6.09.2005

Evident

I don't understand baseball.

That's stupid, of course. It sounds stupid. I understand baseball like the average person understands democracy.

One person, one vote. We are represented, allegedly, by the person we elect. That's democracy. But of course democracy and politics and everything swirling around it is vastly more complex. And some of it's pretty interesting. I guess because our lives kind of depend on it.

But baseball. What I don't understand about baseball could easily fill a basement that wasn't already full of a lifetimes worth of collected crap about which we think we know something. I don't understand the subtlety. And to me, everything except throwing a ball 100 miles an hour and actually hitting it is subtle in baseball. That only happens a few times in every three or four hour block of time that people waste watching.

I watched when Boston came back four games straight a year or two ago in the world series. That was exciting. In a way. But there are 100-and-some-odd games for every team every year. They televise it and radio broadcast it (and let me tell you - that's a serious piece of dead air) and they write about it every day. But it's slow. I'd rather tune to the "Watch Grass Grow" channel. Though there are probably no bikini filled ads on the grass-grow channel. (Okay. Not the grass growing channel. I wouldn't watch that. I overstepped the bullshit line on that, and it's a crap analogy anyway. And it would be pretty weak radio listening.)

I don't mind that it's on, that it's at the top of the newspaper front page, that game days turn viaduct traffic into a petrified umbilicus of human-filled iron. I mind that so many people think it's important. I can't talk about it with them. But that's been the story for as long as I've been old enough not to understand it.

But when ol' Zip down the street walks by and says something about (insert player name) showin them Bulldogs the what's-what in yesterday's game, I'm left to shake my head and smile like I know what he's talking about. When in fact I'm just lying by even responding. Because I don't know WTF he's talking about. And I don't care.

Sorry Zip.

6.06.2005


I flew to the ranch to have a little family meeting on Friday. This I snapped this morning on my way back out to the airport for an interesting flight home. The ponds are full - still. What a wonderful, wet year they had in California. That cow's gonna be fat all summer.
click pic

And why do I love flying so, you ask? Popping over a ridge and thinking, "oh... this must be Crater Lake." This is what it looks like in early June of a heavy snow year. (The color is true to life - it was shocking.)
click pic