A Life For Itself

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  • Where in the Marvel Universe is Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.?

    (If you haven’t seen the season 3 finale of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and don’t want spoilers, go read my thoughts on the Ravens or something. You’ve been warned)

    Another fun season of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ended last night with a fantastic season finale that I’m sure if they’re submitting anything to the Emmy’s, it’ll be the submission.

    The episode had Chloe Bennet playing several different phases of Daisy Johnson’s guilt over her time under the control of Hive — self loathing when telling Coulson she didn’t deserve his forgiveness; sadness when Mac comes to console her; regret and the beginning of grief when Lincoln takes over the Quinjet to fly Hive and the Terrigen-laced warhead into space to be destroyed.

    However, Chloe didn’t just provide the most emotional episode of her tenure on the show. It came out yesterday that she’s not exactly happy with the show’s position in the MCU.

    Specifically, she says the events of AoS tend to be ignored in the movies. And she’s totally right.

    One of my favorite aspects of season one of AoS was the fact that the show literally turns on a dime based on the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. From a storytelling perspective, the world of AoS had been set up and then a huge event changes everything and the characters are forced to deal with a massively different and more difficult world than the one they had been in before. That was satisfying on its own, but the clear connection to the movies made you feel like you were really partaking of a universe of stories, crossing media. You got to be part of this every week, not just when the movies come out.

    (A smaller reference in Daredevil season 1 does the same, which worked really well grounding you in a place and time in the MCU, while managing expectations because the events of Daredevil are confined to Hell’s Kitchen, with the show’s stakes not having to do with anything outside of that area)

    The appearance of a Helicarrier in Avengers: Age of Ultron courtesy of Phil Coulson, along with the allusions to the planning of that event in AoS, were a nice treat too.

    Admittedly, I went to see Captain America: Civil War not just for itself (or for the introductions of Black Panther and the new Spider-Man), but for some reference or happenstance that would show up on the following Tuesday’s episode of AoS. Nothing much in the movie stood out, but I figured that the show would handle that, taking something we’d seen in the movie and making it bigger in hindsight, despite being pretty close to its season finale. Again, events in Winter Soldier had driven events on AoS, so there was precedent to justify my expectation.

    All we ended up receiving was General Talbot using the Sokovia Accords as a justification to get Coulson to be more open about the operation at S.H.I.E.L.D. (possibly setting up Talbot to be the next Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. If you’ve seen the season finale and the epilogue/season 4 jump, then you’ve seen Coulson order someone to “call the Director” when Daisy escapes. So he’s not Director anymore. And, Daisy becomes an outlaw of some kind and Coulson and Mac are hunting her. That’s a spoiler, too.) Nothing much beyond that.

    The problem is, given the magnitude of the story on AoS –and the events of Civil War notwithstanding– it’s hard to imagine nobody from the Avengers intervening. Anyone. Vision? Black Widow, maybe? Hive is about to disperse a gas that will turn a huge segment of the human population into inhuman drones and nobody thinks some help from the Avengers is even an idea that merits discussion?

    Yes, Coulson says during the meeting with Talbot about Sokovia that the Avengers work in the light, but S.H.I.E.L.D. works in the shadows, but with a very real threat looming, wouldn’t they have perhaps wanted Iron Man to help blow the Terrigen-laced warhead out of the sky if it were launched? No Falcon?

    (I was reading where someone mentioned that the Avengers haven’t been told on screen that Coulson is still alive. True. But if he was named the head of the ATCU, how could his being alive have been kept a secret? Especially from William Hurt’s Secretary of State Ross?)

    Here is where Bennet’s comments ring true. The show is indeed about the members of S.H.I.E.L.D.–and they did manage to eliminate the Hive threat– but with the Avengers willing to go fight each other over Sokovia (or to protect Bucky), then wouldn’t it have made sense for at least someone to show up to protect the world as a whole?

    Tony Stark can find Spider-Man swinging around New York on YouTube, but the fact that Hive buys a whole town goes completely unnoticed? A warhead is stolen and the government doesn’t at least ask the Avengers to help find it and sign the accords after? Talbot has to fight red tape to get help to go after Hive, but couldn’t he have just said “Hey, powered person with a warhead wants to cause massive damage,” wouldn’t the government have sprung to action, given how concerned they were about powered people?

    I get that there are logistical issues and such that would need to be worked out, but there do seem to be holes in both when there isn’t more crossover, such as they did in season 1 of AoS. If they can tie-in movies they’re years from releasing, why can’t they tie-in more with the TV show they’ll be producing another season for, by fall?

    #

    On a related, but different note, I really enjoyed the scene between Lincoln and Hive at the end of the AoS season finale.

    Once the Quinjet makes it into space, Lincoln tells Hive he can sway him, but it doesn’t matter, since they’re going to die anyway. Hive, who had been using his evil pixie spore dust to compel people to connect with him informs Lincoln that they’ll have a connection. They will still share something that Hive hasn’t experienced before: death.

    And unlike a million other villains in a million other stories, who choose to go down fighting until the very, bitter end, Hive decides to simply float with Lincoln and they have a conversation.

    About Earth. About Hive’s reasons for what he’d done. Lincoln’s reasons for opposing him, despite not ultimately wanting to be an agent. And then they brace for the inevitable. Then they go. Compelling resolution for their characters.

    And like all good resolutions, it was the start of a major change — this one in Daisy (which, I guess, triggers a huge change in Coulson) that will carry us into the beginning of season four.

    Good stuff. I’m just glad I have baseball and all the episodes of Daredevil season 2 to keep the anxiousness at bay until fall.

  • Five Things – 12 May 2016

    1.

    Ahhh yes. O’s are on a 5-game winning streak with a nice come-from-behind win at home vs. the Tigers. Those games vs. the Twins were really fun to watch.

    2.

    So much for the DH. Mets pitchers are mashing.

    3.

    Disappointed that Agent Carter got cancelled.

    As much as I enjoy the MCU movies and TV shows that take place in the current day, I enjoyed seeing Carter take on the bad guys without helicarriers, Quinjets, teams of super smart scientists, and powered people around to help.

    Plus I very much enjoyed the Dr. Wilkes character.

    ABC didn’t pick up the Bobbi and Hunter spinoff, either. Hopefully, they’ll show back up on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

    Fortunately, Supergirl got picked up for CW. It should have been there from the beginning.

    4.

    Shocking development: Scrivener for iOS has moved into beta testing. They first announced this app a few years ago and writers –myself included– have been waiting. The wait might be over by the summer.

    I still use Scrivener for Windows for this blog and my other writing projects. That and Google Drive, since there isn’t any Scrivener for ChromeOS.

    However, they are talking about an Android version in the future …

    … and with Android and ChromeOS possibly converging soon, who knows what the future holds with writing on my Chromebook.

    5.

    And people are still driving up to it towards the end of the video.

    Before they took Weather Channel off the cable, Storm Chasers was a major guilty pleasure. If you’re into big storms and tech porn, that’s the show for you. They’d load up in these vehicles –sometimes specially fortified vehicles– with cameras, laptops, sometimes tablets, and head out.

    They’d use GPS to go find tornadoes, sometimes going between states to get the shot to sell to Weather Channel and whoever else buys those pictures. One episode, they got too close and were debating hanging out in a fast food restaurant freezer.

    And that’s one of the reasons why I couldn’t ever do that. As much as I’d love to drive around with a laptop (and probably also a tablet) mounted in the car and maybe get pictures from a mile or so away, what’s depicted in that video is way too intense. It takes a different breed of person to get that close to a killer storm on purpose. Same for the storm chasing scientists who work the same way. And for the pilots and meteorologists who fly into tropical cyclones on purpose.

  • Five Things – 5 May 2016

    1.

    O’s won the series with the Yankees, but I was really hoping for the sweep. The further under .500 the Yankees are, the more comical their fans are when they call in on the radio.

    Plus, with the back of their bullpen being what it is, the more losses they take early, the better. Seasons are never decided in April or early May, but if they do hit that hot streak in June or July, it’s better the further they have to go to catch up.

    Especially with that back of the bullpen. It’s like that 2014 Royals bullpen.

    2.

    What is up with Matt Harvey? I’m sure he’ll snap out of it, but he doesn’t seem to be all there in some way.

    What is up with the Mets hitting all these home runs? Certainly a pleasant surprise.

    What is up with the Royals? I thought they’d do us a solid by at least taking 2/3 from the Nats. Guess not. They can redeem themselves in my eyes by putting it down on the Yankees next week.

    3.

    To answer the popular question from the beginning of the week: yes, I was pleased with the Ravens’ draft. Oz is usually right more often than not, it seems, so I never sweat it. Some folks like to go back and look at picks like Matt Elam and Courtney Upshaw (I enjoyed his tenure in Baltimore, but he ended up not being enough of a pass rusher I guess), but look at the last few drafts and who’s contributed along the defensive line and who stepped up last season on offense with all the injuries. At this point, I’m expecting nothing less than the same, especially on defense.

    4.

    I wasn’t surprised the Ravens pulled Laremy Tunsil off their board immediately after the video and pictures hit social media. This is the same team that cut Bernard Pierce mere hours after a DUI arrest in Baltimore County. Arrest. Not conviction. They cut Terrence Cody after his animal cruelty charges (but in their defense, he had one foot out the door based on performance as it was) came out, too.

    Since the fallout from the Ray Rice situation, the Castle has been highly sensitive to the team’s public image. If they were willing to cut one of their own as quickly as they did Pierce, there was no way they were going to take Tunsil, since they were about to pick and had no time to dig deeper into the story and find out the video was old and someone was releasing all of this on draft day, seemingly to destroy the kid.

    They say they had Stanley rated higher than Tunsil and only they know for sure. But I’m pretty sure that if there had been a chance they would take him while they were on the clock, as soon as the picture came out of him in the gas mask bong, that chance evaporated.

    However, NFL Network had the time to let the story unfold before allowing their talking heads like Mike Mayock pass judgment on the kid without knowing the whole story. At least Mayock backtracked on his comments later in the night.

    The rest of them sure didn’t. I wonder if they’ll all be cheering for the more famous and local Baltimore weed connoisseur, Michael Phelps, as he represents the whole country in the Olympics in a few weeks, though.

    Oh, and according to Kevin Byrne, Ozzie reads tweets from college players. Kids, if you think you have a shot at playing pro football, watch what you say on the Tweeter, okay?

    5.

    What a mess.

  • Writing Bootcamp: Postmortem

    And then, it was done. No more prompts. No more classmates’ writing to read and critique. No more 1000 word assignment to turn in on Saturday. Even as I know the time flew by really quickly and I wish I’d signed up for the 10 week bootcamp, it feels like I’ve been at this routine a lot longer. I could go on doing this for much longer. I imagine this what somewhat like an MFA program feels like, from what I’ve always heard or read about them.

    I had an inkling that responding to prompts and letting the writing produced from those exercises lead me to new story ideas, memories I had forgotten that might fit with *something* I’d written and I was right. I produced a lot more writing than I thought I would and leave the experience with many more ideas for projects, both large and small. Since we’ve been invited to, I’ll be downloading the prompts and revisiting them, as I feel like I need another boost or a different alleyway to take my writing down.

    The next step is to work and bring pieces I worked on in the class and that I started outside of it, to conclusion and send them out. I have a huge bout of impostor syndrome to get over, but at this point, if I keep doing any more of these classes (or any other classes, for that matter) without trying for publication at all, I’ll be still hiding. Someone whose opinion I trust asked me when I was going to stop going into these classes looking for validation for my writing and permission to put it out in the world. I learned it’s okay and I don’t completely suck and I should go for publication. The hiding isn’t working.

    So I’ll go back to the lab, throw some things out here on this site, some things out elsewhere, and we’ll see where it goes.

    Since the names of the members of the class weren’t published, I won’t put any of their names here, but I would like to thank them for sharing their work and their opinions about everyone’s work. As I said before, it was great to see work written about subjects that I care about, but from different slants. The class was worth it for that alone.

    Forget about the bravery the writers must have had to produce the work they did. Exploring lifestyles out of the mainstream. Stories about living with cancer. One writer talked about one way their mother’s death from cancer was a relief. She stood on her truth and never wavered.

    I’d also like to especially thank the instructor, Meghan O’Gieblyn, since her name was listed on the site. She gave me wonderful feedback on my work, especially the longer pieces. I am truly grateful for her discussion of an issue I’ve struggled with for a long time: the use of second person in my writing. It’s one of those things that I’ve just “felt” for at times, but she gave me a larger way of looking at that perspective and when to employ it.

    More than that, she offered encouragement and even talked with us about things like publishing with us that weren’t officially covered in the course. Generous, helpful, and supportive — everything you want in a writing teacher.

    Read some of her work.

    And that’s it. Tomorrow, I’ll jump back behind my Chromebook screen and we’ll see where I go.

  • Five Things – 27 April 2016

    1.

    Catherine Pugh won the Democratic primary for Mayor of Baltimore. So, it’s very likely she’s going to be the next mayor. Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is already pledging to work with her to make the transition go well.

    Deray didn’t get many votes, but hopefully the long-term effect of his candidacy is the involvement of more of Baltimore’s youth in the political process as well as other means of change and empowerment. Baltimore must find ways to include more people in its growth and prosperity. It can’t just be concentrated in Southeast Baltimore without the same sort of unrest we saw last year happening again.

    I was happy to see my old classmate, Elizabeth Embry, polled at 12%. Given that this was her first time running and that she didn’t have the same recognition coming in as Ms. Pugh and Ms. Dixon, she did really well. I think she could win in a future run at the office if she stays visible. 12% might not seem like much, but Ms. Dixon had people waiting to vote for again at the time she left office the last time. To do well against that kind of support is really impressive, especially in Baltimore.

    2.

    On the anniversary of last year’s unrest/uprising, Baltimore police shoot a 13-year old with a BB gun.

    3.

    Tomorrow night is round 1 of the NFL Draft 2016. I’m still unsure who the Ravens will pick, but I’m fairly certain the first pick will be made in current slot and it will be a defensive player.

    One thing I am 100% sure of: I’m glad I’m not a Browns fan. Or an Eagles fan. Two things.

    4.

    Lifting again. It’s fun and I feel good after, but I miss the old days, lifting in Mr. Scott’s back yard. Lifting in the weight room at school. I’m going to write more about this one of these days.

    5.

    The writing is going really well in the class, still. Unfortunately, this is the last week. I’m going to miss being in such an environment, but the class has given me lots of material to build on and means to develop more and keep myself going. I’m going to do another bootcamp when I can.

  • A Genius of Prince

    I didn’t understand Prince when I was 7-8 years old when Purple Rain came out. All I knew was most of the talk I heard surrounding Prince was that with all the frilly, purple clothes, blouses, and such, he was too effeminate to be straight. Too effeminate for the real men I’d hear talking about him. Same for the boys talking about it at school and other places.

    Didn’t matter how many women around adored him and wanted to be with him and whether or not he got the girl in the movie and whether that was his girl in real life –because the rumors were always there– Prince had to be gay and gay == bad.

    Even if you liked the music, which by the way, wasn’t necessarily for us, it was said around me a lot, because it was laden with rock guitar.

    Let’s go crazy. Let’s get nuts.

    I didn’t know enough not to join in.

    #

    I wasn’t quite there in my teenage years, either.

    Even if songs like “Adore” and “Diamonds and Pearls” weren’t just fun to sing, they told the stories of my growing infatuations with the girls I’d have feelings for or outright fell in love with.

    Love is to weak to define
    Just what you mean to me

    Even if “Scandalous” and “Insatiable” and often mirrored the puberty-driven thoughts I would have in the later hours.

    I got a jones, Martha.

    Prince was still supposed to be too weird. And that weirdness, with the dress and the symbol and all of that, was still supposed to be too much. Especially with all the other reasons added in. Especially with a more religious-based homophobia that I’d added..

    I still wouldn’t listen to my own conscience about the man.

    #

    At some point, once I became interested in my own art; and quite frankly, when I developed enough confidence in myself to not follow the pack and try to fit into what others did or thought, is when I discovered what I think is one of his greatest geniuses.

    It wasn’t the fact of his musical virtuosity. Playing 27 instruments on an album says enough, but it wasn’t that.

    It wasn’t even the blend of sexuality and sensuality and spirituality in his music. Historians and musical historians will probably write volumes about the introspection and investigation of sexual identity in all the various forms that it manifested in his music and where it crosses with his notions of spirituality and love. Prince is one of the only artists who could merge the vulgar and the sacred to the point where you had to question for yourself where, if anywhere, the line of demarcation was.

    But that’s not even, for me, his greatest genius.

    As I think back to all of us talking about him, making jokes about him, mocking him and what we thought about his sexuality, there he was, not just making great music, not just beginning to change the world, but he was doing something that none of those people back then, I think can say they were doing — Prince was living life on his own terms.

    As folks went back to their crap jobs and their crap coworkers and hated the whole thing, Prince was living his life by his own rules.

    Yeah, look at the frilly blouses. Where was Prince’s supervisor or employee handbook that told him he could or couldn’t dress that way? Where was his compliance officer or HR director to ensure his pants were tight or purple enough?

    Nowhere. That was just him. No bullshit. Sure, in a sense, he performed off-stage as well as on, but that was how he decided to live. Prince wasn’t being told when he could get off or go on vacation. How to dress. How to keep his hair. None of the same bullshit people had to do to get by. Looking back, that looks like it was always his plan.

    Hell, he changed his name to a symbol to be able to continue to do his work the way he wanted to. Up until he died, he was working to get control of his masters.

    He even redecorated Carlos Boozer’s house to suit himself and when he was finished renting it, he changed it all back the way it was. Regular people might ask why Prince would spend the money to do something like that, but he had a vision for himself and his life and compromise wasn’t part of it. How many compromises do many of us make before noon on any given weekday?

    I wish I could go back and tell my child self to look closely — there was someone who knew who he was, knew his worth and value to the world, and lived that. He didn’t follow others and he didn’t try to fit in. He was who he was and anybody that didn’t like it, too bad. My child self could have used that lesson. Many of us now could use that same lesson.

    Do I believe in god? Do I believe in me?
    Some people want to die so they can be free
    I said life is just a game, we’re all just the same, do you want to play?
    Yeah, oh yeah

  • Bootcamps

    I wonder if I should combine aspects of the exercise bootcamp with the writing bootcamp. Write a poem for 30 seconds, write prose for 30 seconds, write a scene for 30 seconds, take a 2 minute break, repeat for 30-45 minutes. Maybe not 30-second intervals, maybe 15-20 minute intervals. Keep the 2 minute break. Drink copious amounts of water during the break. Stretch and keep loose. Hopefully walk away from the experience without the same sort of pain I had in my quads after the first HIIT session.

    Last Monday, I started the exercise bootcamp. After putting it off for a couple of weeks, I finally went. I’ve been losing a decent amount of weight through diet alone, but the exercise is the missing piece in the plans my doctor and I have been discussing.

    So I show up in sweats and a couple of shirts I’d eventually sweat through, ready to jump back into exercising after a long, very long layoff. (I paid the first month’s membership fee and a joiner fee just before the bootcamp and I was not about to back out after that). And after just a few minutes, my whole body felt the layoff. Stiffness, soreness, exhaustion.

    And after the 45 minutes of kicks, squats, planks, step ups/step downs and other maneuvers, all meant to kick and shrink your ass, mine was indeed thoroughly kicked. Towards the end of it, I kept reminding myself to just finish, it would get easier, and it was all a part of a larger plan. That didn’t stop me from questioning, as I left, whether I’d just rather keep the damn weight so that I wouldn’t again feel like I was going to die, but it did also convince me as the pain subsided, that I was definitely going back the next Monday. That it wouldn’t be as bad. And certainly not as bad as checking out too young.

    All in all, I’d still rather be dancing, because at least then, I was learning something I might be able to create some art out of. Or perhaps not.

    But it is still always about the art and the art is getting better after 3 weeks of the writing bootcamp. The soreness of struggling through 300 words a day has subsided. I’m rocking through those words and writing others, even as I’m doing it after I come home from my day job. That was always an issue before. Not as much now. I just hope to keep up this momentum once it all ends in a couple of weeks (I should have signed up for the 10 week one).

    Monday, my barber’s wife was at the gym and asked me if I was bothered by being the only guy in the exercise room besides the instructor. Nope. I was just there to work and hopefully do something that might help save my life. The desire to go on was more powerful than too much worry about looking stupid, which I figured was going to happen anyway. Besides, being in there with so many all working hard, working through the pain and the exhaustion, was inspiring. Those women fought for it. Wasn’t no BS in there. No showing off.

    It’s the same with the writing bootcamp. I’m the only guy in that class, too. And the women in there are churning out some badass pages of essay and memoir. All the good stuff. Classically styled work. Experimental forms. Fun reads. Reads that hurt. Reads that make you question how you look at things you thought you had a good bead on. It’s a blast. And the writing is coming on a daily basis. I don’t know how much the folks in there are sweating, but they’re fighting for it just like the exercise room.

    Sunday has certainly been a day of rest (then again, so was yesterday), but tomorrow, it’s back to the grind, both at the gym and the keyboard. Doing both to live, to keep on going. And getting just enough inspiration to help me decide to keep hitting the finish line.

  • Opening Day Came and Went

    I wanted to talk about Jake Arrieta and the Cubs. It was late for me, but still early for my father. Especially since he had retired and no longer left home in the dead of night to beat the L.A. traffic to work.

    I wanted to talk about the buzzer beater that had just happened, what he thought of his Angels’ chances this season. If he thought the O’s had enough pitching to make it to the postseason, if he thought the Mets could get back to the Series this year.

    We probably wouldn’t have agreed on any of it. We didn’t agree on much sportswise. The only thing I can remember us finding total common ground on recently was whether Andrew Luck would become a top-five QB in the NFL. And even then, his thoughts were twinged with some excitement as Luck was on his team. I didn’t care much for that. Despite the independence he’d instilled in me, part of me always wanted to be able to say that I rooted for the same teams as my father; that we he had shared that, even if he hadn’t passed it down to me.

    I was ready to call. The impulse doesn’t immediately leave. Even when it’s almost been a year since he’s passed on. Sometimes, I need to call my father.

    #

    I did call on my birthday. Out of habit. Muscle memory, perhaps. The phone still rang. Nobody answered it, obviously. At some later point, I texted him. Just needed to say I missed him.

    I wasn’t there when he died. Nor was I there when my sister buried him. We had a small, memorial get-together back in Baltimore. But with no ceremony, no artifact, not even the closing of a casket, the finality didn’t feel as final.

    #

    I shared baseball with my mother. I lived with my mother, so she shuttled me to practices and games. Ran me up and down the highway looking for the right black and orange cleats or 32” Easton aluminum bat. She learned how to keep a baseball scorecard. Until she couldn’t do any of those things anymore.

    Back in California, my father got game recaps. Mailed copies of the player pictures they made like little baseball cards.

    We never even talked much baseball until I reconnected with him.

    #

    He bought me a whiffle ball set for my 5th or 6th birthday, the summer I spent out there with him, his fiancee, and my sisters. It came with a little, blue hat. I told him I wasn’t going to become a Dodgers fan. I loved the Orioles and besides, my mother would be mad. He said he didn’t want me to. He wouldn’t explain to me until later years how loathsome he found the Dodgers. After the 1988 World Series, we agreed on that.

    That summer, whenever we played any games, we’d take on the persona of a player we admired. He had a badminton set in his tiny back yard, but we didn’t know any famous people who played badminton, so we substituted tennis players. He called out that he was Jimmy Connors. I was John McEnroe (not a bad choice considering how pissed I got when I was losing). My younger sister, Kellee, was too young to know anybody, so I tried to assign her Martina Navratilova. My father said she should be Billie Jean King.

    When we played with the whiffle ball set, I was Eddie Murray. Eddie was Mr. Oriole to me. My dad was Reggie Jackson, who had left the East Coast for California around the time my father did.

    We hit balls towards the house. I wanted to hit one over the roof and into the pool in the back yard. Perhaps I dreamed I had a little Frank Robinson in me, too.

    That was the only time my father got to see me play.

    #

    Since we reconnected, calling on these nights became a habit: opening day for the O’s. Sometime on the first Sunday of NFL football. Sometime during each O’s/Angels series. The day of Ray Lewis’ last home game was fun (mostly since the Ravens had put a hurting on Indianapolis in Baltimore, always a welcome occasion). He still wouldn’t let me recruit him to Baltimore’s new team from the team carrying the name of its old one.

    #

    I wanted to say “I told you so” about the Rams moving back to L.A. He swore no team would ever return there. Everybody there was a fan of some other team, he’d insist for years, whenever we’d talk about it. I told him that wouldn’t matter, the NFL would stick a team there. Probably the Rams or the Raiders.

    I would have called and lorded my moment over him and we would have had a good laugh. I would have asked him how his golf was going and if he was finally ready to buy himself the new computer he’d been talking about. He would have asked me how my aunt was and if I’d been eating right. We would have talked at the next big moment.

    When I was younger, I used to be sad about how much we’d missed, the things we hadn’t shared. Now it’s the big moments. I know they’ll come. The Mets may win the Series this year. The O’s aren’t too bad, either.

  • Back From Outer Space

    I guess after not posting for a month, posting today would seem like a late April Fool’s joke. No such intent. No, I just took an unscheduled break from blogging and some of my other writing.

    Call it writer’s block or not, depending on whether you believe in it or you don’t, sometimes a writer can go through a rough or fallow patch and output dwindles. For one reason or another.

    Fortunately, my online class started this past Monday and I’ve been writing like mad since last week. One big thing I’ve learned about myself is I write well under deadline. I’ve also regained more of the sense of fun I used to have writing. I even managed to scrawl a couple of fresh, first draft poems.

    I’ve also journalled more this past week than usual. I had been confining my journalling to first thing in the morning. Now, I’m writing in my journal in the evenings and at work when I’m taking a lunch break. Which is good because my writing is a small slice of nirvana in the work-a-day cycle I’m in.

    —

    Five (other) things since I’ve last posted:

    1.

    It’s baseball season again. Thank God. O’s won this evening on a walk-off single by Matt Wieters. If he keeps it up, he may get that $30M contract for the Yankees this fall after all.

    Opening night with the Mets wasn’t as good. In fact, it was like the World Series never ended. It had all the elements:

    1. A Mets fielding error that leads to a run(s)
    2. Harvey struggling immediately after the error
    3. Met inability to hit Royals pitching
    4. Mets coming back to within one run late
    5. Royals winning in the end

    Thor will be back on the mound tomorrow, so hopefully there will be a better outcome. And if not, it’s all good. The Mets will open their 2016 home campaign vs. the Phillies this weekend.

    2.

    Read a really good article just today about Oriole Park at Camden Yards, with pictures of some of the early renditions of the ballpark. They were tossing around the idea for a multipurpose stadium at Port Covington as well other ideas. One of those is from the 70s. Wonder how things would have gone had they built that multipurpose stadium.

    I am happy with the stadium(s) we ended up getting; unfortunately, the processes to get them done were painful for a lot of sports fans.

    http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/orioles/bs-sp-orioles-camden-yards-0404-20160404-story.html

    3.

    I’ve been watching college basketball, still. Not as much since the Maryland women got upset by Washington and the men ran into the Jayhawks, though.

    I am getting sick of these Kansas/Kansas City teams beating my favorite teams. Royals will host the O’s in a few weeks. Hoping for the right outcome, the outcome of the birds winning.

    4.

    Looks like the mayoral race back home has become a two-person race between Sheila Dixon and Catherine Pugh. I expected Dixon to have a larger lead this close to the primary with Pugh still in 2nd. It may come down to the wire. Deray is around but in the pack with the others. He undoubtedly has access to a lot of money, but Ms. Dixon, for certain, started off with more people.

    The general election should be far less interesting. Part of me hopes that one or two of the people in the Democratic primary decide to make a go as an independent in the general election.

    5.

    I’ve been accepted to a writers’ conference later this summer. Still have applications out for two more.

  • Five Things – 11 February 2016

    1

    My Chromebook is back to life.

    I ordered a new screen, but the one I received didn’t work. So, I had to order another one and send back the original. The second one worked, fortunately. Since I’d already taken apart the machine by the time it got here, all I had to do was connect the new screen, screw it in place, put the bezel back on the machine. Back in business.

    Easy for me to say, some of my coworkers might think if they’re reading this. But here’s more or less what I did:

    Just follow the video and you’re cool. You don’t have to have been working in IT forever to do this. And it doesn’t take long.

    And it’s definitely worth it. I use my Chromebook most often to write –I’m writing this on it– because of the really nice keyboard. I’m still getting often between 6-7 hours of usage from it when I’m not watching video (I will watch video on it while it’s charging because I’m obviously not killing the battery).

    2.

    Reading and very much enjoying Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy. So far, I’ve learned I’m too serious in my writing. I need to have more fun, write longer about more fun topics. It’s not life and death. It’s just life.

    3.

    Supposed to be really cold over the next few days.

    4.

    Last night, the talking heads on MLB Network were discussing the exit velocity of balls batted by various players around the league. Looks like MLB Network is full-on sabermetrics. Which is cool and I’ll be playing the home game this spring and summer, but I need to remember to turn it off sometimes and just enjoy the games.

    Watching a full baseball game is still a great pleasure. Always has been. Never changed. But I can’t talk baseball with just anybody anymore. I’ve met a few folks who only want to dig so deeply into the stats and their arguments that I wonder if they actually enjoy baseball or really enjoy statistics or argumentation and their chosen outlet for those is baseball.

    It’s cool if that’s their thing. I just don’t share their passion. As much as we can look into every stat to discern what we think might have happened or what might happen (and it is often fun, just not all the time), I enjoy the poetry and drama and spectacle of baseball as much. People who understand and appreciate those, as well as the numbers, are the people I want share baseball with now and in the future. Otherwise, the joy of baseball quickly leaves.

    5.

    I’m working on a short piece about Earth, Wind, and Fire, and how their music has been part of my life. Obviously related to the recent passing of Maurice White, the band’s co-founder.