New Crutch

As regular readers will know - and let's be honest, all ten of you are pretty regular - I have most unexpectedly, and most uncharacteristically, become a fan of baseball over the past couple of years. Sometimes I've even been known to bore you with photos snapped from my occasional seat in the fifth row behind first base at Dodger Stadium. And when I say my seat I of course mean My Wife's Boss' seat for which we sometimes get tickets, then get all confused by "Day Games" and "Night Games" and otherwise end-up missing half the games we were supposed to see.

But I'm still a newbie; a tyro; a novice: still bamboozled by 99.993% of baseball terminology.

Last night - which would be Tuesday night - I think I finally discovered what is meant by the "clutch" - as in, "He's useless in the clutch" or "He's a terrific clutch player", stuff like that? Now, where I come from a clutch is something you stomp on when you shift gear, so you can imagine I've had a fairly hard time trying to reconcile that image with the various wide-mouthed witterings of baseball commentators. Is it, perhaps, someone with a delicate grasp of the ball, that it's shell should not break and it's yolk spill to the floor? Is it someone the players squeeze in order to draw a bead of luck? ("Hah! I squeesh your head!)

I thought not.

I settled in the end for the straightforward mechanical metaphor: the team is struggling, on the bones of its arse, precariously close to stalling. Someone needs to come in and shift gear, turn things around.

Tuesday night's Championship play-off between St Louis Cardinals and Houston Astros came as close as I've ever seen to that definitive baseball moment - possibly even to that definitive baseball clutch - that mythical deciding game of the World Series, three runs and two outs down in the bottom of the ninth, and the bases are loaded.

It came so close to that: deciding game in the NL Championship, two runs, two outs, and two hits down, top of the ninth, two bases loaded - in other words, the very last absolute final chance that the visiting team had to turn the game around - and the batter Albert Pujols (and I'll bet he had a happy childhood with a name like that) steps up and very calmly whacks the ball out of the park, turning a 4-2 loss into a 4-5 victory and silencing even the crickets in the till-then rambunctious home crowd.

Fan-feching-tastic: absolutely brilliant, and utterly devastating at the same moment - for indeed Houston had played the better game and surely deserved their victory in front of their home fans.

So that was the Clutch - is that right?

It all balanced out in the end, as Houston beat St Lois 5-1 tonight (Wednesday) to take the championship at last and to bring a World Series game to Texas for the first time ever.

So much for friendly chit-chat: now we get down to business. This is the Xenoverse, after all, where our purpose is to highlight those small but startling differences between what we knew when we were british and what we are come to in America. I noticed something the other night that shocked me to my very core, to the very chills of my black scots heart: the players cheered themselves off the pitch!

Wha???

They cheered themselves off the pitch. They lined up, and high-fived and clapped and hugged the players of their own team as they left the field. Not a smucker of a glance towards their opponents: it was all "We're Number One!" and "Hell Yeah!" and all that self-congratulatory craptlap that, quite frankly, is one of the reasons the rest of the world hates you. "Never met a yank that didnae think he wis God's gift tae the universe" might be the refrain in a typical scots pub (to which "Ye've never met a yank" would be the show-stopper response, 'case you ever find yourself there). Shocking. What happens everywhere else in the world is that, end of a game, you clap your opponents off the field for a match well-played, and they reciprocate. No matter how evil, how dirty, or how disastrous a loss - that's what teams do. In every rugby match I ever played or watched, the home team forms two lines through which the away team walks, being clapped, patted, and hand-shaken all the way through. At the other side they then form two lines and reciprocate. A fundamental and irreconcilable difference between civilizations: on the one hand, It matters not to win or lose, but how you play the game; and on the other, Losers be damned to all hell.

And while I'm on the subject let me just add that it's the players - the ones who fight and struggle and win the field - it's the players who are supposed to be awarded the trophy. Not the owner. Owners - like little boys - should be seen, but not heard.

That is all: have at.

Oh - almost forgot. The title? Seen on a sign pasted to a car for sale in a japanese used-car dealership.

Fitzmas Comes Early

EW WORD FOR TODAY: pajamajadeen - although I think it would be better writ pajamahadeen? It's probably old hat to you lot, you cosmopolitan devils, but I've been busy and keeping my nose clean of distracting blogs lately. Not that I ever read Kos anyway, just arrived there via Memeorandum tonight and thought I'd get into the spirit.

Although I do love it when the old "Give 'em enough rope" addage comes true, it's very rare that it does; more often than not they make a lasso with the rope, not a noose.

One can always hope, though, to brighten the cloudy days.

Rumors are running raj today: Cheney will resign, Condi will become VP. Memories of 1974 (was it?) rekindled and a hapless Gerald Ford, of whom GK Galbraith once said "he can not fart and chew gum at the same time." Expect in the next couple of days - the days before Fitzmas draws down to disappoint us all - expect to read the words "Bush" and "resign" in the same clause of the same sentence somewhere widely read; and of welcoming America's first black and first woman president.

Old Mother Bearded has gazed into her misty tea-cup of the future, and has spoken.

Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Spreading like wildfire!

Sorry folks - me too. Unless it turns out to be a royal pain? I'm half-inclined not to bother, but then, the Terrorists would have won, wouldn't they?

Bloody spammers.

A Capilary Hint of Red

DO ENJOY the writings of Mr Outer Life, but I'm still too scared to read him every day. I've probably written before that he has the uncanny knack of writing about things I happen to be thinking about or experiencing in my own wee life at the time; but writing far more eloquently than I ever could. It's that synchronicity which gives me the willies.

He wrote a wonderful post, oh, two-three months ago? - about rediscovering a way to enjoy his CD collection, borne out of the fiscal stringencies of his youth. He recalled that, back in those days, back when music was important to him, he could only afford one purchase a month, and that he would compel himself to love that piece, whatever it was, and to play it exhaustively for the next four weeks. In consequence, then, he valued his music, listened to it more attentively, more appreciatively, than ever he has since, in the flush of wealth: when it costs one so little to buy new music, he contends, one invariably does; but one treats it with all the respect and care one does for other commodities. Carelessly. Throwaway.

... The mix-CD enticed me back into my collection. I blew off the dust and brought them into my car, one at a time, falling for my forgotten friends all over again, those relics of my peanut butter days polished and gleaming again after repeated listenings. Meanwhile, repeated listenings revealed so much of the new stuff I'd bought in quantity as the barely listenable crap it was, incapable of withstanding the rigors of attentive focused listening.

I'm obsessive about music again, and that's a good thing, I think, for I'm diving deeper than I've been in years. I'm listening more and reading reviews and bemoaning all those wasted years apart. I'm following leads and threads, desperate to unearth more. We're engaged again, music and me, and I'm making a list, 100 items and growing, of more music I must have.

He wrote that late June, but I read it mid-July: while flush with excitement I hadn't known for twenty-odd years at having discovered a new CD, a rock band, that filled me with the kind of joy I hadn't known since long hair and air guitars and one-or-two albums a month. Here I was again, listening to one solitary album over and over and over and over.

Like I say: creepy.

But truth be told - or rather, objective truths revealed - it was wrong of me, this one time, to crucifinger Outer: I have always been a little obsessive about music, as I have of other things. Trivial things mostly, such as the lay of the sheets before retiring to bed, but music has never been trivial, though I listen to it less often than I used to. The only thing odd about my present obsession - for so it remains to this day - is the type of music: I had long, long given-up on rock in favor of classics and operas. All new bands since 1980 have been crap: Rock and Roll, deader than Latin since the day I Meh'ed my electric bass.

I have bought one other CD since that last - by the same band too - but I did not particularly care for it. However, using Outer's Rule on purpose, I did not give up, did not discard, but listened to it relentlessly in the van. It snapped into place last week. Though the technique was this time contrived and deliberate, the manner of its turning was nevertheless an old and familiar story, for it has been the same with every one of my past musical obsessions. It begins - it always begins for me - with a single solitary phrase picked-out of the background that, for no discernable reason, haunts my ear. Beethoven's Ninth, for example, the fourth movement, it was cymbals in the "Turkish March" - out of all the wondrous glory in that symphony, it was some wee guy clashing a pair of cymbals ten minutes from the end that caused me to listen to that piece, solid, for six or seven months. And I listen for cymbals still when I play the piece today. It begins with a tiny phrase that catches the ear, which is then repeated over and over and over. Gradually the rewind-net widens: you delay an extra second or two before winding back, you wind it back a little further than the time before, and there you find another phrase, another discovery. Repeat and rinse until, inevitably, the entire record is the phrase you must repeat.

So it was a guitar phrase near the end of the final song on De-Loused in the Comatorium that launched my newest obsession, which as I write this, unable to find sleep, is reverborating through the darker caskets of my skull.

Oh Lordy, you're all thinking, another fawning review of that shitty Mars Volta! Heheh - not quite. Follow that link, it leads down another dark rabbithole of youth, back to the days when you used to read "NME" and "Melody Maker" every week only to be disappointed by yet another crap review of a band you love by some smart-arsed spotnik with a degree in Smarmy Cynicism from Luton Polytechnic. P'tah - I remember when "NME" first wrote a piece on Rush. They were, of course, labelled Fascists. As I've said before in connection with my kids' tastes in music and paraphernalia, The Shirt Remains The Same.

No: no glowing sycophantic review, no gushing Buy It! Buy It Now!'s this time. Only, two things about their music in general: how frantic or stressful it is to listen to, and how surreal are their lyrics.

The music of Mars Volta is not at all the kind you can play in your iPod earphones to darken yourself into sleep. It is indeed very stressful to listen to: by which I mean you cannot help but feel actual stress while listening to it, as though beset by bats after having fallen off your crutches into a wardrobe while on your way for a 3am pee. I did just that, by the way, but there were no bats. In this respect the band reminds me very much of the orchestral music of Richard Strauss, or Gustav Mahler: frantic [again - sorry] and audibly striving for something always just out of reach. It's a very peculiar effect, and a difficult one to pull-off successfuly - that I'll keep listening to it, and obsessively?

Their lyrics too are completely surreal, abstract, and semantically... difficult. They don't make any bloody sense, in other words. Yet, strangely, I find they do. The words seem to fit even though they shouldn't. Listening to one of their songs the other day I got to thinking about Abstract Art, for which I generally have very little time because I'm too stupid to take anything out of it. Frankly, I don't give a toss for the clichéd platitude the artist is trying to palm-off as deep and dangerous wisdom, nor for his evident ill-health and sacrifice. My problem with abstract art is that I cannot help but try to make some kind of sense of it; pull some kind of tangible meaning from it. I just can't look at a piece of art like that and not ask What the feck IS that? When answer comes there none I bugger off and find me a Rembrandt, or somesuch. Something - anything - with pictures.

And so it is with abstract lyrics, as in these:

Just as he hit the ground, they lowered a tow that stuck in his neck to the gills. fragments of sobriquets..riddle me this..three half eaten cornias, who hit the aureole…stalk the ground…stalk the ground. You should have seen the curse that flew right by you. Page of concrete,stained walks crutch in hobbled sway. Autodafe..a capulary hint of red.. Only this manupod crescent in shape has escaped. The house half the way..fell empty with teeth that split both his lips, mark these words. One day this chalk outline will circle this city. Was he robbed of the asphalt that cushioned his face? A room colored charlatan hid in a safe…stalk the ground…stalk the ground. You should have seen the curse that flew right by you. Page of concrete, stain walks crutch in hobbled sway. Autodafe…a capulary hint of red...

Well, bugger me if I didn't make a meaning out of it, in my driving-the-van-over- the-windy-pass-to-work kind of way? I picked out the bolded words and phrases, and suddenly the song was a paen to 9-11, and a rebuke of sorts to Bushco! I'd found the hidden metaphor and unravelled it! I felt so clever at myself, all the way to work, that I downloaded the "book" from this page right here, and discovered... Not so fecking smart after all, was I?

No: discovered my brilliant 9-11 theory was brilliant bollocks. They wrote this story, see, about this person who kills themself, and the lyrics of the songs are snapshot paragraphs taken at random out of the "book". How many high-paid critics, I ask myself, have made similar arse-ups but never been called on them? How many have written of deep, profound metaphors and allusions while an artist quietly titters There were none?

Makes you wonder, does it not?

I like my version better.

Now, there's a phrase I find myself repeating altogether far more frequently in these days of hardening hearing. I like my version better. Most typically in response to misheard words on television or in conversation. The onset of deafness, most likely, of the faintly kind your Grandpa used to have. Happening to me, ever-so slowly: but what they never tell you, just like with drugs, is that losing your hearing is fun: the kind of fun that makes the cheesiest commercial bareable. I really couldn't tell you what I thought those lyrics said before I read the actual words and, well, gawped. When I collect my thoughts I think I might pursue this further. Is there such a thing as "reading deafness", I wonder, or perhaps "metaphallic deafness" where one fails to catch the metaphors correctly?

Meanwhile, should it somehow happen that Outer Life admits of oncoming old-man deafness tomorrow, or should he write of abstract art or mangey rock bands, you'll know whose timbers have been shivered. Won't you?

---

Oh, one more thing, completely unrelated. I'm afraid I have a confession: I saw the words "Credible Threat: New York Subway Terror" painted on a television screen this evening, and immediately flashed "Karl Rove Indictment Coming" in my head.

That is just wrong on so many levels, not the least of which being that it's more likely true than not. Or that I hope it is while hoping it isn't, if you see what I mean?

Digging In The Dirt

Tagged with a meme Questionnaire by Cowtown Pattie that I'm reluctant to complete on account of it requiring me to dig purposefully into my memory. I'm not very good at that; and before you all wail about how this site is nothing but the regurgitated memories of a pompous old fart falling into "anecdotage", to borrow a word from the Great Burgess, let me explain that those are all unbidden memories flung out at random from this fizzing vortex mind. Any attempt at retrieval of specific information from this boiling cloud is most often met with contemptuous disdain; I am given tablescraps, but of some other meal. No: the only way I'm ever going to find answers to these specific question is to ask them to myself, then immerse myself completely in a muck of work. That is the only way the answers shall appear - while I'm supposed to be thinking in microcode.

So, what the hell was I doing Ten Years Ago? Grieving, and trying to deflect it through unremitting work and overindulgent childcare. At this time on this day ten years ago my stomach was churning at the leaden approach of November and the descent into christmas. The whole month of November, black November, was the sacrifice I paid for a functioning Rest of the Year. Two years before on November 5th - Bonfire Night - my wife was taken unexpectedly to hospital. Two years before on November 30th - St Andrew's Night - she was, now so expectedly, Taken. You bargain with yourself, those early days: you realize that breakdowns are a luxury when you're raising young children, that you must keep going no matter what. So you buy eleven months of seeming normalcy with one of black despair. Well, one-and-a-half when you count the other mortgage: five years before my wife, my firstborn left us; paving the way, I suppose, a week before christmas. There was, however, an unexpected good that appeared by magic in the dying days of that year: I was offered - unbidden as a memory - another job, in another company, that turned out to be another world entirely from the one I was used to. I made an escape.

Jump ahead now five years further to Five Years Ago and I'm two years into my fourth life, my current life, and floating in my pool in the middle of October; it's lunchtime, and I'm floating on blue water, soaking in sun, smoking a smoke, sipping a pepsi, and reading a book - and so was she, my redemption. Life was good and I was grateful. It still is, I still am.

Four years further still, One Year Ago, I was sore still: I'd had surgery in July, but I was still in some pain, still am. But I was also with my Goddess in New York, living the life in a Midtown hotel in Manhattan; she for a conference, me for a tag-along. What a magnificent city, and what magnificent blisters we grew on our feet. We must have walked a thousand miles of street.

Yesterday I went to work - which is most unusual, because I work from home three days every week and that was supposed to be one of them. Driving home through Box Canyon and - my G-d - the blackness, the damage: but every single home, but one, an oasis of green fauna, saved by firefighters. The one home destroyed we'd never known was there though we'd driven within ten feet of it every single time we'd turned that right-angle bend that ramps uphill and into the winding mountains. And there it was - There? Right There?? At the turn. But no: not any more. Came home, had PickupStix for dinner, worrying about our van, which we've driven into the ground, and which yesterday and today has been chugging to a stall whenever it comes to a Stop. Just once - just this one time - I wish the concept of "Give Way" at road junctions was comprehensible to americans.But they can't wrap their heads around it: here in California they call it "Yield", not "Give Way"; and though there was until this year exactly One "Yield" in Simi, they changed it to a binary "Stop" because that's what everybody did there anyway. I think the mistake was calling it "Yield": what stupidity. Here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, we Yield to No Man.

Would you in your daily life ever ask a husky gentleman to list Five Snacks He Enjoys? Would you? But the Internets change everything, don't they - including ones manners. Vinegar chips. Those thin little potato Stix things. Granola bars (no, really!) Those are all the sins I can remember, Father.

There are not Five Songs I Know All The Words To: though I have better luck when drunk. I'm totally useless at lyrics, and usually those few snatches of a song I do remember have been totally misheard. However, in the depths of a bottle of whisky I can assure you of the following, and will insist on demonstrating: Irish Rover - Pogues+Dubliners; New York New York - Sinatra; Delilah - Tom Jones or Alex Harvey; Release Me - Englebert Humperdinck; Nobody's Child - Alexander Brothers or Glenn Daley. Guarenteed you sniff around the darker regions of this blog, you'll find a sampler of two or three of those songs hidden in the links.

Five Things I'd Do With 100 Million Dollars: Hah! I'd spend it all on sweeties and curries. Damn yer eyes!

Five Places I'd Run Away To: Gretna Green, my wife would insist. New Orleans. Oregon. North Carolina. Manhattan. Somewhere I hadn't been but like the idea of? Salzburg, Bohemia.

Five Things I'd Never Wear: I was once compelled - in a public swimming pool in France - to change my forbidden shorts for a frenchman's pair of "slips", as they call them - "Speedos" to you and me. I still shudder at that. No slips; no thongs, that's me. Though I'll wear a kilt I will not wear one of those stupid shirts with the frills down the front (they're named after Montrose, I think?) nor ever those ridiculous ballet-boots with laces that wind up yer leg to yer knees. And I'd never wear a bow-tie or a cravat as everyday fare.

Five Favorite TV Shows: Carnivale; The Wire; Wosspuss-SVU... dangit - I can't remember. Crap like that. I never remember my favorite shows until I've just missed them.

Five Biggest Joys: No Desert Island Disc exemptions here, so they'd be my Wife; my Kids; my Banjo; Opera; and Shopping.

Five Favorite Toys: Banjo; Computers; Games; iPod; and our car. The nice one.

Five Fine Folks I Tag with This Meme: It ends here. It ends Now!

Don't Trespass On Me

Over the weekend, it appears the Xenoverse has been discovered by Comment spammers.

Somewhat fortuitously, perhaps, it also happens that last week I finally took possession of a small-caliber rifle - I bid for it in a charity auction and won! - completing one more step in the Grand March towards becoming a real american. Imagine: forty-three years old and never held a rifle . Not even a small one, or as my green-eyed thirdson insists, a toy one. Maybe it is, says me, but mines has real bullets, not plastic pellets.

So, let us recap our progress momentarily:

• Property - check!
  
• Back Porch - check!¹
  
• Rocking Chair - check!²
  
• Banjo - check!
  
• Gun - check!
  
• Gimme Hat - check!³
  
• Coveralls - bleh!
  
• Corncob - nah.
  
• Mean Look - check plus.
  

But what to shoot? Teenagers? My teenagers? Nah. Damned thing only holds one round at a time, so that's no good - they'd be too quick for Auld Gimpy. They stand there sometimes, just out of stick range, pointing their asses at my face, mocking... Can ya hit me dad? Can ya? Ya fast enough Gimpy? Hah, but they quickly forget what they do; so that minutes, possibly hours later, for I am a patient man, I can always surprise them with an unexpected but wholly satisfying slap about the head. Don't need to shoot them, no matter how much my wife may plead.

Animals, then? Hunting! Like they do in the movies?

She'd never let me do that. Besides, I did that once with my dad and his gamekeeper friend: went hunting wabbits, with shotguns. That was not altogether auspicious - or perhaps, rather too literally auspicious I should say. Neither my dad nor myself had ever done such a thing before, had never fired shotguns before, so when some poor bunny jumped out of the ground between us we both fired at the same time, after a suitable shocked pause, and blasted poor Flopsie to pieces and the wind up each others legs. All that were left were the auspices. So, No: no bunnies, no squirrels, no elk, no birdies. Nothing living.

Targets.

There's a shooting range twenty miles away where I can shoot at targets. Print-out some comment spam and tag it to the line, run it out 100yards and shoot holes in its grammar. I could even take one of the kids to help out. Accidents do happen, you know.

1. Patios count...
   
2. ...So do swing chairs
   
3. ...And Dodger caps.