Bullpen Catcher

Atticus

2010-03-26T03:13:25Z

When I first met him, he was on to his pot smoking and Wild Turkey drinking phase and through with his newspaper owning phase. He was all of 29 at that point. He owned the table and was writing a novel, "Eternal Summer" or something like that. I tried not to pass judgement. I was the Carraway to his Gatsby. We went to the house at the beach in July, two years, that I liked to say belonged to his family, on the beach just down from the architect's place. I don't know. I drove the convertible back to college town that week. His sister brought him back later. There was a kiss. Me and her. 25 and 18 (or 17, shhh).

Atticus me Laurie at a coffee shop by accident. That's the most I remember of the details. It must've been summer. Blonde and sleek, red and freckled and pasty. Once he figured that it wasn't going to work - a few years before he met Jehovah - he would buy the table where they sat when the kids in town turned from caffeine and coffee to whiskey and revolution. He would buy the table where we played cards and drank the kids' whiskey, and we likely got high, and we stared out over the small city, through the arched windows, onto the streets where she once walked. He would talk of her in that way that we remember the actress (mind you, not the character) where you learned things about women right at that cusp of puberty. But that was before the war. That was before she died.

Things I remember about 9/11

2009-09-11T23:48:58Z

1) I was to fly out to San Diego later that night for work. It would've been my first time in California (I have yet to go). I went in to the office to gather some things to take with me. On the way in, I heard NPR sayings something about a plane crashing into the Pentagon. I thought very little of it until I arrived in my office to my mother calling and asking was I okay - and then saying she needed to get off the phone when the second plane hit the other WTC tower (not the actual sequence of events, but the way she and I experienced it). Naively (I realize now), I still packed my stuff thinking I would make it to San Diego before midnight.

2) I leave work after alarms go off at the Monarch Tower in Buckhead - a supposed bomb threat. The parking lot is jammed with people wanting to get out. All emergency protocol is thrown aside as we are fearing that our building may be attacked to. Ironic that the naivete that made me think I may be able to fly out to California later that day did not come into play when reckoning with the likelihood of my own office being attacked.

3) Fat and tired, as I was much of the time in those years, I made it home in the late morning. I called Kathy and she said she would be home a little later. I started drinking whiskey and coke.

4) Kathy would arrive and Tommy T., our contractor friend - staying in an extended stay - would later arrive. Tommy brought scotch. We would tire of watching the video footage on CNN, but could not bring ourselves to change the channel. We would get drunk.

I guess on the last day on Earth, if I knew it as such, I would do something similar, but with a lighter heart probably.

5) Suzanne D. and her friend would call from California saying their flight back from Napa had been cancelled. They were laden with wine purchased on their tour and needed to figure a way to get back. They would eventually drive across the country (probably not the way they had hoped to do the Great American Road Trip) until flight stoppage was relaxed and they were in Oklahoma City. They came back home with various great wines after purchasing plastic sheeting and lots of tape, to strange looks from the Wal-Mart clerk, in Oklahoma. We would later have a wine tasting where I learned to adequately stick my snout in the glass to fully experience the wine, and how to awkwardly aerate the wine for full flavor.

6) I would worry about my friends in Chicago, who had moved there just a couple of months earlier. They were fine.

7) My British friend Robert, an atheist, would write telling me that his country felt for our country and was saying a prayer for us.

8) I remembered my time in high school when I went to the WTC and stood on the enclosed observation deck, scared to go any higher. I would think about how I would never go back there.

9) In subsequent days I would hear David Letterman say that such religious fundamentalism made absolutely no sense - drawing parallels in my mind to the conservative Christian rhetoric that had come to dominate U.S. public discourse at that time. I would watch more news reports where it seemed that the only good thing that had come out of this was that it had brought us all together as a nation. The crime rate dropped briefly. People met new neighbors. We weren't afraid to cry.

10) One year after I would be in the midst of deciding whether to move to Vermont or stay in Atlanta. Kathy (of the getting home late on 9/11) would already be there. Robert (of the British prayers) would arrive for his, at the time, annual trip. We would go to the game with Suzanne (of the Napa wine excursion) et al. to the Atlanta Braves game. There were commemorative t-shirts, a video presentation, songs, and a moment of silence.

I've lost much contact with all of those people now. Tommy T. is gone. Robert no longer makes the annual trip although we talk. Kathy is happy in VT and we talk some. I asked Suzanne today to be my Facebook friend as she was responding to Kathy's memories.

I don't want to ever have to go through that day again, but I miss so many of those people. Sometimes I wish we could have the day after over and over, the good stuff, without the necessity of that really horrible day before.

Lambchop does "Once in a Lifetime" @ XX Merge

2009-08-07T17:15:31Z

Lambchop @ XX Merge from sassafrassv on Vimeo.

Had to post this. Sound is not great, but the performance makes me wish I had skipped Pitchfork and gone to this instead. Or just have unlimited time and money to go to shows.

Guyliner loves you!

2009-05-08T21:32:34Z

On the upcoming transition to digital...

2009-04-07T17:46:34Z

I think images are worth repeating

2009-02-10T06:17:56Z

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.

Thanksgiving is goodbye

2008-11-29T07:03:49Z

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.

Stevie O

2008-11-08T08:42:33Z

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.

]]> Steve died two weeks ago Friday. He was 63 years old. When I heard I felt as if I had lost a good friend; a good father-figure friend. It's funny to feel that way to a man who I knew so little about. Toward the end of our sessions, he moved his office into his house and I saw photos of what I believed to be sons and daughters. I occasionally saw toys around that seemed to indicate a possible grandchild or two. There was a couple of plaques with Irish proverbs hanging on the wall. There was a friendly cat, and I believe one that was too scared for its friendliness to be discerned.

The most of what I know about Steve is what I read in the obituary in the paper. He was a lover of sailing and the sea, and indeed, he was a lover of Ireland and all things Irish. He was born in Queens, got his PhD in Florida and had three children and, indeed again, a grandchild.

I feel it's selfish just to write about me and my limited knowledge of Steve here. It should be obvious at this point that I truly knew little about him on my own. I have to write this from a selfish point of view, however, as I feel that he knew better in many ways than anyone else ever has. That's just the way therapy works. You go in , pay your fee, and talk, not to be judged, but to be led to a new level of understanding, self-sufficiency, self-worth, etc. etc. etc. - and you tell things that you feel you can't and shouldn't tell anyone else, and those are the things that, through telling and coming to understand, usually spring you forward.

I know that the depression I have largely overcome now could not have been overcome without therapy, and I doubt it would have been overcome as effectively or expeditiously if that therapy had not been with Steve. To know that he is gone from this world does not seem right, much less possible. I may have never seen him again, but my world was much more comfortable knowing he was a part of it. It will take getting used to him not being part of it, if indeed he is not - if indeed he is gone.

Summer in the City: 29 September 2008

2008-09-29T22:55:49Z

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.

The storm - Albert

2008-09-27T06:27:14Z

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.

The storm - Moses (part 1)

2008-09-26T15:08:26Z

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.

The storm - Donald

2008-09-20T07:23:23Z

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.

]]> Just worried about the one slug hole in the roof. Might pour down right on my diploma. That's right. Don't ask. I got it.

Take the DVD player. Take my fucking wife. Oh, that's right, he's already done that, so take his house, my chldren - just leave me the fuck alone. I mean it this time.

I got my bread and my vienna sausages. I got cigarettes again after 15 years. I got a pistol and I'm pissed off. I got love in my heart, but no one's gonna get at it for a long time.

This storm. This storm. Take from me, like fucking Braveheart, my property, but not everything else.

I just wanted to say one more thing: fuck you. That's what I think of you, and the weather man.

Come get me.

The storm - Richard

2008-09-19T15:42:31Z

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.

]]> The approaching storm is hesitantly welcome. He misses her kisses. Her orgasms, or feigned ones, or half-hearted attempts at them. The one mutual friend says that Ashley always said that he took care of her, but he's not so sure. He feels like an ass.

If the house were washed away tonight when the storm hits, it wouldn't be soon enough. Insurance would cover the cost of another move, and a move is what he needs. Throw the typewriter in the river. Don't write the love notes any longer. All of the songs that could be given have already been said. Live it up. Live it in. Put a bow on this, and get on with life.

For the sake of dialogue, back then they said things like:

"Why don't you stop drinking so much?"

"Why don't you stop sweating me?"

"I would love you more if the night weren't like this."

"Piss off."

"Fuck off."

"No, fuck you."

'No, Dick, you can eat a bag of dicks."

"Oh, please, I will, but don't bother coming."

And that's where it would end. And full-stop. She couldn't bear not being in that bed one night. The cursing and drinking was gamesmanship. Her reality was impossible to comprehend. To all outsiders, it's no wonder she walked away, and a mystery that it was not sooner.

Storms have the capability to take away, but also wash things clean. There was one approaching that Richard knew was more than what he, or this house, could take, but he stayed. In his mind, storms could be the thing that righted wrongs as well. Could rectify karma, and, in the best instances, wash the world clean. Could give hope to the hopeless. The last will be first. The meek will inherit the earth.

Sitting in that living room, there was a sprawl of remote controls, beer bottles and various pieces of paper around him. On each piece of paper was written one aspect of the storm: wind velocity, historical barometric pressure, crude drawings of the hurricane path.

In the damp moisture of the approach, he felt whiskey going down, the feeling of first love, the desire to settle, first marriage, and the want, as he had always felt, for it to last.

The storm - Nancy

2008-09-19T06:02:50Z

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.

]]> After that storm, she swept the kitchen and waited for him to come back home, and he did, but he didn't. Lost in the storm along with the neighbors chimney, the neighbor girl's tricycle, and the sign at the supermarket, was something inside of him that had come loose long before the storm, but untethered itself that night and was blown away in the wind, washed away in the flood.

Last she would see him he was walking on the tracks, and her father had always told her as a girl to be wary of the men who walked the tracks. That was when the train still ran those tracks. Within a couple of weeks the line would be abandoned and she imagined that if he walked far enough, there would be nothing that could bring him back. The storm had washed away a part of her too, the part that wanted him there, and seeing him on those tracks, not knowing if he could find his way back, did not hurt then like it does now. It had become a sunset and a silhouette, when it was cloudy and he looked like a hobo.

She thinks that if she had just made him get in the cedar closet with her, made him turn off the TV, that she could have saved him - all of him - and then she could've gone on loving him as always, because it was all of him that she had loved, and part neer seemed enough. They both had died a little, for him, possibly totally.

Sitting in the cedar closet during this storm, she thought, a part would be enough. She had known alone would follow, and some lonely, but never imagined lonely like this. Waiting in the closet for the storm of the century, or so they say, just a portion would do. The smell of sweat on him. Faint aftershave. The feel of stubble on the cheek. Hands on breasts. Lips. Head on shoulder. Tears. Mother's name, and hers.

Daily reading

2008-08-26T01:07:50Z

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.