Month: March 2008 (Page 1 of 2)

At Least Someone Has a Sense of Humor…

Yesterday was far away Opening Day. Today the bright sky of “Play Ball” hides behind drops of rain.

That’s it. I just needed a reason to link to 13 Fabulous Photos of a Rainy Day.

“I’ve felt the coldness of my winter
I never thought it would ever go.”
– Zep

“I misspoke.” No, you tried to pass a premeditated lie on us to bolster your claim of “experience” you say your Democratic opponent apparently lacks. In the recent tradition of soiling the office practiced by your husband and his successor, you have passed the Commander in Chief threshold for lying. Congratulations. Please run with your head down like you did in Bosnia and exit the race.

I’m left with Gary Kamiya, who writes in Salon, “Wright isn’t the problem. Stupid patriotism is the problem.”

It’s true. If not for the “patriotic” fervor whipped up post 9/11, there would not have been an Iraq war. We were lied to and used by the Bush Administration who will leave us soon with thousands dead and injured, our international image laughable, a $3T war tab and $4 gasoline.

Then there’s the sickening, racial hypocrisy spewing like raw sewage from the bowels of Sean Hannity. He rants on Rev. Wright for 9/11 comments suggesting we got hit for our imperialist tendencies, but will tirelessly defend the late Rev. Jerry Falwell who said we were attacked as punishment from god because we have gays.

How must the religious and phony patriotism bent in this campaign look to the rest of the world?

Today’s reading is from “It Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive” by Eric Alterman:

“The sunny new Springsteen is also evident in the album’s packaging. Gone are the blank existential stares of the Frank Stefanko photographs for Darkness and The River and the stark , depressing Robert Frank-style artwork of Nebraska.”

These messages have been coming at me lately. Last night as Kyle and I watched previews before “The Bucket List,” a scene from “Definitely, Maybe” depicted a young daughter and her dad talking:

Daughter: “I want you to be happy.”
Dad: “I’m happy.”
Daughter: “Trust me Dad. You’re not happy.”

Of course the feature film theme was, “Find the Joy in your life…”

“Break the Mold.” That’s the sage advice from my buddy Alan. Another smart guy, Albert Einstein is credited with this definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

“Can you give me some dating tips?” That was the question floated out toward me a couple weeks ago. I think the question was facetious, but I still had no idea what to say and that fact I couldn’t say what I was really thinking: “Are you kidding? With that whole brains/beauty thing you have going on, all you have to do is show up,” still irks me. I went with a very safe “Don’t settle,” followed by a short passage on how I won’t compromise time with my children for a woman, blah, blah, blah… Yeah, she basically got the kitchen-ready recipe for “How to be alone.”

Safe. At arm’s length. Still living in the darkness on the edge of town… Protected by my facade like carbonite, but fighting for air.

I guess the real advice I should give and follow is the Nike brand slogan. There’s no way around it. You’ve got to drop the bags at the curb and jump on the train because it’s moving. When the ghosts catch your eye and your old friend fear smiles wickedly, smile back and keep moving…

“I’ll teach my eyes to see beyond these walls in front of me
And someday I’ll walk out of here again
But now I’m trapped”
Trapped – written by Jimmy Cliff, performed by Bruce Springsteen

The sunny new me.

On January 20, 1961, a young President challenged the nation, “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” John F. Kennedy’s words were historic.

Nearly 50 years later, I hope we have the collective courage and wisdom to “do for our country” and elect this young man President. Only then will his words rise from heartfelt to historic.

I sure hope St. Patrick’s Day is not associated with the day the American financial kegs ran dry, but with the Fed taking truly drastic actions since Friday, including an agreement to help finance Bear Stearns $30B in losses so JP Morgan’s can buy them for $2 per share, I’m not thinking it’s going to be a green day on Wall Street.

The growing problem we face is a lack of confidence abroad in our financial system and in the United States as a world leader. The world has changing while the Bush Administration has been clinging to the “romanticism” of war. Our President has no credibility in the world and very little on his own soil. What we need is leadership and it’s ten months away. One commenter to a Bear Stearns story this morning wrote, “I think that the market would stabilize pretty quickly if the US would adopt emergency legislation to balance the budget and start paying down the debt.”

I just don’t think we’ll see that emerging from the George Bush House of Cards. No, we’ll have to wait ten months until the presidency of Herbert Hoover II is finally over and a new president will be saying something like this.

I meant to round out my shocking littering exposé with discussion of a baseball found among the other items of discard dropped on our streets like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. It was scabbed gray and coarse from asphalt ballrash, and the red seams were raised and hard from cycles of wet and dry. I rolled it in my fingertips while contemplating the grip of various fastballs, the splitter and the knuckler. I thought about how “a baseball” was at the center of great moments in the game:

A baseball… hit by Carlton Fisk
A baseball… caught by Willie Mays
A baseball… thrown by Don Larsen

Baseballs have also been in the middle of infamous moments:

A baseball… missed by Bill Buckner
A baseball… thrown by Jack Hamilton
A baseball… crushed into summer nights of our imagination by Jose Canseco or Mark McGuire or Sammy Sosa or Barry Bonds… before the illusion was exposed.

“Walking down Main Street,
Getting to know the concrete.”

“Tear Stained Eye” – Jay Farrar of Son Volt

Early Friday morning I left my car at European Auto Werks and walked most of the 4.16 miles home. I was going to iPod out the din of life on that route, but instead decided to leave all senses available for the trip. Traversing a common path by foot provides such a different perspective than through a windshield. Our streets are crumbling like dry chocolate cake and chunks of asphalt are strewn around craters where they once lay. The blacker repairs are clearly temporary and quality of their installation lacking. I passed many dormant storefronts and old churches broken by time.

What accompanied nearly every step was litter. Superfund sites aside, I’m concerned that we are literally littering (wow, that was bad alliteration…) our country into a dump. I saw Bud Light and Coors Light cans, various auto parts of rusted metal and black rubber, fast-food packaging, and of course cigarette butts; my favorite. Oh, and there’s a flattened plastic jug of windshield fluid. I guess the owner was finished with it… Much of this garbage is invisible at 20 miles per hour or more (driving, not running), but it’s right there in 3D when you’re stepping over it.

Why do people litter? Did no one ever tell them not to? When I was a kid, this Public Service Announcement ran for quite some time. Maybe it’s time for a sequel.

As I climbed a long hill close to home, an aging ambulance accelerated past me leaving a cloud of acrid blue carbon poison in my path. Is that Spring in the air?

Music marketing of a relatively unknown artist isnt easy, but we certainly had musicians whoring around, and now with the internet, anythings possible. Apparently, the young woman under the fall of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has made $1.4M in the past couple days off two singles she had on her MySpace page In the math can be fun category is the fact she earned 69 cents per download. Yeah.