I’m thinking about compiling one of these for the decade too, but let’s look at what made 2009 great and not so great.

In summation, looking back at this year, it’s been one of those seminal and all-encompassing annums. It’s been a slow and generally joyous year, punctuated with some really lousy events. I think it’s good to look at the good and bad of a year, lest one think that any year, no matter how great or terrible, is all one or the other. Ultimately, however, I have to say that I’d be pretty happy if all the years were like this one.

Let’s start with the lowlights (who knew I could have a happy ending in something I write?!)…
9. In June, we were informed that we would be getting a small (464 square foot) apartment from the housing lottery at Princeton. Emily and I fought about to what extent the preferences I’d asked her not to list on the housing form had determined this decision and the ensuing tension lasted for much of the summer and the early part of our time moving into Princeton. Upside: We ended up being happy with the place and sincerely calling it “cozy” instead of just tiny. Though it will always be Tiny House to us.
8. In August, at the conclusion of a great six-week trip, we moved to New Jersey. We’d come to accomplish many great things in school, debate, and writing, all of which wound up going pretty well. But… New Jersey. Upside: Yeah, we were moving to Jersey for some pretty good reasons.
7. In December, a co-worker of mine from Glide passed away. While he was not my closest friend or someone I’d even contacted since departing Glide, his passing hit me very hard with its suddenness and the loss of such a vibrant, joyous personality. He’d moved me to tears the day I sent out my e-mail announcing my impending departure from Glide, coming down to my office, giving me a hug, tearing up, and saying “I don’t want you to go.” I can’t stop thinking about this scene, how much it meant to me, or how little time he proved to have left. Upside: While one never wants to see an upside in death, it does always get those still living to examine their mortality and priorities, which never hurts.
6. In November, I got tremendously sick, derailing my writing at the time and prompting my parents to cancel a long-anticipated trip to see us on the East Coast. I had extreme trouble breathing and went through a number of inconclusive tests, ultimately requiring simple time and rest to recover. Upside: The illness didn’t derail my novel as I feared it would at the time.
5. In July, we left the Bay Area, possibly never to return long-term. While I felt we’d stagnated a good bit in the Bay and needed a change, the actual departure was tough to swallow and required leaving jobs we’d felt were the best we’d ever had, people we really enjoyed, and an area that seemed more naturally like home than where we’d be going for some time. Plus, there was a lot of packing. Upside: (Most) everything that followed.
4. Over the course of the year, I lost an impressive amount of money in the stock market. I had been up big and got complacent and started losing like crazy. While all of this could theoretically be recouped, I’d started betting against banks right about the time people got irrationally excited about banks again. Granted, I hadn’t risked anything we couldn’t afford to lose and it was all in long-term futures anyway (i.e. money we can’t touch till we’re 65). But it still hurt. Upside: Banks could still collapse.
3. In July, Emily and I were informed that all of our stuff making the cross-country trip to support our life in Jersey had been in a rollover accident outside LA. This proved to be more devastating in the resignation and loss it inspired in us between then and finding that the damage was generally much better than anticipated. Almost all the most sentimental items came through minimally scathed, though we still took some costly losses. Upside: It was a good reminder of the relative insignificance of material goods.
2. In January, Emily and I were informed that her mother had colon cancer. We endured a horrific month of ambiguities and tests and worries. Upside: Not only was the surgery successful, it wiped out the cancer so completely she didn’t even need chemo.
1. In October, Emily and I were in a car accident that could have killed me were it not for a pickup sandwiching itself between a passed-out octogenarian and myself. The Prius sustained 5 digits worth of damage and Emily and I had 4 digits worth of damage assessed by the ER. Upside: We survived the accident.

And now for the highlights…
9. In September, Fish and I (accompanied by Madeleine and Emily) saw John K. Samson play “Sounds Familiar.” live.
8 (tie). In November, the same four of us (no John K.) enjoyed a restful and rejuvenating Thanksgiving weekend in Washington DC. It was just what we needed at the time and recharged our batteries to make a last push in the book and the semester.
8 (tie). In March/April, I spent a similar week of restful rejuvenation in LA with Russ, the last of my many trips to his apartment while I was living in the same state. We watched movies, talked about everything, played chess endlessly, beat FIFA on World Class mode with Denmark for the first time ever, and I even won the most money at online poker I’d ever won. It was just what I needed to get through the last 45 days of day job I had left.
7. In March, Emily ran the table on her grad school applications, going a perfect 5-for-5 in schools applied and allowing herself to have the maximum possible options. This culminated in her full-ride to Princeton, freeing up our options as a couple to pursue what we’ve spent most of the decade putting off in terms of personal aspirations and fulfillment.
6. In June, many New Mexican friends and I reunited for Jake’s wedding. We had a fabulous “bachelor party” hiking in the woods above JPL that would later be endangered by fire. Many of us wrapped up the weekend of celebration with a visit to Disneyland and California Adventure that was probably the most efficiently jam-packed such visit of my many to such parks.
5. In May, I watched Randy Johnson pitch what was almost certainly his last game in Seattle, going out to a triumphant standing ovation from an infinitely appreciative fanbase. Though watching him shut down the Angels in the ‘95 one-game playoff, let alone his relief appearance in that year’s ALDS, will always be more charged memories, those were witnessed on TV. This was my single greatest live moment of Mariner fandom to date. No less, it was enjoyed from the best seats I’ve ever secured at a Major League Baseball game. This was the highlight of a generally great trip to Seattle.
4. In November, the Rutgers team I’d been coaching for two and a half months enjoyed their first break in almost two years, to quarterfinals at American University, a tournament fielding 90+ teams. After being uncertain of the impact I was making on the team, I finally had confirmation of progress and great reason for optimism about the coming semesters. The team celebrated at a DC diner that night with spirits raised high to the future of the team.
3. In May, I left Glide exactly as I’d hoped to, going out after ten weeks’ notice with a perfect day of meetings including the long-anticipated foray into what would ultimately be the new database solution for Glide’s programs. I could not have scripted a more fitting exit and I finally got to leave something on my own terms, with a great replacement, and with people wanting me to stay.
2. In July, Emily and I departed for a six-week tour of the US, with stops in National Parks and baseball parks, plus plenty of time with friends and family. Highlights from this trip alone could fill this list, so it’s only fair to group the whole trip. Our anniversary dinner at the Wawona in Yosemite, hiking the Grand Canyon, and camping in the Badlands are probably the most lasting memories from this epic journey.
1. In December, I finished writing a novel for the first time in eight and a half years, after working on it for seven and a half. The culmination of everything I’ve hoped to do in the last decade of struggling to write against a backdrop of day-jobs was finally reached, five days ahead of my deadline. I had once again proven to myself that there’s reason to take this writing thing seriously. Just before year’s end, I finished editing the work.

Yeah, like I said, I’d be pleased if every year could be this full of life, decisions in the right direction, survival, and joy. I’ll take ten more like 2009 any time. 2010, care to start with one?

Holy cow. The Mariners, apparently not satisfied with filling step one of my philosophy on baseball (stock your team with speedsters like Chone Figgins), are apparently a little bit of paperwork away from filling step two, which is to stock your team with top-notch starting pitching.

Cliff Lee is about to be a Mariner. CLIFF LEE!

I haven’t been this excited since the Erik Bedard trade, the last time the M’s landed an ace-level pitcher. Except this time, the trade isn’t going to cripple our team, mostly because our current GM isn’t named Bavasi. Also, Cliff Lee is a proven multi-year talent, while Bedard had had just one great season as the basis of his success.

I mean, did you see Cliff Lee pitch in the postseason? Holy cow. I’m so glad we’re going to still be in the States for (at least most of) the 2010 baseball season.

In other news:

• Emily prompted me to look up Rainbow Brite on Wikipedia tonight, after she jokingly embraced my sarcastic suggestion that we name a child, should we ever have one, Rainbow Bright Clayton. This led me to discover that the cartoon character of ’80’s lore starred in a whopping 13 (thirteen) broadcast episodes, almost exclusively in 1986, yet somehow grossed $1 billion (with a b) in 1980’s dollars from merchandising. Or $77 million an episode. And you think baseball players get paid a lot.
• I have edited 19% of American Dream On’s chapters and 14% of its pages in the last three days, working on a sporadic schedule. It’s exhausting. Completely wiping me out. I was in no way prepared for the sheer physicality required of intensely editing a book this size. At the same time, it’s been going far better than any major editing project I’ve ever undertaken, something I can credit in part to countless hours of editing grant proposals and other paperwork for Glide in my last day job. The amount of work I’m putting in, the amount of change manifest, and the amount of satisfaction I’m getting from the newly emerging draft are all great indicators that I’ve shed my reputation as someone who has trouble with editing. Unfortunately, getting to 100% is a must before anyone sees the thing, so we may be looking closer to New Year’s than Christmas for distribution to first-run readers. My interest in getting feedback is keeping me motivated.
• Plus, I can edit in the Chancellor Green Library. So there’s that. Pretty much anything is worth doing in there, no matter how much energy it takes.
• Spent Saturday in New York City, taking the train all the way from Princeton’s “Dinky” station to downtown Manhattan and (almost all the way) back to see former ‘Deisians for a day of games. Managed to tie for a win in Citadels and run a distant third in Railway Rivals, a stellar railroad game that was West Germany’s 1984 Game of the Year. Hm. I guess you don’t have to take my word for it.
• Cliff Lee!

Didn’t write a D&C today because the focus was on catching up on chapter 51, left unwritten yesterday because I was hanging out online with the Meppers all night.

But it’s done and now I’m very excited that the number of chapters remaining is now a single digit number, especially since the number of days remaining till deadline is not.

But I want to take this brief break from my writing play-by-play to express my jubilation at this development, fresh from the hot stove. Chone Figgins is a Mariner.

Russ’ heckling of him on my behalf in Anaheim aside, Chone Figgins is exactly the kind of player I love to root for. Essentially, the Rickey Henderson School of Baseball is that which I most enjoy – it’s how I create lineups in baseball video games and it’s how I’d stack a real life team were I ever a GM. Lots of speedy, bunty guys who steal bases, get infield hits and triples, and basically make life a real pain for anyone they’re playing against. It’s my favorite brand of baseball offense.

And with Ichiro and Figgy joining up (and presumably hitting 1-2) in Seattle next season, it seems like the M’s GM is on my wavelength. Already looking quite promising, 2010 just got a little better.

I have just leveled up in computer knowledge.

Drawbacks include the fact that I wasted most of my night doing this, that the knowledge gained was largely unnecessary, and that my writing session may or may not be shot as a result.

But hey, knowledge.

It all started when I wanted to know the voting breakdowns of the AL Manager of the Year. In the old days, media outlets would provide the full voting summary of any given award in the same article where the award is announced. You know, with the number of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place votes and then the complete vote total at the end. But for some reason, at least in the last year or so, a lot of outlets stopped doing this. Especially Yahoo!, which for whatever reason (fantasy sports tradition, I guess) has become my personal favored provider of sports news.

So I went looking for the AL Manager of the Year voting. You see, I happen to think that Mike Scioscia was a pretty bad pick and I wanted to see who agreed with me. Not that Don Wakamatsu, rookie Mariner skipper, was a shoo-in or anything, but I actually think Ron Gardenhire deserved the award, with maybe Ron Washington and Wak duking it out for second. Since I agreed heartily with the AL Cy Young (even though my boy Felix Hernandez didn’t get the award) and NL Manager of the Year, I figured the voting on AL MOTY had to be closer to reflect my dissent.

One of the first sites I found, however, failed to tell me the full voting record. It turned out to be someone’s personal ballot, probably not even a baseball writer. And then my manual cookie-acceptance filters started going crazy and extra windows started popping open and I tried to shut down Firefox as fast as I could. Firefox closed and instead of shutting down my computer as fast as possible, I stupidly reopened the browser and started looking for those elusive vote totals.

I found them (Wak got 2 first-place votes! Gardenhire was second overall! Generally intelligent votes abounded, save for the inane voting for Joe Girardi), but also soon found that there was a weird-looking virus “detection” pop-up message on my screen too, letting me know that a program called “System Defender” had found all these viruses and wanted me to take action right away.

I’m not a fan of anti-virus software in general or even conceptually, since almost every anti-virus software program I’ve ever found either (A) charges money, (B) is actually a virus, or (C) both. Making differentiations between the programs seems almost impossible and their effectiveness is often dubious even at the highest level. Recently, though, I have had a good bit of success with the popular (and free) Malwarebytes Anti-Malware program which seems to be pretty well regarded and has yet to act like a virus itself.

Judiciously wary of the purported software, the name “System Defender”, and the Windows-look-alike shield that just says “I am phishily trying to trick you” all over it, I avoided clicking on anything in this program and furiously got my Anti-Malware running. It found several problematic files, then did its magic, and I figured I’d be all set.

It took about three full restart runs of this pattern (restart, swear at the fact that the System Defender dubiously reappeared upon restart, run Anti-Malware, restart, repeat) before I started looking for an end-run solution around this tried and true methodology. And then I had to go to intramural basketball (my triumphant return after a week of illness), so I just shut my computer down for a while to let it think about what it had done.

This post should just be about basketball and my love of the game and how good it felt to be healthy enough to play and still fell I was getting air to my lungs, how I need to start playing twice a week with or without IM’s, how my muscle memory has preserved my downtown 3-point shot but the streakiness of said shooting remains, how we lost by a point in a hard-fought struggle, and so on. But System Defender had other plans for my night.

I won’t regale you with every twist and turn in my battle with this nefarious software or my ultimate conquest. Some highlights of things that I learned or remembered along the way, though:

• Internet forums are generally helpful in aiding the deletion of known virus software, but they only go so far. Eventually, you will be on your own and have to outwit the beast.
• You will have to reveal hidden files, INCLUDING system files that Microsoft warns you against revealing as though it were the file that proves Microsoft is a monopoly.
• You should search by date and try to pinpoint files created within the first 2-3 minutes of infection. Narrowing file searches by date will allow you to find and delete most everything.
• Safe Mode is your friend. Restart in Safe Mode by pressing F8, then delete the files that won’t go down because the nefarious program is still running.

Even if this doesn’t help you, this list will be invaluable to me in the future, so chalk it up to notes on how to combat the dangers of the future.

Of course, once I’d finally deleted everything, had a successful restart without the bad program, danced around the room, and gotten over my euphoria, I realized that Task Manager was still down. It had gone down in the wake of System Defender’s original attack, never to return despite repeated pressing of control-alt-delete and right clicking of the taskbar and so on. Even with System Defender defeated, it had left this one vestige of its success.

To which the answer was, of course, System Restore. That only took 3 Internet forums and several bad pieces of harder advice to figure out. System Restore timestamps the Windows settings every 24 hours or so and saves them for a while in case you want to backtrack in time from a serious mistake. This alone would not have wiped out the virus, but it was enough to put a bow on the restoration effort once I’d taken out all the mysteriously buried files it had installed.

For those of you reading this narrative in terror for the status of my novel which has been written in its entirety on this computer, fear not. I’ve been backing it up almost constantly in several different locations, including my secret cache under the mountains of Utah (seriously). By far my larger concern was lost time in working on the novel if the problem persisted or if I would have to get a new computer or do some larger restart of the whole thing. Not that this program ever looked threatening enough to do such things – after all, I could still access all my files, just with an annoying series of occasional pop-ups in the background.

But System Defender may have won this night, if not the war. My beloved word counter in WordPress tells me that I’m closing in on 1200 words for this post, aggravating if only because that would be a half-decent night of writing, but instead I’ve been regaling the torments of my last few hours. Sigh. Maybe there’s something still left in the tank. Time to go find out.

It’s October.

There’s a lot of sleight of hand involved in October, but perhaps its greatest achievement is bringing an end to baseball season without generally making me upset about said end. Granted that the excitement of playoff baseball and its association with October helps, but all too often October comes with no real hope for the Mariners and often no hope for any team I particularly care for. (Indeed, with the demise of the Twins tonight, I find myself rooting for, what, a Red Sox-Phillies World Series? Yawn.) Yet October is able to draw me away from baseball with smoke and mirrors and pumpkins. Mostly pumpkins.

Tonight (or rather, the last night of September), I had the distinct privilege of listening to the full game of perhaps the most satisfying Mariner win all season. I mean, strategically it was unsatisfying, given that the M’s were eliminated from contention over a week ago. But Brandon Morrow nearly threw a no-hitter, Griffey hit a three-run homer in the first inning, and the M’s clinched a winning record for the campaign, leaving themselves an outside shot of passing the Rangers for 2nd in the AL West. And Rick Rizzs almost predicted a homer (turned out to be a triple off the top of the wall) on a precise pitch and then nearly had a stroke calling the play he had nearly predicted. All the while, I was reminded of how much I love listening to baseball in particular, how the quiet nights in my room with a game remind me of so many quiet nights in my room with a game from younger years.

The nights have been quiet lately largely because of Em’s efforts to acclimate herself once more to a studying routine, while I try to write and (much harder) find the discipline to code changes for the Blue Pyramid. Tonight, for example, I was working on the tedious conversion of the Book Quiz pages to the new navigation-bar format. I’m also trying to get the jump on the long-awaited Book Quiz II, which I’m hoping to have out by the time American Dream On is ready. The former could not be much less of a priority, however, especially by comparison, though watching the BP’s sagging stats always gets me back on my horse for a while.

Like anything, these projects – even Em’s studying – are all about momentum. Getting in a groove and then finding things satisfying or rewarding enough about that groove that make it worthwhile to stay there. Or, more accurately, to return there time and again, to recreate that space. When the space is wide enough, this is easily done with writing. Pretty much everything one does (or at least I do – perhaps I shouldn’t attempt to speak objectively about what may ultimately be a very personal experience) relies on the renewal of the font of momentum, the benefits of being in the zone. This is perhaps why so many people give up so completely in their place of work and general approach to a day job: the feeling of obligation alone is insufficient to charge the batteries that generally get their best fuel from excitement or passion.

Of course, obligations provide a fear factor and disciplinary onus that those who haven’t completely checked out come to rely on to keep them going through a day job work week. So a big part of the game of these two years is about revving the engines without overt obligation (though self-imposed deadlines help) and pacing oneself with the constant celebrations of milestones in writing, in coding, even in playing basketball or walking the cat (long story, but she needs to eat grass for her digestion). Debate, unsurprisingly, is taking care of itself. If anything, I need to find ways to limit my attention on the debate coaching side so it doesn’t consume the time required for everything else.

Why? Because debate is exciting, innately sort of passionate. It creates its own rewards very quickly. The thrill of one round, the excitement of even one well-answered Point of Information, these things are enough to charge months’ worth of batteries. I have had so many dreams in the past seven years about being back in rounds and wanting to savor a last competitive semester or year. Despite my interest in both, I have had no such heartbreaking dreams about the summer of 2001 or a chance to code a quiz.

The challenge right now, the challenge of a life lived creatively and deliberately in a variety of pursuits, is the create the fire of a competitive event in everything I do. And starting in four days, I won’t have baseball to distract/inspire me.

It’s starting to get colder. Already we’re starting to debate when we’ll have to bite the bullet and actually turn on the heater.

It’s been a crazy week on my home planet, one that presses the line of credibility to an extent. It seems all the books have major crises one after another, piling into one great crescendo that’s either cataclysm or triumph. But that’s not supposed to be real. That’s supposed to be Ender’s Game or its sequels (which I’m devouring at present), not 2009.

But every once in a while, there are years like this. 1968. 1987. Years that just sort of transcend everything and usher in a series of changes that seemed like it would take decades or even centuries, in a grand swoop.

It’s weird to be in a gentle transition and a soft landing against the backdrop of such a year. Although, I can anticipate the incredible bulwark of changes about to be breached. 1987 made so much sense, because my own life was in crazy upheaval and it reflected well. Indeed, maybe 1989 was really the year, far more than 1987, but things for me were calmer in 1989. Maybe it’s all just the personal filter one puts on things and maybe there’s nothing really going on at all.

Somehow, I doubt it.

But I’ve been in limbo nonetheless. A fantastic trip to Seattle, with lots of baseball and hanging out by the water and soaring to great heights (planes, Space Needle). A subsequent return to an apartment full of boxes that need weeding, resorting, unpacking toward repacking toward a ship date that looms ever closer, now looking like 7/7/9.

Yesterday, after chasing sold-out showings around the East Bay for much of the week prior, Emily and I went to see “Up”. My conclusion was that the only reason they give you 3-D glasses is that most people are self-conscious about crying around other people, even in a dark room. The substantial plastic glasses are a great cover for a movie where one spends most of the time weeping. To keep the kids happy, ever shorter of attention span (presumably, and if the youngin’s at the 10:25 PM showing were any indication), there’s a discordant chase-filled plot that even ends in a rare Pixar death (spoiler alert), but it’s bookended by tragedy worthy of Hans Christian Andersen. Seriously.

Today I went to lunch with a friend in the City (which means SF for only a few more weeks, and then I guess will mean… what, gulp, New York? Wow). She works at the San Francisco Food Bank, this huge airplane hangar of a building in the hills overlooking the freeway. As we approached the building, a pigeon flew into the glass side of the building, made a horrendous thudding sound, and fell to the sidewalk, dead.

At least it looked dead. It wasn’t even twitching – the wind gave its feathers a deceptively eerie sense of movement. But it was very much dead. Cue the Monty Python parrot sketch.

It was a horrific sight. I hadn’t seen the actual impact with the glass, but I’d heard it and seen the bird hit the ground. Its legs were curled up under itself as a last dying act, falling from the side of the building. Coming in as fast as it had, it was little wonder that it had killed itself with the impact.

The receptionist called Facilities to take the bird away, and just before I left, they informed us that the bird had been shot. It had a pellet in it and this had caused the death. Had we actually seen the bird hit the glass? Well no, I had to admit, but I had heard it. Maybe the bird was flying out of control because it already knew it was dying. Or it was hit where its ability to control its movement was, and had no choice but to fulfill a building-bound trajectory after being shot. Or it was shot just before hitting the building? But that would have to mean the shooter was far closer than we realized. And who shoots pigeons anyway? In the City of San Francisco?

If I hadn’t already been thinking about Air France flight 447, I sure was now. I couldn’t believe that something like this had happened right in front of me in the same week. Crossing one of the only radio deadzones on my home planet, the plane suddenly falls out of the sky. It was breaking up, but it was whole when hitting the water. It exploded in the sky, but didn’t break apart. We can rule out terrorism, but everyone saw a flash and fire. There was a massive lightning storm, but other planes made it through and every plane on Earth gets struck by lightning every few years. It left a debris trail, but the trail of debris was not from the plane.

It’s all about as crazy as an already shot bird hitting a window with enough force to die.

Suddenly limbo is seeming okay for now. Maybe the problem is just momentum.

Trying to ride Obama’s coattails into ticket sales? Trying to distance itself from the Bill Bavasi era? Trying to highlight an ABCABC three-letters-or-less rhyme scheme? Trying to simply point out that tomorrow is, indeed, another day?

Whatever the motives behind my beloved Mariners’ new marketing slogan, I’m wildly excited to be attending my first game at Safeco in nearly six years tonight. Today opens a 4.5-day trip to the Pacific Northwest, the last venture therein as part of the West Coast Farewell Tour. Emily, her sister, and sister’s husband will be meeting up with me tomorrow.

Tickets to a whole three-game series? Check. Randy Johnson’s return to Seattle? Check. Ken Griffey Jr. vs. Randy Johnson? Check. The only three-day sunny streak in the Puget Sound all year? Check.

It’s 5 in the morning and time to get to the plane station. When I return, it’ll be time to have discipline and get serious about things again. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to rooting for the home team.

So I was listening to the Mariners’ radio broadcast via MLB-TV’s audio package and this ad comes on the radio advertising tickets for the Giants’ series in Seattle, marking Randy Johnson’s return to Safeco. And I realized quickly that I already had tickets to all three of those games. And that it would be after I was free of day jobs and school for the first deliberately chosen time in my life.

And that was really cool.

I finished a book tonight that would’ve been more fitting to finish on my last day of work and it was all I could really think about as I was walking home from the train doing one of those walking stutter-step things you do when you haven’t quite timed the completion of your book correctly but you can’t simply let it linger over the overnight and somehow it doesn’t seem right to finish such a roadbound book in the confines of the house at six o’clock PM when the world is just darkening and everything seems at its most depressing and anger inducing but I’m not there yet I’m swinging my backpack around my shoulder to deposit book and sunglasses and contemplate the end of Oscar Wao and his world and whether it all came to a satisfactory end or not and all these tourists are staring just past me over the overslung shoulder at Godzilla or nothing at all and I don’t bother to contemplate for the storm is blowing in hard and I really can’t wait to be out of it before the rain that was supposed to be here earlier but isn’t yet and I’m suddenly rooted to the ground despite my rush by the vision of this pile of books that’s just strewn out on the sidewalk and one would normally think abandoned with a free sign that blew away but somehow this looks different worse much worse like something that was punitive and there are CD’s too and just enough peripheral stuff that it looks like someone flew away in a hurry or said you want your books huh THERE have your books how do you like them now and it was clear that they hadn’t quite been rained on yet but they would be soon and always the eternal dilemma that somehow gets to me of whether to scoop and salvage or whether the offended would be back for them soon and sometimes it’s even more complicated because there are times I think someone is meant to lose something they leave behind and another to find it and any intervention from me sometimes feels like its just abridging free will almost like I don’t think I can be a participant in the lives of others at least of strangers at least of those who seem to be on a predestined course that I should do my careful level best with not to interfere like picking up the books which just feels wrong despite the droplets I can see envisioning somehow it would be like picking up a dead body or something it just seems a monument to things I am not meant to interact with and I’m stumbling back across the Abbey Road crosswalk almost before I think of looking up to see if anyone is stopping because I’ve already burned time looking at the books and the rotting banana on the cardboard just after that seemed to tie so perfectly to the book just finished and rumbling back around in my head and I wonder how much agency he felt he had and how it compares to mine and what if you were stuck in a really beautiful prison with guards and fellow inmates who treated you well and you somehow intellectually knew it was a prison but still were so comforted by so much of it that it felt somehow strange to leave after a sentence of say three years and maybe it’s good to have rotten-to-the-core days like today because they remind you that it is a prison and there’s not even the hint of doubt about what you should be doing even though there’s times that what you think you really need IS a prison but no metaphor so much as a real prison with walls and guards and no computers or games or recreation or friends just you and just enough access to pen and paper to appreciate it enough to make it work after all you’ve talked about a hospital before or something similar but pain can be exhausting and makes for unreflective drivel like you’re barely able to chunk out now between the moments of startling exhaustion things that your father would call self-indulgent and you recognize as mental chaff but think it’s helpful too for the writing or for you or for something anyway maybe but it doesn’t matter you’re almost falling asleep on your feet falling through the gate and thinking about the dark dreary insides of the house and your one-hour no-contact foul mood and the unsatisfying release of a video game and whether the Mariners can do something today and there’s a package you weren’t expecting and an invitation you definitely weren’t expecting and you realize for the thousandth time this year how badly you’ve neglected everything that matters while in prison and the thought of nine nine nine nine nine nine nine sings you through the door like some trippy Beatles song and you know you must capture this moment and express it to yourself for one two three years hence when you’re on the brink and ask yourself like Oscar Wao flying back to the Dominican Republic goddammit is this ever going to be worth it again do you really want to live like a zombie can you ever get through this and so close to the edge that all you can do is see the walls and bars anew and wonder if you’re really going to make it or if you’re too broken down to even care and you realize that all these debates are why you haven’t been able to write anything or codify what you’re feeling and there are all the people who you do care about and believe in what they’re doing in prison and how can you explain that their paradise is your prison and your prison is still better than anyone else’s prison and now you’ve gone and upset everyone else and this is a hard lonely road to talk about with people who almost all feel differently and nine days away is just no time to make final seminal statements when you’re still in the thick of it and you have to wonder how long after nine how long after zero will you still feel in the thick how many dreams of stress and nightmare will you awaken to like this fruitless spoiled morning when you had something really due that day that then wasn’t as opposed to the school assignments the debate rounds the Seneca kids all the past things and you know that you will be haunted by this forever and somehow God please somehow let this all have been worth it.

Tonight I watched one of the most incredible Mariners games in recent history, with the M’s crushing the Angels 11-3 on a grand slam by Ichiro in his first game of 2009, alongside Griffey’s first homer at home for Seattle since 1999. It was one of those thoroughly satisfying wins in every way, with a very close game that the M’s led throughout, capped by a 7-run 7th where they simply romped.

Meanwhile, the Blazers were pounding the Nuggets to wrap up their first playoff season in many years, clinching home court in the first round of the playoffs to boot.

It’s starting to feel a lot like 2001. This could be a very good year for more reasons than I’ve already compiled.

Even though I’ve been feeling Octobery for a full week, culminating in yesterday’s trip to a pumpkin patch in Petaluma for Emily’s 29th birthday, I officially am declaring the October Season open today. (Hit Refresh if you don’t see why.)

It’s also the last day of the baseball season and I’m going to try to bring myself to watch some of the M’s game as they try to avoid losing their 102nd of the year. Meanwhile, I have to admit finding myself more interested in the fate of the Twins and Brewers, the last two teams I’m rooting to get into the playoffs. While I feel a pull toward both the Cubs’ breaking their curse and Lou Piniella, I think I’m cheering for a Twins-Phillies World Series, assuming the former can get there. October baseball always finds a way of drawing me in.

The BP is coming off its two lowest traffic days since I instituted advertising on the site three years ago. It rapidly seems to be forcing the issue of me making a concerted effort to re-bolster traffic effort and content or just letting the site hibernate till I have more time to maintain it.

Many decisions and changes seem to be afoot, taking shape and finding form in the darkness of an uncertain future. For now, I’m just trying to take each hour as it comes, savor the joys of uncertainty and possibility, and hope against hope for decent outcomes.

Finally getting over being sick. Finally thinking about tackling some big stuff. Too jumbled to find real focus; too energized to not comment on almost everything.

Happy October.

Just because I don’t write Introspection anymore doesn’t mean that I don’t often think in terms of quick updates. This blog format affords the luxury of doing both short blippy quips about my life like the old days, as well as the longer, more thoughtful pieces…

One of the grand ironies of the American experience is that some of our greatest themes and anthems for revered concepts are actually songs lambasting said concept.

The least subtle example of this may be Peter, Paul & Mary’s “I Dig Rock-n-Roll Music”. This is a more obscure case, but it remains PPM’s only really fully legitimate radio song. With lines like “But if I really say it, the radio won’t play it, unless I lay it, between the liiines,” it’s not really hard to see exactly where this song’s loyalty lies. And yet it made the radio and remains there to date as a sincere tribute to rock-n-roll (as opposed to folk music, which PPM were actually advocating). I’m sure the even crueler irony of this being their one radio hit when it complains that the radio won’t play folk music… yeah.

The most damning example may be Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”. This tune has become third only to “Proud to Be an American” (a song guaranteed to induce vomiting within 30 seconds) and the national anthem itself as the theme music to flag-waving jingoistic American patriotism. And yet the song was written as an indictment of American hypocrisy and the Vietnam War. The non-refrain lyrics are just hard enough to understand and the chorus is just loud and brash enough to ensure that this song will always bring a smile to the face and a cheer to the voice of those who are unaware they are celebrating an anti-American tune. “So they put a rifle in my hand, sent me off to a foreign land, to go and kill the yellow man.”

But the song that’s stuck in my head from this category today is “Takin’ Care of Business”. Office Depot or a related office store has become the latest in an unending string of businesses using this anthem to explain how productive you’ll be when using their products. “It’s the work that we avoid and we’re all self-employed, we love to work at nothing all day.” Yeah. This song is about quitting your job and starting a rock band, which is explicitly stated to be a lazy sort of scam on those who actually slog away at day jobs. Business indeed.

The song is stuck in my head because it’s one of the rotating theme songs for my baseball video game of choice these days, the 2007 mod of the greatest baseball game of all time, MVP Baseball 2005. My Mariners are getting massacred in this game on a regular basis, but any time I win makes it all worthwhile.

And speaking of the Mariners and winning, last night offered a glimpse at the best inning of the year for the (real-life) Seattle Mariners. Raul Ibanez had 6 RBI in a 10-run seventh inning that catapulted the M’s from a 6-1 deficit to an 11-6 win. When I tuned in around the fourth or fifth inning, it was 6-0, Twins. I wasn’t even sure why I tuned in when the score was already that lopsided. The M’s haven’t exactly been specializing in comebacks this year. But Ibanez hit a grand slam that made it 6-5 and the M’s proceeded to tack on and on and on, all the way to bringing up Ibanez again in the inning as the 14th man to come to the plate, and again with the bases loaded!! He only smacked a single up the middle to plate two and the inning only ended because Willie Bloomquist tried to score too on a throwing error and got barely tagged out.

It’s funny how just an inning like that can redeem a mood and a perspective for a day or so. Even in a hopelessly lost season.

It’s the sun that’s hopelessly lost here in San Francisco, and it’s looking like my trip to Las Vegas (Thursday evening departure) couldn’t be coming at a better time. The 10-day forecast in San Francisco does not get above 65 degrees (high temperature). The same 10-day forecast in Las Vegas does not get below 81 degrees (low temperature). I am a little nervous about “Florida Syndrome” in LV, wherein people will air-condition casino interiors to the point of being as cold as August highs in San Francisco, but then I may just cancel half the poker to go sit outside on the Strip and bake. I desperately need to feel the illusion of some sort of summer.

Meanwhile, my job continues to be my job. Slightly more livable than two weeks ago, ebbing and flowing, constantly leading me on only to crush my spirit. If nothing else, it’s giving me great fodder for future books and stories, future tales of how the American work model fails its people on all levels. And I know that where I’m working is better than 95% of what else is out there. We’re not even driven by a profit motive.

And speaking of profit (and even prophet), is it too early to declare the End of Capitalism? Today, Wall Street wants to think so. It’s just so exciting to have a negative net interest rate! To just feel that money devaluing in your pocket. I mean, how often does your pocket burn a hole in your money? That’s just nifty. Let’s buy financial stocks before they fail.

What surprises me is not that people are revealed to lie, cheat, steal, cut corners, and fabricate in pursuit of almighty profit. What surprises me is that people are surprised by the revelations.

Work out.

The weekend was sort of a waste. A very fun waste, but I still didn’t get nearly done what I was hoping to. Both in terms of making decisions and in terms of catching up on other projects of import. There’s a lot that needs to happen in the next few weeks and the sooner the better.

But it’s Monday and that can mean fresh starts and new beginnings.

To wit:
-Silver skyrockets.
-I actually have work to do.
-A project that seemed like it was going to be harder turned out pretty easy after all (more on this tonight).

But the granddaddy of them all, the mighty news that brought an actual lift to my life today, is this:
The Mariners fired Bill Bavasi today.

The Mariners are 24-45, worst team in the majors, and just got swept by the worst team in the NL. At home. This season would be hard-pressed to become more abysmal. And suddenly, like a sunburst through the clouds, the man responsible for assembling this on-field travesty is kicked out of his comfy chair. As though somehow, somewhere, concepts like accountability and consequences may still have meaning on American soil.

Our Manager, who got lucked into the job by his old boss retiring last year, needs to go too. And Mel Stottlemyre needs to remember how to coach pitchers. And we have about half our payroll going to people who will probably never be good again. This is no panacea, and it’s not going to save 2008.

But oh, what a start. I haven’t been happy like this since Ryan Franklin finally departed the Mariner ship.

So today, somehow, I’m almost feeling like Barack Obama. There’s hope in the water. Which is a lot better than the bacterial microbes in the water of my dream last night. (We were back in India, forgetting to ask for bottled.) A lot better than the (literal) stench of death that hangs around my office today. (At least two dead mice and a third who must remain unfound, given the ongoing odor.)

Cautionary, filtered, fettered, unsteady. But today, I’ll take it all. It’s not even Tuesday yet. Hallelujah.

The world of finance, of which I’ve become just slightly more aware/interested lately, has something called a “Misery Index”. Herein, undesirable conditions for individuals like unemployment and inflation are combined to demonstrate just how much harder it is to be financially viable under those conditions. I’ve been thinking a lot about personal misery indexes lately, in part because all the meters seem to be pretty high.

Misery Index: Weather Edition

Hey, if a popular TV show can put four words together in a non-sequitir with a colon in the middle and the word “Edition” on the end, why not me?

In any case, this would be the index that determines how frequently a given city or town has weather where the high stays below 72 and the low stays above 32, with no interesting “weather events”, such as rain or extremely high winds. While many people might make an index desiring such a state, mine would uptick the misery for every day where such conditions were met.

I’m guessing San Francisco gets a 325 (the scale is 0-365, of course). Higher is more miserable.

The only thing intolerable (or indeed, even less than stellar) about the Bay Area is the weather. And my goodness, is it ever intolerable. This much middling, piddling, nondescript but still a little crappy and cold weather is just killing me. Give me rain, snow, heat, frigidity, anything but this. I mean, look:

The last time it got over 72 was May 17th, when there were, admittedly, 4 days of decently warm weather. The last time it got below 32… the data I’m looking at doesn’t go back that far.

I need some extremes, some seasons, something other than slightly miserable weather for months on end.

Now I’m really curious what would score well (low) on my Misery Index… I’m guessing places like Chicago and Albuquerque, which have weather I love. It would be great to find a site with actuals (averages don’t really cut it) for a year or two and just run the numbers.

Misery Index: Personal Edition

I stayed home from work today with a raving migraine. Despite vastly improving my migraine status with my own self-regulation and stabilization of caffeine intake, combined with the profuse wearing of sunglasses and maintaining a non-fluorescent work environment, I still do get migraines from time to time. And this was a doozy that made the idea of being on a BART train, let alone sitting in front of a desk for 8 hours, utterly laughable. It was starting to clear by about 6:30 or 7:00 this evening, this after I had spent basically all but an hour or two in bed from waking up at the parallel time in the AM until 3:30 in the afternoon. In a word, joy.

Last night, I got a $328 bill from AT&T. For calling Canada. You are no longer handling my long-distance, AT&T. SBC was a wonderful company, but AT&T is currently proving itself to have ravaged everything that was even a little good about SBC. I’ve hated AT&T my whole life, and owning the Giants’ ballpark isn’t going to get them out of this. I called Qwest this morning to switch long distance, and my internet might be on the block next. The hate I cannot exaggerate. I actually wrote a diatribe on the memo portion of my check.

I have seemingly forgotten how to play poker. Which is not a big deal (none of these things are what we would call a big deal), but it makes everything else worse, or at least feel a little more miserable. Of course, there are just enough times when I play really well, but get outdrawn at the last second that really cut to the quick. But still, early May was one of the best poker periods of my life. That time is gone.

I am no longer in Albuquerque. The trip was great, but it’s over now. And I’m left with that drought where I have no scheduled trips or breaks to look forward to. Having something to count down towards is an essential part of making life less miserable. And I’m fresh out. And there may be the ‘Deis debate reunion thing in August in Vegas, which would be great (though less so per the paragraph above, I suppose), but August is a long way down from now.

There are other things I could put here, but I really should self-censor. They are in arenas that it is just best if I don’t post about for the time being. But they are probably the most difficult/miserable items.

And the M’s are 20-34. This is, however, somewhat mitigated by the fact that the best game of all 54 of them was last night and I got to watch all 9 innings. It was a 1-0 shutout gem where Yuni Betancourt (my second-favorite position player on the current team) smacked a rare homer to cement a Bedard/Morrow/Putz strikeout-laden shutout victory, a second straight over the defending champion Red Sox.

This last fact is the only happy thing I can really think of today. That, my friends, is – what’s the word? – miserable.

Apologies for the complaint-laden post, especially when all of them are mild and only really combine to make for much misery. But in the sine-curve lifestyle, one has to take the chutes with the ladders.

Like high inflation, everyone’s proclivity toward debt, and the Iraq War, StoreyTelling being inundated with a deluge of spam comments is looking like part of the reality I’m just going to have to adjust to.

The one spam comment per minute rate looks pretty consistent, so I think that’s what it’s going to be.

Meanwhile, the general barometer of how things stand based on the people on the streets of the Tenderloin says outlook not good. The theory about the end of the month causing the trouble seemed to be dented yesterday. But who knows at this point.

And if the Mariners lose one more exciting one-run game, I think they’re going to set some kind of record for fan frustration. They’re 1-8 in one-run games. 1-8! And they’re 12-8 (.600) in the rest of the games. .600 happens to be the winning percentage of the top two teams in the AL. The only good thing about this is that they can’t possibly keep up that kind of record in one-runners, so as that progresses to .500, the M’s will go on a tear. Right?

The cable may get fixed today and we’ll have some sort of explanation. It’s Comcastic!

Work’s been better; everything else has been crazier. The rate of change is looking pretty spiky as we settle into May. I’ve surrounded myself with distraction bolsters: the APDA Forum game, playing baseball on Sunday, and so on. But the world is there whether one’s distracted or not. Does anyone really think Bush is going to take record disapproval lying down?

Happy Friday.

So, barring unforeseeable alterations or difficulties, here is a big chunk of my schedule for this calendar week:

Sunday, 4/13: Cardinals @ Giants, AT&T Park
Monday, 4/14: Diamondbacks @ Giants, AT&T Park
Wednesday, 4/16: Mariners @ A’s, McAfee Coliseum
Friday, 4/18: Pirates @ Cubs, Wrigley Field

7 teams, 4 games, 3 cities. That’s a good week. Makes it a little easier to deal with working and all that in the meantime.

But tack on things like an unexpected free trip to a luxury suite yesterday (apparent face value: ~$400/seat), Randy Johnson’s first start of the ‘08 campaign today, my beloved Mariners on Wednesday, and my first trip to Wrigley on Friday? It’s downright amazing.

I’m also hoping that the streak (currently a 1-game streak) of teams I’m rooting for this week winning can keep up. Even though my loyalties are somewhat torn tonight (my favorite pitcher vs. my favorite NL team) and are not strong on Friday (though they lean pretty discernibly toward the Pirates, which I just can’t say that the Cubs bleachers fans will be excited about), I’m looking to go 4-0. Or at least 2-2, with the second win being the M’s. Because really, that’s all that matters in the end.

April may be terrible – and it is – but it at least bestows the blessing of baseball. I’m not sure how I’d survive this month without it.

A first day – no joke. A joke in the bathroom. A dental visit. A decision: no anesthesia. A walk home. A phone call, somewhere between banter and the most important decisions of our lives. A poker game, where a lesson was actually learned. A Mariners game, where all season was lived in a day, or in two tumultuous sine curve innings. A heart-stopping phone call for all the wrong reasons. A joke that just doesn’t work because of history, of context, of life itself.

I could write all the details, flesh it out, spell it out in flesh (a pounding heart in the wake of feeling the Earth slip out from under one for no good reason) and blood (spilling onto the towel from prodded gums). But there’s no need, or no cause – today felt like a day that hearkened for blippy Introspection-style reflection. And some day I’ll read and remember and another dawn of another April will come across from the distance of years or months or weeks or days. And I’ll be just there. Inside it all again. April the first. April is the cruelest month. April come she will.

And has.

It’s been a baseball weekend. Which helps explain the lack of updates of late. I had today off, which was not officially an Opening Day holiday, but it should have been. Might as well have been. Cesar Chavez is important too, but this is baseball.

I managed to attend not one, but two games that didn’t count this weekend. Well, if you count Thursday as part of the weekend. Both games were at AT&T Park (the most recent appellation for the SF Giants’ ballpark), both were 7-2 road team victories, and only one was the most glorious game I may have ever attended.

You see the ball in the picture up top of this post? Coming screaming off Raul Ibanez’ bat? It ended up in my hands. And then on my knee, and then on the floor in front of me, and then in my hands again. A foul ball. Stamped Official Major League Baseball. From an exhibition game, yes, but off the bat of a Seattle Mariner. And not just a Spring Training guy trying to make the team, but off our three-hole hitter in the starting lineup. My first ever foul ball.

The convergence of events that led to this Thursday catch (”catch” – it wasn’t exactly clean, but I also didn’t have a glove) were pretty remarkable. Em & I were at the game with Gris, Gris’ Dad, Gris’ Dad’s wife, Gris’ half-brother, and some friends of Gris’ Dad. We all sort of showed up in that order, with Emily being last. But it turned out that through some sort of will-call mis-timing, the friends had bought tickets down at the lower level of the park (we were in our standard nosebleed seats). So we decided to sneak down, since approximately 471 people and at least twice that number of seagulls were in attendance. We went down in about the fifth inning.

Off-handedly upon arrival, I remarked “Hey, we could get a ball here.” It seemed pretty optimistic at best, given that we were three rows under and overhanging deck, and we were lined up with shallow left field on the third base side. Not exactly behind the dugout. After discussing these odds with Gris, I admitted that it would have to be some sort of line drive.

Indeed.

Within two innings, Raul Ibanez stepped to the plate in the midst of a major Mariner rally. After collecting two strikes, he stayed alive with a swing that sent a liner sailing vaguely towards us. It kept hooking in our general direction (we stood up immediately, as fans hoping for foul balls tend to if anything’s looking to land within a half-mile of one’s seat), but it looked sure to catch the overhang. I was pretty resigned to it bouncing off the overhang above me when I realized that the pain in my hand was from a collision with the ball. I had not moved my feet at all. I had been perfectly aligned with the trajectory of the ball, in the precise seat we’d snuck down to.

It was all over in seconds. There was basically no time between being sure that it would hit the overhang and coming up with the ball off the ground in front of me after it had ricocheted from my hand to my knee to the floor. And it was so automatic that I was surprised when people were high-fiving me and congratulating me and asking to see the ball. I almost said “what ball?” while holding it aloft. I was in such autopilot that it took me maybe ten minutes to really come down to Earth and realize I’d finally caught a foul ball after so many years of yearning for just that at baseball games.

The subsequent weekend has gone down in a similar burst of speedy autopilot. It’s been mostly good, especially on the front of making major progress on a vital project that I’m doing for another website (details to follow, hopefully in a matter of weeks or perhaps even days). Played some of the best tennis we’ve played yet. And yes, there was baseball. Joined Gris to watch a depressing 7-2 drubbing of the Giants by the A’s. Then was at home for Opening Day for the Mariners, playing for keeps finally, taking down the Rangers 5-2.

It’s hard to say just how much time and energy baseball are going to take up of the next few months. While still working a day job, I’ve promised myself that I’m going to lay off myself a little. Not be quite as harsh about time for recreation and demanding more writing from myself. The way I feel I’ve lived the last five years of my life has been a lot like constantly yelling at oneself for not being able to perfectly juggle while trying to waltz on a conveyor belt. Really, honestly, waltzing on a conveyor belt should take most of one’s focal time and energy if one’s to do it at all well. And juggling while doing so, while maintaining perfect balance and waltz form, is just about impossible. And even if one can manage to get in a few tosses, it really pales in comparison to how well one can juggle when one is neither on a conveyor belt nor attempting to waltz. Seriously. You just wouldn’t believe how poor that juggling is compared to any authentic objectively good juggling.

I don’t know if that makes sense to you or not, but realizing that this is a good metaphor for my life, I’m going to try (note: TRY) to take it easy on myself about the imperfect juggling. And maybe even take a dance or two off from attempting juggling along the way. Because really stellar juggling is to come. When I’m on solid, danceless ground.

Yes, that had to do with baseball – baseball is just baseball, somewhat on the side from juggling, conveyor belts, and waltzes. But it takes time, just like those things. And the fact that I still get tempted by things like Facebook offers to give one the opportunity to blog full-time about one’s favorite team (with probably no compensation and maybe not even readership) indicates where baseball ends up falling. I love baseball. It gets my heart palpitating. And a year where the Mariners are good and MLB.tv exists? It’s just scary how much fun this could be.

I can leave the baseball-blogging to people who know what they’re doing on that front. Or at least have more time for it and more of a following already. Why do something if one isn’t going to be either the best or unique? That’s just a good standard question to ask about any expenditure of time.

Except rooting for baseball teams. Because I’m not the best and I’m certainly not unique. But not doing that would be like not breathing.

Which is very different than not waltzing on a conveyor belt.

While you’re waiting for the Country Quiz II to be out (maybe tonight?), here are some random assortments to tide you over. And if you’re wondering why there hasn’t been anything big, it’s because the CQII is about to come out. Latest calculations have it that it takes me an hour to write 8 answers, fully coded. There’s also the question tree (done a while back), the image collection (done more recently), and getting all the merchandising ready to go ahead of time (a significant time-suck). So it sort of saps the creativity. Non-stop writing and coding will tend to block out other writing.

The 2007 Mariners (in my MVP 2005 season) are 9-2 (.818) since switching back to All-Star level. One of the losses was a heartbreaker where Travis Blackley coughed up two solo homers in relief in the 7th inning of a 1-0 lead. They also lost the first of the 11 games on All-Star, so they’ve won 9 of 10. This is looking most auspicious, but admittedly most of these games were on a tour of NL Central ballparks – not exactly stellar competition. The sweep of the Pirates just completed was the first sweep of the season – in the second week of June. Just before, RJ took a no-hitter into the 7th in Milwaukee. Thus, the playoffs are looking at least like a longshot instead of an impossibility.

The CQ2 has 32 of 64 answers completely written. Full merchandising of about 80 items per design will be available at launch. Additionally, a new advertising strategy is going into place with the launch of this quiz. You wouldn’t want everything to be just like the original, would you? I briefly thought about holding the launch till the day of the 5th anniversary of the original (it would be 18 January 2008), but timed launches of quizzes have never exactly served me well. It’s going up this month, and probably within minutes of me finishing it.

After a few months of notable average improvement, I’ve gotten beaten down with the migraine stick this month. Maybe seasonal changes have something to do with it. I’m also noticing a November pattern, given how concerned I got about these things last year at this time. Still, overall severity seems down big in 2007.

After the longest-ever 4-day week last week, it’s hard to get as excited as I’d be inclined to be about a 3-day week upcoming. Who knows how long those 24 hours can be? But there’s reason to believe they’ll be relatively straightforward, a brief lull between twin storms of last week and the entirety of December. In other news, there is no news yet, but there will be by ‘08.

Finally, Free Rice is perhaps the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

This is my 62nd post in StoreyTelling, in its 48th day. Duck and Covers count for exactly half (31) of those posts.

Okay, so I got to thinking. And I can’t just leave the last post where it ended.

You might be wondering, for example, what the statistical probability is of me making the playoffs after switching to an easier difficulty after just 57 games (35% of the season). Maybe this doesn’t sound very challenging to you.

Last season (2006), my M’s went 101-61, for a .623 pace. Assuming that same winning percentage greets my next 105 games in 2007, I’ll go 65-40, for a final record of 72-90. Which will NOT make the playoffs. For an indication of how much I’ll miss by, the Angels are on pace to win 101 games (sound familiar?) and the A’s 94.

Now, you might say that after playing 57 games on Impossible Mode, I’ve improved over 2006. I sure hope so. But I’ve also set my players back a notch. And if this baseball game is like any other, the player progressions for the season are at least partially impacted by the start the player gets off to. So one would think this might mitigate any improvement.

For example, Ichiro is hitting .186 with 3 HR, 5 RBI, and 16 R. Last year, he hit .271 (yes, last year’s difficulty was hard) with 78 R. It’s unlikely that he’ll suddenly bounce back to hit .271 or score runs on that pace for the last two-thirds of the season.

Similarly, Randy Johnson is 0-11 with a 6.13 ERA in 12 starts and 3 relief appearances (61.2 IP). Last year, he was 11-8 with a 1.70 ERA in an injury-shortened season (22 starts, 158.2 IP). Staff ace Mark Mulder is 1-8 with a 6.47 after going 20-6 with a 1.71 (in 247 IP!) last year. Only Eddie Guardado is within 2 points of last year’s ERA of anyone significant on the staff. And he won the Cy Young Award last year, with a 2-0 record, 54 saves (in 54 chances), and an 0.61 ERA in 59.1 IP (64 appearances). He almost won the MVP Award. This year, he’s only managed to get into 9 games so far (8.2 IP), but has posted a 1.04 ERA, no record, and converted all 6 save opportunities.

What to conclude from all this? (Besides the fact that I’m a tremendous dork who loves baseball, statistics, and video games?) That this will be mighty difficult. Assuming the A’s go on to a 94-68 record, which is a very standard mark for a Wild Card team, I will need to compile an 87-18 (.829) record to catch them. In my Pro-level (3rd hardest of four levels) season in 2005, I only went .722. And that year, Ichiro hit over 30 HR.

Good luck.