Un Ano Ayer

Well forgive the translation, that was the title of a brooding poem I wrote in twelfth grade in order to memorialize 9/11.  What I forgot to mention on Monday was that this past Saturday marked the one year anniversary of the Brooklyn Invitational, an event I put on with my friend, Rich Lee in DUMBO.  It was our first real foray into putting on an event that we completely funded and lets just say that it was a learning experience.  Some feelings were hurt, some bouncers cost us money with graffiti, plenty of beer was drunken, roads were driven down the wrong way at dawn and friends peed and the floor and fought - all in all, it was a terrific and memorable experience that I would not trade for anything in the world.

Some memorable shots from the Brooklyn Invitational:

The only other thing I would like to mention in  this post, is this link, which was sent to me by this man today. Ah, sometimes you just have to marvel at the world.

That's it for today - oh, if you are that beautiful girl on the subway, just give a shout the next time we run into each other.  I know leave you with the next installment of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt.  Kindly read this  while you are taking breaths of hyperventilation during Game 6 of the Celtics vs. Lakers NBA Finals.




No one broke from the crowd of mourners to move beside the casket.  The priest lifted one hand in the direction of Jack Simmons and Ed Verlaine. Ed pulled his spade from the turf and they began walking slowly to the mound of dirt.  The priest straightened his posture and led the mourners away from the gravesite back to the winding cemetary path where hearses, limos and other luxury sedans idled.
As they approached the hole, Jack followed the girl with the crimson hair as she walked across the grounds, the spring of turf underfoot.  The crimson bobbed along with the black and white of the rest of the crowd.  He watched her stop and hug the older man who had spoken.  Behind them, the boy stood, his hands in his pockets.  His hair fell across his forehead, giving his head a round look, though his face and chin were sharp.  He was a dash of grey next to the crimson and black and white.
One of the heads groundskeepers, Louis, came from the crowd.  He approached Jack Simmons and Ed Verlaine.

“Ok, boys.  We’re going to lower it down now.” He nodded. “Good service.  I like that Father Charles.”

Jack Simmons raised his mouth slightly, keeping his brows lowered.  Louis walked over to the platform the casket was seated on.  He reached below one of the edges and hit the switch.  Jack had never seen the switch before – he just knew where it was.  The casket slowly sunk into the ground.

“You’ve done burials with him before?”

Louis looked at Ed Verlaine.  Ed shrugged.

“He looked familiar.”

Louis nodded as the casket moved halfway into the hole.  The top of it still brown-red, sheen, with panes of white running along its edges from the  sun and clouds.

“He did John Lennon’s funeral,” Louis said, tucking his chin and watching the casket.  He rubbed his red cheek skin. “He did it in New York.”

Jack Simmons listened to the hum of the machine and the rattle of the casket as it burrowed further and further into the hole.  The shadow cutting away its shine more and more.  He looked at Louis’ well kept brown moustache.

“Strawberry Fields Forever.  He was there for all of that.”

The coffin nestled itself within the walls of the grave.  Stray pieces of dirt crumbled down the neatly packed sides of the hole.  Jack saw the coffin snugly fit in the grave, a shadow cast upon its entire face.  The sun beat on his neck and it felt good to him as did the familiarity of the humidity.  However, the coffin fit, it was dark with shadow and it was cool.  The coffin was as familiar as the harbor in winter, or following Emma by the shade of the docks.  Jack felt that the mother inside of the indian orange wood panels and on that soft silk pillow was cozy in her bed.  There were pieces of root sticking out of the grave wall.

The machine stopped.

Louis bent down and checked the button.  He stood up and clapped his hands, they gave off a soft echo.

“OK, boys.  It’s your time now.” He tipped his head first to Ed and then to Jack and moved across the grass towards where the mourners were in the distance. 

Ed Verlaine dug his shovel into the mound and held it there.  He pulled out his pack of cigarettes and lifted one with his mouth.  He held the pack out to Jack Simmons.  Jack took a cigarette.  Ed threw him the lighter. Jack caught it, lit the stick and passed it back to Ed who did the same.  Ed dropped the lighter into the pocket on the front of his uniform.  He pulled the spade out, weighed with dirt and turned it down into the grave.  It hit the casket with a scratch and a thud.

“Thank you,” Jack said.

“Strawberry Fields Forever,” Ed puffed.

Jack looked over his shoulder and saw the girl with the crimson hair up the hill on the gravesite grounds.  He turned back to the mound.  He struck his spade in and pulled it out swiftly, turning dirt earthward.  His back flexed with his hamstrings and he moved the dirt once more.
The scratching continued below Ed Verlaine and Jack Simmons as they worked.

“It’s a shame isn’t it, Jack?” Ed thrust his shoulders forward with the shovel, weighted, then lightened his load.

“What is a shame?”

“That after all the nice craftsmanship they do on these caskets that we go and scratch them all up with dirt and pieces of clay and little rocks when we cover them up.”

Jack Simmons’ biceps strained as he lifted a spadeful of dirt. Sweat moved up and under his jaw.

“That’s just the way it is.”

“Why do they spend so much time on them?  I always wondered that.  We should’ve just left them like the old west coffins like in A Fistful of Dollars. Planks of wood.  At least when the Egyptians used gold they gave them pyramids and plenty of room.”

Jack Simmons stopped shoveling.  He took a long pull off his cigarette and exhaled it.  His short hair was soaked with perspiration.  He rubbed it and felt it spike.

“It’s just the way it is.”

Ed looked at Jack standing and smoking. “I suppose you’re right.  I suppose that’s the way it has to be.  Especially for someone you love.  You’ve loved someone right, Jack?”

Jack nodded his head and picked up the shovel, setting to the mound of the dirt again.

Ed Verlaine smiled.  “They loved her.  That family that is.  They must have.  That’s why they all spoke so strange.  She must have been a good mother.”

    Ed let his eyes move up the hill of the grounds to the mourners who still remained.  The crowd had grown smaller.  He listened as Jack scraped and dumped dirt, quietly grunting and breathing.  He used to watch the girls outside his window in class as the water from the icicles fell.  He’d sat in his backyard underneath the porchlight and drank cool beer and  let the fireworks play in the sky above him.  Jack shovelled more dirt onto the coffin.  He’d let the dark of the night, the navy of the night sneak in and wrap around him as his canvas shoes rested on the sedimentary walkway in the middle of the grass.  Ed sighed and flicked his cigarette.  It hit the edge of the dirt pile, slightly red and still smoking.

    “What was the next hole?” Ed asked, holding a shovelful of soil.

    “Olivero.”

    “Olivero, that’s right.” Ed dropped the dirt. “That red head is still up there.”

    Jack Simmons nodded and dug deeper into  the mound.  They were making good progress.  He stopped and turned his neck to see the girl with the crimson hair.  He  could see her up the grounds.  The crowd had thinned considerably. She was standing with a man.  Her posture was slightly slouched and he seemed to stand above her; stand into her.  Jack resumed digging. He dug slowly and without effort.  He turned again to watch her.  She and the man had walked away from the remaining mourners.  Cars continued to idle by the roadway.  The girl with the crimson hair and the man she walked with stood by one of the neatly contained thickets that were littered throughout the cemetary.  There were small yellow and purple flowers in the thicket.  Jack tilted dirt into the hole – it made thumping sounds now, hollow, warm repeating thuds.

    The girl with the crimson hair sagged her shoulders and threw her arms around the man.  Her hair fanned and swished.  The man held her and turned to the side.  The girl moved her face from his shoulder and kissed him directly.  Jack felt his stomach rise and fall deep inside, he felt his kneecaps grow warm and then cool with sweat.  They stood by the thicket, the clouds covered the sun again leaving few slants of grey light to fall solemnly by the yellow and the purple eminence of the flowers.  The wood of the shovel chafed Jack Simmons’ palm calluses.  The faces of man and the girl with the crimson hair separated.  Jack thrust his shovel back into the mound of dirt, he strained his forearm muscles lifting the next shovelful out.  He didn’t look as he floated the shovel above the grass and into the grave; he only watched the two of them.  Their faces moved together again in a kiss. Jack thrust the shovel once more, feeling a pain down through his abdomen and groin as he did so.  The man and the girl with the crimson hair kissed once more.  Jack Simmons’ chest was on fire and he felt a persistant and primordial urge within his chest and attached to his brain that told him to run away.  To explode and disappear into the grey, the light and the heat of the day. He drove his spade into the brown, brown dirt.  He  saw the purple sash of  his youth that was life and that was death.  The purple sash across Emma’s soft round underchin and the way her hair still looked alive.  His chest burned but he continued to dig – it was all he could do to remember.

    Ed glanced up from his digging and saw Jack rapidly moving the dirt into the grave.  Both of Jack’s eyebrows were raised and his face was red.

    “Are you alright, Jack?” Ed asked.

    Jack nodded.

    “Sure?” Ed put his shovel into the ground and pushed his hand through his hair.

    “Yeah, just have to finish this hole and move to the next one.” He continued to dig fervently.

    “You got it, Jack.”

    Ed looked over and saw the red head walking with a guy over to the idling cars.  Another funeral was finished and Jack was right – they would move on to the next hole until the sun went down and it got cool and then they could leave.  He’d get a beer once he left.  He could taste it.  Actually, what he felt was the bottle’s cool perspiration against his finger tips. Ed laughed, the feeling of the wetness made him think of the taste of beer and of refreshment.

    Ed Verlaine pulled his shovel up and pushed it into the pile.  He pulled out an even shovelful and tossed it into the grave.  The coffin had long disappeared.  He shook his head.  All of those words, those strange speeches from this family, gone into that hole as well.  He collected another clump of dirt in his shovel.  But that wasn’t necessarily true.  Those words didn’t get stuck underground with the body, they weren’t trapped.  Maybe they lived on and escaped through the cracks and floated away: disappearing: reappearing and moving away in the trees and the light, just like the worlds that moved and disappeared from him – the girls, the friends, the look of the stone walkway under his porchlight.

    He kept his eyes on his shovel and the pile and listened to Jack’s persistent breath and motion.  Ed Verlaine was looking forward to the night, though.  Maybe there would be a breeze that would blow against his legs, the cool breeze of a school year starting and he could remember that feeling near his heart from when he was younger and the summer was ending.  That feeling he had thought was love. Ed’s shovel struck a big rock. He lifted it and flung it over the near sycamore tree.  He and Jack could finish the next hole and the one after that and then leave in their cars, driving out in the highway away from this green field of bodies.  Ed Verlaine knew  that if it didn’t rain, he’d roll the window down and hold his elbow out the window.  The cars in the other lanes would swish by and the neon signs from  the strip malls would too: Stop N’ Shop, McDonald’s, Sporting World IV, GameStop.  He’d lick his lips and think of a beer.  He wouldn’t reach for one like he used to – he’d wait and think of the cool.

    Ed took a look at Jack and then looked up the hill.  The last cars were pulling away and he heard a strange bird’s call that might have been an owl.  He turned back to Jack.  The family had all gone and he and Jack would be gone too soon.  At night, the breeze would hit him and it would be like the cool of the swimming pool in the bright light and heat of the summer.  He floated above the black T’s at the pool’s bottom and they stayed until the sun turned red and it was time to go for dinner.  He would help his mother pack the suntan lotion into her canvas bag, gently placing his mother’s sunglasses on top of the towels last.  Then, Ed would hold his sister’s hand and they would walk past the concession stand with the smell of chicken fingers and into the dark, dank cool of the entrance tunnel.  His bare feet slapping on the chipped maroon paint.

    “Maybe we can go down to the water and see fireworks tonight, Eddie.”

    “Fireworks?”

    “Of course, it’s July.”

    Ed took another shovelful of dirt and lifted it high up, feeling the strength of his biceps.  He brought it down slowly and tipped it evenly into the grave.  Pieces of dirt stuck to the spade.  The dark of the maroon tunnel gave way to the square entrance and the way out to the scorched brown grass.  One square of light against the black.

Truth and Opinion

I have to apologize to all my Puddlers out there because I know that my posting has not been as frequent as it probably should be over the past few weeks or so.  I am trying to come up with new material and I want to start inserting the podcasts  back into the schedule so that the new writing posts can be broken up a little bit more balanced, which also helps me because I get more time to work on them before I have to post them all up for you to read.  Also, the fact that the summer is here and that weekend trips become much more frequent doesn't help matters.  This past weekend I was able to go to my friend's house in Connecticut where we watched the World Cup games on a big projector his father had set up.  My friend's father is Argentinian, so we watched Argentina and the incomparable Lionel Messi easily defeat Nigeria on Saturday morning.  After that game, his father and mother treated us to a delicious Argentinian spread, which consisted mainly of barbequed beef in several varieties: prime rib, skirt steak, flank steak and short rib.  We also go to enjoy some sweet breads as well as empanadas and a grilled Argentinian provolone, which was rubbed down with oregano and other spices and was quite delicious. And of course, we got to scoop on the chimichurri.

So being stuffed like that, we then watched the U.S. play England.  The U.S. managed a tie due to one of the luckiest goals of all-time, which I am sure you all saw.  The U.S. played terribly in that game. They lacked aggression, urgency or even joy in their playing.  It was almost a replay of the opening game of the 2006 World Cup in which the U.S. played as if they didn't even enjoy the game of soccer or have any interest in winning a game.  England did not play terrific and we actually should have won that game if any sort of pressure was put on the English defenders. Very disappointing.

Then, we ate dessert, which was cheesecake and flan.  After that, being more stuffed and filled with some leisurely daytime beers, we decided to play some soccer on the slippery lawn.  There is nothing like slipping on grass on a full stomach and getting your ass all wet.  At one point, I pulled soccer moves on my friend's dog in order to prevent the ball from being bitten and was able to evade her while holding a beer and slipping on my ass in the mud.  Needless to say, I felt great and then finished the beer.

Of course, we had to come back to New York, where we regrouped later at night at a new bar on Lorimer and Meeker called Night of Joy, which is a legit bar.  It has a great roof deck, some creative cocktails and a much smoother and classier inside than most of the bars in Williamsburg.  I'll probably go back there quite a few times.  The drinks are a little pricey, but I spend enough time watching basketball and drinking 24 oz. of Busch to throw some coin at Maker's Mark on the rocks or a gin gimlet.

The weekend finished up last night, with the Celtics taking Game 5 from the Lakers in the NBA Finals. Game 5  basically lived up to the high standard that Game 4 did.  In this game, Kobe had no supporting cast and had to take on the Celtics on his own. Kobe scored 19 points in the third quarter and at one point had scored 23 consecutive points for the Lakers.  Meanwhile, Pierce was played the big game I was expecting from him at some point and put in 27 points.  His game was so effective, that it actually felt like more.  He had his midrange jumper going, his drive, his jap step fadeaway and even a few three pointers.  The Celtics were playing well on all cylinders, but let the Lakers get close in the last four minutes of the game.  However, the Celtics eventually made the highlight play of the series when after Pierce ripped a rebound off of an Artest missed free throw away from Kobe he called timeout.  The Celtics then took the ball out, with Garnett inbounding.  There appeared to be no real options, until Pierce streaked towards the sideline in the frontcourt with Derek Fischer guarding him.  Garnett hit Pierce who had to stretch for the ball to save it from Fischer.  Pierce then tightroped the sideline and as he was leaning to fall out of bounds hit a streaking Rondo who had shook off Kobe.  Rondo caught the ball in stride and laid in a beautiful reverse layup as the crowd went wild with the slight resemblance of Dennis Johnson's layup after Larry Bird stole the ball against the Pistons in 1987.  The Celtics now have a 3-2 lead in the series and Game 6 will be in Los Angeles tomorrow night.  Both teams have a short rest and long travel.  It seems to me, that the Lakers are tired.  Phil Jackson has been playing his starters too many minutes because the Lakers have no faith in their bench, whereas the Celtics have seen their bench flourish in the Finals.  This series is going to come down to legs at this point.  The adjustments to be made are fewer and fewer and all that is really left is for each team to play their hardest.  Whoever plays harder and makes less mistakes will win.  Can Kobe's legs hold up? Can the Laker bench show up with the home crowd backing them in L.A.?  Can Gasol bounce back from a terrible performance in Game 5? Besides Game 1, every game in this series has been played tough and neither team has disappointed.  No matter what happens in Game 6, we are in for a treat now that this series has shifted back to L.A.  We have one or potentially two pressure packed games to look forward to.  This is why I love the NBA Finals.

This post is called Truth and Opinion.  Well, that bit about the Celtics and the picture of Paul "The Truth" Pierce handles the "Truth" part.  The "Opinion" part of this title comes from a reader of this blog who found my site through Expecting to Rain, which posted my piece from last Thursday called "Signs" as one of their posts of the day last Friday.  The reader's name is Dr. Wolfgang Schwass.  And I apologize Wolfgang if you did not want these comments to be posted, but I found them sincere and felt it would be appropriate to put them up:

Hi Matt,

my name is Wolfgang, I´m 60, Dylan-fan since ages ago, number-cruncher (controlling) in a medium-sized company in Germany…. and during my coffee-break (kind of…) I just read your post about „New Morning“ and I do feel the urge to let you know how deeply impressed I am about your clear and open thoughts in it  of life and death and will and hope and reality and dreams and life in NYC and in the country and about nearness and openness and about satisfaction and longing…. poles in life, we all hang in between somewhere… until we do not anymore some day…

and all this related in way to Dylan´s album.( I always felt the same way about the four lines you quoted from Sign in the window: eternal truths …. for a while…..)

  

Good to know that there are people like you elsewhere in the world who feel the same way…

Again: awesome post …and so well written…. will keep me thinking…. Thanks !

and have a nice day …. in New York City…. (a city I love a lot… because it´s a city of choices…and poles)

kind regards !

Wolfgang

Wolfgang, I have to thank you for writing in like that and I encourage all my Puddlers to do the same.  You can even write in with suggestions and I will try to abide by them.  The above e-mail is the whole purpose of this blog and my writing, is to connect to people and make them feel an enjoyment of life, even if enjoyment is painful.  In any event my Puddlers, that's what this is here for and our pal Wolfgang is evidence of that.

Tomorrow will be another installment of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt, then the rest of the week is up in the air, but Friday or late Thursday should bring the posting of the Puddles of My Podcast of Myself that will be conducted with the table being flipped and Nick Mencia interviewing me.  So please stick with me here and try to enjoy the last bit of basketball you are going to get for some time.

Signs

It’s funny in a way that I am listening the Band’s version of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” while I write this piece. Actually, it may not be so funny because sometimes you need to listen repetitively to a song that is not the musician or singer that you are writing about in order to gain the correct perspective you need in order to render your opinion or image of them as justly as possible.  In this case, the musicians are different, but the songwriter is the same.

A few months ago, I wrote about Bob Dylan’s notorious 1970 album, Self Portrait.  Now, my attention turns to the album that comes next in his discography; that album is New Morning.  This isn’t going to be a run through of tracks from the album, but rather just a focus in and around the song that is the thesis statement of the album, the song “Sign on the Window.”  After reading about the song on Every Bob Dylan Song, I was reminded about how much I loved the album New Morning and about how much I loved the song “Sign on the Window,” which is not just the thesis statement for the album it appears on, but perhaps the  thesis statement for Bob Dylan’s career (if not a thesis than one of the top five pivotal moments in a long, storied and covered to death career).

We all know that Bob Dylan crashed his motorcycle and then retreated up to Saugerties (mislabelled Woodstock by the history books) to gain sanctuary from a frenzied fanbase and world that he was only happy to get away from.  There he made The Basement Tapes with the Band, worked on John Wesley Harding, and then went on to record Nashville Skyline in Nashville, however that album is included in the Saugerties/recluse period because of how sharply it turned away from his early and mid sixties catalogue and focused on simple “country” themes – the album is only twenty eight minutes long.  Dylan then went on to make my beloved Self Portrait which nearly everyone hated, before he decided to up the ante for his listeners.  Dylan upped the ante as far as quality of performance and songwriting, but not in feel – the feel and the themes on the album still remain quite reclusive and insular, especially “Sign on the Window.”

“Sign on the Window” comes in the second half of the album.  It starts off as a plaintive piano ballad, with Dylan singing the title of the song quietly before an organ and tasteful soul backing singers come in to bridge the verses. Here, Dylan is singing a song about a group of three, there is a girl and her boyfriend and a singer who sees the sign on the window that says, “three’s a crowd.”  The girl and the boyfriend go to California and his friend warns him that “Brighton girls are like the moon.” The piano playing is graceful and elegant throughout, especially when it is paired with a terrific woodwind section that would have fit “Fool on the Hill.”  Mixed with the controlled gospel of the alternating sections of the song, the feel is nothing if not poignant.  Especially when Dylan comes to the third verse, which is what makes this song in my opinion the thesis of his career.  In the third verse of the song, Dylan sings the following:

Built me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch a rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me pa
That must be what it's all about
That must be what it's all about

The lyrics are concise and perfect.  Anybody who reads them without the music, gains the same effect as if they were listening to the music itself – music matches meaning, music matches emotion.  But what makes this so important to Dylan’s entire career? At this point it is well established that Dylan wanted nothing more than to be away from the crowds, to be isolated in the country.  However, what New Morning shares with Self Portrait is that when Dylan sings, sometimes you just can’t believe him.  And as plaintive as he is in this song, there is an element in his voice that suggests he is trying.  Instead of his earlier days when he took a posture and told the world that he could play the role he was playing and he could play it better than they even suspected he could play it, here, he recognizes the role, he understands the benefits of playing it, but in the end he feels himself pressing to pull it off.  Instead, a song about building a cabin in Utah and catching rainbow trout and having kids call him pa, features its other two thirds focusing on a girl with a boyfriend who he is trying to chase down.  The homebody/recluse role he had crafted in varying levels of artifice (Nashville Skyline and the country croon being the highest level, the greatest sheen wall put between he and his fans, even Self Portrait is more visceral) is beginning to crumble around him and will eventually lead to the torture of the Blood on the Tracks Bob Dylan – the outlaw element still there, but urbanized slightly with the tone and bitterness of divorce, rather than the indifference of the backwoodsman.  This is a key to Dylan’s whole career, because it shows him as always morphing and here is where the transition was not as fluid as it had been in the past, he is fumbling here and it is the skeleton key into his psyche, whereas before it had been harder to follow.

However, the real Bob Dylan would probably take great offense to what I have written in the previous paragraph.  His lyrics are not meant to be rooted for clues, which again is why this song is so important in his catalogue – you do not need to root around for clues, because the song itself is so enjoyable as a picture of country and domestic life.  This is not Dylan playing perfectly in genre as he had done on Nashville Skyline; this is Dylan using the tropes of the simple or “country” life and composing a song that is in his own image, that retains his likeness.  And sometimes when I listen to this song, with the piano playing so well behind the lyrics, I believe the singer and I see that cabin in Utah and I want nothing more than to catch rainbow trout and have kids that call me pa, because in many ways that is what its all about.

In other areas of  New Morning the songs suggest a similar earnestness and rural feel (a lot comes from the terrific piano and organ combos on most of the songs).  “Day of the Locusts” feels like the the graduation from a State University in Kansas or Nebraska back in 1923; “Went To See the Gypsy” brings to mind a kid travelling to St. Louis or Memphis in the 1950’s only to have to retreat back to his little Minnesota town in the early morning light, with dew coming to the blades of grass as he feels the ultimate remorse of that first night of drinking and disillusionment; in “Time Passes Slowly,” the speaker sings about time passing slowly in the mountains, time passing slowly in a dream, he recalls a sweetheart who was fine and good looking and about sitting in a kitchen where her momma was cooking.  These songs all bring to mind worn wooden floors with back screens open and perhaps a little creek running through the  backyard, the places we have seen in the Virginias and Vermonts and Minnesotas of the world and of our minds.  There, the kitchens are dark with a small window right above the sink and the bottoms of the chairs have wood that is light with time and on the gas stove we cook white gravy in black cast iron pans.

I used to listen to this album along with Self Portrait at college while I drove around the roads of Saratoga Springs, Glens Falls, Wilton, and Balston Spa and I thought about how great it would be to shroud myself in the roads all around the area and set up a farm or a small life with a girl who was good looking.  I always admired time passing slowly.  I’d drive around at night in the winter, with snow descending slowly upon the streelights of the town and the wood porch of my apartment building, where it collected on the white wooden rocking chairs that were placed out front. These songs would play in my head while I walked the back lanes, looking at the makeshift wooden fences and the small bits of chicken wire people used to fasten them.  I’d think about love and I’d think about esccape.  The summer after I graduated, when I spent my time thinking about people and other things and reading books on a small bed in a dorm room while I taught students how to think creatively, I’d think about time passing slowly.  I’d wake up early and run and look at the mist rising above Lake Winnepasauke and up into the mountains and then later when the sun came out and it was hot, I’d swim in the lake waters.  There, I’d mark the time and think about time passing slowly “when you’re searching for love.” I’d go back and read my books and figure out what it would be like when I could finally escape and move again.

The reason why New Morning is so good and the reason why “Sign on the Window” is so important, is because not only does it make these images spring to mind when listening to the music and the lyrics, not only does it capture Bob Dylan in the act of transition, it also shows us the greatness of the two fundamental sides of our character –  the side that wants to go and take up with the simple life, enjoy the simplicty of sun on skin, blue sky, physical labor, stepping slowly over the broken-in earth, eating something hot and drinking something cold, and the side that is constantly seeking escape, the side that wants to run down every little alley-way and know what it is to be alone and to commune with the universe, for sometimes romance can only be captured alone, with orange streelights around you, and that faint drunkenness giving way to the strength of independence, youth and confidence. This is the issue we all must come to face in our lives, the tear between wanting to run and wanting to stay.  It’s the Town and the City and you can never just jump to the conclusion that you are one or the other, until you’ve lived your entire life.

To bring things full circle, around this period of time, Dylan also wrote “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” which is a fun song to listen to.  You picture Dylan or someone travelling around the world to the different destinations and encountering the different characters at different historic locations, only to find himself wishing that he were back in the land of Coca-Cola, which would of course be America.  Let’s say it is Dylan that’s the speaker in this song, so we have an artist who is longing for the day that he finally finishes his masterpiece.  This is an artist who has put out Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited.  This is the artist who wrote “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”  And yet his masterpiece has not been painted yet, his work is not done and he can’t wait until that day when it finally is. 

What the song highlights is not just the mark of the successful artist, but of the successful person.  A person can’t stop working at figuring out their place in the world.  All I know is that everyday after I leave work, or really any day I walk down the street in New York City - especially on a strange day like today, when the clouds are passing and giving way to blue sky and if you look down one of the avenues, you almost feel like you are looking into the distance of the plains because with those buildings lining your points of vision, you can acutally understand distance – that the only thing I can think about is escaping it and leaving everything that I’ve done and am a part of behind in order to get to a place where I can breathe and can have space.  So I imagine that I would run out to a farm somewhere upstate. There I’d chop wood and I’d grow crops.  I’d sleep in a bed and pass time with thunderstorms rumbling and raining on my roof as I thought about home.  I’d run in the mornings and drink strong coffee and feel dew on the bottoms of my feet. I’d drive an old car with glee and work somewhere.  However, I’d get bored of  that fantasy, just as I got bored with my city fantasy.  When Dylan sang “that must be what life is all about,” whatever part of him that was giving that sentiment was right.  At one level, the country life is what life is all about; and on another level, life is all about looking in from the outside, of feeling exiled no matter what your surrounding may be.  So then, perhaps we are all working at painting our masterpiece, we are all working to find a place that we can feel comfortable so that we will no longer think of all those nights sleeping under strange roofs when we thought about home.

4 Is the Perfect Number?

As I said, this past weekend I went to Rockaway Beach with some friends. On Saturday, we spotted a picturesque French family wading in the waves.  I had initially spotted the wife, thinking she was a beautiful au pair for some rich Upper East Side family, but alas she was a Frenchman's French wife.  The perfection of this family can not be emphasized enough and luckily, my friend, the artist Janelle Sing, took this candid shot.

Speaking of groups of four, or something like that, I am seriously looking forward to Game 4 of the NBA Finals. Game 3 was rather frustrating due to the officiating as well as the sloppy level of play of both teams and the somewhat baffling coaching decisions by Doc Rivers at the end of the fourth quarter.  It seemed like both teams were effected by the short time between games and the hefty coast to coast travel.  However, they played their asses off.  It was one of the most hard fought basketball games I have seen in a very long time.  I have a feeling the Celtics are going to come out roaring next game. Garnett had a big game last night, but to win games, they don't need him to score big, they need Allen and Rondo to score big.  If those two are on, then the Celtics will win. They only need Garnett and Pierce for defense and to give them a little bit of scoring - that's it.  Trust me.  However, its hard to argue that they don't need help from Garnett or Pierce when Ray Allen goes 0-13 from the field (0-14 is you count the layup he missed after he was called for an offensive foul).

Since we are the subject of the number four, a third point I would like to make tonight is that you should check out this blog.  Very good stuff if you are a Bob Dylan fan.  Seek out some reviews from Self Portrait while you are there; best Dylan album of all-time.

This has been a hectic week at work, so I apologize for the lack of content.  We may not get a podcast up this week, but I am trying to get back on track.  In the meantime, while we are talking about perfection, here is the next installment of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt.


“So, what do you make of that?” Ed Verlaine asked. “What do you make of him? I thought that was good.”

Jack Simmons nodded.

“After all your pointing, all you’re gonna do is nod?”

Jack Simmons nodded once more.

Ed Verlaine laughed.  He picked his shovel up and drove the spade into the grass.

“What do you want me to say?” Jack asked, raising his right eyebrow.

“I don’t know,” Ed said. “That you knew him or something.  That there was a reason you were pointing at him like he were an example of something.”   

“No,” Jack said. “There is no reason.  He’s just an old man.  I knew he would have something to say.”

Ed swung the shovel to his right shoulder.  His forearm felt damp. A faint chemical smell came to his nose and then quickly faded.

“You knew he would have something to say?” Ed smiled. “How did you know that?”

“I just did.”

“Why? Because it is a funeral?  Because he’s old? Because all of these people we watch putting coffins and urns into the ground have something to say? They all look sad and important.  This isn’t even a funeral in the cold and the rain where the people are wearing blowing trench coats. You know those look even more dramatic.”

Jack turned to the mourners, the casket and the mound of dirt they would soon be shovelling to fill in the hole, which they had dug the evening before in the fading drizzle and mist.

“Something in him reminded him of me.” Jack paused. “Are you happy with your questions?”

Ed locked his hands on top of the wood end of the shovel. “Do you want a cigarette?”

Jack shook his head.

Ed took the loose cigarette out of his pocket, raised it up, holding it by the filter, brought it close to his lips and then slid it out, up and behind his ear.

“It is damn hot,” Ed said.  “Where’d you get that haircut?”

Jack Simmons looked down. “Place by my house.”


“Yeah, I should cut mine short.”

Jack pulled his spade handle close to the break of his chest and faced the funeral.

Ed Verlaine exhaled smoke. The purple shine on the round edges of his father’s car came to him.  The orange and sepia that came through the windows of the car.  He remembered his father’s profile, the trapped heat in the car and the rolls of grey highway unfurling and shaking in front of them.

“What are you looking for out here, Jack?”

Jack Simmons held his posture straight, his legs spread slightly and poised.

“I don’t know what I’m doing out here,” Ed continued. “I don’t know what I’m looking for or if I’m even looking for anything.  But you, you’re trying for something out here.”

Jack remained silent.

Ed pulled on his cigarette and exhaled. “Alright. No more questions,” his words were softened and rounded by the tobacco smoke. “We’ll just keep on watching. We’ll just keep on watching and then fill in the hole.  Isn’t that right, partner?”

Jack Simmons rotated his shoulder blades back in a close circle. He did not respond.

Ed remembered the wheels of his father’s car and the feel of the leather.  The look of the green trees on the side of the highway as the yellowed and towering buildings of Queens began to rise through and around them, and further Manhattan lay like upside down icicles.  There were no girls then, no trails of snow and melted ice.  It was only sun, the heat like the heat on the legs of his uniform, and his father’s profile.

Ed looked over Jack’s shoulder to the casket.

“Look,” he said. “There’s the redhead.”

Jack Simmons turned his head to the side, giving one eye to Ed Verlaine.

The girl with the crimson hair stood at the casket, her hair curling down in two even fans on each of her slightly raised shoulders. The cars in the harbor parking lot would scrape sand under their tires as they pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road.  After summer rainstorms, the sand stuck and made a smoother sound against the tires before they hit the puddles in the road.  The clouds would slowly break purple and then the crimson came out behind the purple and over the green that edged the harbor water.

Jack breathed in deeply and clenched his hands into fists. The girl was more of a woman.

“I’ve been in heat and humidity this bad – maybe worse,” the redhead said.  “I was in Croatia in late August the summer after I graduated from college.  Mom actually paid for the whole trip to Europe.  I’m sure dad did as well, but she came to me and told me that the trip was from her.  She never did things like that, so I always figured that she meant it.”

The girl with the crimson hair stopped.  She breathed, folding her posture in slightly, her arms turning.  Her eyes were fertile.

“I took a picture of a girl there, in Croatia in Dubrovnik.  She was nine years old or ten.  She wore a faded purple dress and poked a little white flower into one of the white city walls.  With the light of the sun and the whites of the flower and the wall, the dress became more than purple – it became a new color I could only take a picture of. And I did immediately.  The first photo she didn’t notice and she was so curious of the flower and the way it hit the wall.  Then she saw me and started smiling and laughing.  I smiled and laughed with her and took the pictures and I even shook her little hand afterward and asked her in bad Croatian if she were my friend.  She nodded.”

The redhead shook her head and looked down.  Ed Verlaine knew of plenty of girls who had studied abroad.  They came back with short haircuts and different shoes and talked about men they had loved.  In the end, they still walked the same paths with him, still liked to get drunk and make love to boys instead.  But they knew something he didn’t know, maybe knew what they wanted better than him.  They did still talk to him and drink beers with him – but they moved away from him, just as they had moved to that other continent.  Their worlds unravelled around him and reformed.

Ed pulled towards the white freckled filter.

The girl with the crimson head shook her head once more, slowly and, slowly, lifted it again.  Tear streaks marked her cheeks.

“What this story has to do with mom, with her dying, or with her life with dad and with us, I don’t know.  I just remember that little girl and how I felt that must have been how mom always saw me: poking around in things, smiling, innocent, cute, but with something sinister behind it.  Maybe she just knew all that and loved me for some reason – because she was my mom. And I know that I loved her and I tried to show her.  But what do you do? Sometimes you just can’t show her.”

She raised her right hand, hinged, to her nose.  She shook the crimson.  Breathing out she smiled and put her hands at her side.  The clouds passed over the sun.  The afternoon was stretching and Jack noticed the cicadas for the first time.  He hoped the rain would not come.

“I’m sorry,” the redhead said. “That I am rambling on like this.  I can usually hold it together.”

Ed looked over and the priest was nodding at the redhead. He looked at her with some kind of empathy.

“This has been a long few days,” the redhead continued, her smile carrying into her voice. “I know that mom liked that picture of the little girl.  I know that she probably liked all my pictures, even with her discerning mind.  I’m a photographer and I think I love taking photos.  I’ve been to Dubrovnik in the heat and to Siberia the freezing cold and taken picture of a dog’s funeral.”

The girl with the crimson hair turned to the priest.  The priest nodded piously and held out both of his hands.  The girl turned, shaking the fans of her crimson. She smiled, her eyes wide and unfocused; intent on something unseen, but present. “I’ve taken a lot of pictures.   But I don’t think I will ever understand the rest.”

Her eyes became dark with focus once more.  The clouds moved past and the sun slanted down intermittently.  The world was a fishbowl.  The girl with the crimson hair began to cry and the tears fell in rolls and not in streaks.  Jack felt the heat inside each of his nostrils.  She moved from the casket with her hands folded in front of her by her waist and her hair swishing behind.  The priest took her place by the casket, keeping his hands outstretched.

“Some girl,” Ed Verlaine said.

Jack lifted his shovel to his shoulder and raised an eyebrow.

“Time, isn’t it?” Ed asked, bouncing his spade from one shoulder to the other across his body.

Summer Fridays

Now that I have started working for a legitimate company, its funny to find out about the certain benefits and perks of a job.  One of the main perks for a legitimate job in New York City during the summer is the policy known as "summer fridays," where you work a half day for every Friday from the Friday after Memorial Day until the Friday before Labor Day.  There is something strange and antiquated about this policy as some kind of New York tradition that I find very appealing - well that and the fact that you don't have to work a full day.  With the short day, I decided to head down to Rockaway Beach and spend the weekend with some friends at the beach, which included the typical beer drinking, swimming, sunburn, fish-grilling and "two dog day" policies that are a part of any type of beach weekend.

This beach weekend only enhanced the fact that Sunday featured two great sports stories and one slightly less intriguing.  We'll run through them right now and then hit some general points that I want to touch on.

- I love the French Open Final because it is yet another signal of the summer coming and there is something rewarding about waking up earlyish on a Sunday, maybe slightly hungover and getting a bagel or egg breakfast and watching a tennis final.  I have become a slow tennis fan over the past two or three years and I am nearly fascinated with it.  So fascinated that I may pull a David Foster Wallace and even wax poetic about the dynamics of the game on this blog in the very near future.  I have a clear memory in my mind of a weekend in the summer of 2006 when I went with one of my best friends to Astoria to visit his older brother and his girlfriend.  My friend and I were underage, but we snuck into bars in Manhattan with a crew of older people and then broke off and adventured on our own on the Lower East Side to visit some friends of ours, ending up back in Astoria at about 5:00 AM to sneak into the apartment of my friend's brother's girlfriend where there were about ten people crashing on the floors and couches.  I find myself a nice piece of lineoleum in the kitchen and spread out to sleep.  That sleep did not last long since it was so uncomfortable and the next morning we went to a Greek Diner for breakfast, where much to my surprise I watched Rafael Nadal defeat Roger Federer in the first truly enjoyable tennis match I ever watched.  Now, this past Sunday, after a year of hardship and injury in 2009, Nadal once again won the French Open. There is something moving about watching an amazing athlete like Nadal bawling into a towel after he wins a championship. Watching that image was one of the few times I got goosebumps watching an athlete's emotion on television - this was because I could follow the psychology of Nadal's tears. He was so beaten down by his misfortune last year that rising back to the top meant so much to him, the memories of his hard work flashing through his mind, that he had nothing to do but cry.  Now, that is tennis.  Nadal is now the number 1 player in the world as we approach Wimbledon, which is Federer's favorite tournament.  Obviously, there is a showdown looming in England in two weeks and I can only hope that on Sunday, July 4 of all days, we get to see Federer vs. Nadal III at Wimbledon.  If I get to watch that match in the morning on July 4, then you are all in for a blog post of epic rambling proportions on the subject of tennis.  There will be no factual information about the game itself, but only hypothetical and poetic ruminations on two men facing each other in one of the most fascinating games in the history of human civilization.  If you had asked me in 2005 if I would have ever written that statement, I would have laughed and laughed all the way to the fridge.

- Yesterday evening, we were treated to one of the better NBA Finals games in recent history.  In Game 2, Ray Allen went insane. Going 7 for 7 on three pointers in the first half and setting the record for three pointers in an NBA Finals game at 8.  However, the Celtics almost let the game get away from them until Rondo took over in the fourth quarter.  It is somewhat amazing that in a game where Ray Allen scored 32 points and hit 8 three pointers and at one point you wondered if he would ever miss a shot again or even hit the rim on a shot again, that Rajon Rondo was arguably the player of the game. He finished with 19 points, 12 rebounds and 10 assists, which is a pretty ridiculous line.  Yet, his true greatness came with his defense. First, the ridiculous strip of Derek Fischer's three point shot where Rondo over commited to defend the shot, going past Fischer, but then managed to halt his momentum, plant his foot, dart back and use his freak arms to strip the ball from behind Fischer's head as he was releasing the shot.  Second, his gamble on the around the back poke away from Kobe, which basically ended up sealing the game for the Celtics.  It was a hard fought game on both sides with some questionable foul calls going against both teams.  For the Celtics to win, they need to make Kobe take a lot of shots and try to put the Lakers on their back.  Ray Allen has to be the MVP of the series and Rondo has the play solid and dictate the tempo, scoring in the 15-19 point range.  Garnett and Pierce have to focus on defense, and offensively, Garnett simply has to worry about facilitating and not scoring, while Pierce needs only one monster game.  If that all happens, the Celtics win the series. For the Lakers, its simple.  Limit Artest's mistakes, get one big game from Odom and continue to give Bynum and Gasol the ball. Those are the game plans. The adjustments for each team from game to game will be minimal - this series now is all about who will just play their game harder from game to game. Tomorrow night's game is huge because of the long travel and short rest. Who is going to be able to play in their highest gear?

- The somewhat lukewarm event was Game 5 of the Blackhawks vs. Flyers Stanley Cup Final.  Last night's game was the least exciting of the five games so far. However, each team has won out at home so far in the series and I believe the Flyers will keep that trend alive in Game 6.  This Flyers team has a chance to be perhaps one of the best teams we have ever seen when they play with their backs up against the wall.  They came back against the Devils, they came back from 3-0 against the Bruins and they looked bad after two games against the Blackhawks only to even the series.  I think we are going seven games in that series, which is only good for the NHL because hopefully then NBC will have to air that game in prime time during the week instead of relegating it to Canadian television.

Now, for some of the general/literary points:

- I just finished Paul Harding's novel Tinkers.  This is a phenomenal novel that anyone should read.  The writing is very clear and concise, with plenty of strong and vivid imagery.  However, what makes the book so rewarding is the manner in which Harding plays with the techniques of inner monologue and stream of consciousness in relaying the memories of George Washington Crosby and his father Howard.  I won't spoil the rest of the plot - what there is of it - but will simply say that is an excellent novel that ruminates very much on death and the way we weave and construct our own families and lives.  You can read the prose easily but still feel challenged by the way the story itself is told.  There is something very Faulknerian about it.  Tinkers is my kind of book and Harding is my kind of writer.

- Sticking to my kind of novel, I have just started reading the novel Stoner by John Williams, which was recommended to me by a co-worker/friend.  The novel already has a very familiar tone and style to it that I can't place since I have only cracked into.  However, there is something very Wolfeian about the collegiate setting of the outset  of the book and also about the way that Williams relays feelings of discovery in his protagonist.  I am waiting to see how it develops, but much of the writing strikes me as something that I would pull forth out of my pen.  Not to say that Williams is in the same league as I am, but that I need to let these observations develop.

- Speaking of being in the same league as other writers, the New Yorker has just unveiled their Top 20 Writers Under 40 List. The New Yorker last unveiled a list like this back in 1999, which included authors such as Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, and Junot Diaz.  This list has some usual suspects like Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, a welcome member in Gary Shytengart (Absurdistan is very good), and overrated guest in Joshua Ferris (And Then We Came to the End was not fantastic), and a guy who can give a great interview, though I have never read his work in Phillipp Meyer. I have not read a majority of these writers on the list, though I have read about their work.  I'm going to delve into some of their books as part of my summer reading in order to better study up on the competition.  In their New Yorker interviews, take a look at how many of them say they question being a writer everyday - classic artistic self-loathing.  I don't know if I buy into that party-line, but perhaps that's because I am not a published author yet.  But seriously, anyone artistic or with some kind of desire to create art for more than one person to view, read Philipp Meyer's interview.  It is very inspiring and truthful stuff to keep in your back pocket as you navigate through the world each day, encountering possibility, impossibility, abandoned dreams and false ambitions.  Definitely good stuff, until my interview gets posted up there on the 2020 list.

That's it for today.  We have Game 3 of the NBA Finals tomorrow night so I will be putting up another excerpt of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt so I can focus on the game.  Later in the week I hope to have the Puddles of My Own Podcast recorded and posted in order to end this podcast drought.  I'll get in all in order.  However, in the meantime, you can always check out the Puddles of My Podcast archives or just check out LillebyTube for some video podcasts.

Enjoy the coolness of the night my Puddlers.

The Natural

Once I found out that Ken Griffey Jr. had retired last night, I wanted to immediately take back what I had posted on this blog for the day and put up a hasty and overly emotional post praising the man.  However, what I did instead was scroll through the initial blasts of praise for Ken Griffey Jr. and his career. How he was the one player from the last 20 years that you should relish having the opportunity to tell your grandchildren about.  I let my initial urge to gush (no sexual innuendo) subside.  I let my eyes focus on the fact that so far this season, Ken Griffey Jr.’s stats read:  .184 BA, 0 HR, 7 RBI, 1 NAP.  I let all this sink in along with the image of a slightly bloated, clearly 40 year old shape of Ken Griffey Jr. and stew overnight.  What you are about to get after all of that clear headed and objective thinking is a post that will detail, in only the highest hyperbole, how great Ken Griffey Jr. was.

In my lifetime, I have seen only three to four transcendent athletes.  When I say transcendent, I mean three to four athletes that captured my imagination in such a gripping way that it was impossible to deny them and their greatness.  The list is as follows:

1.    Michael Jordan
2.    Ken Griffey Jr.
3.    Barry Sanders
4.    Jerry Rice (uneasily)

I say Jerry Rice uneasily because he didn’t truly capture the imagination. What Jerry Rice captured and exhibited to perfection was what a terrific work ethic and discipline can accomplish.  He was an overachiever and was the epitome of work ethic. We all know Michael Jordan’s excellence, my love for him and his firm entrenchment as the best athlete of all time.  Barry Sanders was simply a freak of nature, a player in the Jim Brown, “too good and too smart to allow time to tarnish an image of them” mold.  There will never be another Barry Sanders and there will never be another Michael Jordan.

There will also never be another Ken Griffey Jr.  He was a singular talent and athlete.  He was on the opposite side of the spectrum from Jerry Rice in that he was not the epitome of work ethic.  He was the poster boy for natural athleticism, superior speed and strength, and an effortless grace of playing a game – the game of baseball.  He had the quality that certain athletes have that makes you think, “If I were to look up the definition of a  [insert sport] player, who would the picture be of?” I am of the firm belief that for baseball it would be Ken Griffey Jr.  He roamed centerfield like no one ever had.  He made people forget Willie Mays.  He flew.  He crashed into walls; he scaled walls.  His swing was perfect.  Maybe it wasn’t mechanically perfect, but it looked perfect and it felt perfect.  You would see Ken Griffey Junior standing at the plate, nearly straight upright, that white or grey Mariners jersey matched with the navy helmet and the revamped, classic looking silver Seattle “S.”  He’d hold the bat almost limply against his back shoulder.  Then, the pitch would come in and Griffey would swing the bat like a golf club and make the ball soar.  It soared through the Kingdome; it soared through Kansas City, through Baltimore, and through New York.  And as it soared, you thought that Griffey was the only player who could catch his own pop fly because he was so fast. He stole bases; he won ten Golden Gloves in centerfield, etching himself as perhaps the archetypal centerfielder in Major League Baseball history (and perhaps edging out Willie Mays Hayes in sports fiction as well).

There were extenuating circumstances that made him seem larger than life.  There was the fact that for his first two seasons in the league he played on the same team with his own father.  He was the only baseball player in the 1990’s to have an ad campaign that even approached those that were put on by Michael Jordan and other NBA players.  He was so good, so beloved by kids and baseball fans everywhere, that in Little Big League he could even pull off a turn as the bad guy when he single-handed beat the Minnesota Twins in a one game playoff by hitting a deep homer and then robbing Lou Collins of a home run in the bottom of the ninth, breaking the heart of Minnesota and manager Billy Heywood.  There was the classic Ken Griffey Junior SNES game that featured no real MLB players besides Ken Griffey Junior. He was handsome, he looked cool, and there was just a natural easiness to him that was never surpassed by any other big slugger of the 1990’s or the 2000’s.  Four different presidents took office during Ken Griffey Jr.’s career in the MLB.  He was the Paul Newman of sports.

However, he was not perfect.  His decision to go to Cincinnati was ill fated.  It was seen as a classy move since his father played for Cincinnati and Ken Griffey Jr . was raised in Cincinnati, but really it was a move of slight cowardice and greed.  Cincinnati threw more money at Griffey, so he left.  However, his Seattle teams had consistently performed well in the regular season but always underachieved in the playoffs. The 1997 and 1999 Mariners were certainly as talented if not more talented than the Yankees in 1999 and both the Indians and the Marlins who faced off in the 1997 World Series.  It would have elevated his legacy if he had stayed in Seattle and finished the job he started. Perhaps the one postseason highlight he had was the slide against the Yankees in 1995, which kept the Mariners in Seattle.  That was certainly one of the best games in baseball history and of course you had to assume that Ken Griffey Junior would be a part of it.  His natural grace and athleticism also got the best of him and caused him to miss a large portion of his prime due to injury. Ken Griffey Jr. was notorious for not stretching.  He was so in tune with the game that he never thought he would need to.  Griffey once said, “Why should I stretch? Does a cheetah stretch before it chases his pray?”  How insane does that sound? Pretty crazy, right?  But that is how good Ken Griffey Jr. was.  You did not question him comparing himself to the fastest land animal on Earth.  His instinct and ability to play the game of baseball were no natural and so impressive, that you never expected him to slow down or ever get injured.  Yet, that is what happened in Cincinnati. Each year you were expecting him to come back and show his old form.  And each year he would either get injured in spring training or hit almost 20 HR through June and then be put on the DL until the end of August.  He would hit a few HRs and then be done for the season after the second week of September.  It became like clockwork.  It was frustrating and it was sad.  It goes to show how valuable a player like Jerry Rice is and how valuable a work ethic can be.  Jerry Rice was not as physically gifted like Ken Griffey Jr. was, but he worked harder than anyone in football and he had a long career where he set basically every receiving and almost every offensive record in football. Griffey could have done the same thing.  Even missing almost five seasons with injury, he finished his career with 630 home runs.  Who knows what would have happened had he just considered stretching; had he just thought for a moment that he might get old and his once in a generation natural ability might wear out at some point? Maybe Barry Bonds wouldn’t have garnered so much attention; maybe we would feel a little better about the steroids reality.  However, we’ll never know, because Ken Griffey Jr. didn’t want to stretch.

We will always look back fondly on Ken Griffey Jr. because he never took steroids. I am convinced that he never took steroids and that we will never find out after the fact that he did.  He was a slugger in the most corrupt era of baseball and put up numbers alongside McGwire, Sosa and Bonds without cheating. He was the best baseball player of his era without using steroids.  And in the end, who cares about steroids anyway?  We all wanted the home run frenzy and it serves us right that we now have to deal with the fact that the larger than life heroes we craved so much, were in fact larger than life.  We look for heroes when we need them and then tear them down as soon as we realize the measures they took in order to help fulfill our dreams.  In the midst of all this steroids, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa aren’t even relevant anyway, because we are going to remember Ken Griffey Jr. more than all three of those guys anyway.  Americans love natural ability, they love transcendence and that’s what Ken Griffey Junior was above everything, he was transcendent.

Obviously, I love Ken Griffey Jr.  I watched him as a child.  I drew pictures of him. I wore a backwards, teal Mariners cap to school. I always wanted to be Ken Griffey Jr. when I played home run derby with my friends.  I am a grown man now (at least I pretend to be) and I have grown past truly idolizing sports figures. I’ve seen Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, Emmit Smith, Joe Montana, Steve Young and all of the other sports heroes of my youth retire and turn into the grey and tan blazers of middle and old age.  However, saying goodbye to Ken Griffey Jr. still contains some kind of meaning to me. It signals the evaporation of the last drop of childlike wonder I had towards sports.  I still look for those moments of wonder, the players that inspire wonder (Dwyane Wade) and I can acknowledge where it is.  And that’s what matters to me now. Ken Griffey Jr., as much of a shadow of himself as he was, still stood as the last vestige of a virtue of wonder that I still hope that kids have for sports and for athletes even if they know they take steroids.  Rock n’ roll bands are for “can do” attitude, but athletes like Ken Griffey Jr. were put on earth for the, “I could never do that” attitude.  And sometimes we need people like that.  We need that ability to wonder, we need a hero that we can build up and who won’t be pulled down so easily. Perhaps Ken Griffey Jr. can’t be pulled down so easily because he made it look so easy and because baseball and being an idol were part of his DNA.  Or perhaps it was because he never reached the heights that we always expected he would.

Ken Griffey Jr. hit 630 home runs in his career.  He spent 22 years in Major League Baseball.  I am 24 years old.  Ken Griffey Jr. has been my life. Knowing that there was someone so natural out there always made me want to strive harder in the world to do better, to find my natural grace with whatever talents I have.  I will still strive do that even though Griffey is gone.  And I find it funny that Griffey leaves baseball and effectively closes the book on my child heroes in sports right after a weekend where I visited a friend who is in many ways closing the book on being the same childhood friend I grew up with.  He will be the same person – that is for certain – but he has bought a house, he has gotten engaged and he has entered a new phase of his life. Sometimes your heroes seem like your friends and sometimes your friends are your heroes.  In any case, Ken Griffey Jr. and my friend are both moving into different phases of their lives.  I think it may be time for me to strive to do the same.  I’m glad there are people like them out there.

Sensitive Sweater

You want sensitive? Well you are going to get sensitive. We are going to do a little diving into the vault today to pull out some ruminations of mine all all things artistic and sensitive. Maybe this picture above is too much of an inside joke with people I spent my freshman and sophmore years with in college. Perhaps this next picture might do a little more for you in the way of sensitive:

In any event, in order to make up for the lack of Puddles of My Podcast and other tremendous new material for you this week, I, like all good sitcoms and other column journalists, must provide you with something that may be a little older, but can be construed as something new.  This little excerpt I am going to foist on you comes from middle/late October of 2007, when I was rambling around Europe on my own and listening to a lot of the Replacements and sifting through the aftermath of my own college graduation - among other things.  This excerpt is basically a recap of an ill-fated trip I had to Pescara in Italy as I was making my way to Rome, where I would then fly to Athens and then fly back to Madrid before returning to America in November.  In any event, you may deem this too personal, too hard to read.  Well, that's too bad.  Tolstoy did it to his wife and if he were alive today he would do it to his blog too.  So without further ado, here is some Puddles of My Seoul:

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20.

Pescara.  Well it was basically a failure.  The ride down was long and beautiful.  A grey and rainy day in the Italian countryside.  I felt very at ease during the initial ride.  The farms and the life called out to me in the hills and at some moments I felt as if everything in the world was going to be alright.   I was not riding a train from Albany to New York or from Stony Brook to Penn Station, I was riding along the Adriatic Coast of Italy.  A thing I had dreamed about and romanticized for so long.  But now I was doing it.  I was in between the sea and the mountains.  I saw the towns pass by.  I heard the sing-song language and saw the beautiful girls. I thought about Raphael, Dante, Leonardo, Petrarch all of the great ones that had come before me.  The simple and delicious ways of life they had cooked up – the spread of the vernacular away from Latin.  It was a beautiful ride and moment in my life.  I felt at peace with all of the problems and anxieties that have and will surround me.  On this train ride I really felt far from everything.  I was completely obscured by the countryside and the riding rails and the lonesome traveller between one town with one main road and another town with one main road.

Things grew a little more sinister as the ride wore on (almost eight hours) and this strange old man paced up and down my car just staring at people.  He infuriated me.  I thought he was trying to rob me or rape this woman when she got off the train. So I stared him down as we rode. Luckily, a kind Italian woman picked up on this as well and became as aware as I was.  The man got off and I don’t think anything happened to the woman.

But I got to Pescara and it was cold, it was damp and it was strange.  I got a cab and couldn’t talk with the driver.  He got mad, but we found my place on a quaint, quiet sidestreet on the hill above town.  The woman there was nice but I couldn’t speak with her either.  We bumbled our way to an understanding. Luckily, the main proprietess showed herself and spoke some English with me.  I went for a walk in the dark and the rain died down and it wasn’t so bad except I wanted to get some wine to drink but everything was closed.  I found one caffe open and they had drinks and cold paninis.  I didn’t feel like buying single drinks so I settled for a panino con frittata e asparagaci.  It was good and I couldn’t help thinking of my deceased grandfather as I ate it walking back to my place in the mist.  I think because something about the whole situation was sensible, and that’s what his legacy to me is supposed to be.  That’s what people tell me anyway.

So I got back and read more of my beloved Ulysses and left the strange Italian television playing.  It was full of funny soap operas, American music, futbol highlights and women.  I fell asleep to the sound of the couple next door watching television.  Asleep at 10:30 for the first time I can remember.

This morning the dog next door was barking and they were doing winter construction on houses nearby.  I took an awkward shower in the bathroom soaking the whole floor.  I noticed that I have lost a good amount of weight in the past two weeks so I feel OK with a red face and a "beard."  A cold might be coming on but I will fight it with oranges and alcohol.  It was raining again so I decided I’d have to get out of Pescara and head to Rome a night early so that on Wednesday I can have a full day to really explore everything.  But before I left I had to get some groceries so I walked through the cold and damp streets blowing smoke, feeling strange not to feel this first cold in America where I romanticize it so much.  "Everyone goes home in October."  Pescara seemed odd.  It appears to be a booming summer city that just shuts down in the fall and winter.  Everything seemed dreary, but there were palm trees and bright colored houses and apartments.  I suppose maybe I needed more time to wander around and find things.  There were plenty of delicious looking and smelling patiscerias and pastacerias, pizzerias, gelaterias.  The bread looked amazing, but I figured I’d just wait until Rome when there is a better chance of the person behind the counter meeting me halfway.  I walked to the Adriatic and there were two dark looking blonde men sitting on rocks and there was garbage littered along the shorelines.  People have to live everyday, even in your romanticized visions.  That just goes to show you.  But the avenue along the sea was beautiful and the waves of that sea itself  looked fine and inviting and I could picture Greece in the distance where I will be on Friday afternoon.  Pescara by the sea reminds me of Queens, the Rockaways, of Coney Island, or Montauk in the winter.  Cold, drawn-out, with one eye cocked looking at you from delicious darkness you don’t know the half of.  That’s certainly what the train station is saying to me right now anyway.

I walked back to the main road and saw a nice-looking husky behind a gate.  He seemed very friendly.  Drizzle was falling as I climbed the railroad steps and went back up the hill.  I stopped at a grocery and got myself due meles, two oranges, prosciutto, two loaves of hard good bread and some cheap coffee biscotti, which are delicious.  I went back to the room, packed up, had an orange, spat up some phlegm and locked up. I climbed the spiral staircase to the roof apartment and knocked.  A kind older woman answered.  I was expecting the woman from the night before, but I wasn’t flustered. I spoke to her in broken Italian and gave her my money for the night.  She was making sauce and my God did it smell absolutely delicious.  I only wondered how she was doing it.  Was there pork in there?  Had to be.  But what kind? Rib? Butt? Neck? Shoulder? Not loin.  I don’t eat my pasta but I can smell and taste a good sauce.

So Pescara was a failure.  I think it was good for me. I wanted to fall on my knees at the waves of the Adriatic and scream out to the Lord and to my ancestry in a truly ancient and dramatic way.  I wanted to bring Earth back for my grandmother to throw on her coffin.  But what is all that?  Meaning and symbols.  My grandmother was born in Manhattan.  As the train rode over th Adriatic yesterday, I looked over the tumultuous waves and I felt excitement and I felt horror.  In my mind, I though, “what more do you want from me?  What more can I do?  What am I supposed to do?”  These questions in my mind are always addressed to God, but they needn’t be.  They can be addressed to the world itself, this hunk of earth and lava that burns in space. What does it want from us with its waves and distance? Does it want anything? What are we suppsed to do in a world of such evil and goodness? Where kids light homeless men on fire, but where people on a train rush to the rescue of an old man who stoops to fall.  The communal hand.  This is a strange and beautiful place and I don’t know what I believe.  Do we  believe in a God? My aesthetic beliefs would say that the way to look at the world is that a God set it in motion, but left it to spin and ride on its own, he is paring his nails in the distance on the outside of whatever realm this is.  Some think that hand has longer nails and it constantly molding and prodding. Still other say, why a hand at all? Why not just a chance collision of atoms, and each day us a collision of atoms in a universe of colliding atoms.  Would that be wrong? I don’t think so.  I don’t think any of those is wrong or right, whichever one fits your purpose or your view on the world is your entitlement.  People have gotten mad at me for looking for meaning and symbols in this world, as if there were some artistic deity.  Well I’m done looking for symbols and meaning.  Not because of them, because even with those symbols and meaning what would it all mean?  Nothing.  What you have is yourself, that’s all you’ve got in this spiritually broke world where everyone is hiding and forgetting themselves deep inside, dying in the middle of life and becoming deeply afraid of ghosts or anniversaries in the way that Derrida thinks of it, re-encountering yourself or your non-self, your non-history (Zizek) that never existed.  Those signifiers, those moments I put memory on or in, come to nothing. Even in me, they are a momentary lift to a passing sun that WILL melt my wings.  Its all up to you, what you do in a moment and not its meaning.  I suppose I learned that from this trip.  But I don’t want to learn anything from this trip.  This trip will have no meaning.  It will be a trip through atoms and space in a world part of a universe of atoms in space.  I will return to my home and start again.  Venture out to more anniversaries, ghosts and non-selfs all of which mean nothing.  I will leave everything behind me and move forward into a world, which means nothing, but simply is in its existence.  Like I have been for millions of years in this world without end, Catholic boy Amen.


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Whew! How is that for sensitivity.  In order to lighten the mood a little bit, let's take a quick look at what used to be my "Favorite Movies" section of Facebook, circa January 2007:

Little Big League, Jack (the story of Michael Gaudino starring Robin Williams) Cant Hardly Wait, Waiting to Exhale, About A Boy, 3 (Dale Earnhardt Movie), Waking Up Tavis, Major League 2, Airborne, Jurassic Park, Once Upon a Time in the West,  Pizza My Heart, Hot to Trot, Stella Comedy DVD,  Master, Dolemite 2: The Human Tornado, Furious Cow starring Al Pacino, Fractureface Hill (Gay Samurai Movie)


If those puns and slurs don't take the sensitivity out of you, I don't know what will.  Tomorrow, you can expect another installment of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt and then on Friday a recap of Game 1 of the NBA Finals between the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers.

Take care my Puddlers and be sure to stay out of those sensitive streets tonight.


EDITORIALIZATION:

Due to Ken Griffey Jr.'s retirement, tomorrow's blog post will be absolutely dedicated to him and his impact on me as an athlete.  Now, you have something to look forward to and make up for today's post. 

Remember Memorial Day

Let me just tell you that I love Memorial Day Weekend.  There are a few reasons why you have to love it:

1. It is the first holiday since Easter and is always rewarded with a classic three day weekend - perhaps the archetypal three day weekend.

2. It is usually brutally hot and leads to prolific swimming, which means that most pools and beaches are christened for the season over the Memorial Day Weekend

a. You will most likely be attending one to five bar-be-ques over the course of the three day weekend.

Second of all, it is the gateway of summer, meaning that after Memorial Day we are unofficially in summer, until that day of days - the Longest Day of the Year, which is summer's official beginning.

3.  Sun-tan/subburn - always welcome. You have got to set that base tan before getting out there on Memorial Day Weekend.

And finally, that beer just tastes that much colder when you are drinking it all weekend long.

This particular Memorial Day Weekend was fantastic. I went to Providence to stay with my old friend Jeff.  Jeff has just purchased a home in East Providence (near Brown University) and has gotten engaged to his quite terrific fiancee.  Anyway, I and a few of my high school friends descended on the house this past weekend and had what many scientists refer to as "The Perfect Weekend." I'll let you marinate in my enjoyment of life and how it supercedes yours for just a slight moment.  A few of the highlights included:

- Watching the Celtics clinch a berth into the Finals by beating down the weak Orlando Magic on Friday night.  Leading my friend Jeff and I to giddily anticipate the Lakers beating the Suns the next evening.

- Watching the Lakers edge out the Suns in yet another entertaining game in an entertaining series, which leads to Celtics vs. Lakers in the NBA Finals for the second time in three years.  This is going to be  brutal and physical series.  These teams do not like each other - obviously - and the Celtics are going to force the Lakers into playing their game much as they did to the Cavaliers and Magic.  The Lakers are going to be led by a determined Kobe and Pau Gasol who are both looking to avenge the embarrassing loss in the 2008 Finals.  We will also be seeing Ron Artest who is showing signs of a rare mix of child-like innocence and craziness that is rarely seen in a grown man - there is something truly poetic and genius going on in the mind of Ron Artest at the moment.

- Eating a seafood feast in a sunroom during a thunderstorm on Saturday night.

- Swimming in the Atlantic Ocean a Second Beach near Newport.

- Almost swimming in a scummy pond.

- The 11-Part Memorial Day Weekend Documentary that can be seen at Erik Lilleby's Youtube Channel.

- Meeting some new acquaintances like one Jeff Byers and exchanging workday e-mails on the hungover post-Memorial Day Tuesday.  This is a shout out to some of Mr. Byers' work at the blog Leadbellies.

- Listening to five and half Beatles albums (chronologically) on the way home and hitting no Memorial Day traffic at all, while watching a terrific mist rise up from the ground throughout Connecticut and over New York City, which made me feel like running away forever and never resting in one place. Just one of those true American Nights.

And so it goes. There was plenty to enjoy on this Memorial Day Weekend. The main thing being the ability to enjoy the passing of phases of your life, friends growing older in the sun and in the rain, by fires and amid the spray of the beach, while time and drinks pass, if ever so slowly in the adjacent room.

As for blog updates, this week may mark the first non-podcast week in awhile.  I will try to make it up to you with some other content, however scheduling with Puddles of My Podcast guests can get tricky when you are working a 9-5 job once again.  However, when the podcast returns, we will have the following podcasts: Art Discussion with Lauren Gidwitz, NBA Finals discussion with Paul Sicilian, Baseball Movie Podcast with David Stern, and the Puddles of My Own Podcast where Nick Mencia interviews me.

So, please stick with me here as I will be bringing you plenty of new material as the week rolls on.  Tomorrow, you will get a special excerpt from  one of my writing notebooks, Thursday the next installment of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt, and Friday will be a Play-by-Play of Game 1 of the Celtics vs. Lakers Finals.

Get excited everyone.  The summer is here.