Wax Banks

A lovely bit of violence for you.

Rio? Really?

How are they gonna deal with most of the world's semipro athletes doing 'rhythmic gymnastics' with the various man- and lady-whores of the Carnivale all night?!

Pornolympics is more like it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!drunknow

Bill Simmons makes me want to care about things.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud of the Boston Sports Guy.

I can’t wait to see what happens to KG, Kobe, T-Mac, Carmelo, Howard and others when they finish with basketball. These guys have been mini-corporations and basketball machines since the age of eighteen. What will they do? What will be important to them? When I was researching my book, one thing that blew me away was how brilliant the guys from the fifties and sixties were. Not as players, as people. Oscar Robertson, Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Bob Cousy, Wilt Chamberlain…these were thoughtful, well-rounded human beings who cared deeply about not just their sport, but about their place in society and (in the case of the black guys) their stature during such a tumultuous time. Everyone knows about Russell’s eleven rings, but did you know about everything he did to advance the cause of African-Americans? Everyone knows about Oscar’s triple doubles, but did you know that he filed the lawsuit that paved the way for a real players union and free agency? These were truly great men and the N.B.A. just wouldn’t be where it is if that wasn’t the case.

Read, as they say, the whole thing. You don't even have to care about basketball. It's just kinda that good.

Tabata.

To cycle in to tabata circuit:

situps
pushups
squats
pullups
jumprope
dumbbell bench presses flat on floor, legs up in crunch position
burpees
lateral lifts
squat/presses
shoulder rolls
decline pushups (yoga ball), move to press-ups (upside-down pushups)
running/sidestep laps, alternating directions
straight-arm dumbbell lifts from side to clap (chest exercise)
three-point headstands, handstands
lie on back, partner 'throws' legs, you lift (crushing abs exercise)
row

Gladwell and Goliath and blah blah blah.

Got bored, read the latest from Malcolm 'in the middle' Gladwell: an unbearably laboured metaphor about David vs Goliath. He's waving at something interesting but not quite getting there. The idea is that as long as Goliath plays by Goliath's rules, he has to lose, because the game is built for Goliath. Gladwell doesn't take the poetic step, the spiritual one, because he can't, because he's a business writer instead of a cultural critic or poet: he ends with Goliath wondering whether he's really a giant, but the real lesson is that 'giant' is a made-up category, and it does not connote. It means only size, and entails certain abilities, but strengths and weaknesses are entirely context-dependent. They describe interactions, relationships. 'Giant' is about identity. When you think the game is one thing, a still-life, you cease to look at it truly, as a realm of interactions. As process, movement. Basic zen, of course, and also basic games theory.

Naturally Gladwell has an interest in keeping things low-key; that seems to be his temperament, but it's also one of his audience's major demands. So there's almost nothing to the article - just the straightforward observation that the only way to win the written game is usually not to play. Which is a teenage insight. 'Why don't people understand this simple thing?' he asks. Partly because he's describing, essentially, games - war, basketball, single combat. One-on-one contests. And of course his characterization of basketball is exactly as simplistic as his characterization of social networks, war, scientific research, university admissions, single combat...halfway-decent basketball teams are trained on how to beat the full-court press, and the energy of grown men flows quite differently from that of teenage girls; Gladwell's usual Tiny Little Bit of Insight doesn't even scale within the narrow domain he's discussing. Never mind that the purpose of basketball isn't, ultimately, to determine superiority - it's a symbol, a dance. He admits this in his piece, yet doesn't understand why it matters! And so his usual Big Central Metaphor is even more strained than usual, which is why the piece's language is so fucking amateurish and inelegant.

Gladwell's pop-psych tidbits and half-digested snippets of overheard math and social theory are as they've ever been: undeniably intelligent, unbearably self-satisfied, anything but courageous. He's an ad man, and bless him for taking his job seriously, but they're only ads - selling lifestyle poses and cocktail-party conversation-starters. Gimme a break.

Pong.

This right here? Impressive. Most impressive.

Catching, throwing, juicing, hoping, waiting, listening.

Over the last couple weeks I've been part of a baseball-n-literature roundtable at Quiet Bubble, overseen by Mr Walter 'The Other Walter' Biggins, a/k/a Q. Bubble himself. It happily ranged all over the map:

Baseball's a little different. It encourages hardscrabble kids to try their hands at it but slumming rich kids have always been drawn to it, too. And, because it's a team sport, it forces people from different class and ethnic backgrounds to get along and coalesce into a working unit. Different teams fight against each other but baseball also forced—earlier than most American sports—people within a team to make conflict and resolve tension, too. There's at least two sorts of conflict happening in baseball. When you add managers and owners to the mix, there's even more class conflict and tensions between workers (players) and corporations (owners).

[...]

Man, it’s hard to be a baseball fan right now. And, pardon the narcissism, it’s particularly hard for me. The team of my childhood, the Texas Rangers, is not only the worst franchise in professional sports (even the Tampa Bay Somethings have been to a Series now), but we have recently discovered that the players during the Rangers’ only era of semi-competence—the AL West champions of 1996, ‘98 and ‘99—were the preeminent juicers of their time. I picture Juan Gonzalez, the (strangely moody!) two-time MVP who symbolized those years, sitting in a darkened room right now, rocking back and forth, clutching his shriveled, aching testicles and neighing softly to himself.

[...]

In game studies—'ludology' or the critical study of the form and content of games and play, as opposed to 'game theory'—you get the concept of the 'magic circle,' the operating fiction of the gameworld. It's the contract that binds gameplayers into the crazy belief that this leather thing belongs in something called an 'end zone,' or that there's a substantive difference between one side of the 'foul line' and the other (talk about a Manichean goddamn universe—in baseball, 'in' and 'out' are called fair and foul!). Within the 'magic circle,' our morals are reset: coworkers become enemies, the fifty-yard line marks the border of the homeland, and 'traveling' gets you yelled at...

[...]

In this postmodern time where the existence of a stable, coherent self (and therefore Reason, Truth and Knowledge) is made problematic and the individual subject position is decentered for a more social conception that is almost Sophist, how surprising is it that baseball is waning in the popular imagination? Another reason to hate postmodernity.

It's a good read if I do say so myself, but don't take my word for it. Many thanks to Walter, Dan, and Brian. Let's play two.

Well I'm weirdly proud. Sort of.

Look at these guys!

Everybody's getting paid behind this steroid stuff - so why talk?

Alex Rodriguez is like everyone else in the Major League - a corporate employee masquerading as something else, whose business happens to be baseball. The list of steroid-abuser names came out when it had to, not a day before, and of course the MLB honchos knew about it. Home run records and superstar names are how they make money. The Boston Red Sox have no connection to Boston except in the imaginations of the audience members; the teams have no integrity but what the audience desperately, gratefully imputes to them so as to avoid acknowledgment of the emptiness of pro sports spectatorship.

Steroids have long been part of the Major League's business plan. McGwire, Sosa, and the pursuit of Maris's home run record - you think it's a goddamn coincidence that this happened when baseball's media fortunes were at a low point (post-strike)?

Naivete is one of the privileges of childhood, and childhood is what pro sports sell. Screaming, crying, single-sex congregation, playing dress-up, simple games with arbitrarily complicated rules, weird architecture, sanctioned violence, monomaniacal idolatry (of monomaniacs): popular pro sports in the U.S. are Romper Room with a paycheck.

The idea that these sports are anything but TV entertainment filmed in front of a studio audience, partially scripted and all, should vanish from our national mythology. Saddens me to say so.

Updike and the Kid.

I hadn't read this in a while, but it really is an extraordinary piece of writing - if you are or ever have been any kind of baseball fan, John Updike's farewell to Ted Williams will tear you in half.

It may be that, compared to managers’ dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

If you know your American mythology or ever loved a ballplayer as a child you already know how the story ends.

Harsh start; truth.

The GF says a 'harsh start' is a beginning to an argument that puts you immediately on the defensive: e.g. 'DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW TO MAKE A SHOPPING LIST?!' She also says:

'There's a claim that women are responsible for most 'harsh starts,' but I believe that's because men are inferior. They need so much direction.'

And that's why I love her.

Hat tip to Ai-ris for bringing this truth into our lives.

Two blades of the knife.

Up: But I did get up at a reasonable hour, speed to the gym - without checking email first - and put in some time on the bike and the rowing machine, the dreaded 'fasted LISS (low-intensity steady-state) cardio' that everyone seems to agree is a good way to lose some extra weight atop muscle-building. And I feel fine, modulo the sharp pain in my left lower back, which is as likely a function of sleep position as anything else. And it looks like today will be an excellent day.

Down: But I did sit down to blog this instead of, say, continuing to write the Great American Novel.

[In other news we have coined a new phrase meaning perhaps 'stupid risk-taking' or 'chivalry' or just boys' habit of answering all the teacher's questions in math class: male pattern boldness.]

Olympians.

This heartens and saddens me: protests have ended the progress of the Olympic torch in Paris; the torch has been extinguished five times in that city; officials had to board a bus twice to continue the relay. Of course the idea of 'protest zones' is offensive and ridiculous; of course the pro-Tibet protestors are right to insist that the Chinese face the inhumanity of their annexation and occupation. But the thought of the Olympic athletes monomaniacally training for their ludicrous every-four-years competition, then faced with the possibility of a boycott that will render those years of preparation moot, is depressing. I hope the Americans boycott but I doubt they've got that kind of backbone - the Olympics are far too profitable for athletes and TV broadcasters alike, to say nothing of our nuclear-armed billion-strong business partners to the East.

Sweet unholy little babychild Jesus!

When I was in middle school I had a poster - taken, I believe, from an actual box of Wheaties - of Michael Jordan's apocalyptic free-throw-line slam dunk: if you've ever seen footage of him dunking you've seen the one, legs splayed out, tongue at full extension, one man looking for the all the world like he's achieved the dream of flight. One thing I used to love about Jordan was that he wasn't ugly and ungraceful like Patrick Ewing, nor a smash-em-up machine like Dominique Wilkins, nor a weaselly little point guard type. He moved like molten metal; watching him play was like watching old footage of Mohammed Ali in the ring.

Back in those days the All-Star Weekend really came down to the slam dunk competition for me; I ate that stuff up. Nowadays I'm no basketball fan, but I'll readily admit that the slam dunk competition has gotten loopier over time. As a result, it's gotten to be kind of a snooze; I haven't felt anything for it since grade school, and the word is that commentators and fans alike have come to feel the same.

But this guy...

...is from another planet. Pure, joyous theater.

Good on him.

Pain everywhere.

Usually we head to the MIT gym on Tuesdays: some pushups, situps, jumping jacks, maybe a few dozen of this doofy squat/press combo thing that invariably leaves my thighs feeling like tempered steel afterward (if steel felt like ow), then off to the weight room for the usual Huge Train routine. It's nice. I'd worried about sacrificing one of our weekly Big Fitness Days on the altar of the milonga; it's not like I'm gonna stick to salad to make up for lack of exercise. Well, I needn't have worried so much: I woke up this morning with fun fun burning pain issuing from every joint and muscle, not least my back, which was also causing some of my I Didn't Know I Could Stand Up Straight Instead of Hunching Over Like a Goddamn Bell-Ringing French Literary Character neurons to fire. Gaily. They gaily fired. Ow.

I have much to look forward to. Including, perhaps, an Advil. Marvolo, Reader(s). Absolutely marvolo.

(Sidenote: don't bother googling 'tango howto'; some asshole invented a programming language by that name. Might I suggest searching YouTube, which has an entire, like, 14-part instructional series? Plus an armful of other tango instruction in grainy frame-dropping video form, gratis. The earth offers up her virtue once more all digital-like.)

Slightly-more-rapid transit.

Just so's you Boston bicyclist types know, you can quite comfortably ride in the large shoulder on Route 9 out to Newton; it's probably safest at higher-traffic times to take some of the offramps (so as to avoid swerving into traffic on overpasses), but you can cruise Boylston St. at a goodly clip for several miles. Great exercise too - those inclines give your legs and lungs a bit of a how's-your-father, particularly eastbound.

In other news: wow I could use a nap.

Subconscious connection.

As the Pats game drew to a close last night, we flipped over to the Sox-NYY game to see a bad situation: 4-2 Yanks in the bottom of the ninth. But unlike the football game (the outcome of which was never in any doubt), the Sox game was a dramatic thing, with Schilling and Clemens(!) dueling to 1-1 after seven innings, a cloudbreak for the Yankees, then two intense go-rounds for the Sox. The last at-bat: David Ortiz, bases loaded, two outs, against Mariano Rivera. Who may look put-upon but is the fucking Prince of Darkness as far as I'm concerned. He wasn't at his best, but he got what mattered.

I bring it up only to mention that I'm bringing it up: I was riveted by the final series of Sox at-bats, particularly that impressive two-out walk to load the bases for Ortiz, who flied out to shallow center. All it took was the scoreboard, the words 'New York Yankees,' and the sound of all of Fenway Park screaming its collective head off, and I was twelve years old again. 'Longtime Reader(s)' of unusual patience may recall that I have mixed feelings about such things; I don't like the posturing and pieties of diehard sports fans, who are like Buffy fans without the assumed depth of shared meaning. (This isn't to say I don't understand and share some of the pieties and posturing; I'm just saying, the game is not the myth of the game, and that disconnect is central to the nature of fandom. You don't have to like everything about yourself.) But I was totally, uncritically sucked in. And maybe that's an analogue of 'reading for pleasure' but maybe it's something else - like turning on E! True Hollywood Stories and not being able to turn away - and I'd like to know better. Meanwhile I embarrassed myself jumping out of my seat every time that skinny fella pitched to Ortiz. Not even working out my mixed feelings here. Airing them out, like socks.

Locus classicus of the hugeness/fitness paradox: bicycling.

See, I think I could start every day with a ~15-20-mile bike ride. Get the blood going, clear the mind, burn some fat. (The term is 'Low Intensity Steady State (LISS) Fasted Cardio Workout.' Though I object to the term 'low intensity' because I get really angry at the world, even when I'm going slow as ass! That's pretty intense.) But will that encourage hugeness, or fitness? Unclear. I've gone on record supporting hugeness (see the previous post), but then sometimes - when you're all alone and not totally flexing for the ladies - sometimes a little fitness can be acceptable. At the expense of hugeness? Unclear. Like so much. Like this entry.

Of course Mim and Adrian are probably going 'F that, I ride 17 miles on my junker bike just to get to the garage where I keep my rock and roll bike for the 250-mile ride to the airport for my commute to the Moon!' But there's a reason you're right this instant reading my blog and not theirs, Reader(s), is all I'm saying. I show you my heart and soul and you click away, you embrace some other online diary? I don't think so!

[Today's loop - Science Museum to that Boathouse a good distance past Harvard, at the footbridge - took an hour on the nose. Getting dressed, 5-10 minutes; post-ride ablutions and relaxation, 20 minutes. An hour and a half on non-weightlifting days seems totally reasonable.]

Just so you know what it's like at the gym with me, Reader(s).

'We're not here for fitness or health,' I noted last night as we did our Military Presses. 'The ladies aren't going to want to get with us because we've got fucking fitness. They want hugeness, and we're here to attain and offer hugeness.' I then hurt my elbow somehow doing Bicep Curls and begged off the rest of the night. Later on, over burritos at Anna's, I helpfully clarified: 'Hugeness isn't a physical quality, it's not something that happens to your body at all. It's a spiritual state.' I accented the second syllable of 'spiritual,' knowing it was wrong. Jesse and Bo seemed to understand. I am willing to tell you friend that I did not understand.

Things get complex at the gym, no question. It's only the midsize guys who stand around pinching their biceps in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror; the small guys are reluctant to be seen looking and the big guys don't care. (I probably count as 'small' in this schema.) I've never seen a lady at the gym squeezing her biceps in front of a mirror, nor any other muscle. (But then I've never seen a guy reading US Weekly magazine on the exercise bike.) Last night the MIT Track & Field team was occupying (monopolizing?) half the gym; they understood muscles to one or another extent, sure, but they clearly were unaware of even the concept of hugeness. We watched as they fell one by one; we laid garlands and bouquets near their 'fit' and 'healthy' bodies, now gone cold; we sang encomia and then we continued to attain hugeness. No offense, but fuck those poseurs: you don't go to the gym to get muscles.

What?

I've been too much in my own head lately to notice that the Sox have the best damn record in baseball! And the Yanks are two games out from the AL wild card spot, eight behind the Sox, with 30 games left in the regular season. Gnarly. (Sidebar: there's a high school in California that produced two Major League perfect game pitchers: David Wells and Don Larsen (the latter a name burned years ago into my brain as one of the great American heroes. Consider the odds.)

40+ miles on the bike; ping pong majesty; squash.

To Alewife, up the Minuteman Trail, around Monument St to Concord (with a stop at the Old North Bridge, oddly stirring), stop for lunch. Then foolishly head down 2A, caught in a brief fall of rain, roll past Hanscomb airfield, double back at I-95 to Lexington over that damn hill, lemonade from an adorable little girl and her mom on the street. Back down the Trail, stop briefly at home for athletic shorts, then down to MIT for ping pong and squash, where one of the opponents is a tennis pro in his late 20's.

Have you ever noticed how well tennis skill translates to ping pong and squash skill? I'm dead, folks.

See you tomorrow.

Possibly inspiring, possibly excessive, arguably grotesque vis-a-vis body hair and narcissism: one year of exercise in pictures, and thoughts on fitness as personal goal and obsession.

[Wrote this a couple days ago; was worried that it's not strong enough to show to people. Standards are lower at this moment, apparently! But: this is clearly an incomplete post; I've been thinking a lot about this collection of topics and want to come back to them. To it? Damn, I never did take a proper grammar class.]

This guy took daily pictures of himself for more than a year while he worked off some excess weight. How much? He shed roughly 50 pounds in six months, and went from a 46" waist to a bit over 31". The movie is striking for several reasons, not least his egregious decision to start waxing his body hair, and his wife's suggestion that he go bleach-blonde (which frankly I think suited him once the roots grew back). As he puts it elsewhere on his site: he wasn't eating enough, so the weight loss is in part due to slow development of lean mass, not just fat burning.

So, done how? Weights six days a week, cardio workouts every day. Doesn't sound too hard, actually.

See, here's the thing: I find the movie kind of inspiring. The guy's a network admin, and did all this working out in a room in his house because he was tired of (ahem) looking like me. (I mean he didn't put it in those terms, exactly. But unfortunately his starting stats are essentially the same as mine.) I don't tan, I burn, and frankly I find the idea of prancing about on the beach a little goddamn silly. And let's face it: being concerned about muscle mass as a visual feature, rather than an aid to some kind of athletic achievement, is evidence of a crippling narcissism. I mean for all the guy's brotherliness and plainspoken articulateness on his web forum, his life appears to consist of doing exercises, cleaning his house, maintaining computer networks from his home office, constantly updating his website (every day since the beginning of 2003, without fail) and once every year or so allowing himself a calorie-packed celebratory meal with friends. John Stone may have mastered his own body, but he still has a geek's lifestyle in a lot of ways, and that tinges the inspiration he provides with a little bit of sadness.

But is it possible to bring yourself to make such a change without an element of narcissism? And can you turn it on and off for tactical purposes? And can admiration of positive change be separated from mere addiction to one's own neurochemistry? And isn't a shapely happy jock preferable to a dumpy unhappy nerd? And am I seriously asking that fucking question??

This is to say several things, firstly: I'd like to be in good physical shape. In late November and December I tried to go running as often as I could bear it, and found it both frustrating and enjoyable. I don't have much endurance, but even over the span of 2-3 weeks I noticed a huge uptick in my ability to keep up with the program I'd been assigned. Then Christmas vacation hit like a truck, and I went jogging once with my brother back home, and that was it - only a couple of times since then. Frankly, I find the activity crashingly boring; plus my knees and back screamed constantly in pain whenever I jogged.

Plus do you realize how goddamn cold it gets in Boston?

But then a gym membership was acquired, and a routine established: 4-6 trips to the MIT gym per week, combining a half-hour on the (!@#$!^$#) bike with at least a half-hour of weightlifting. Between running, biking, and lifting, change has been almost instant: I have more energy, breathe more easily, sleep better, feel more confident. My self-image has altered perceptibly; though I know academically that no major physical change is apparent, that I'm still overweight and soft-looking, I sense that people must see me differently, that my carriage or something-or-other has changed. Anyhow I now walk into the gym without shame and that feeling has been a long time coming: more than a decade.

At the same time, I wonder whether I'm even capable of pushing myself with the zeal required to achieve that kind of health change with that rapidity. I can't help but think time spent sitting should be spent running...but then time spent running should be spent writing, i.e. sitting, and it's tiring just giving a damn.

Clearly I need some wine. To take the edge off. Today's a 'space out lots of little meals' kind of day. So it may also be a 'little bit of wine goes a long way' kind of day.

If you know what I mean.

The Sports Guy dunks one.

He writes reverentially about Allen Iverson, then delivers this unbelievable image:

Third, the best situation for Iverson should have been Minnesota, but the Timberwolves' own candidate for "Worst GM of the Decade" screwed up their roster to the point that they don't have enough appealing contracts/assets to make a respectable offer. Imagine Iverson and KG together? What a shame. Plus, King and McHale collaborating on a deal would have been practically historic, like seeing Frankie Muniz trying to post up Haley Joel Osment in a celebrity game. We were cheated here.

His irritating tics and occasional even-more-irritating juvenilia aside, Simmons has moments of incandescent fucking genius, and that is one of them.

Running.

Just a moment to observe that running without music is unexpectedly engrossing - counting the seconds out loud (to measure intervals of running and walking) sounds like not so much fun, but it certainly frees up the just-above-reptile mind in an interesting way.

Also a note: sprinting repeatedly up long wheelchair ramps is not a trivial thing. Rarely have I found myself, as I did this afternoon, letting out barbarian yells against my will, from exertion. I used to hate the rubbery feeling in my legs after a hard run. This week I find myself - against my will as well - loving it. As stupid as jogging is, it's a little bit addictive. And every day it gets a bit easier to get up and run.

If you know me, you're well justified in asking: how fucked up is that?

Why have the Patriots been playing like bullshit lately?

Yes they didn't deserve to lose to the Lions today - and they won with a couple of minutes left - but that's like not deserving AIDS. (Doesn't take much.) Detroit is 2-10 if memory serves. What happened? Looked like the Pats thought they had a bye week after beating Chicago, and the Detroit QB played his little punk-bitch heart out. Good for him.

More importantly: Did you catch those extraordinary Volkswagen ads in the second half? I gotta say, the first one gave me a bigger shock than any piece of advertising since, roughly, the dancing chimp and the two retarded people sitting in the garage over the E*Trade logo and the words 'How are you spending your money?' (Still my second favourite ad ever, behind 'See why 1984 won't be like 1984,' and that's only because I'm a huge dork.) If you haven't seen 'em yet, don't read about them, just watch them somewhere. Dazzling and disturbing.

Self-esteem boost.

Nice feeling? Jogging. Yes I'm surprised. Running without being chased by monsters has always struck me as dumb, the sort of thing people do when they're not capable of holding conversations or playing team sports. I know I'm a jerk, don't bother pointing it out.

In any case I went jogging today of my own free will for only the second or third time in my life. (Last time? 1999. An XGF had just told me about her nice date with some other guy. I walked out the door and ran five miles to boil off some rage. Not wisdom.) The Esplanade is nice when it's not overrun by other goddamn narcissists self-improvers. Mem Drive feels very visible, i.e. embarrassing for someone of my build and running-induced redness, but that's OK. In time that will change.

Anyhow the self-esteem boost is this. This morning's route was a bit longer than I'd anticipated, and my lazy ass ran it in less time than I expected. Apparently I'm so far out of shape that I'm all the way back in shape. God apparently exists! Whaddaya know.

OK just kidding about that last part. Plus I won't even tell you what the soundtrack was, it's embarrassing. Suffice it to say that mid-90's midtempo acoustic college rock has its place. And 20 minutes in, something changed dramatically: it actually seemed worthwhile. Was that just the onset of fat-burning (vs glycogen consumption)? Well I don't know the 'science' here, Reader(s); what I know is it felt pretty much perfect for a couple of minutes, and that's alright.

Only a couple of minutes mind you. The rest felt mostly like slightly-better-than-shit. I didn't mind.

Holy Christ what an essay.

Just go read. (Thanks Walter.)

I mean let's take a second before we go: it's a petulant and sentimental piece of writing in a register/style that glorifies ornamental machismo by saying 'Well I also like other stuff,' and that's basically bullshit. Alexie's prose has an exhilarating rhythm and tonal variety to it, and this is a great piece of personal writing. But as sports writing, as polemic on behalf of the Sonics and their fans, it's not perfect. Might not even be great. And there's some dead air in there. I mean I've got mixed feelings about professional sports and was both moved and un- by the prose but look:

While my father was dying, he and I talked basketball. Three days before he died, my father still had enough will and character left to deride Kobe Bryant for being a rotten smallpox wound on the game of basketball.

"I know," I said. "I can't stand him."

That meant I love you, Dad.

"I still can't believe they traded Shaq instead of Kobe."

That meant I love you, too, Son.

...which is lovely and right in its way. I mean my dad and I have conversations like that all the time about Manchester United. and that's precisely the function they serve. Nice to read yourself in someone else's story, but don't you want to turn around and ask, Well what if motherfuckers had something else to talk about? Even...themselves?

Even one another?

Aww hell, it's a great little essay and you should read it and enjoy it as much as I did. By the end I was in awe of how nicely the whole thing turned around. But that 'meritocracy' talk down near the bottom is off-key, and the hoops talk doesn't go too deep, and the talk of hating and greatness is a straw man thing, and part of me just can't help wishing there was something a little...deeper...to give a shit about than the Seattle Supersonics, maybe even something less 'pure' and less 'elemental' and a little more challenging and complex for everyone involved. I mean you talk about what it's like on the court but we're not there, we're on our couches with cans of beer and real enough emotions but no achievements or failures to hang them on. We're playing make-believe but like to pretend we're not, and that's unhealthy in a way, don't you think?

I think. Nice essay though.

Holy fucking Jesus.

Do you know who founded Multi-Man Publishing, the people who publish the entire Gamers wargame catalogue (including the OCS games, the Civil War Brigade series, and more) and Advanced Squad Leader, widely acknowledged as the most detailed WWII tabletop simulation ever made?

Curt Schilling, currently of the Boston Red Sox.

Holy shit! MMP is the center of a wargames niche for extreme specialists; I'm glad they exist, and that they continue to produce ASL materials. And with Schilling's money in the company they can stay afloat for a long time.

For some reason this knowledge makes me really happy - as an Avalon Hill fanboy from back in the day, and as an adoptive Bostonian.

As usual, pissed on by technology.

So the Cardinals are up 23-10 on the Bears deep in the fourth quarter - after the Bears befouled themselves in the first half and made a somewhat better Q3 showing - and the Cards defense picks up a fumble (or interception, I can't remember) and seemingly runs it in for an improbable TD.

Game basically over, right? We think so. We make ready to clear out.

The TiVo pipes up: 'Delete or Save?' We pipe up in response: 'Huh?'

Apparently something has gone wrong with the recording. Too little hard drive space, too long a game, something.

We figure, OK, we'll just cut to the live feed and find out how it ended.

Apparently the goddamn Bears scored 14 in the last five or six minutes to close it out at 24-23. And what was a grand, stunning victory for Arizona (for whom everyone except the Chicagoland native in the room was cheering, and rightly so!) is now being discussed as some kind of dull, disappointing fait accompli by Steve Young and Boomer and Irvin and the crew. Ever wonder what the phrase 'blue balls' means? Wonder no more.

Hugely enjoyable game throughout, though, unless you're a Bears fan. Hell with that! My Chicago loyalties extend to the Jordan-era Bulls (best value-for-dollar of any televised sport, I felt at the time, though as I get older I'm more nostalgic for the Magic-Bird rivalry) and the depressing Cubbies of the mid-to-late-80's. I'll never forget watching Andre Dawson get beaned in the face on WGN, or Harry Caray's voice washing over the faithful gathered in the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. Hell, I cheered for them against the risible left-coast Giants in the 1989 NLCS, with Mark Grace and Will Clark the tall lefty first basemen, my last postseason while living in Texas...

(Sorry, got carried away there.)

Anyhow: the TiVo pissed on us. I mean it was as bad as Darfur in a lot of ways - you've got to hand it to us, the way we stuck together and persevered through that mild anticlimax. I mean seriously, the poor Cards are 1-5 now, 1-6 or something? With a QB like that you've got to be doing something aggressively wrong to be losing games that way.

Survival.

Last year several housemates and I took regular trips - twice weekly for a while - to the MIT Climbing Wall for indoor rock climbing. A friend - artist/scientist/bon vivant Solar O., which by the way if I'm an exotic dancer on a moonbase in the future my stage name will be 'Solar O' - anyhow Solar's one of the keepers of the Wall. He's in freakishly good physical condition for an MIT graduate student, all biceps and posture and so forth; his condition is made all the stranger by the fact that the only exercise he gets, apparently, is rock climbing. No aerobics as I recall. (He used to row for MIT's Crew team, but those days are gone.)

So we climbed the Wall, and while suspended from a horizontal surface a couple feet off the ground, I mulled over this state of affairs.

I could do it, you know. I'm not much of a climber - my form was horrible - but after only a couple of trips to the Wall I had noticed a tremendous increase in strength and dexterity, and in calm. Solar recommended traversals - horizontal trips around the 3-sided Wall, rather than up it - and his advice paid enormous dividends right away. Rock climbing, it would seem, is an activity at which rapid meaningful improvement is the norm. I loved it but haven't been back since doing something nasty to my lumbar region one day and taking a couple weeks off to recuperate. It's fine now; I should return. God knows I need the exercise. (But don't go too often; the pads on your fingers will thank you.)

Hanging there, my back to the earth, straining muscles I didn't know I possessed to reach a 'rock' large enough to fit three fingers half-bent, part of my (too-great) weight held up by the curve of one foot, knee hypercompressed, akimbo, off to one or another side - like a monkey in fuzzy still-frame - I had a flash of insight, among other things.

Months later I've had another. It has to do with near-death experiences, and the possibility of Heaven; tangentially it concerns National Novel Writing Month, and video games. This is to say, it is about the value of terror.

[Warning: uninformed airy speculation follows. Probably there's a 101-level CogSci textbook out there that'll clear all this up for me. But I like writing it and I have the time, so no matter.]

Now that is a superb piece of writing.

Ffter reading this column I found myself freakishly interested in the subject of football highlight shows. And perhaps you will be too. It's brisk writing and thorough, full of enthusiasm and telling detail, and written with a collegial authority that's the mark of observant, serious criticism. And it's about editing goddamn televised football clips! That's no small achievement. The opening:

Once upon a time, I was a production assistant at ESPN, cutting highlight packages for SportsCenter and other studio shows. It was easy enough to simply cut together the scoring plays. But what separated a good highlight reel from a generic one was finding a turning point or trend that went a little deeper. If that could be shoehorned into the time allotted by the producer with any measure of coherence, you might get a "nice job" from the highlights supervisor. Then you'd go cut the UNLV-San Diego State game.

The biggest difficulty with editing highlight packages is that there are so many games and so little time. In 1987, ESPN bought itself a few extra minutes. In a historical footnote to the deal that brought the NFL to the channel, Bristol negotiated an exemption to the traditional two-minute limit on highlights [...]

It's strong small-scale writing. Kudos to its author.

Bower of bliss; a kind of narrative virus, communicable and mutating in response to our very personal and invasive questions.

Parents' and children's lives orient themselves according to the school year; summer, time for rebirth and escape and through-green-fields-running, is the interregnum. Look: state of innocence, the first tentative hold and breath and kiss (and...) of young romance, the granting of secret names, the convincing dream of all over communion. Finally the expulsion from bliss into a colder realm, less alive. Overseen by cruel masters too long removed from their own freedom and release.

(All Odysseus wanted was to go back to being a husband, you remember, after the enslavement of sexual bliss. How very grownup of him. But the story ends not in the marriage bed but the land of the dead: the most grownup thing of all.)

Teen romance stories are Garden of Eden stories, I should think, and the Garden is infancy. Love without lust, pleasure without fear. Baseball is played in a walled field of greenest grass, the pitcher standing atop a dirt pile, everyone in caps and shirts too big. 'The sandlot' they call it. The field is a playground. It strikes me as only slightly odd that the great American fantasy of escape is the desire to turn into a woodcut or watercolour. Why not: paintings live forever more or less.

Morning rising drowsing writing: assorted.

[Started this in the morning yesterday I think. Maybe this morning. Honestly I can't remember. It's crap anyway, stay away. Seriously.]

Not setting the categories in advance helps. Hell you can even type with your eyes closed, like this. If you're lucky you catch the typos with your fingers. If not you get them on the rebound ('s how you find The Girl too, probably, though I'm generalizing and abstracting here). Yeah type often enough and in 'chords' and you start to feel the errors before you consciously spell out the words. Or there's a keyboard-iamge in your brain and as you press each key the appropriate image lights up inside your head. Eventually I'm serious someone will start manufacturing keyboards thin as paper that you can attach to whatever convenient surface for ergonomic reasons. So you can lounge on your bed and tap out blog posts on your lap, or the arms of a chair, or the back of your head as you do situps...

Not my realm of expertise.

Played some Pikmin 2 the other day on the GameCube and ran up against the brick wall of my spatial-processing limitations again. In that game you send little dudes out to do tasks for you - mainly carrying stuff back to your homebase, or attacking enormous alien bugs (it's a silly game yes) - and one key thing is to keep your army's size optimal by picking them up as soon as they've returned to base, or (failing that) by scooping up your Pikmins as soon as they're done dispatching whatever task they've been given. Which means, which means: you need to have a map in your head. The space is simple and not that large, but the number of little tasks you have to queue up and plan in parallel is really striking, and to layer on top of that a slightly complex spatial-processing requirement...it's hard for me. Maybe it's the sort of thind I could get good at over time, but I'd not played Pikmin in a few years and it turns out I have no out-of-the-box aptitude for that kind of processing. Same with StarCraft and other such real-time strategy games. I wonder whether that translates directly to my awfully messy room, or whether there's some intermediate brain-failure step.

Been playing in addition a lot of Sudoku lately. Last night I did so without glasses - hopefully for the last time, as by the end my vision was swimming around and when I woke up this morning my eyes were killing me. Sudoku's not a great game - it's largely mechanical, like those logic puzzles in Games magazine - but it's diverting. And its challenge increases the worse your memory is. Apparently I just don't have much RAM installed, or something, because keeping the arrangement of numbers in mind all at once just takes it out of me. Some days I fly through the Hard puzzles we've got in no time flat; other days (like last night) it's just too much to go exhaustively through possible arrangements and reach the answer. Every Sudoku board reduces to an already-solved problem. So why bother? But it's a blast. It's actually kind of embarrassing how much I enjoy it. A lot of that is the execution - when you treat it socially it gets even a little harder, especially if you're embarrassed to lose. So yes: Sudoku happens.

Was asked yesterday what I'm reading and couldn't give an answer. That simple sentence is factually true but doesn't get at the Truth of the encounter, which is: it's like saying aloud that you haven't called your family in a year. There was a time when the local library wasn't big enough for my brother and me.

I remember how angry I was when people were falling all over themselves cheering for the local professional baseball team. It all seemed very personal. I suppose in retrospect that's not an inauthentic or particularly cynical outlook: it is personal. The game is only a staging ground, played professionally. The 'stage' isn't the location of the play. The play itself is the stage; you are the performance. Maybe it's better to learn about Macbeth and his wife than about your own bullshit; but maybe you're better off focusing on yourself than on who can pummel the ball furthest. It's not unreasonable to ask 'what do I learn' and it's not unreasonable to say 'this means nothing' I'm certain of it. Still, it was all very personal. It's churlish to have a reaction to an aesthetic object well out of proportion with its complexity and seriousness. Also churlish to be the Angry one when everyone else is Celebrating. But then you didn't see her face at the last game of the World Series.

You've seen this. But it's worth watching again.

I had no idea how this story ended the first time I saw it. It nearly killed me.

Only a beast could watch that news story and not feel a thrill for the guy. You needn't like sports - just people.

Well, this week he met President Bush. If an athlete has deserved it lately, it's this kid.

Barry Bonds uses steroids? No fucking way.

Retire, Barry. Just do it.

Simmons and Gladwell on Page 2! Plus a Joss Whedon aside.

Holy moley, check out the Sports Guy vs. Malcolm Gladwell stroke-off/gab session at Page 2 (in two parts). Simmons is a hugely entertaining sports writer and life-long Red Sox obsessive who counts Games 4 and 5 of the 2003 ALCS as the peak of his sports-watching existence; Gladwell is an essayist and cultural critic about whom I have serious mixed feelings but who's obviously (a) very, very smart and (b) weirdly hip but also (c) enamored of small, shapely ideas blown up just past the point of precision and correctness out of some popularizing impulse. (You can see why he irks me!) His Harvard-admissions essay remains the most exciting thing of his I've read, but I got a thrill as well out of this moment on Page 2:

I loved "Moneyball." I thought it was one of the best books of the past decade. I think it should be taught in psychology classes and business schools as a treatise on the subtle effects of bias on expert decision-making. But do you think that Billy Beane, for a moment, wouldn't trade his situation with Theo Epstein or Cashman? To me, the hard cap in football -- and, to a lesser extent, the soft cap in basketball -- are what makes those sports so interesting. It's what makes them sports. Contests where one player has significantly more resources than another are not sports. They are marketplaces. To root for the Yankees or the Red Sox is the functional equivalent of rooting for Microsoft or General Electric. No thanks.

Ouch.

OK but I propose a questionable analogy: Moneyball-style management is like putting together a large ensemble cast of talented character actors and no stars. More traditional GMing is like trying to find a DeNiro or Streep or Hoffman (Philip Seymour or Dustin) for every single part in the cast, and mostly failing, but on the rare occasional success creating something that will be remembered until the end of time. The legends of baseball are largely happy accidents. Managing a baseball team can be about pounding out wins (*ahem* Steinbrenner) or giving birth to happy accidents. Which would you rather watch? Baseball is a TV show and stage play rolled into one, in which touring productions compete against each other. So how do you cast that, to what end? Assume for the sake of argument that your viewers are all zombies and proto-fascists and good ol' boys and impressionable yoots and wizened old men, and...

(Then again: Firefly was a Moneyball show, unless you account for Joss Whedon as the Michael Jordan of TV scriptwriting, which is debatable but not prima facie unthinkable. You might say in 1997 he was the greatest Moneyball pick of his time, a utility player capable of MVP numbers but entirely without flash or pretension; now he's the marquee player, face on orange juice commercials and so forth. And wins the big games. Um, or something.)

Someone nominate me for a goddamn Koufax already!!!

Why hasn't this happened yet?? I AM SO AWESOME.

It's not about the Jew-hatred, is it? Because to quote Saddam Hussein, I can change, I can change!!

(Sandy Koufax, in addition to being arguably the finest southpaw ever to pitch in the majors, is among the best-known Jewish athletes in the U.S. And did you know the first pro batter he ever struck out was Bobby Thompson?)

And there's this, from Wikipedia:

Koufax showed back up for the 1961 season in better condition than he had in previous years. Over the winter, he decided to start working out and running more. Koufax also decided to find out just how good he could be. During a spring training trip to Orlando, Dodgers catcher Norm Sherry told Koufax the same thing that many others had in the past: stop throwing the ball so hard. In the first inning of the game in Orlando, Koufax walked the bases loaded on 12 straight pitches. Again, Sherry told him to take something off the ball to get better control. Koufax finally listened and struck out the side. By the time he came out of the game after seven innings, Koufax had struck out eight batters, walked five and given up no hits.

(My emphasis.)

And re: the 1963 World Series, in which Koufax's Brooklyn Dodgers swept the Yanks:

Yogi Berra, after seeing Koufax's Game One performance, was quoted as saying, "I can see how he won 25 games. What I don't understand is how he lost five."

Finally: when Koufax threw his perfect game in September '65, the Dodgers didn't have a hell of a lot of reason to be proud of their performance at the plate: they put up only a single hit themselves that day.

Aaaaah, baseball.

"Trying to hit him was like trying to drink coffee with a fork." - Willie Stargell

Bowl.

Dull game, awful advertisements. 'The bus stops here in Detroit' was nice. When you don't have a dog in the race everything's a lot less interesting. Still: truly horrible advertising. Even the Rolling Stones were uninspiring. Damn.

Several qualities.

Bill Simmons: awesome. (Even when he writes about football, as here.)

The Golden Girls: awesome. (I didn't realize the show was created by a woman. Makes sense though.)

Damon, by the way.

A while ago I left this as a comment elsewhere, in response to the question 'What do you think of Johnny Damon?'

He's a greedy, barely-literate professional athlete whose interest in his temporary home city goes only as deep as his paycheck - in other words, he's just like almost every other professional athlete.

Dan Shaughnessy's laughable spasms in the Globe about Damon leaving were yet another reminder that, for the most part, pretending professional athletes and the businessmen who control them are anything more than employees in a massive, unbelievably lucrative corporation is...well, at this point, more or less inexcusable. You don't have to take away the loveliness of baseball to see the ugliness in pro ball.

Over/under on the Yanks has gotta be around 100+ wins this year, huh?

I'm with Bill Simmons on this one: who cares? Or rather: why does everyone care? The outcry over Damon's 'hasty' departure seemed a little bit pro forma after the Sox's blueball 2005 season, but leave that aside: seriously people, it's not only 'just a sport', it's a sport in which the players are dumber, more myopic, more egocentric, more image-conscious, more overpaid, more likely to be moved around like chess pieces than at any point in its Proud, Noble History. Did no one around this city see Jerry Maguire or an episode of Arli$$?

But that's not the most irritating part. See, the feelings of wounded pride blah blah blah are understandable. But this is a city full of fanatical baseball supporters whose fantasies of surrogate parenthood and childhood hero-worship (which are I suppose the same thing to a degree) were so publicly played out 14 months ago. I was jumping up and down hollering like a fool in October 2004 at the Thirsty Scholar, sure, and I teared up when Curt Schilling made his - aren't they? - kind of silly statements about the existence of a Higher Power with whom he communicates on the mound and during the commute in to work. I'm only slightly embarrassed by those facts. It felt good, like going to the theatre (or watching, say, Friends). But I'd be more embarrassed if I'd joined the chorus of people talking about 'faith rewarded' and so on. Baseball fandom, if you live in a medium-to-large American TV market, is cost-free. Has been for quite a while now. 'Faith' - Jesus, here we go again, but only for a second I promise - is most emphatically not.

Baseball fans: what it is you're into, when you strip away the nostalgia, is nothing more than a television show. And even though (back-of-the-envelope) David Schwimmer made more annually on Friends than A-Rod does with the Yankees, baseball is pure marketing glitz. TV scholars and cultural critics are well-versed in the hard truth that broadcast television isn't about supporting programming with ads, it's about selling eyeballs to advertisers - the entertainment is the hook that gets you to sit down for the ads. (This system is changing right now, before our eyes.) Baseball is the same. It's about asses in the seats, and a machine for generating (1) feelings of community bought cheap; (2) massive revenues for team owners and the cities with which they strike deals; (3) memories of 'civic engagement' that don't actually take place. Smile all you want at people as you wander around the streets after a big victory, but you're not changing your fundamental relationship with them.

If you're not on the field, baseball is a pretext. Beautiful, sure. Moving, yes (but indirectly). But next time you ask someone 'How can you like this shit?' - about anything at all - remember how many people have described baseball to you as boring, slow, repetitious. They're not wrong, though they're not entirely right either. Baseball is all those things. Its 'graceful rhythm' and clockwork functioning are components in a myth we tell about ourselves. For most of us, not onfield, it's a collective narrative mechanism, and a low one. It's lovely the way a dolphin's 'smile' is friendly.

---

Y'know, I write stuff like this, and I instantly feel guilty and think I must hate everything under the sun. Must not dream or feel or love at all. But that's not true. How can I tell? For one thing, I remember how I felt watching the Sox win the 2004 World Series. Joy. I was glad of that feeling. (I think of lots of other things, and other people, but let's stick to the topic for a second here.) It's soured a bit, for a combination of personal reasons new and old and those stated or alluded to above, but it was real and good. It's just...you know how you feel weird watching other people's stupid household rituals, and you want to excuse them because you and your family have your own stupid old habits, but you also wanna criticize, and you might feel a bit hypocritical? No? Some people find that situation charming. I find it awful. I believe in the power and importance of ritual - you'd be quite literally insane not to - but bad or damning ritual is bad or damning, and ritual uncoupled from meaningful community and social bond-formation is...well, what?

OK gotta go return this rental car. No more time. (Awww, and I was even gonna use the word 'fascism' and then spend five paragraphs trying to explain its appropriateness! My liberalization is complete! :)

Faith, once more.

From a while ago:

Perhaps it's stupid to think that baseball matters. Here's the thing, though: it matters as much as we believe it does. I'd guess it's more interesting, more challenging, to have to question your beliefs. Isn't that the true appeal of religious belief — not to have this infallible thing to fall back on, but to have something to bounce ideas off of, to question, to wrestle with, to try to understand in spite of it being by its nature unknowable?

I never did write that I disagree utterly with this claim. But I do, I do, no, no, no. As examples for consideration, I offer:

1) Belief in our parents' infallibility;

2) The rise of evangelical/therapeutic Christianity in the United States;

3) Down-the-ticket party-line voters;

4) Several thousand years of interfaith conflict;

5) The persistent Western belief in the elementality of courtly love;

6) The constant use of terms like 'suture' and 'rupture' and 'conflict' and 'irreducible complexity' in self-serving academic jargon of our time, martyr-complex-afflicted;

7) The humid chthonic mystery.

All great art comes out of the struggle with the things in which we put our faith and the struggle with that faith, but we...mistreat our artists. All great political movements come out of the struggle between new ideas and articles of faith, but we...object rather strenuously to new political ideas.

The illusion of challenge: that giving yourself over to a 'higher power' is somehow more difficult then dealing day-to-day with the world. You'll find they're not so different, I think, except that the former empowers you to go home and say, 'I'm right.' Split hairs all you want: 'I don't think I've got the answers!' Yeah, but you've got a monopoly on the questions, and you're willing to claim all the answers can be found if you stare long enough at this book. It's a translation of a translation of a divine dictation, but take our word for it, it's all in there.

For a change, ludology is helpful here: the concept of the 'magic circle', within which suspension of disbelief is the prerequisite for pleasure in play. Right? But that doesn't take an act of faith, it takes passive acceptance and relaxation. Just like reading literature.

The hypocrisy at the center of religious belief (and I'm open to the objection that I'm foolishly extrapolating from Christianity to other religions, but we can talk about that separately) is that we valorize it as a conscious act when it's a hell of a lot more like the relaxation of the critical faculties. The apparatus of 'faith' - bowing toward Mecca, saying your rosary, nailing Scriptures to your doorframe, moaning in rhythm, whatever - is a mnemonic device to keep you from doubting, to help you eliminate doubt. (You call it 'discovering God' but what you're doing is 'ignoring questions'.) Even faiths that 'encourage questioning' valorize your arrival at the right answer.

All of which is to say, about the Red Sox: yell all you want, vote with your dollars, pretend your 'faith' is more than a gamble, more than statistical play, but you may as well yell at Lear for cutting Cordelia out of the original deal. You are required as part of the apparatus of fandom, to keep the church full, but what's asked of you is that you sit there. Your fantasies of involvement and self-worth are your own.

In such a way is the secular god Shakespeare more generous than his heavenly counterpart; in such a way is his church the more welcoming one.

The gym.

In high school I occasionally lifted weights in winter - I was in better shape then, though I haven't been in good shape since I was a young child. I'm not strong or fast, but I'm stronger and faster than I look. For lots of reasons, though, I'd like to look the part. Mostly for health, but also vanity, of course.

This week I've been doing a free trial membership at a gym in Copley Square; it's a bizarre experience, silly, and in several ways quite distasteful. The place stinks, for one thing, and I've never gotten used to that. Perhaps I could someday, but I'm not convinced that's a good thing. The music is absolutely dreadful, for another - dance mixes, club tracks, banal R&B Summer Jamz, and slow hip hop tracks dripping with false piety and melodramatic encomia to the 'street'. (The petulance and solipsism of commercial hip hop has, I think, outstripped that of Top 40 pop, which has a considerably larger tradition on which to draw and consequently needn't be so numbingly adolescent-sexual/autobiographical all the time.) The people are exactly the kind of people you'd expect to run into at a gym in Copley Square - the vanity of so many people there is shocking. I have little to be vain about at the gym - and that, I feel slightly vain about.

The nice things are quite nice, though: I'm not the person in the worst shape there, though I'm in the bottom half I suspect; no one cares how stupid you look mouthing the words to Crowded House tracks on the stationary bicycles; having lots of people around can, if you're in the right frame of mind, serve as a wonderful guilt/motivation source; and of course, since I get no exercise whatsoever, I've immediately noticed a difference in body and mind. I carry myself in a whole new way when I'm exercising, and I fucking love it.

Cardio, arms, legs, abs, back, cardio, a nice walk to LOWER THE VOLTAGE. Pathetic. I've turned into that corporate type I hate - comes straight from his office job to tone up a little before going home to watch cable. (Only I didn't watch Cable, Reader(s) - I sat down to write this missive to you, whom I love or at the very least acknowledge.)

And now I hurt all over. Excelsior.

So long, Epstein, and well done.

Theo Epstein is leaving the Sox, which seems like a bad thing. I've always loved seeing loyalty to a city in athletes - y'know, the guys like Nolan Ryan who wanna stay close to the family and the fans they've grown up with, even though Nolan came up with the goddamn Mets and then the Angels before his salad years in Houston - but the clubhouse of a baseball team must be completely insufferable when you're surrounded by millionaire crybabies and semiliterate wannabe playboys (along with a few aww-shucks gamers, sure, but let's be serious here, this is the Major Leagues of Baseball we're talking about). Epstein has worked out quite well for the team (as has his monster payroll, of course), and it's sad to see him go. I remember shaking my head at what appeared to be a total lack of coherence or vocabulary on his part during the 'We traded Nomar' press conference last year - but Theo Epstein fooled me that day, easy as lying. A million dollar poker face that kid has and no mistake.

I hope things turn out well for him. I wasn't much interested in the Sox this year, and I don't anticipate being much interested in them next year - or maybe ever again. It all seems very much of a particular moment, and a particular group of people, and a particular set of motivations now less present and proximate. But it sounds like he was the behind-the-scenes MVP of the Sox's inevitable World Series victory, and it's a shame that personal asshattery by the team's CEO is what's apparently driving him away (though the blueballed vibe of the White Sox's sweep can't possibly help).

[Yes, by the way: inevitable. But then I'm not much of a believer in destiny, fate, 'luck', so it's just a business proposition bound to a sporting event for me. Meh. And while we're on the subject of cherished myths, Abner Doubleday did not invent the game of baseball. Not even close, I'm given to understand. See Stephen Jay Gould's rousing essay, 'The Creation Myths of Cooperstown,' in your collection of The Best American Essays of the Century for instance.]

The days are just packed.

I felt like an All-American boy yesterday (no, not a recipient of the All-American honors, which is something you give to these like fine upstanding student-athletes): did a longish day at work, strolled home singing, went rock climbing again**, came home to some beer and an episode of South Park (what an extraordinary show - you can keep The Simpsons, I'm a South Park lover), turned in relatively early.

My usual custom is to check email freakishly often, but I didn't make it to a computer last night: too damn tired. As I explained to someone after plunging unceremoniously from a fairly straightforward hold, 'I could do that, but right now I feel pain in places I didn't know I had places.' Which yes I stole from some comedian but no one knows who, and so to shower!

** Not since I took up the saxophone in middle school have I felt such rapid improvement at a physical task. Saurabh is definitely right about this: After a couple of weeks I'm already doing things I simply couldn't do the first day. Which is to say, of course, that I'm 10% of the way to doing what the freakish human/spider/monkey hybrid staff members do with no problem. But the biggest single leap is from 0 to 1, right? One day at a time. Leaving aside the question of whether it's worth ripping one's hands up.

Fitness update.

85, to catch up for flaking out yesterday. I have made a note of the 22 I owe.

I am not yet fit.

But oh man does my midsection hurt right now.

Well, at least he had an OK night.

Pedro Martinez, former Red Sox ace, was let go amid no tiny amount of acrimonious backbiting and ego-tripping after the team did pretty good last year. He opened up the 2005 season for the New York Mets yesterday. And how did he do?

I will tell you how he did.

That bastard managed to strike out 12 of the last 14 batters he faced. That's 12 strikeouts in less than five innings, kids. That's not pitching, that's murder.

And the Mets still lost!!

Basically nobody wins. Except the Cincinatti Reds, I guess. And really, who cares about them?

Hey our team won I guess.

Like I give a shit!

The important facts:

• All the ads sucked this year, except for the monkeys and the one with the cat and the pasta sauce.
• Breaking a party up into two rooms, 'upstairs' and 'downstairs', and not playing Settlers of Catan like you'd planned...that's some crap right there.
• Paul McCartney has written some pretty incredible songs, but there's something immensely disturbing about seeing a bunch of 16-year-old girls dancing and screaming while a 60-year-old knight plays songs that were old before they were even born.
• But those monkey ads were like Tolstoy. Probably I'll be doing my dissertation on the topic.

No I lied about the dissertation thing.

Serious questions about politics now:

• Are wealthy people all assholes?
• What would you do with $1 million?
• Donald Trump: American hero?
• What should we do about the fucking POOR?

Discuss, rejoice! For my 26th birthday is nearly at hand.

Todd Boyd on basketball and race.

I did some work today on an article that's been kicking around my head for a while, about professional sports, games, popular perception, race, and myth. (I say 'article' instead of 'blog post' because I'd like to sell this sonofabitch.) I found myself going in to the thing with one particular argument in mind, and in the course of doing some research for the article, I ended up shedding that argument entirely. (Lucky for me the jettisoned bit was only a component of the broader claims.) I was reading about the Ron Artest-sparked brawl in Detroit last month, and came upon this radio interview with, among others, Prof. Todd Boyd of USC. Boyd appears about 20+ minutes in (he's paired with a very deep-voiced fellow professor), and his segment is excellent (especially compared to the histrionics of the first segment). The whole piece is worth a listen, but I'm particularly moved by Boyd's insistence that the player/fan brawl in Detroit wasn't really about race - that the NBA audience, for the most part, simply doesn't view basketball that way. For Boyd, it was as much about class as anything else, coupled with Ron Artest's particular mental instability.

See, it's funny because my argument was in fact the polar opposite: that the very purpose of the modern NBA is indeed a kind of staged intercultural theatre. On the other hand, did you know that the percentage of black players in the NBA has actually declined over the last few years, from 82% in 1995 to 78% in 2002? And yet it doesn't feel that way to me as (very occasional) spectator. A recent Village Voice piece claims, in fact, that basketball's undergoing a curious racial contraction and national expansion - getting less black and more international, but also less 'black' in playing character. (That's also a good article, I think.)

In any case: as a longer response and complication for some of my other posts on sports, race, &c., these two pieces are solid. More on this later.

Tark on baseball.

Leafing through old posts and comments tonight, I came upon this comment from my friend Mike. Maybe you already read it, I don't know. It's beautiful. I'll only repost the most smile-inducing part:

My Dad expected them to lose Game 7 last year BEFORE Pedro's problems started. When I got probably unnecessarily angry last year when they lost in extra-innings, my Dad said "What did you expect?" It's a funny thing. You hope to win, but expect them to blow it somehow -- making sure to do it in the most painful manner possible. Somehow all of us continue to think the next year will be different, and for 3+ generations it's been the same old story year after year.

Somehow, I expect them to make it to game 7 again, only to lose in some hideous manner. Buckner all over again.

My smile won't go away for some reason.

Gammons on steroids.

No, no, not on steroids, I mean he's writing about steroids.

Beautifully.

Baseball is going to have to ride all of this out and prepare for names and allegations thrown against the wall; on MSNBC Saturday, it was casually mentioned that the Yankees have three players involved in these scandals, throwing Kevin Brown's name in with Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield.

It will survive, as it survived the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, Pete Rose, the 1994 strike, etc. It will survive because while Cal Ripken, McGwire and Sosa helped bring back the game, as baseball has boomed in the 2000s -- hey, the Brewers were just sold for 20 times what George Steinbrenner paid for the Yankees, the value of the Red Sox has increased by more than a third since John Henry bought them in 2002 and if MLB.com went public, its estimated value is $2.5 billion -- it has done so not because of stars, but because of teams. It's not a game of stars as the 1996-2000 Yankees proved. The Mariners shed three Hall of Famers, won 116 games and shot up to second in the majors in revenues (now fourth). The record ratings enjoyed by FOX and ESPN in 2004 had nothing to do with Bonds, but with the fact that the Red Sox, Cubs, Yankees, Cardinals and Astros captured the national imagination. Hey, Bonds was booed when presented the Henry Aaron Award at the World Series.

As baseball has paralleled America's great, proud immigration/assimilation patterns and integrated sports seven years before Brown vs. the Board of Education, maybe what it can do is change the way Americans think about "at all costs." Maybe 14-year-olds dreaming -- many of whom are pushed by parents hungry like the wolves -- of being McGwire or Corey Dillon or Ben Wallace will think twice about turning to the underground that all too many high school athletes know about.

Maybe, just maybe, we'll think about what cheating really is, that scuffing baseballs or placing anonymous phone calls spreading hideous lies about political candidates -- such as the ones in South Carolina in 2000 about an American hero named John McCain -- isn't right. That while we understand why Bonds lied -- if he did -- or Bill Clinton did the same, that perhaps it's more than just words.

Like the best sports writing, this is an expression of faith. The part about integration gave me a chill - perhaps that's the feeling of correction, a change of view. Or maybe I just want to believe the same noble stories as everyone else. Regardless: the fallout of the baseball steroids scandal will surely continue for some time. Coming in the wake of arguably baseball's greatest postseason - surely one of the great few - the news is all the sadder, the more shameful. I think Andrew Sullivan misses the point (and not just because heavy drugs are the reason he's alive and healthy) - the myth of purity is important in itself, never mind that it's at odds with the grotesque, star-driven, merely commercial reality. Watching the Red Sox this fall helped me understand that. To whatever degree the Major League can fight against the slippery slope of diminished expectations and cynicism, it should do so. The fight is important. (That's a fundamentally conservative argument, I think.) The culture will be richer for it.