Bullpen Catcher

Too many images tonight reminding me of forgotten (and thankfully so) desires. There's the hair that hung down and the hair than didn't. I guess there's just less hair altogether now - shaved pubes, balding - but there's more of us: bodies consistently expanding. Then there's the creepy thing that she cut the 5th grade version and the 12th grade version out of something, possibly even a larger photo, and montaged them together. All runnerly and jaw-thrusted - everything was ahead. Now Franklin-stove-esquely, waiting for something to happen. Off my meds for three days. Should be in bed. Get back to the gym before the gig. Drop a few. Fit into spandex bodysuit. Live again.

All the turkey dwindling in a freezer container seven feet away. When I moved in here my parents were here and it is apropos that they should be here this weekend - my last. My fingers are scarred, thumb pads rent from the mesh. Today was a long day. The walls have told all their stories and I am itching, this day after thanksgiving, for new palates on which to plaster new stories - clean walls, my walls.

I am running naked and wet through the rain tonight; the family quietly sleeps in sudden slumber. The fun that was had will be had again - but not quite in the same way - if not now, then very soon.

I ate the jello cranberries: my favorite. I sucked my thumb. I played Ken and Barbie and Ken. She can't stand up. She's dancing to stay upright. Kicked the high-heels into the pool. Goodnight this place; it is slowly dismantling. Goodnight sweet prince; he's dead. Goodnight Candler Park, or Lake Claire, or whatever you are.

For a little over three years, spanning from August of 2005 to August 2008, I spent one hour a week - sometimes Thursday afternoons, sometimes Tuesdays, and for a brief period on Wednesdays - sitting in an office with dim lighting and half-closed blinds trying to figure out what was wrong with me. When I started going to these sessions, I was in an awful place in my life in which my then live-in girlfriend had moved out (ostensibly in an effort to save the relationship), who then subsequently left the relationship for good a few weeks later. I had spent the better part of my previous 10 years nightly carrying out a love affair with alcohol, and whereas I had tempered these wicked ways a bit in the previous couple of years, my anger and frustration with myself would still boil over from time to time - whether drunk or sober. During those three years of weekly meetings I would come to realize that I was in, and had likely been in, a deep depression that extended back into my teen years.

The man that I talked to (and I mean "to", like when a pitcher throws a ball to the catcher, because our sessions were 95% one-way) in those sessions was Stephen O'Hagan. I would come in most of the time thinking I had nothing to say, pretending that everything was okay, only to leave an hour later realizing my tongue was tired, and most times feeling much more levity than when I entered, all at the expense of tear-stained cheeks. Steve didn't speak much, but when he did his words were well chosen and had the air of a Zen koan to them. He knew from training and experience that there was little that he could figure out for me, but he would try to clear the path so that I might have moments of discovery myself: self-help authors and cynical critics of psychoanalysis call these holy grails "breakthrough moments."

I don't know that I ever had a "breakthrough moment" during any of our sessions. It has taken the passage of time, the looking at where I was and where I am, to realize what happened during those weekly hours spent with Steve. When our sessions had to end in August of this year because of his declining health, I wasn't sure what would happen with me. He told me, "at the end of therapy, and especially at the unnatural conclusion of therapy like this situation... many people will feel as if they are relapsing... this is natural and is linked to your desire to continue therapy, it is temporary, and should be expected." I asked him what was next for him and he described a new approach to medication and treatment that his doctors were going to try, and that they had reason to hope it would be effective.

I've spent several afternoons over the past months sitting here at my desk, at the end of a day. The light for most of the summer streamed through the windows that are straight ahead, and I battled that late afternoon light with baseball hats, pieces of cardboard taped to the window, my tennis racquet in its case, and odd body contortions.

The days are getting shorter and the light is not an issue any longer. Today it is making orange quavers full across the office and living room, and on the fireplace all the way over there. It gets me to thinking that I likely will not be here in this place next year, and in that I will not be here during this time, I will never see light quite like this again. I try to enjoy it for today. Try to take a picture, but although photos are really made of light, they never quite do it justice. The way in which you experience it in person cannot be captured. I am not sure whether that is good or bad. I would like to keep a little of this orange light today in a bottle to bring out and remember this place on days like this, in the early fall.

I am house hunting and will be gone within months if not sooner, and that new place will not sit on top of this hill just so, at just this angle, with those trees just there. Everything will be different, the light, my likely preoccupations, me in general.

I will have to see what the summer is like in this city from that place. Let this one be all those memories, mostly good. Remember this light; close eyes now.

Yesterday was the last for most MLB teams. Regular season is over, I've turned the air conditioner off. It's over.

Mo doesn't want me to tell you this, but I once had sex with his wife, before she was his wife, but while I knew he was in love with her, and I don't know if I can ever live that down. Now I am married, and happily I may add, and I don't want anyone other than you to know. I am a sonofabitch.

Today, he wants me to kiss his ass though, and I am not married to her, so I refuse. He wants everyone to bow down to the holy Clower ass, and we all rise up, and say no. Each and every one of us.

I am so sorry to you, dear readers, but not to him. He's an asshole and I just want all of you to know that.

It's hard to not love New York City, even after your twenties are long gone. In the approaching autumn of that year I found myself there again and was transported back to post-college-graduation. The world as a proverbial oyster. Surely, NYC would come, but the job was at a newspaper, back home, in suburban North Carolina; just a step on the road to the Times and a loft in the Village. So, in that year, my early thirties, I found myself in New York again, ostensibly for a tennis tournament, and a few drinks with almost-lost friends. A storm was approaching up the coast, skirting the coast with a bump and then back out into the water, where it would build steam and head back inland. Thousands south of the city, including those in the town I then called home, were without power, many without homes. I found myself in NYC oblivious to the storm except the blips of it on cable TV news. In my mind, the city was covered in a protective seal that kept out such things as storms and locust infestations (the last of which could be correct).

My name is Moses Clower, or Mo as I like to be called - gets past the biblical implications which I have come to find problematic, and once made for an immediate launch in to the realm of the "academically gifted" as a child when I became the first in my class to know how to spell his name. I have been divorced for four years, six months ago I jumped from the sinking ship of newspapers (my passion; my blood - I thought) to a job in online journalism for a major 24-hour news network. I am 37 years old and have no dog, no children, and I do have a retirement portfolio that would turn no heads: women at the bar, financial advisers.

That weekend, as the storm approached, Labor Day weekend, I spent in NYC feeling like a kid again. It's okay to say kid from this vantage point, because that is where the longing is - to be a kid again - but, what I really felt was like a young adult again (freedoms of an adult, no adult responsibilities) - what I would of called when I was actually a kid "an adult," or simply "old" which makes me wonder what I would have thought as a kid of myself now. But that's neither here nor there, or perhaps it is one or the other, but either way I was in NYC feeling like a "kid," drinking with old college friends who I felt had somehow found the holy grail, but, as it turns out, were in similar positions as myself and my non-NYC friends, and it made the city seem smaller. And in making the city seem smaller, it made it more appealing to me, as I had long given up on the notion of making it there, and through giving up on the notion, had soon given up on the desire. A NYC that was not so overwhelming, didn't feel like it could crush a person, alighted new fires of yearning in me - and those drinks, and those walks, and those views from that hotel room, and those women, all those different women, after these lonely past four years, seemed to sound the siren's call.

This storm thinks it's going to get the best of me, better think again. I'll fuck it up. This ain't no Katrina, harbinger of heartbreak; people standing on roofs while husbands die. I think they wanted husbands to die. Die drunk. New Orleans, best city in the country. Remember a spring break there. Met a girl and she sang songs to me in a courtyard. New Orleans has courtyards.

Take my fucking house, but you'll have to do it out from under my feet. I deny God. Been twelve years without church and don't know that I miss it. European friends think I'm an ass for even considering. That's right, European friends.

I got this house, and I got my dog, and I got my testicles and my dog has his too; fuck Bob Barker. Fucker lives in Burbank or somewhere and spent too much time with artificially colored hair to be trusted.

For days, Richard has been reading the weather reports, watching the weather reports, researching weather phenomenon on the internet: wikipedia, NOAA, weather.com, various weather related blogs. Even before anyone else on the east coast knew anything about Nolan, old Dick was already buying canned goods, bread, bottled water, beer, whiskey, nudey magazines, a diesel powered generator, a prepaid cell phone. The weather radio already works on batteries, as well as AC.

Ashley left him back in the spring, long before hurricane season. His heart has never been the same, as anyone that knew the two of them would suspect. He has been obsessed with the things that he really cannot control since then, but they are all things that he thinks, through a more perfect understanding, he will be able to control. For him, it is not turning on and off the light switch an odd number of times, that's too easy. It's these weather phenomenon, and when a storm of this size and shape is on the loose, he is in his heyday.

Ashley left with the guy who designs the charts and graphs, the best he can figure, down at Channel 2. Said he's hung like a horse. Tells Richard, on the night that she walks out, that he never did shit for her in the sack. He always felt like he was attentive, if not overly so.

Nancy's in the cedar hall closet waiting for the storm. She hasn't seen a weather report in days - no weather.com, CNN, or newspaper either. There was just something in the way the clouds were moving when she got up this morning that got her worried, so she called in sick, took the dog to the kennel and is sitting in the cedar closet in the hallway, the one that still smells of cigarettes from when she and her husband used to spend time smoking in bars, and before he died. The cedar has tried, but the cigarettes have won.

It's the smell of the cigarettes that remind her of him, and thinking of him, and the smell of the cigarettes, makes her want to smoke - but mostly she wants to smoke with him, or be with him, and that's not a possibilty, so she wishes that she had picked up a pack on the way home from the kennel, before the storm clouds started churning too much, so at least she could smoke, even in the cedar closet. It would make her feel close to him. It looked like the storm would be long and powerful this time.

She didn't know why he lied to her, and about such easy things. She didn't know if he was dead, it was just easier to think of him in that way. The military jacket he had worn during the war still hung overhead in the cedar closet, so there was always a possibility. When she thought of the jacket she thought it might be nice if he were not dead, because the jacket was possibility and death was not. She had once decided to live and not the other. It wasn't taken for granted. The jacket. The cigarette smell. She hadn't felt this way in a while. If he were dead, surely his ghost was there in the closet. If not, she like to think of him as dead so his ghost could possibly be there in the closet with her.

There was one other storm. It came toward the end. She hid in the closet during that one too. He sat in the living room watching the TV and drinking until the power went out. Then he listened to the emergency radio, the one with the hand crank, and drank until he could not crank the radio. Then he started throwing dishes across the kitchen and yelling his mother's name. His mother had died the previous spring. His father was dead, or at least dead in the way that he was now dead to her, for many years. The father's name never crossed the mind. He thought of himself as an immaculate conception. He prayed at night, but the storm still came. His mother's ghost seem to live with him.

The Traffic Guru

At work tonight, covering the convention while watching baseball, I decided to delve into my daily reading for a respite and uncovered this article that has my head all afire right now. This is a fascinating article about a "radical" traffic engineer that decided that the best traffic controls were as little controls as possible. People would generally act more cautiously and intelligently if they were required to do so, and that structurally we can create situations in which people have to act in a better fashion by not prescribing the appropriate behavior in all situation, or as he states it, ""When you treat people like idiots, they'll behave like idiots."

Today, as I have been for many in the last few weeks, I have been working on an electoral college speculator map. In a presentation of the map I did today, I was asked to make sure we spell out exactly how the user should interact with the map. I think in doing that we fail or users or we fail in our efforts to do effective design, one or the other. I think if you let the purpose of the map be known, users will figure out how to use it, just as you don't need speed bumps or speed limit signs if the environment is designed in such a way that drivers can figure out the proper behavior.

I walk into therapy today hellbent on not crying like i have the last few weeks (Steve and I are set to discontinue our meetings next week so he can get on with taking care of his health issues and I can get along to whatever it is I will do next), so I don't. I tell him that am feeling more motivated, getting things done, not feeling like an impostor, not letting the women get me down. He says since I don't have much to talk about, maybe we should just let today be our last session. I agree, holding back tears. It just sneaks up on you.

Then I come home. Down the highway and the parkway, through the detour, and into my driveway. Coming up the steps and along the walk that borders the front corner of the house, right before the dogleg, hidden by those unruly shrubs, I find a man-sized pile of shit: first the smell, then the flies, then the visual. It's either from a man, a bear or a great dane, and I'm betting on a man. There aren't that many bear sightings in my neighborhood, and why would a dog find its way to that hidden spot when in my experience they would rather do it in grass where they can scratch? Dogs don't ever seem to have issues squatting and doing the deed right in front of god and the whole world.

The pile is right up close to the exterior wall of my house. Just where a man could've squatted and rested his back against the bricks, extending his legs out far enough so as not to get it on his trousers. I have shat in the outdoors before, just not on someone's sidewalk.

So if it is a man, I think, why would they do it there? Perhaps they are homeless and have nowhere to do it. Perhaps it's Leroy and he's mad at me for some reason.

I guess it doesn't really matter. It appears a man decided to come and shit on my sidewalk and now I have to fight the flies and the stench and go clean it up.

Those of you who know me will think me up all night on a drunken bender, but my life is filled with profound sadness this evening.

There's the one friend whose love of his life is leaving him, and another that just wishes that he had such a love of his life.

It's early and the morning birds are singing and my tongue is tired.

Tom Waits at the Fox Theatre

Okay, this one is not like reading either, but like intake, but listening to Tom Waits is like reading, if your really listen, right? THis is the July 5 concert that I went to here in Atlanta. So excited to find the document. Read it. Love it. If not... you call yourself MY friend?

So long and not much noise here. My therapist may very well be dying of lung cancer. Not the type of lung cancer that builds and builds, but the little nefarious sonofabitch that gets right in there next to your aorta and tries to take it all out of you. The guy's skin is turning gray and his hair is already gray and I feel like it's any day now, and I ask why him and not me.

We've got two weeks left of this experiment that we started three years ago: three more weeks of therapy and then I got to do something else. He says he thinks it might be good to pursue a woman therapist since that's where my problems lie, with women, and that she may teach me how to trust the universal her.

We talk lots of how I am feeling. I guess that's what therapy is. We have been especially keying in on how I feel about the separation. He asks if I feel anger, and I guess I do. The adult part of me understands the state of things, the child feels abandoned - the worst and constant fear. I cannot talk to him about it until he tells me to talk to a third person in the room that is not him.

I tend to cry a lot during these recent sessions.

Are you going forward? Then stop now

This piece, apparently written for on-air delivery, is pretty hilarious. As one, like many of us, who has spent days upon days listening to the chipper clichés of managers and the like (remember the days of "synergy" and "out-of-the-box thinking"), it led me to believe that all that an MBA granted you was the ability to use, misuse, coin and abuse such hackneyed tropes.

This article is a grand skewering of such business speak and a fine critique of modern business languages inability to really say anything at all.

Favorite excerpt:

If love has no place in the language of business, neither does passion. Passion, says the dictionary, means a strong sexual desire or the suffering of Christ at the crucifixion. In other words it doesn't really have an awful lot to do with a typical day in the office - unless things have gone very wrong indeed.

What the World Eats

This only marginally qualifies as reading since it is a photo slideshow with brief captions. It's fascinating to see the families in their homes with food piled all around. It's also interesting to llok at the facial expressions of the people. It's also amazing to see the differential in the amount of packaged foods from family to family, and how it relates to monetary food expenditure.

In the Sicily photo, I am not sure if the husband knows it, but those three kids are not all his.

The older man in the Konstancin-Jeziorna photo is not so happy his wife hoodwinked him into participating in this project.

For the Melander family of Bargteheide, I have a suggestion: family counseling. Dad has a drinking problem and no one in the famuly is very happy about it.

The Chameleon

This article in this week's New Yorker is simply fascinating; the stuff of which movies are made. Don't want to ruing the plot for you, but be prepared for several twists and turns.

The most fascinating thing about the whole plot to me is how persistent the guy has been, even after serving time in an American prison, he returned to the same behavior when he got back to France. His insistence that he was always looking for love and a family is supported by his troublesome relationship with his blood family.

There are times when I am depressed that I will look upon children jealously, seeing a simplicity to their lives (that may be an illusion) that do not feel in my adult existence. I don't think I am alone in this feeling: it's been written about time and time again. How many books are filled with longings for childhood, to be like a child?

Bourdin's inhibitions just were not great enough to stop him from taking the next step that at least I know I have pondered before: time machines, magic potions, Tom Hanks in Big.

I can't really put my fingers completely on why the story touched me so much. There are plenty of reasons not to desire a return to chidlhood, or to being a child, I guess that's what keeps me sane, but if the genie granted me one wish...

10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List

Throughout my life, I have been surrounded by one form of worry wart or another. It's very entertaining most of the time, but when it boils down to being told what vessels to drink my water out of, and where I should carry my iPhone, it is going too far. I have planned many times to do hours of scientific research to debunk the worries of my wartish friends, but like so many things (like taking out the trash and washing all of my dirty clothes) I just can't find the time or energy.

Lo! Today I see this article on NYTimes.com. A lot of my legwork has been done for me, and in a very few, short paragraphs too. Now I don't have to worry about compiling this list anymore.

My favorite quote (and this one is for my old boss):

Nalgene has already announced that it will take BPA out of its wonderfully sturdy water bottles. Given the publicity, the company probably had no choice. But my old blue-capped Nalgene bottle, the one with BPA that survived glaciers, jungles and deserts, is still sitting right next to me, filled with drinking water. If they ever try recalling it, they'll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers.

Now I need to go refill my bottle that I keep on my desk, that I will never take camping.

One last pitch for Tim Drew

I heard this piece on NPR this morning and sought it out when I got to work. It made me shed a manly tear that nearly caused me to blow through a traffic light. This page has an audio link to Frank Deford's audio story as well as a transcript of the same story.

For a little over a week now, at JT's encouragement, I have been reading this blog that is ostensibly a critique of how the press covers baseball. It being a critique of baseball journalism, I didn't think of posting it here as I imagined it would be of little interest to the average BPC reader, but, lo!, today I spy a piece that we can all get a chuckle out of. It's a pretty funny sideswipe at ESPN commentators doing their best Siskel & Ebert on the new Batman movie.

Enjoy!

My uncle Willy died last Friday. He was 78. While alive, he was the wiry, hairy-chested type of old man of which the world does not make any more these days. He's the first of my dad's siblings to die and I believe that it has affected my dad in ways that even his mother's death over ten years ago has not. When I got the message I was sitting in a park listening to indie rock music in Chicago. I couldn't help from imagining how strange Willy would have thought the whole scene to be, and in imagining that I thought of how far I have come from my family: that thing I grew up with, and as, that I spent much of my adolescence trying to outdistance, and have spent much of late 20s and 30s trying to figure out how to get back to.

What I knew of Willy is that he farmed a bit: sweet potatoes and the like. He worked for several years at the Nu-Tread tire company, just behind the outfield wall of the old Durham Athletic Park; the same park where the Durham Bulls play and where the movie Bull Durham was shot. He also bought cords of wood in the fall the at he would cut, split, and deliver to houses nearby for winter heat. On the property that he owned there are two ponds that my brother and I frequented on weekends for fishing. Bass and bream could be caught in such aplenty, with bobbers and worms or crickets or grasshoppers, that one would think that Willy stocked the pond, but that was just not him. It's almost as if the fish were there because a man like Willy could only have a pond with such plentiful fish.

In the fall, my brother and I (and sometimes father and mother) would help harvest the sweet potatoes. It seems that I even remember gathering bailed hay at some point as well. When a tire went flat on one of the cars we would go to the used tire and repair shop that Willy and a friend had established in a building on his property.

He had a wife named Nelly and a daughter named Patricia, my cousin, who lived across the street with her husband. I would not know Patricia if she were to walk right up to me. Probably wouldn't recognize Nelly anymore, maybe not even Willy in his last few years.

Beware the ides of July, the day before you leave for Chicago and the day where every minute will be twice as long as they were yesterday. And the day after... before the airport, every minute thrice as long as even today. Logarhythmic expansion.

And at work there's too much to be done. Self-imposed deadlines the I am trying to shirk. Trying to just cruise into it all, to not have an all-nighter like I seem to always have when getting ready to depart for a few days.

The upcoming New Yorker cover and its consequent fallout is a shame. I would totally expect the reaction that the Obama campaign is having from a conservative candidate in his shoes. After all, they have done all that they can to discredit the "liberal media" (i.e. media not controlled by conservative owners and organizations) over the last decade or so, so much so that people are not sure what is real information and what is purely myth, as attested to by the purely-myth, conservative mass email that was forwarded to me today about all of the ways the Democratic party has screwed the American people over Social Security over the last few years.

Hollywood's Hero Deficit -- The American, A Magazine of Ideas

The article's basic gist is that "true" heroes have disappeared from American cinema in the last few decades, or when they do exist, they are relegated to "a world far, far way":e.g. Star Wars, Superman etc. It downplays what it calls "victim heroes," which it says characterizes all of the heroes from films in recent years: e.g. Erin Brockovich, Michael Clayton... The author states that Hollywood fails to give us such "true" heroes, even though audience obviously want such heroes, although the author fails to provide a source for this matter of fact.

If you cannnot tell from tone here, I think this is a load of horseshit. So, tipped by the add for a Newt Gingrich book on the same page as the article, and remembering my college conservative news rag's (The Duke Review) proclivity for printing photos of John Wayne, I decided to do a little research.