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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.