4 posts tagged “baseball”
Let me apologize in advance and wish you the best of luck in getting through these difficult next few weeks of heartbreak.
LET'S GO, RED SOX!!!
Just a post to assert my existence. I don't know that I've been busy, but I feel like I have.
I did this show this weekend:
And saw this baseball game last week:
And to everyone in my house's annoyance, I've learned to play (and sing) "Mister Jones" on this guitar:
What more do you need to know?
I realized today that I feel about Opening Day what my mother wishes I felt about Easter. Resurrection? Hope? Washing away of past transgressions and a chance to begin again? Baseball does that stuff for me way more than Jesus ever did. Not that he has dibs on the symbolism. Every human culture has some sort of ritual that celebrates springtime and its unlimited potential for rebirth and renewal. It's primal, hard-wired, built right into our bones.
And baseball gives me a kick in the ol' collective unconscious in a way religion never did. They're the same mythological building blocks, but put together in a way that means something to me. I don't mean to lay it on too thick, but when you talk about spiritual awakenings, my first trip to Fenway Park pretty much blew my first communion, my confirmation, and my peyote trips in the desert all right out of the water.
I mean, coming up that ramp, and seeing The Monster, and then that green, green grass - no shithead on the road to Damascus experienced anything better than that. Anyone who's been to Fenway knows it's a cathedral; you know it without having to be told.
Of course, it would be much easer to keep this spiritual little writing exercise going IF THE GODDAMN YANKEES WEREN'T WINNING RIGHT NOW!!!
I was just sitting here in the dining room, figuring out which tactic to take when negotiating with the Missus for some time away from the Knuckleheads so I could write. My goal was 60,000 words by the end of the month (or a finished first draft, whichever came first), and I was pretty sure I'd need a couple hours this weekend to make it.
Well, I decided to cut and paste in the pages I wrote on the sly at the day gig, and what do you know? I'm at 60,133 words and going strong. Right now, if I had to predict, I'd ballpark the finished draft at around 67,000, with about another 10,000 that'll get added when I (a) revise the sections I know need to be seriously revised, and (b) when I fill in all the parts that say things like [find out if this is true] or [can an Impala SS really go this fast?]. Real literary stuff I'm writing here, obviously.
Point is, for the first time, I really feel like I might actually get this thing done. I don't think I'll make my deadline of having the draft finished by Opening Day, which I picked because I fully expect my productivity to plummet once baseball starts. Good news is that there's a lot of day games that first week, so my nights should still be free for writing.
