10 posts tagged “red sox”
Show us what makes you a die-hard fan.
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!!!
I'm drinking Dixie Stingers, watching the Red Sox, and playing Dwight Yoakam songs on the gee-tar. Life, as they say, is very, very good.
Tomorrow I'll hang with the knuckleheads, read some comic books, and then head to a party thrown by a legitimate mad scientist, whose roofdeck will be perfect for firework viewing and whiskey drinking.
Everything is going to be all right.
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?
We foisted the knuckleheads on their grandparents this weekend and lived a blissful 48 hours like grownups.
We ate Japanese food TWICE (from two different restaurants), we watched R-rated movies (The Departed), we worked on the house (new light fixtures), we worked in the yard (got the Missus's garden planted and my square foot garden built), we slept in (well, the Missus did - I got up at my usual early hour and watched spaghetti westerns) and generally remembered that yes, we do in fact like each other a lot, which is sometimes hard to remember with two screaming maniacs laying seige to the house.
Also, I learned two songs on the guitar and watched the Red Sox curb-stomp the goddamn Yankees. All in all, a pretty banner weekend.
Having finished my draft, I find myself kind of in a weird headspace. I've been so ludicrously obsessed with the thing that I feel like the rug's been yanked out from underneath me. I feel like Kramer* after Kenny Rogers Chicken shut down.
Kenny.
Kenny.
Per the advice of every real writer I know, I did start a new project today, just to be working on something. It could be kind of good, but mostly it feels like I'm hitting on an ugly chick because my real girlfriend and I are on a break.
Spent Easter at the in-laws', and it was very nice. The food was aces, and the Knuckleheads did a great job of keeping each other entertained, so I could actually relax a bit. Gramma did, of course, practically pour chocolate and sugar down their throats, so by bedtime, they were wound extra-tight. Knucklehead One was pretty much just vibrating in bed. The duclet tones of Joe Castiglione calling the Sox game** on the radio finally knocked him out, though.
The Missus insisted I buy her and her sister*** Morrissey tickets at the very instant they went on sale last week, and since I did it online, I got two free iTunes downloads from Ticketbastard, which I kept as my fee for being their ticket mule. Since I almost never buy individual tracks, being more of an album-oriented geezer, I decided to snag a couple of songs that I love but have lost possession of somewhere in the cassette tape to CD to iPod transition, namely Crazy Mary by Victoria Williams and Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns by Mother Love Bone, both of which were played a million times back in the day, when I had just graduated from college with a degree so useless that the only job I could get was delivering bundles of newspapers to 7-11's at 3:00 in the morning.
I'm fumbling through the chords for Crazy Mary on the guitar now. I cannot stop listening to this song.
*Pre-Nazi Kramer, natch.
**Jonathan Papelbon, motherfuckers! JONATHAN PAPELBON!!!
***I demand kudos for the phrase "Missus insisted I buy her and her sister..."
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.
I have been down the rabbit hole, no question. Mostly, I've been grinding out words like there's no tomorrow. It's a straight shot from where I am to the end of my first draft - in my head, at least - and I'm just knuckled down and banging keys. I'm on track to make my next self-imposed (and entirely artificial) goal, which is good, because baseball season starts in earnest two days after that, and I foresee a real slowdown in my work.*
On those rare occasions I've come up for air, I've been completely blindsided by a new obsession, or, more accurately, a raging flare-up of an old obsession, one I thought long dead and buried. Namely, comic books. Now, I recognize that here in Vox-land, populated as it is with literary hipsters of various stripes, I probably don't need to defend reading comics, even at my advanced age. Y'all most likely get it.
But to be honest, I'm not sure I do. I read comics in earnest from the late 70's to the late 80's, during what one could consider a kid's prime, and legitimate, comic reading years. This is before the advent of the graphic novel, and Dark Knight Returns, and all that. This is back when comics were the land of the hardcore nerd. I wasn't reading because I liked the artist or the writer per se. I was reading because I liked the laundry. I read Captain America because I liked Cap; I didn't give two shits about who wrote or draw him. Ditto for the Avengers, the Hulk, the Defenders, &tc.**
Anyway, I read and bagged comics religiously until about the end of high school. The obsession had begun to taper off, mostly due to (a) getting a car and (b) discovering that girls would indeed touch my junk if I played my cards right. Comics were fun. They weren't that fun. I stopped reading altogether in college. Every now and again, someone would hand me something and tell me I had to read it, and I would, but it was sporadic and rare.
Over the years, especially when I was writing and hosting the Geek Council, various people got me to read the Big Stuff: the Invisibles, Sandman, From Hell, Sin City, Astro City, things like that. Still, I was hardly current on who was writing and drawing what, to say nothing about the baffling "new" ways of numbering comics and/or their higher price and quality.
Then a few weeks ago, I basically devoured The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which was heartbreaking and brilliant, but which also made me realize what a powerful medium comics really are and how ideally suited they are for telling a story. So I polled my comic-literate friends to find out where I should take the plunge if I wanted to get back into it. They all sent suggestions, most of which I promptly forgot, and I went shopping. I picked up some stuff I liked***, some I loved****, and some I hated*****, but yeah, my addiction has flared back up and how. Like a drunk who falls off the wagon and drinks himself to death, I am going crazy-ass bananas and loving every second of it. I had planned to claim that I was just being a good dad and buying comics for my kids, but as of right now, they couldn't care less. So I gotta own my obsession, I guess. 'Nuff said.
And today's Wednesday! New stuff out today! Intervention? What intervention? I CAN CONTROL THIS!!!
*Daisuke Matzusaka will win 15 games this year, easy.
**Yeah, they're all Marvel. DC baffled me. I'm not that smart. I read a couple JLA/JSA summertime team-ups, and the Earth-One/Earth-Two stuff broke my head and sent me back into the nice, safe arms of Stan the Man.
***Blue Beetle, Green Lantern, Justice Society of America, DMZ
****The Immortal Iron Fist, Fall of Cthulhu, Mighty Avengers
*****Union Jack
My next writing goal was forty thousand words by March 1. I just hit 40,151 with a whole day to spare. My reward is going to be watching the Red Sox play the Twins at spring training tonight. And beer. But mostly the Sox.
