to do while usually getting caught up in more directly personable and interactive pursuits. Is it against my nature to sequester and write, to scribble and shun in order to communicate in a wider, broader, more explicable way? Should I be more comfortable with the 1-on-1, the 1-on-10, the small-scale but somehow attainable pursuits of change? Is this my true calling, in spite of what my ten-year-old self concluded? My ten-year-old self was sick of people, felt rejected and isolated. Every year since, with only romantic exceptions, I’ve felt more welcomed and included and inspired by the people in my life. Perhaps it is there, in iteration and not stagnant text, that I have the most to offer. Or perhaps it is a balance, as feedback rolls in from the prior two tomes of my own, perhaps there is something quality in scaling these pursuits against each other, in alternation, in the much vaunted middle ground.

I can’t even update Duck and Cover on a regular basis these days, it seems… today all but destined to be another gap in the already reduced weekday schedule. Part of this is a logistical paper problem – I’ve worn out the month of Oscar themes, but need some supplies to rejoin the regular tread of the other eleven months. Of course I feel an additional disconnect when facing the political world, however, namely an inability to relate to the events of the world around me. The US has become a hyper-militaristic state, never flinching from a conflict where anonymous bombing can destroy buildings, lives, and morality. And all the people I warned about Obama starting a war, I wrangled with about his Afghanistan comments and said he would find countries to invade in his tenure, that it’s become almost required action from each Presidential term, they can’t wait to sign up as being “in” on the Obama campaign on Facebook, can’t wait to commit to four more years of death by sky. There are no Democratic or Republican ideals, there is only a commitment to big business, big war, big money, big death. This is America’s role and influence on the world and the only hope is that someone eventually gets sick of it. But it won’t come from within, that’s increasingly clear. The next generation has been co-opted, far too susceptible to the idea that whoever America replaces bad leaders with will be better even in the face of plethoric counter-evidence everywhere in the world. The simple notion that killing can lead to progress has done more harm than any other single concept, and yet it remains close to its most pervasive at this very moment in history. Six-thousand years, no real progress. Just flashy machines and technological advancements to bring us our books from far away, our mail from law offices, our bodies to one continent or another, while our minds and emotions fail to keep up.

It’s no coincidence that the most satisfying aspects of our lives are the most ancient. Yoga, oral discussion, the warm feeling of connection to another human soul. It is at our most rooted that we are the most secure, happy, able to trust and hope. Put away the phone, unless it is really helping you communicate directly and robustly. Put away the screens, the bells, the whistles. Sit. Think. Read, maybe, or maybe just talk, even to yourself. The core of our experiences are no different than they were 6,000 years ago, or maybe longer. The best hope for progress may, in fact, be regress.

Truly random musings, because it’s that kind of day and I’m in that kind of mood:

1. Life is a lot better when one isn’t in chronic tooth pain.
2. I’m really wildly excited about our tournament, now just nine days away. You should check out how much fun we’re having with our theme.
3. Yoga can be quite painful, especially for one’s head/neck. I am not trying to play with headstands any more.
4. In related news, I think there’s something wrong with my system when it’s held upside-down. I’ve always hated upside-down roller-coasters and last night my head felt much like it does after going on one. This may be related to migraines or just having a thin skull or something.
5. Baseball season is likely to increase quality of life soon. At least, until the M’s are 20 below .500, which will probably be about late May or mid-June.
6. I have/get to spend the weekend on the Princeton campus. This should be… interesting.
7. Computers seem to corrode my discipline. Showers enhance it. Food is a crapshoot.
8. I need to find a place to feed ducks regularly when spring comes. This is one of those random little aspects of life, like having an armchair or burning candles regularly or talking to people more, that is really easy to do and really ups my attitude about everything. I think at the end of life, it’s easy to ask why we didn’t fill our days with more tiny little enjoyable activities.
9. Most things seem worse in advance than they actually are. This should be the basis for fearlessness, especially in accumulation. Look back on all the things you dreaded and got through. Is life really worth dreading?
10. I think whenever I next get a pet, which could be years from now, it will be a rabbit. Preferably an English Spot:

Dave Niehaus died last night at the age of 75. Most of you probably don’t even know who he is, but the picture above might give you a running start. He was the man who single-handedly (or voicedly) convinced me to be a Mariners fan. He was the shepherd of my audio youth, the man who may have first inspired me to take an interest in public speaking. Indeed, it was an aspiration of mine to be a baseball radio announcer long before a speaker or debater. Although I guess drama had something to do with that evolution as well.

A lot of what I would want to say about Dave Niehaus today is what I already said about him when Ken Griffey Jr. retired earlier this year. Read that post and you’ll see how inextricable the influence of Dave Niehaus as the lead broadcaster for the Seattle Mariners was from my growing to love the team, from my love of all the players whose names he called amid the excitement of “My oh my!”, “Fly away!”, and “Grand salami!” He was the consummate broadcaster, warm, friendly, approachable, prone to enthusiasm at all the right moments. And of course he was on the call when the greatest moment in Mariner history happened, that fateful fall of 1995:

In recent years, I’d gotten a chance to reconnect with Niehaus during his early-inning stints on the TV broadcasts and late-inning stints on radio, both available in California and Jersey through the magic of the Internet. He’d been wearying a bit, laboring under the strains of a septuagenarian body running through a much younger man’s schedule. They were giving him breaks in the middle innings. But in 2008, he finally was inducted into the Hall of Fame, and the lift in his voice that came in the final two years thereafter was clearly audible.

It is thus tragic, but somehow almost fitting, that the M’s lost 101 games in his final year with the team, with the planet. The Mariners have never been about winning, not really, not even when they set the record for wins in 2001 only to fall short of a World Series. The Mariners of 1977 that Niehaus first broadcasted lost 98 games. They went on to have six seasons worse than that, including 2010, and one equally bad (1992). They didn’t even get above .500 once until 1991, by which time Niehaus was well on his way to converting me away from the A’s and into a lifetime of love for Seattle. And the next year they still lost 98 games.

Listening to a Mariners game will never be the same. Dave Niehaus has announced nearly every one of their games in franchise history. No one knows what it’s like to be aware that the M’s are playing and not know that somewhere, whether directly audible or not, Mr. Niehaus is plying his craft in the booth, musing and screaming with every pitch and swing.

Thanks for everything, Dave. Fly away.

Forgive the use of the Star Warsy sounding subtitle in the new logo up top, but it’s really the most accurate thing I can convey. There’s a reason that film was a smash hit, and if you go back and look at it, it wasn’t because of the acting, dialogue, or even the special effects. I’m going with title.

Explanations, you ask? No one ever called me an enemy of the sine-curve. And since there was nowhere to go but up a few days back, the universe promptly complied. Or I dug myself out. Whatever narrative you prefer, based on your accordance of free-will, control, fate, or what have you. As soon as I can resolve the paradoxes of absolute free will and the benevolent safety-net of the universe, I’ll let you know.

Suffice it to say that I’ve had the best 50 hours of my last 2,500. It’s been over a hundred days since the crisis began, and it feels like I’ve been truly happy in a sustainable (read: more than a few hours) way for the first time in that whole duration.

Some causes:

1. UPenn vastly surpassed Maryland (which was only two weeks ago, and the last competition we attended) as the best tournament in RUDU club history (caveating again the legends of early-1990’s teams that were comparable and technically organized as a different club). Dave & Kyle won the tournament, the first tourney win in the 10-year history of RUDU. Farhan & Chris broke for the first time as a team, including Farhan’s first-ever break, won quarters on a 3-0, and then barely dropped semis on a 3-2, finishing 3rd overall. First and third. Needless to say, the team was euphoric all weekend and everyone was just beaming at the team dinner as we basked in the glow of having come a ballot short of closing out finals. And Krishna & Bhargavi were in a bubble round to boot. As the post that will go up on the debate side will attest (once we get an image unloaded off someone’s camera to display atop the site), Rutgers is now 5th-ranked in the country, breaking our all-time high from two weeks ago, and Dave & Kyle are the 4th-ranked partnership in the country. Yeah. It was a pretty good weekend.

2. Today I got a call about a job interview for one that I’d applied to long enough ago that I’d given up on it. Turns out that they were sifting through 400 resumes and I’m one of three (3) finalists getting interviewed in the next couple days. It’s in NYC, four days a week, wrapping pretty neatly around debate. It looks like I can get monthly train passes that keep the transportation costs from being prohibitive, and carry the added bonus of giving me a marginal-cost-free ticket into New York whenever I want. There’s no guarantee, but I’m feeling pretty good about it. And even if I don’t get it, it bodes well for future such applications. My interview’s tomorrow.

3. The San Francisco Giants, long my second-favorite team in baseball and my favorite NL team, are one win away from the World Series title, their first in the city I used to work in. While my obsession with their playoff run has been limited to listening on the computer due to not having a TV and generally being lower energy for much of October, I’m still elated to see them on the verge of this milestone, especially coming at the expense of Texas. I can’t imagine how Gris must be feeling right about now.

4. There has been another development which I will refrain from overtly discussing, probably for a long time depending on how things go. But it’s good and has helped turn things around in conjunction with the above.

Happy? Yeah, I’ve been happy lately. For real. Today especially, with that job interview coming in on top. I can look at these four things and think they might not look like much. You might even say they were all obviously inevitable. But in the throes of the last hundred days, not a one of them, let alone all four, felt even likely. That’s the nature of a tunnel.

It’s far too early to declare any sort of emergence from the tunnel and it’s clear that all four of these things are tenuous (well, probably not debate, since that’s pretty well established and no one can undo the accomplishments of the past nor deny the momentum it implies for the future). But it’s a big fat start. And there’s enough factors that even if one or two collapse completely, there’s a lot to build on. It’s rally time, kids. Get your caps on.

Postscript:

Cleaning up my place today and doing the surprisingly enjoyable laundry (having it in the basement instead of down the road or at the laundromat is remarkably fun – this is the closest I’ve lived to a washer/dryer since living at home in high school), I was listening to Pandora. And paying close attention when a song I’d never heard came on.

It was Tom Petty’s new “Something Good Coming”, and I submit it to you as the best encapsulation expressible of my current mood:
Listen to/watch “Something Good Coming” here.

This past weekend was a good one. As always, you can check out the Rutgers Debate blog for details on how things went for the team. They neither disappointed nor went over the top this weekend, though they were frustrated with their octofinal decision. The disappointment was somewhat mitigated by watching Brandeis run to victory… I gave their floor speech before their 9-4 Opp win.

On Sunday, the much-ballyhooed “APDA Mini-Cup” was held at Harvard, featuring a Harvard-heavy pool of eight teams comprised of fifteen former elite debaters and one current one. This evolved from an earlier idea to hold a year-long “APDA Cup” that would be one giant tournament taking place over the entire season and culminating in one final weekend of out-rounds. Despite widespread interest, that never got off the ground last year, so this idea was implemented instead, perhaps as a lead-in to a future year-long Cup. To sweeten the pot, there was a $1,000 cash prize allotted to the winner, garnered from local teams who wanted the event to be a success (and apparently got first crack at the tapes of all the rounds in return as well – it’s like a basic incentive argument in an APDA round).

Anyway, I was paired with BU’s Jake Campbell, one of the nicest guys ever to grace the circuit and a mutual believer in the power of crazy philosophical opp-choice cases. We wound up in a Harvard-light pod, consisting of a GW team, a Brandeis team (Zimmy & Joel), and a hybrid of two 2010 National semifinalists (one finalist – and TOTY to boot) from Harvard and Amherst. The format was round-robin with the top team advancing straight to Finals.

I really enjoyed our rounds – hopefully they will post the videos sooner than later and I can feature each of them on the blog a la my posting of the Stanford rounds over the summer we moved out to Jersey. I wrote two cases for the festivities, but we only ran one, being handed Opp by GW and flipping Opp against the full ‘Deis team. We ran the table, though each round was by exactly one ballot, so we apparently just squeaked in to a 3-0 record. I had felt pretty confident about all of our rounds, which was apparently warranted and unwarranted. They’ll also be posting the RFD’s (reasons for decision) online, so I’m really curious to see those.

Finals was somewhat disappointing for me, though I guess not for the others, all of whom proved to be BU debaters. We were matched against the only current debater and his partner from two years ago and were given Gov, though we would have grabbed it if we could have, since Jake had wanted nothing more out of this tourney than to run the case we did. It was supposed to be a round about whether ethical systems ought derive from human nature or not, but wound up being a round about how differently people interpret human nature and, ultimately, that most people think everything in human history has derived directly from human nature, which certainly isn’t my understanding of that concept. So it goes. We dropped, 8-3, setting up this weird Lincoln/Kennedy type thing where four years ago I lost to a Harvard team in BU Finals and then just lost to a BU team in Harvard (Mini-Cup) Finals, both running crazy opp-choice cases on Gov. Unlike the BU tourney, though, I don’t have the solace of knowing I put on a real showcase Final Round. I also don’t have my half of a thousand bucks.

It was still a great weekend and it was awesome to spend so much time with Stina and Dav and Zimmy throughout, as well as to see Drew on Friday night. When I finally got home, bleary and punch-drunk from a hilarious car-ride home with Dave and CBergz, I slept for half a day. But then I got up and it was soon time to listen to the Giants-Braves game on the computer and, as I often do when I want to focus on an audio-only experience, I decided to play a little online poker. I’ve mostly avoided things that can loosely be termed as video games since Emily returned from Liberia, preferring to focus on dealing with our stuff and then trying to focus on moving and dealing with my new life in Highland Park. But since the time was already budgeted for the game and I couldn’t watch the game, I found myself a tournament.

Within minutes of entering, I was facing a tough dilemma with KQ and a high-card Q on the board. I decided to push in all my chips, save one, a fun intimidation move that’s shy of going all-in and is the kind of thing that would never happen in a live game. The other guy called and flipped up AQ. So I had my chip and was going to be out of the tournament, with the 100-chip big blind coming around the next hand. I sighed and berated myself for overvaluing my hand, trying to determine whether to sign up for another tournament immediately since it was only the second inning and my same entertainment interests applied.

Then a funny thing happened. I tripled up on my 1-chip auto-all-in. Okay, great. I was still forced all in with my 3 chips on the small blind. But then I quadrupled up. Twelve chips. And two hands later, I went all in and quadded up again. Forty-eight chips. Soon I was forced in by another big blind, but this time I tripled up once more and could finally see over the top of the big blind. There was something almost like hope, after this many consecutive wins.

Five hours later, I finally got knocked out of the tournament, 22nd out of 2,666 entrants, having at one point amassed 223,000 chips. The ballgame was long over, long since won by the Giants. I’d listened to the whole post-game show and its litany of champagne-sodden interviews with understated players. I’d listened to hours of music on Pandora, rising and falling with the moods of the music I used to like. And I’d made about sixty bucks. A far cry from the multi-thousand-dollar top prize, but a miracle after facing such an early elimination on the decision to hold back one chip instead of go all-in.

It occurred to me somewhere in hour four or five of the 381-minute run through the tournament that I might make more playing poker that night than I stood to gain in the APDA Mini-Cup. Which I found kind of hilarious, because while poker is a hobby I’ve periodically been successful at, debate is a profound passion where I’m extremely confident in being in a top echelon. Of course, 99.9% of the debates out there don’t pay at all, while every poker tournament save for a very few low-level ones pay something to the winner. So the Mini-Cup changed the incentives in some strange way. Or at least my perspectives on them. It never would have occurred to me to compare a poker payoff to a debate round without the random financial carrot tacked on to the showcase event.

Perhaps the larger issue is the one that Russ pointed out when I shared the results of the tournament with him, just before sleeping hard this morning as well. He observed my one-chip miracle as a metaphor for my larger emotional state of being. Which, remarkably, for all my emotionality of late and patternistic vision in general, hadn’t hit me at all. Of course as soon as I read it, I had to begrudgingly admit that he had a real point. I was at death’s door and found a way to survive again and again when the odds were clearly against me. I was already mentally resigned and found a way to carry on. I wound up doing quite well.

It’s the doing quite well that I just can’t be sure about. Except, of course, in the context of debate. It’s funny to look at the Mini-Cup performance as almost the reverse of the poker run… I had soaring confidence about rounds I was just barely winning. And then grand anticipation for a case that sort of ran aground. Which I really shouldn’t put too fine a point on, because I had a great time debating. And it was nice to be judged by so many current and former (but still far younger than me) debaters. There’s a feeling of invincibility that dinos often bring to the circuit, of having paid their dues and being above reproach. Events like the Mini-Cup are good if only for their ability to remind former debaters that they are still capable of being judged. And when the seasoned aged dinos judging me are people like Jon Bateman, who I judged in National Finals five years after my own last Nationals, it really puts the whole thing into perspective.

Then again, maybe I just like the concept of judgment in all its forms. Or less than people perceive, as my current Rutgers debaters found out from spending a weekend hearing crazy stories from ‘Deis of old. Who knows? More and more, I think that Judgment may end up being the key watchword for my life. Part of a larger theory about everyone having a watchword – a singular concept that sums up the dilemmas, tests, and challenges that seem to recur in their life. As though we all were put here for one reason, one purpose, and our respective uniqueness makes bridging our gaps harder than might otherwise seem necessary. I’ve perused this concept before, though perhaps never in public. My Dad’s word is Survival. My mother’s is Motivation. Emily’s, I think, is Expectation. Mine… mine is almost certainly Judgment.

Don’t spell it with an extra e.

Miles walked today: 3.5

Today is a little better, for no apparent reason. I think it might be good to not leave the house for days at a stretch. Although my haircut is scheduled and isn’t a home visit. I expect to put some pics up at some point. You should be prepared for my hair to be partying more or less like it’s 1999. I’ve had really long hair for a really long time.

In the meantime, here are some numbers for you:

1: The number of known readers who have finished The Best of All Possible Worlds.
3: The number of books I have finished reading since the crisis began (White Noise, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Snow Crash).
4: The number of games the Mariners have won since the crisis began.
12: The number of pounds I have lost since the crisis began.
17: The number of days elapsed since the crisis began.
17.8: The number representing my current body mass index (BMI).
27: The length, in inches, of my longest hair.
46: The number of people who have contacted me in some way to express condolences on my situation.
50: The number of dollars you will have to pay to haul away Fish’s “antique” mirror.
82: The score for my first game of bowling last night, being the first sub-100 tally I can remember getting since I first learned to bowl in my youth.
124: The number of pounds I currently weigh.
125: The score for my second game of bowling last night.

Consider this an addendum to my earlier post today. Go read that, because I think it’s more interesting than this one will be. But this one has videos! Feeling strangely prolific today, like all my energy from traveling has been stored up and is ready to be unleashed.

In hell, you can watch all the baseball games you want, but every single commercial break between innings or for pitching changes carries the exact same sequence of commercials. And in the ninth circle, the commercial sequence in question leads off with a horrifically over-masculine aggressive commercial for a new planned-obsolescence rollout of conventional shaving apparatus. You know, like this:

Unfortunately, I live in hell, masquerading as a place called “New Jersey”. As Robin Williams said in one of the twenty greatest films of all time, “I found you in Hell – don’t you think I can find you in Jersey?” So this is my experience with MLBTV. It makes me a lot more likely to exit early from a game the M’s are already losing 8-3, but might also make me cut bait on a game where the score is reversed. I have never moved so fast for a mute button so many times. Ugh.

I really need to update my favorite films list. It may include this:

Yes, I am telling you all about seventeen times to see this movie. You need to listen.

Seriously. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube in twelve parts. Do it already.

Also, this:

That one’s available on Vimeo. In one take. People are just giving away thought-provoking cinema, people. Take advantage.

Finally, I’ve used the appellation “Tiny House” so many times lately that I realize I may never have explained the origin of same. It’s not just because the house is small; it’s also a reference. To this:

I have to agree with the YouTube commenter who expressed anger when he realized that this was just a spoof commercial and not an upcoming reality series. That is, I felt that way until Em & I began our own personal reality series last August when we got here.

If you missed it in the last post, please let me know if you want to read The Best of All Possible Worlds and you haven’t done so in some way already. Eight people signed up on Facebook already. Don’t risk being the thirtieth person on your block to read this book or something. And by “your block,” I mean “planet Earth.”

It seems like both a lot and very little has happened since I last checked in with this form of communicating with the outside world. But since I haven’t dialed in for a while, it’s probably good to put out the obligatory “not dead yet” missive.

The car thing from the last post worked out fine. After a truly comedic attempt at stuffing Fish & Madeleine into the Smart Car and then resigning to putting them on the Hertz shuttle, we went to one of the four people working behind the Hertz counter and it was thankfully not the same person who gave me the half-car in the first place. With Priceline already committed to investigate the issue of why’d I’d gotten the wrong car and send me a settlement in the next fortnight, I was hoping someone could possibly actually resolve the issue without me forking over more cash. The guy looked at the mismatch of car I’d reserved and car I’d been given like something crazy had happened, resolving to quickly restore order for free. I refrained from pointing out his crazy co-worker who’d bluffed me into the joke car and ran to get the keys and mileage from same. We spent the rest of the weekend cruising around in a spacious Toyota Yaris. You know, a car with both four seats and four doors!

The rest of the weekend was a great time – hanging out with Fish, Madeleine, Gris, Anna, and occasionally Nagrom as we interspersed discussions of politics, history, and race with Boggle, Yahtzee!, Bang! (one-word and exclam-heavy games only, apparently), tennis, and watching World Cup matches. Also got to see a very little of Jaque and Jenny both at a dim sum breakfast the morning of the wedding and at the wedding before they departed early. Saw even less of DK and Sara amidst their nuptial fervor, though their ceremony was beautiful right up until the officiant made the bizarre decision to pelt us with sexist Red Skelton jokes as we were contemplating the sanctity of their vows and commitment. So it goes. Catching up with both, especially DK and his parents, who remembered all the old crew, was great fun and it seems they’re putting together quite a good life in LA.

Then it was back to Russ’ where we completed our second-ever conquest of the World Cup for Denmark on the ultimate (World Class) level before checking in with the Wilsons in the first-ever conference with all of us in the Pacific time zone. The power of Skype has definitely been impressed on me in the last few weeks, between my video chats with Emily and periodic other conversations over free computer-to-computer networks. Also at Russ’, I saw two movies which probably join “The Corporation” as required viewing for the thoughtful person these days. And as scared as I was that “The Corporation” came out more than half a decade ago, it’s downright terrifying that both of these movies date from the time when I was barely verbal. Anyway, add “Koyaanisqatsi” (1982) and “My Dinner with Andre” (1981) to your upcoming playlist. I have since discovered that the former has two sequels, but they don’t quite have the same power of the original it seems, despite some thematic verve, especially in the conclusive piece subtitled “Life as War”.

Been in Albuquerque since a 7/7 flight where I overheard my two rowmates encouraging each other in their love in America and infinite faith in its power to both rebound and offer infinite opportunity to all. Made some major progress on editing thereon between the eavesdropping, and now stand a little over a third of the way through editing The Best of All Possible Worlds. Given the encouraging feedback that’s been coming in for all sorts of my creative endeavors, I’m really looking forward to hearing what people think of this one as a real departure from my past novels. Also newly reinvigorated to start submitting ADO to agents when I hit the sweltering East Coast once more. Everything’s coming up Milhouse.

Albuquerque has been the usual good mix of New Mexican food (Frontier 2, Waffle House 1, Garcia’s 1 as of this writing), long conversations, and perfect warm weather. The yard is in full bloom and I’m starting to believe all the bees left alive on the planet are actively engaging the flowers in my parents’ well-tended garden. The house is less changed than usual as my Dad struggles with arthritis and my Mom seems to be prone to pulling or straining various things. They’re doing well otherwise, though, in good spirits and with plenty of energy. The new cat, Nesbitt, has also been a joy, though he seems more thoughtful and reserved than any of his species I’ve known in the past.

Today just got word that Cliff Lee, one of my favorite and briefest Mariners, has been shipped to Texas in exchange for Justin Smoak and a bevy of prospects. Given the pitching staff and prospects to come, the length of Lee’s contract (ending after this year), and the need to restock our farm, it’s clearly a great move. Especially looking at the 34-51 record they’ve compiled, an inexplicable shock that’s the sum total of bad luck and an abandonment of the very concept of clutch hitting. The team continues to build around the right things, though, and I have to believe that the new GM will be able to continue to work magic that will hopefully lead to a breakthrough. But this season is over and I guess I don’t mind much, since it takes the pressure off going to Africa and feeling like I’m missing something back here.

Other than the friends and family I’m trying to see before I go, there’s just not much to miss.

Ken Griffey Jr. reacts to his 616th home run, against the Giants on May 24, 2009. It was the last of his homers I’d see in person.

I moved to Oregon in 1988 and discovered Major League Baseball on a roadtrip down to California that October during the World Series. As I’ve discussed fairly recently, this led to my being an A’s fan for a few years while living in Oregon, though my interest in their green uniforms, elephant mascot, and Mark McGwire was gradually worn down by years of listening to the Mariners Radio Network.

The first year I started listening to baseball was 1989 and the announcers were buzzing about a hot new prospect just called up named Ken Griffey Jr. I think it was Dave Niehaus who first called him The Kid, since his dad was still in the majors (and would be united with him on the M’s the next year). And even though I wasn’t always rooting for them in those first couple years, I listened intently to about a hundred M’s games a year as The Kid lit things up and sparked a previously abysmal Seattle club to something like mediocrity.

The real turning point, of course, was 1995, well after my Mariner fanhood had fully taken hold and I was living in Albuquerque relying largely on newspaper articles and the few rare televised games. I remember being unable to wait to get home from school to see the one-game playoff the M’s had miraculously forced against the Angels after being some incalculable number of games back in late August. The 9-1 drubbing, a thing of beauty. And then the series with the Yankees, the impossible 0-2 deficit, including a heartbreaking 15-inning affair in Game 2. (I still remember Fish telling me at school the next day what a great game it had been and that I must be excited and I got really upset with him. Turns out he’d turned it off after the M’s scored in the 12th. The Yankees then tied it in the 12th and won it in the 15th.) And then, of course, the comeback, capped by the greatest game in Seattle Mariner franchise history, the decisive Game 5 in Seattle. The 5-3 deficit erased in the 8th. Randy Johnson coming in to pitch extra innings. The 6-5 deficit in the 11th. And suddenly, out of nowhere, The Double. Ken Griffey, Jr. steaming around 3rd base, trying to score from 1st. The play at the plate, the epic slide, the dogpile at the plate. And me, at home in New Mexico, jumping up and down like the world was on fire, like I’d just realized that anything in the world was possible.

Then the horror came. A Ken Griffey Jr. poster was one of the first choices I made to fill my vast collegiate wallspace when I got there and while 1998 and 1999 weren’t quite 1995, they were solid seasons. But as 1999 wore on, there were rumblings about Griffey’s desire to retrace his father’s footsteps, get closer to the homestead, be part of the Big Red Machine. I already despised the Reds and this was a nail in the coffin. And by announcing publicly that he wanted to be traded to exactly one team, Griffey destroyed his value and the M’s had to settle for a pitiful return. I was angry, I felt betrayed. Much of the fanbase was more forgiving, but I was resentful. I couldn’t believe he’d done that to us, to the people who’d raised him from 19. How could he leave such a talented team, a crew with A-Rod, Randy Johnson, Edgar? (Yeah, I didn’t know what was coming.) Just for some parental nostalgia? His dad had even retired as a Mariner! Wasn’t that enough?

Well fate was cruel to Grif for the decision and he spent almost a decade in a hellish span of injuries and fan ridicule. He succeeded in tarnishing the Griffey name for almost every Reds fan and made them regret the meager sacrifice they’d made to acquire him. Oh sure, he was still The Kid, still electrifying when healthy enough to put the prettiest swing on a baseball you’ve ever seen. But it was a rare sight and he never quite fit with the red and white. And then he came on an interleague roadtrip to Seattle with the Reds and dropped the bombshell that he’d like to retire a Mariner.

No one could believe he’d just said that. They thought he was joking. But he was less than cryptic in his follow-ups, and before I knew it he’d signed to come to the M’s in 2009. I had the rare treat to see him in three games in May against the Giants and then again briefly as the M’s swung through Baltimore last month. I looked for my old KGJ poster and couldn’t find it, concluding with some horror that I’d probably discarded it in anger when he became a Red. He looked good back in blue, though older, fatter, his body displaying the tired signs of a typical athlete at the very sunset of his career. Most Mariner fans thought he should’ve retired after a decent 2009, and the numbers agree. He failed to hit a single homer in two months this year, finishing below .200 and getting benched with aspersions swirling in the press.

And while the book on The Kid is clearly a storied and memorable one, one of glory and contributing more than any other single individual to keeping baseball in Seattle and putting the Mariners on the map, any description of him is incomplete without measuring him unfavorably against his potential. He could’ve been the greatest. He could’ve hit 800 home runs, all without an ounce of steroids. He could have been The Franchise for all-time.

Of course he probably would’ve been beset by the same injuries in Seattle as he endured in Cincy and all that resentment would have been ours over his decaying body instead of his mild betrayal. But no Mariner fan alive would tell you they haven’t thought, at least once, that he might have stayed perfectly healthy in the cool rainy air of the Northwest. That he would have been not only a legend, which he certainly is, but The Legend. The Michael Jordan of baseball, but with humility.

We’ll never know. But we can thank him and appreciate him for all the things we do know about him. And watch tonight’s M’s game, as I will, knowing that something special is missing and will never return.

I’m still here and still thinking things and still have stuff to write about. But most of it is going in the ever increasing pages of The Best of All Possible Worlds.

I’ve posted about this before, and probably not too long ago. Maybe even on a May 17th before, in this exact place in the universe, looping back ’round to it again. Here we are. It’s not a new concept or a particularly hard concept, but it’s one I feel the need to revisit. When the tide is high with the creative process, lots of writing, a surprising about of reading for how much writing there’s been, then other forms of writing, the chaff, this blog, take a direct hit.

The corollary in the other direction was long obvious – that this blog would get the most attention and care when I was at a low tide creatively in the rest of my life. The times when my job was tugging at my soul and the commute was eating my time would give birth to long flowy metaphorical examinations of my real life in the moment. It was fun, and at least one of you thinks it’s way better than the non-chaff meaningful stuff I try to produce now. It will probably come again sometime, but it is not the time for it now so much. And that’s good.

This is largely because the life itself is relatively unnoteworthy. Sure, stuff happens – Em and I went to a AA baseball game today in Trenton and played bocce ball with friends on the lawn of our military-barrack-trailer-park complex. The sun shone, people bid each other a pleasant summer, embarked for new adventures. Em and I watched two of the four series we’re following on Netflix. We made more plans for the summer to come. But these are the undulations of life of the everyday. And the rest of my time makes these times look fascinating.

Because the rest of my time is extremely unreportable, the most of the mundane. I sit down at the computer at a designated time, aiming for 2-3 sessions each day instead of the normal single overnight session because of the time crunch I’m facing and what a washout April was. I play Tetris, trying to imbue myself with the mood appropriate for quick, magical writing. At a certain point, I stop, having formulated the first sentence to two paragraphs. I switch over to Word, enter my trance, and go. Anywhere from 30 to 150 minutes later, I stop, usually suddenly on a particularly sharp conclusion for that section. I come up for air quickly, surveying practical considerations like how many words I’ve written and whether I’ve overlooked anything intended for that section. Sometimes a quick review, but often not – there’s plenty of time for editing the month after the deadline. Then I start to meditate on the next section and do something mundane like eat or sleep or read.

That’s my life. And when Em departs for Liberia in a week and a half, it will be without those other preliminary things like baseball games and bocce ball and Netflix. It is hard to envision as mundane, because it feels like the most vibrant and important part of my life I’ve ever lived. Every moment carries the sense of purpose that’s so effectively eluded most of the uses of my time. Every day feels deliberate and worth living. But talking about it? Explaining it? Highlighting some quirky thing to capitalize into a post here? Forget it. To the outside observer, writing is about as exciting as watching paint dry.

I guess there are a good number of breaks, though, and this is where the conservation comes in. I did go down to Baltimore for the two Mariner losses in their three-game set with the Orioles early last week. I saw two old friends and ate in two different Waffle Houses a total of three times. I could write the better part of a novel about the third game alone, probably the most objectively exciting game I’ve ever seen, with the final out recorded on a play at the plate that would’ve tied the game. But I don’t have the juice to, because it’s all going to the novel right now.

So maybe it’s not my life that’s any more mundane, for day jobs and commutes are awfully mundane too. It’s probably just about the energy, the focus, the dispersal of creativity leading to blippy vignettes, while extended intense concentration that saps everything else is required to produce the 100,000 word novel.

Let one thing be clear in all of this: I am not complaining.

Who would’ve thought that a day in, I’d be almost missing April?

Since writing my last post, I have:

• Had a migraine, making April’s total fourteen.
• Developed some strange but persistent non-migrainous pain and possibly swelling in the soft tissue over my right ear.
• Gone to a “Prom” held for students in Emily’s program.
• Watched the M’s cough up a game where they had the bases loaded with one out in the bottom of back-to-back extra innings.
• Judged the 102nd Harvard/Princeton/Yale Triangular Debate, specifically a Princeton-hosted match against Harvard.
• Written 17 pages of The Best of All Possible Worlds.
• Finally bought a new batch of coffee to test my bad-batch theory for the April Migraine Spike.
• Run – almost literally – into my second girlfriend on the street in Princeton. Yes, that one. No words (or blows) were exchanged.
• Discovered that said girlfriend and her husband have been living less than a mile and a half away since we moved here.
• Watched the film adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which I loved and Em hated.
• Finished reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, a novel which is neither about 2666 nor is finished.

I think it can all best be summed up in four words:

My head is spinning.

Used to be that I would get some pretty epic migraines. This was back in high school, before I started drinking coffee regularly, when I was out there in daily life with all the fluorescent lights and loud noise you could shake a stick at. There were migraines that lasted a full week and months when I had more time under the spell of the head-throbbers than free of them.

Then I started drinking coffee regularly, not intended as a migraine medicine (I was experimenting with actual migraine meds, to little avail but much consternation over the risk of stroke) and things quickly got better. Not great, but better. Then I started to make serious moves at trigger controlling after graduating college and things got quite a bit better. The last few years, I’ve been down to something like 30-40 migraines annually.

Enter April 2010. And the hammer dropped. With three days to go, I’ve notched 13 migraines, the longest of which lasted 36 hours (which used to be the norm, but is now sort of an impressive standout). And I probably have to do laundry at some point before the month is up, which has been the most consistent trigger since moving to Jersey (they really love fluorescents in our laundry room… it’s like a sort of shrine to the power of headache lamps).

I noted this April’s phenomenon earlier this month, hinting that maybe I was just on a really bad batch of coffee that was restoring me to the pre-caffeinated 1996 version of myself. While I haven’t tested against a different batch, I’m starting to wonder how to really isolate and test the factors. If there’s something more problematic about April itself, changing the batch of coffee May 1st doesn’t really demonstrate improvement on those grounds if the migraines go away.

What else could be going on in April, you ask? (Especially those of you who, let’s face it, haven’t fully subscribed to my theory that time is place and place is charged with meaning.) Well, there’s a lot of new theories running around about migraines being tied up with barometric pressure. And as I’ve learned since moving back to the region of the world where all our weather-based aphorisms about months hold true (e.g. March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb), there are a lot of storms in April. So that’s a lot of dropping barometers. At the same time, San Francisco is not exactly famous for its stable-to-rising pressure, and I logged some of my least migrainous years while working there daily. So what gives?

As with so much about migraines, I ultimately have to chalk it up to an ongoing mystery, try to test for certain variables (I really do need a new batch of coffee), and take relevant notes. And I must stress in this latter element that the symptoms are completely textbook. I really don’t think these are the early signs of some larger head problem, unless that head problem perfectly simulates frequent migraines. When you’ve had something like 600 migraines in your life, you get to know them pretty well. Except for those few fun outliers, like the one where I lost vision for a few hours or feeling in my whole left side. Those are pretty rare.

In other news, I’ve been watching a lot of sports lately. Last night’s migraine was prompted in part by the Blazers’ disastrous performance in their pivotal fifth game of the first round of the playoffs. (Incidentally, it’s funny that we always attribute headaches to having real-life sources comprised of frustration… probably true of minor day-to-day headaches, but largely untrue of migraines… although this one was caused in part by the lights in the Frist Campus Center where I had to watch the game, lacking cable at home, so…) I may watch the game tomorrow, though the Blazers showed me nothing to look forward to in that game. Although I guess they’ve been largely schizophrenic in this series anyway.

The M’s, meanwhile, finally won tonight, mounting a stellar comeback against the fact that Zack Grienke has no bullpen behind him. The AL West has thankfully been clumped enough that their late 4-game losing streak hasn’t buried them too far in the standings, so there’s still a lot of hope, especially since Cliff Lee makes his Mariner debut Friday. Since it looks like I’ll be out of the country for up to a month, I’m hoping they’ve built a substantial lead by the time I leave, but that’s making a lot of assumptions.

Like the assumption that we’ll get out of April someday.

From time to time, I feel the need to post a rambly cattle-call of happenings in my life and links around the web. I should start designating a day to do this and making it something like a regular feature, but that would probably require me approaching this blog with the discipline of a professional columnist.

• It seems I don’t write much about politics here anymore, largely because of the twin forces of Duck and Cover and TMR getting first crack at my political musings. I almost cross-posted this commentary on Obama’s lack of Socialism here, but instead I’m just linking it. Enjoy.
• As promised yesterday, I recently put up the APDA Nats brackets for 2010, complete with results of submitted brackets from current APDAites. (Those distant from debate should note that this is not how APDA Nats is actually structured, but a hypothetical based on the NCAA basketball tourney.) This hasn’t generated as much discussion that’s gotten back to me as I expected, but I’ve heard rumors that people are still enjoying it from afar. Given that I’m on a bid to become Tab Director of Nats 2011, this will probably be the last of these I do for a while… it seems a little weird for people involved in the Nats tab staff to publish a ranking of debaters partaking at that tournament, which is why I didn’t do one in 2007.
• The last two M’s games have been amazing. I missed the Tuesday game because I was doing prep work with the Rutgers team for Nats, but yesterday’s was a real gem. I am a huge fan of the new additions to the team, including the fact that Milton Bradley seems to be happy and ready to produce for this team. But Chone Figgins is threatening to become my favorite Mariner. Between the steals and the walks, he reminds me of Rickey Henderson so much it’s ridiculous. And I loved Rickey Henderson. But he seems to have even less of an ego than Rickey, which was the latter’s one annoying trait. Then again, Chone isn’t exactly contending for the all-time steals title.
• Did, in fact, get our taxes in on-time, yesterday. We do owe both states a little money, and TaxAct scammed us out of more money than they should have. But it’s done and the Feds owe us a lot.
• I wonder if the West will characterize this bombing as “freedom fighting” while everyone else utilizing these methods are “terrorists”.
• My mental state and health have continued to be somewhat subpar in recent weeks. The main issues seem to be a general feeling of dissociative malaise and surreality that may just be endemic to April, and also migraines. I’ve been averaging about 4 migraines a week, an astounding spike in frequency that seems inexplicable when observing normal triggers and factors. This combines uncomfortably with this dreamlike sense of reality that’s overtaken much of my last 2-3 weeks, which may partially be related to the subject matter of the current novel I’m working on. (Though I haven’t been working nearly as much as I’d like, but I’m mostly doing plot work to enable really cramming on output in the next month or so.) I feel largely like I’ve been looking at my life from 30,000 feet, or at least 30 feet, watching myself live instead of actually being in a first-person view. It’s strange and makes me sound completely nuts. I’m not completely nuts. I just feel more like I’m living through a filter than that I’m actually fully here. I sort of feel that this reality is all illusory anyway and that life’s core realities are a little like our souls playing a video game (but with meaningful consequences) on this planet, so maybe I’m just more aware of that reality.
• The other explanation for the above issues, of course, may be that there’s something seriously wrong with my brain. I’m inclined to think otherwise, but it’s good to keep all the possibilities in mind. I’ve told Emily to keep an eye out for me behaving really erratically or out of character, which would be indicative of a possible brain tumor. I’m not actually that worried, though, because the migraine symptoms have been so classic. (Though such symptoms also mirror those of tumors and aneurysms somewhat.) The other factor that I entertained was that I was somehow drinking decaf coffee – that the batch of Folgers I’m working through is either mislabeled or contaminated somehow. Because honestly, foggy worldview, increased tiredness, and more migraines could all be explained by caffeine deficiency too.
• Debate Nationals this weekend – always one of the most exciting times of the year. I’ve attended 7 of the last 11 nationals prior to this one and this weekend will make 8 of 12. For all that I probably should feel a little strange about being so old and having seen so much on APDA, I really feel nothing of the sort. I think I’ve been in the work world long enough to understand just how meaningful and valuable I find the APDA community to be, to treasure how rare its intellectuality is. I’ve been thinking a little about how much work I’ve put in to the Rutgers team, all unpaid, and realizing that I don’t see any of it as a chore. I think this is what it would be like to really love one’s job, because I do it all voluntarily. I’ve worked for organizations I truly love before, but never felt this way about the actual work. If the writing doesn’t work out, I need to figure out a way to swing professional debate coaching. Possibly in Africa.
• 

New image up top. Refresh the page if you can’t see it. If you still can’t see it, well, here it is below:

One of the subtler overall changes on the page, going with a relative simplicity that reflects my effort to refind some focus. I’m not that far off, not all over the place, but still not quite as centered as I’d like to be. Ever since I got back from Virginia (all of 48 hours ago), I’ve felt a bit foggy, rather dissociative. As though this is all a big dream I’m about to snap awake from. Not all of it, as in the last 30 years, but all of it, maybe most of the last 48 hours. It’s odd.

Of course, in part, it’s April. Every April, I get to thinking and hoping that maybe it won’t be so bad, so strange, so despondent. Most Aprils, I have to remember that there’s a reason I have this whole time-is-a-place theory going. This time round, at least, I have two insanely busy debate weeks back-to-back to keep me distracted. And then it’ll be time to enter the home stretch of a book that feels like it’s not quite off the ground yet. This month may yet prove to me that two books a year is a more reasonable expectation than three.

But I’m still hoping otherwise.

This past weekend was pretty debate-heavy as well, if only because it takes about 13 hours to drive round-trip to and from Charlottesville, home of one of the better campuses in its absolute peak time. Arriving in Virginia under an 88-degree sky was pretty much just what I needed at the time and I thoroughly enjoyed the tournament there, in no small part because of Rutgers’ great successes. Not only did Dave break for the second straight weekend and the third in the last six, but our newest novices were second novice team and both made the top ten novice speakers. And Dave & Chris managed to establish that they own 7th place, having finished exactly 7th all three tournaments they attended together. One could do a lot worse, especially for a junior-freshman duo. The tournament also just managed to be a bunch of fun, I got to judge many good rounds, and everyone was generally in high spirits. Although the less said about Friday night the better – suffice it to say that it’s easy to block out the worse parts of college over time and thus even harder to when they’re re-presented to you.

The only good thing about April, consistently, other than debate Nats I guess, is the start of baseball season. And what a great start it was today, with the M’s almost coughing up a win only to demonstrate they might have enough offense this year after all. Watching Chone Figgins and Casey Kotchman come through so consistently was great. I am going to have a lot of fun watching this team run this year. It was all almost enough to make up for the heartbreaking NCAA Finals, though that itself was such a great game. And both of these were big uppers compared to the amazing but horrifying video that Russ has up on TMR.

That video was on its way to sending me into quite the tailspin. If you don’t want to make the jump or want to know what you’re getting into first, it’s basically 40 minutes of American military chatter about 11 unarmed civilians that were slaughtered in a 2007 incident the US denied knowledge of until very recently. This is followed toward the end by a triple-missile attack on a building that also seems filled with civilians. It’s perhaps the most chilling piece of video I’ve ever seen in my life. As bad as it is to watch 11 people killed (and trust me, one sees them shot and killed), it’s probably worse to hear the live reaction from the people committing the murders. In some ways it feels like a vindication of all the things I say about people in that situation, but I’d really rather just be wrong. Perhaps most compelling of all is the vision of the blurry lines between video games and reality for a whole generation of American soldiers. The whole situation, from the dialogue to the monochrome target-screen, has the look and feel of a sophisticated first-person shooter (I mean, think about that phrase as a genre of video game on face there for a second) and one gets the sense that the people killing can’t quite get over the psychic break between the surrealistic setting and the fact that what they’re doing is all too real. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking; maybe they know full well and are just that awful and/or manipulated.

In any event, I’m still struggling with it. It’ll be with me for a long time. It’s encouraging to know that there are people who would post it, who would make it available, who would spread it around, though part of me almost feels like it’s an Orwellian exemplification of how much can be gotten away with. Still mulling.

The cat’s sick and we took her to the vet, who knew no more about why she was sneezing and wheezing than they do about my migraines. But they gave her some medication, just like me, and wished her the best. There was a lot else on my list to do today, but I only did about three other things. My brain refuses to be still and yet won’t move quickly either. It’s pickling in a jar, just for a time, letting itself soak up the brine between the folds like some grimy spa catharsis. As though to gird itself for April and all it entails. As though to make the push into the depth of where I need to go to really fulfill The Best of All Possible Worlds.

I don’t like pickles.

This would be a good week for me to be living almost anywhere I used to live.

Here’s the Mariners’ schedule starting later this week:

Fri, 2 April: vs. Colorado @ Albuquerque
Sat, 3 April: vs. Colorado @ Albuquerque
Sun, 4 April: @ San Francisco
Mon, 5 April: @ Oakland
Tue, 6 April: @ Oakland
Wed, 7 April: @ Oakland
Thu, 8 April: @ Oakland

Strangely, they won’t be entering the state of New Jersey, uh, ever.

But even if I won’t be in my old hometown or by the Bay to celebrate, baseball is almost upon us. And the M’s will be somewhere nearby, though perhaps not returning to ABQ or following Emily to Africa or Atlanta or wherever she ends up for the season. However, if you will be having the M’s near you on this seaboard, perhaps now is the time for us to start planning a day in the sun.

To wit:

May 11-13: @ Baltimore
Jun 29 – Jul 1: @ New York
Aug 16-18: @ Baltimore
Aug 20-22: @ New York
Aug 23-25: @ Boston
Sep 21-23: @ Toronto

Take me out to the ballgame. Or I’ll take you.

Things are a lot better than they were Friday and even better than they were before. And while I can attribute a lot of that to the passage of time or mental adjustments or even a variety of positive events (including having a relaxing weekend that included two fireplace fires and two visits to Waffle House), a disconcerting amount of it seems to be about winning.

I have long been a competitive person and this combines rather extremely with being both emotionally expressive and emotionally turbulent. Thus I not only fluctuate wildly between perceived highs and lows, but my actual gestures and body are likely to do the same as I flail about in victory or defeat. Fortunately this competitive streak tends to apply most pervasively to things that don’t actually matter, such as loosely organized sporting contests, board games, and video games. I tend to be slightly less expressive but more overtly invested in larger pursuits such as, most currently, the debate team I coach and the success or failure of the books I’m writing.

Not always is my mood impacted by the more important stuff alone or even primarily, however. This was more notable in the days when I was working in day job pursuits rather than things I feel more passionate about, like debate and writing. There was nothing, for example, at Glide to be competitive about. I might get angry about some internal office conflict that seemed intractable or giddy about some well received report, but it carried none of the competitive weight of a contest with winners and losers or the triumphs and failings of the effort to get one’s voice on important matters to the masses. As a result, I had to push my competitive energy into things like video games and following the Mariners, one of which doesn’t matter at all and one of which is both impossible to control and seems generally doomed. This was, as can be guessed, not a great recipe for joy.

Fast forward to this weekend wherein, on a bit of a losing streak (I just had to play ultimate frisbee, for chrisake), I thoroughly drub a competitive field in both Boggle and Clue, two of my favorite games, shortly before leading my team to victory in a nerve-wrenching match of trivia newcomer Know It or Blow It. Sound trivial? You bet. But nevertheless, such things fuel a perception that all is right with the world, that I have things to offer, that there is momentum building around me. It’s not rational nor particularly important to put such stock in irrelevant contests based on varying ratios of skill and chance, but I nevertheless can’t underestimate what a real impact such have on my moment-to-moment outlook. My perceptual reality is awash in the tide of my ability to prevail at things which have virtually no ultimate value.

But of course the real energy fires up when I get home from the weekend jaunt to discover that Rutgers has not only broken to octofinals at one of the largest tournaments of the year, but prevailed therein over a heavily favored MIT team currently ranked 3rd in the nation, before being ousted in quarterfinals. I actually yelled so loudly when I saw the results on my screen that Emily thought something was seriously wrong. And in some sense, maybe there was. But in another, all suddenly again seemed right with the world, like order and hope had been restored. Was I overvaluing this single performance? Absolutely. But was this also a crescendent cracking through to recognition for a hard-working team long overdue? No doubt. And does that potentially put them on a whole new trajectory looking forward, one that looks very different than where they seemed even a week ago? Of course.

And so I maintain my faith in the value of competition and my submission of so much of my will to its whims. Undoubtedly there is some tension between my competitive nature and my personal societal values of socialist communitarianism, just as there is a strange dichotomy between my desired global cooperation and my personal individualist, separatist tendencies (especially, as also highlighted this weekend, around food and taste). But perhaps it is my manic-depressive core, my fundamental commitment to ride the ever-bobbing waves of emotional authenticity and fervor, that drives my passion for spirited strife. I am certain that this unstable jetsam gives birth to much of my creative ability, and even more so to my desire to pursue it, distill it, and dry it for future observation.

And yet, in moments of reflection and observation like this, it can’t help but strike me how fragile it is. How it doesn’t take many spills and misfires to resemble the local NBA franchise, winning just nine times in 74 tries, spinning out of control toward a destiny that feels like determined self-destruction. How a boat on the seas that refuses to ever dock might eventually turn under the waves.

Next time that happens, though, and the deck starts compiling a salty mix of sealife, perhaps I just need to play another game of Boggle.

In the meantime, I’m off to the races.

It’s been a bit of a weird week. It seems a lot of people are discombobulated. In flux. It’s hard to say how much of that revolves around the fact that my life is thoroughly immersed in people who rely on academic calendars these days. After all, both Princeton and Rutgers had midterms this week, with their Spring Break starting today. Nobody likes midterms.

The writing is going… fine. It’s not bad, but it’s not tearing up the charts either. It feels like the right project at the right time, but it’s settled into that slow steady groove that probably denotes most long-haul fiction work. That’s good, overall, really, especially since this project is taking shape more on-the-fly than either of the prior novels. But I probably won’t be maintaining the quick-burning fire I started out with a week ago. Wow, it’s only been a week working on The Best of All Possible Worlds. I’m going to relax a bit.

And honestly, one probably couldn’t keep the fire going throughout a 3-month project. I just don’t think it works that way. You can have a brushfire on a short story or a poem, but it’s unsustainable for a whole novel. It’s like expecting every day of a marriage to consist entirely of that white-hot first-days-of-love butterfly passion. You’ll go there periodically, but every day of marriage is not going to feel like the first day. And that’s not only okay, but good. Because otherwise it would burn itself out.

The M’s are gearing up for their most exciting season in years and I’m preparing to block out big chunks of time to follow that. I’m sort of grateful that I don’t like Spring Training, since it both gives me another month to not worry about this and I don’t have to follow every little up and down of who exactly makes the roster. Of course, this is kind of self-fulfilling – if I liked those kind of things, I’d enjoy Spring Training more. But it’s just impossible for me to get excited about games that don’t count in an environment where strategy is handicapped and the decisions are all about getting people practice. It’s just a month-long practice-round. If I were a player or a coach, I think I’d love Spring Training. But as a fan, it just leaves me (ironically) cold.

Maybe I should figure out a way to do Debate Spring Training next year. Of course, it would be Fall Training. I guess the Novice Retreat we did this year was kind of like that, now that I consider.

Of course the other sports issue in my life is the meteoric rise of the University of New Mexico men’s basketball program. At 29-3, the Lobos are poised to receive a 2- or 3-seed in the NCAA tournament, based on their performance in this weekend’s Mountain West championship. This UNM team is unlike every other that has ever played near the Frontier – they win clutch games, they overcome adversity, they find ways to win on the road. It’s a real personality change and one that is especially strange for a long-time Blazers and Mariners (and Lobos) fan to experience. I wonder if every fan has a mythology about their team’s ability to pull defeat from the jaws of victory – if this is just one of those things that everyone feels psychologically by focusing on the crushing and unexpected losses. Regardless, this is the first time the March Madness tournament has had a real role for UNM since I was sneaking peaks of the game on Sonia Roth’s TV during the 1998 tourney, so yeah. Pretty neat.

On the debate front, this weekend is Providence College, my first visit to the campus since the fabled origin of Mep in 2001. I’m not sure how completely I’ve ever told the story on this website, and I’m not sure this is the morning for it, but I was curious exactly how badly I spoke at that tournament. So I went and looked up our performance on the old back-archives of the APDA site.

The brief story, of course, is that Russ and I were debating together for our first and only time before he graduated during that, his senior year. As a double-LO attack, we expected to tear teams up, especially given the confidence we had in our cases. Fifth round, sailing into the 4-0 bracket on the wings of crushing the mighty “juice” (Yale OJ) on a dull-as-nails-and-possibly-tight case about insurance law, we hit my regular teammate, Zirkin, and his hybrid partner, another Yalie. We had an ugly round (as such rounds between regular partners often are, especially when said partners are hybriding) and lacked full confidence that we’d won. But we never questioned that we’d break, because we were sure we were speaking well.

Russ was, of course, scoring a 132 with ranks of 7 and ultimately taking home 4th speaker in a pretty remarkable field. I, however, was deemed unworthy of the field. I apparently spoke a 128 with ranks of 13, outspoken by Russ by a full 4 points and 6 ranks. I’m not sure any partner ever outspoke me by that much at any other tournament in my life. If I had more time this morning, I’d look up what an epic fail a 128/13 was in the context of the rest of my career at the time. It’s hard for non-debaters to contextualize this, or even for modern debaters who’ve grown up with half-points and a squashed speaker scale to understand (128’s pretty good these days – and not because people used to be better, but because the scores have fundamentally changed). But trust me, it was a disaster.

So we missed the break – as it turned out by only a point, despite my glaring apparent incompetence. We even outranked the two 4-1 teams who broke over us, just a slim point behind either of them. If I’d been deemed only mildly incompetent, we still would’ve made the semifinals. (To say nothing of a 36-team tourney breaking to semifinals being pretty skimpy as well.) It wasn’t till we received our ballots that we realized I was to blame for our near-miss – neither Russ nor I felt I’d performed poorly that weekend, but the proof was on the paper.

In long retrospect, of course, I’m grateful for the outcome, both because it made a great story and it spawned my spontaneous apology to Russ for unseating the emu who’d asked him to debate with him instead, from which all Mep lore was borne. As I squatted down and craned my neck around to the dulcet sounds of a monosyllabic flightless bird, I had no idea my self-flagellation would be creating this monster. But I’m glad it did.

Interestingly, looking through some of those results from the past, I hadn’t realized that PC was the weekend before NorthAms that year. Somehow I’d thought it was later in the year, after Zirk and I had already secured the title that would define my career. It somehow makes it all the more amazing that we overcame the frustration of that fifth round, that my last round before our tear through the title tourney was an adversarial match against each other. Of course we both long attributed our success in that tourney to my yelling at Zirkin after octofinals and the self-examination that such produced (he’d been over-coaching me from his desk during my PMR for the Lottery case, something I knew I had in hand and could give in my sleep and I ranted at him after the round about how we had to trust each other if we were going to survive the marathon of break rounds we were facing at the time… the rest is history). But it’s interesting to note how much extra acrimony there was going into that tournament. Ah, memories, mythology, madness.

For context, I’ve been looking up a few other scores I received, and I got all 130+’s everywhere I look, including at Wellesley, a tournament with a notoriously low speaker scale and where I received the last of my only two career losing records. It’s almost as though the fates aligned to give us the emu. One might even say it was… Providence.

Makes you wonder what Providence College will offer us this year. I’ll find out.

1. It is looking increasingly likely that the Mariners starting rotation down the stretch (and into the playoffs, if applicable), will be headlined by these three starters:

I mean, I know about counting chickens and all that, but still. Assuming Bedard gets signed and is healthy (two enormous assumptions, I’ll grant), this may be the best starting trio the Majors have seen in decades. You can keep your Sabathia/Pettitte/Burnett. I’ll take Hernandez/Lee/Bedard any day.

2. It is startling how much more productive one can be when one is neither sick nor has to deal with insurance companies. I didn’t even notice how much spare energy I was expending trying to get healthy and/or deal with the fallout of 2009’s various accidents until I spent a full afternoon without either task. Very liberating and bodes well for all future projects.

3. The Dow has seen five digits for the last time in a good long while. Prepare accordingly.

When I first got into baseball, the Oakland Athletics were my team. It’s hard to admit as a loyal baseball fan that I had a team before the Mariners, that my eternal and undying fanhood is not to my first love. It has become acceptable in our society not to marry your first love or have the same job for life, but sports fans are basically supposed to stick with one horse forever, for some reason especially in baseball. But alas, such is not my story.

I first discovered baseball watching softball games in public parks in Washington DC in the spring of 1988. I was intrigued by the strange shape of the field, the amalgam of so many people doing such specific things. More than anything, it looked like fun. It was nothing like the sports they had us play in PE, nothing like the endless running that people seemed to equate with organized sports. It had an artistry to it, a mystery, it demanded explanation. I wanted to know more and my parents – not exactly big baseball (or sports) people – couldn’t give me much beyond the very basics, which only deepened the mystery. They enjoyed the camaraderie of the public park games, too, though, and we were sometimes the only fans in the bleachers at these loosely organized games.

Then we moved to Oregon that summer and took a trip down to retrieve our stored items from the Central San Joaquin Valley in October. In a random hotel lobby, there was a TV displaying – wonder of wonders! – the same basic game I’d seen in the DC parks. But it was shinier, with classier uniforms, and thousands of fans. I parked in front of what turned out to be a World Series game, having no idea the significance or even that these were professionals. The desk clerk took me for an avid fan and bemusedly asked me which team I was rooting for. It hadn’t occurred to me. I looked back at the screen.

“The green team.”

Green, you see, was my favorite color. And so I was enthralled by the Oakland uniforms, triply thrilled when I realized the next spring that their mascot was an elephant. And their nickname was associated with the grade I diligently pursued in every subject. I fell hard for baseball. And not just baseball, but Major League Baseball. I learned most of the rules through third grade playground kickball, started reading boxscores in the daily paper (I remember vividly poring over the details of a matchup that appeared to be between the Boston Royals and the Kansas City Red Sox), tried out for Little League, infamously (in my own memory) thinking that the glove was supposed to go on the hand one found dominant, to the point of arguing with the person who gave me a glove out of the bucket of extras that my right-hand glove wouldn’t fit properly on my right hand. I overcame this, adored Little League, and started setting my sights on a Major League career.

And then came baseball cards, which were to dominate an incredible amount of my time and energy for the rest of my time in Oregon. And with baseball cards, a new awareness of the players. And quickly, before even the midpoint of the 1989 season, I had picked a clear favorite. He was a towering hulk of a player, but thoroughly competent and, moreover, seemed like an affable guy. He was the heart of the Oakland A’s lineup. His name? Mark McGwire.

Mark McGwire was my favorite baseball player for years, even after I had shifted gears from the A’s to the Mariners, the result of a long geologic wearing down from hearing over a hundred M’s games a year on the radio and falling for the excitement of the likes of Ken Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson. Before the ‘89 World Series, I had a lifesize Mark McGwire poster on the back of my door, which stayed there till we moved to New Mexico. I loved Big Mac, loved his effortless grace in smashing homers, his fearsome glower as he awaited the next hopeless pitch. He was perhaps an unlikely hero for a scrawny, terribly short right fielder (though I was quickly falling for Rickey Henderson too, with his wily speed, and I would soon become a catcher and really deepen my understanding of the game), but he just seemed to have the game figured out. He had the right attitude. And a cool name.

By 1998, I had grown to almost dislike the A’s after some intensely rivalrous years with the M’s in the new six-division structure of MLB and Big Mac had left them anyway. But I was over the moon about his season the summer before college, remember watching on a friend’s computer every at-bat after 60 homers. Wherever we were, whatever we were doing, someone would keep watch at the computer during Cardinals games and call us in and we’d all crowd around. Maybe it wasn’t every game, but that’s what it felt like at the time, and I’ll never forget 62, sending me over the moon with the high arc of the ball. There was the All-Star Game later, too, maybe the summer of ‘99 or 2000 if I recall correctly, watching Big Mac rip what felt like 50 straight homers, all of them 450+ feet, just taking the cover off the ball and sending it as far as possible. I couldn’t stop smiling and my parents watched too and said that I knew all along, had picked the best guy so long ago.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately or hate baseball, you’re doubtless aware of Mark McGwire’s recent admission that he used steroids. The news is hardly earth-shattering for those paying attention to baseball in the last decade or so, watching people balloon into caricatures of themselves, popping out homers left and right amidst rumors of juiced balls and diluted pitching while baseball enjoyed the increased “game-saving” profits and turned a blind eye. The recrimination McGwire and his cohorts have faced has been severe and one might expect, given all my other proclivities, that I would feel betrayed by Big Mac, that he’d play Bill Richardson to my baseball fandom and I’d walk away thinking they were all crooks and cheats, unworthy of the homage we try to pay them.

But it’s not so. I diligently attended tens of San Francisco Giants games during Barry Bonds’ pursuit of the career home-run record, cheering every time he came to the plate. I still think fondly of McGwire, even as the media eviscerates him and the baseball writers laughably refuse to grant him passage to the Hall of Fame. I’m not wild about Rafael Palmeiro, but I think that’s just because he lied so vehemently about the whole thing. And I’ve always hated Roger Clemens and A-Rod since he ditched the Mariners for greed, so it’s really just an excuse to gang up on those guys.

Why? Is this just my loyalty to baseball overwhelming everything else I rationally feel? Everything I think about drugs and authenticity and everything else out the window? I mean, how inconsistent could I get, right?

The issue for me, and I haven’t seen this argument anywhere else (nor do I expect to), so I suspect I’m on my own here, is that the difference between steroids and everything else is basically nil. Yes, steroids are technically illegal, but so is refusing to sign up for the Selective Service. We live in a country where smoking marijuana is a vilified criminal activity while drinking alcohol is a lauded social rite. Law alone is no argument, no justification. Folks, the laws are stupid. And even if the laws about steroids are designed to protect people from long-term ill health, I know plenty of people who’ve been prescribed steroids for one thing or another. Heck, just a year ago, a Kaiser doc tried to put me on a lifetime steroid nasal spray to prevent all these ear infections.

Mark McGwire started talking early on about Andro, his legal daily supplement that he took to help build muscle. (I think it’s short for something, but I’m not sure what.) He recommended it to people publicly. And it was always the part of him that made me most uncomfortable, because something felt weird about taking a drug that would make you better at baseball in some way. And that, I think, is the point. All of it – lifting weights, even, let alone nutritional supplements or legal chemicals or other artificial inducements – is weird. Professional athletics have long relied more on science than on straight hard work. It’s about what to eat and what to drink and what to ingest and what to inject and what to build to specifically construct, through carefully researched science, the greatest athlete possible. It’s all artificial.

At that point, we have two choices. Either only let people play who walk in off the street and refuse to try to change their bodies… or let them do whatever they want. There are countless players who are on prescription ADD drugs that would otherwise be banned stimulants, but they get a special exemption. You probably can’t find a Major Leaguer (at least a position player) who isn’t on countless chemical supplements and substances. The science of sports is carefully managed and throws everything into doubt, especially when compared with the era of Babe Ruth, whose scientific regimen consisted of eating as much as possible. I mean, come on. Can you imagine Babe Ruth getting by in today’s game? They wouldn’t even give him a tryout till he shaped up.

I just don’t see the bright line between steroids and the rest of it. And while the law may have made things “unfair,” deterring a Ken Griffey Jr. or a Will Clark from trying steroids, baseball’s policy throughout the Steroids Era made it clear that they didn’t see the difference between steroids and other artificial substances either. You can call something illegal all you want, but if no one’s going to enforce the regulations and everyone heaps praise on what you’re doing, you pretty quickly realize that word doesn’t mean what you think it does.

As we get closer to a world of genetic engineering, this question isn’t going to go away. People will look first for the genes that impact growth and size and strength, beefing up their children in the hopes of lucrative contracts. And then where will we be? Do we bar these people and their unfair advantages, penalizing them for things they had literally no control over? Or do we start a space race for 11-foot tall mutants who hit every single ball over the wall till we have to rebuild the Polo Grounds to keep things in play? And what of our society’s increasing proliferation of BGH and other substances which have already increased our relative size and height?

Science will keep pushing the bar. And if one’s going to let some things in and not others, one’s being inconsistent. I don’t blame any of the people who took steroids in the so-called Steroids Era, though I still hate Clemens and A-Rod. I look down a bit more on those who lied, but I even understand their frustration with the double-standard retroactively being enforced on them. Big Mac, I forgive you. I get it. And I hope all the baseball writers get off their sanctimonious high horses long enough to let you into the Hall of Fame someday. After all, they didn’t exactly blow the cover off these stories in 1998 or 2000, however obvious they think your actions were then. They pocketed their money and made their reputations at those times, so who are they to deny you yours? Ex post facto standards are never fair and certainly not in America’s pastime.

And thanks for being honest about it, however long it took you to open up.