late night audio hijinx
July 28, 2010 11:15 pmFountain of Youth
July 22, 2010 2:18 pmSometime yesterday afternoon I realized that I was feeling good about the evening’s softball game. I had the same enthusiasm and energy that I had a decade ago (when I played four nights a week).
I went 4-4, hit for the cycle, and had the best defensive game I’ve had in a long time. I attribute it to my increased gym activity and my focus on eating better, healthier foods.
I tore both of the knees in my pants, road rashed my elbows, dove for things, slid into second, and…I didn’t feel any of it this morning. Just popped right out of bed and started my day like you’re supposed to–pain free and ready to go.
sometimes life is strange
July 1, 2010 12:40 amBecause I’ve turned into some Forrest Gump from Fly Over Country, I had a chance to meet the President of the United States of America today. He was in Racine, Wisconsin for a town hall meeting. Somehow I ended up sitting in back of him.
Here is a picture of it.
If you want to see some brief footage from CNN, click here.
If you want to see a bunch of it, click here.
If you want to read about it (and the Morgan Freeman stuff from a few months ago) click here.
Waiting for the call up
June 10, 2010 10:42 pmLate Night Saturday experiments
June 7, 2010 12:38 pmfrom a county park
June 5, 2010 6:44 pm
So yesterday I had one of those days where the last thing I needed was to be around my cell phone or anywhere near my email. As I am prone to do on days like that, I got in my car and headed for the neighboring town of AnywhereButHere out highway 51. Most of you are probably not familiar with Wisconsin geography and that’s ok, because I probably don’t know much about where you live, but depending on the direction you’re traveling, Madison isn’t very far from the middle of nowhere.
I headed out 51 past Frank’s old place that the state tore down because they were calling Eminent Domain on the property and there was all kinds of talk about widening the road, but now it’s all just a vacant lot with overgrown weeds and the old asphalt driveway. The house is gone. The barn is gone. The shed warehouses are gone. I made a mental note to call Frank later and ask him what the hell happened and to tell him that T.G. Sheppard is playing some country music fest in June (except I didn’t know that then, but I’ll get to that part later). I tried to remember when he moved out of that house and I figured it was “a couple of years ago,” but then I remembered that Aaron and U.S.E. practiced there and that was back around the time of the 2000 election and that was a decade ago so I’m probably just getting old and senile and turning into everything I feared and hated when I was young and remembered everything and could tell time by things like, “that was my sophomore year of high school” but once you get to be an old ass man like me you lose those kinds of markers, or at least I don’t have them because it all blurs together and I just kinda know that “something happened, some time” and after that I just laugh about it and try not to let it bust my head too much because all that worrying only makes you older, faster, and the last thing I need to do is step on that accelerator.
Anyway, a few miles past DeForest, there was a sign and it said that Highway 51 was to the left on a curve and it also said that Interstate 39 was that way, and just about the last thing in the world I wanted to see was a damn interstate and all of its chain restaurants and Best Buys, so I just kept driving straight and the road magically turned into highway 22 and I pictured the road as the barrel of some long ass rifle and I was a bullet just spinning out, too fast for the bang, and neither me nor my target knew when or where I would hit. And that’s cool, because that’s life, and if you try to overplan what you’re doing or where you’re going you’ll inevitably get lost, so I just rolled down the windows and popped open the sunroof and made like I was in some car commercial.
I got to some random stop sign and noticed some half-buried sign that said “John Muir County Park thatta way” with an arrow to my right and I figured “why not John Muir County Park?” Hell, I didn’t know it even existed before I saw that sign, but probably at some point I paid taxes to the State and the State handed over my nickels to some dude who paints the signposts or something, and I figured now was as good a time to get my money’s worth. I had to drive five or ten miles down winding country road to get to the park and I almost missed a couple of directional signs that looked like they’d either been buried or sabotaged or handmade by some eight year old who was doing summer projects because she was bored and Girl Scout camp didn’t start for another week.
When I finally pulled into the parking lot, there was some sketchy O.J. Simpson type Bronco parked with some old guy staring out through his windshield and I started thinking about me and this old dude sitting out in the middle of nowhere and how I was going to get out my car and he was going to non-metaphorically fire a rifle into the back of my head and he was going to say, “Son, this ain’t really a county park, it’s a meth lab and you’re trespassing.” But then he didn’t get out and I figured he was some widower and that he and his old lady must have spent time at that park and took their Border Collie into the tall grass and everybody laughed and played fetch and didn’t worry about Mondays, but then she died and the dog ran off and now he just sits in that parking lot all day long, retired and bored, squinting with his hand up to his forehead, hoping that if he calls for it loud enough, the dog is gonna come bounding out from behind the clover patch.
Anyway, about the time I hit the head of the trail he fired up his broke down engine and left the park and I felt like some Grade A asshole because I figured that I chased him away and who the hell was I to intrude on his soap opera? I got about half a mile in when I noticed this Monarch butterfly (if that’s not a Monarch butterfly, I apologize, I know much about many things, but butterflies aren’t part of my knowledge base) flying ahead of me and it’d drop down into the green for a bit and then when I got closer it’d pack up its bags and like that old man, it just moved on. Then I got this crazy idea because I’ve watched a bunch of Discovery channel stuff and I started fancying myself some student of the universe and wouldn’t it be cool to take pictures of nature and pretend that I was some karmically positive guy like St. Francis of Assissi and that by the end of the afternoon I’d be playing volleyball with black bears in some secret county park fort that they’d all built and where they partied once all the humans were gone for the day and that old man wasn’t sitting in the parking lot looking at them and creeping them out because they’d gone all SLA and kidnapped his dog and taught the dog to be feral and free and to stick it to the man who wanted to throw sticks and play fetch.
It was about that time that I noticed the butterfly was on top of some clover and I unzipped my camera bag and took out my camera and dropped to my knees and did a belly crawl to get close enough to make the zoom feature worth something. The picture above is what I took. If you click on it, it gets like triple sized and you can see little butterfly fur and an ok level of detail for a five year old digital camera and a guy who doesn’t normally go all Crocodile Hunter in a county park.
After I shot those pictures I decided that I was done taking pictures and that I was just going to enjoy nature and I sat down on some bench that was dedicated to the memory of some woman and I started thinking that maybe she was the old guy’s wife. You know, if you can ignore bugs flying into your face, sitting on a bench under a big Oak tree in the middle of nowhere is pretty peaceful and lets you contemplate what’s what and make you realize that you don’t know anything and that living the moment with clean air and a lake in the distance is what we should all be required to do once a week. But after ten minutes of this one bee kinda buzzing by my face one too many times I decided that it was better to be a moving target and I pushed on, deeper into the trees and the weeds and the grass and I thought about how grateful I was that I wasn’t along the Apalachicola where I might could have been bit by a rattler, killing me where they wouldn’t find my body for a couple of days because nobody knew I was there and I didn’t have any ID on me, even though somebody probably would have seen my car in the parking lot and mentioned something to the local sheriff who would be too busy hanging with Boss Hog to really care too much but would send some rookie cop out to the park who would then see the old guy and give him a ticket for loitering (now the second time I’ve totally screwed with the soap opera) and all that talk about being karmically positive would be laughed at by the true saints among us.
I crossed over some footbridge and the green stuff started getting really thick and I had to slow my roll and that’s when things started rustling around in the brush and I started thinking about what kind of bears were in the area and then a deer came bouncing out and ran by me within ten feet of me and it gave me a nod like it was saying, “Hey, just passing through,” and then it was gone and I started feeling guilty for startling it and who knows what else so I sat down on that path for a few minutes and waited to see what I could see, and what I could see was nature and I took out my camera one more time and shot video of the trees because a long time ago when Peff and I walked into whatever forest is near Marion I took some shot like that and I loved the visual of it.
And then I left. As I was walking back I kinda emerged from the trees and the tall grass and there were these two elderly women walking towards me and I know I startled them so I made with the quick smile and asked them “it sure is beautiful out here, isn’t it” and they were disarmed and smiled and we all kinda passed good feelings and I didn’t feel so bad about the world and about another mile down the path I spotted a man and a woman walking towards me and they had a dog and that dog came running at me like it knew I had some pocketful of Jerky Treats or something and if a dog can smile, then it was grinning that pure God Is In The Frisbee grin and I bent down to pet it and the man starts kinda jogging towards me and telling me that it’s a nice dog and it likes people and I looked and him and said I know and I told him and his wife to have a good day and they told me they would and that was that. I got in my car and headed out.
After winding my way down county roads with full intentions of getting deeper into nowhere I got to a three way stop with a waterfall and a sign pointing to the left saying “Oxford” and I could hear my mom in my head talking about going to Maggie Mae’s Cafe in Oxford and I figured if the sign had the courtesy to pop up out of nowhere then who was I to ignore it, and I headed to Oxford for lunch and I found Maggie Mae’s and I was the only person there and I used to hate eating by myself in restaurants because you know people are wondering why you don’t have any friends or what you’re running from, but I’m past all of that now and I took a seat in a booth and read the menu and the placemat and I figured that Maggie Mae who owned the place was also a country musician and that she was playing at some country fest and that T.G. Sheppard was going to be there singing “Devil in the Bottle” and that I needed to tell Frank.
Because I’m big into eating new things I told the waitress to bring me what she thought was best and she said that they had Haddock as their Friday special and that it came with corn fritters, baked beans, raspberry fluff, and mashed potatoes and I told her if that’s the best she had, it was good enough for me. It was good, too. The corn fritters were new to me, and I loved them (the haddock was also good and so was the raspberry fluff, both of them new to me).
I paid my bill and headed home somehow ending back on 22 listening to Hank Williams III, not the least bit impatient with the drive, enjoying the rush of the wind, wondering what that old man was up to and if maybe he wasn’t just some parallel timeline version of me that I wasn’t supposed to see and that’s why he got up and moved on so fast.
I still haven’t called Frank. But I know that when I do, he’ll sing “Devil in the Bottle” and we’ll both laugh and I’ll know what’s important in the world.
