A Sports Conundrum

Sitting down to watch the first half of thursday night football was an experience in itself when confronted with the attention of my two toddler-age children and the lull of pizza and beer. It was the Chargers vs the 49ers from San Diego, CA where both teams needed a win badly. The first half measured up to be quite entertaining with goal line stops and nail biting special team mishaps by the Chargers (as their '10 special teams unit has yet to step up their game, despite both offense and defense being ranking amongst the top it the NFL) and me being the San Diego fellow that I am was highly enthralled... that is until the score got a little to one sided.
Come half time and half closed eye lids I put the children down for their usual bedtime of eight pm. Well my daughter decided to have herself a bit of a fit and bedtime took a bit longer than usual. By the time I had a moment to pour myself a glass of bourbon I checked my Facebook feed on my Motorola Droid and found out the the Chargers were up "31-0 with 12:06 left in the game". From being excited for the second half to reading this message I found myself drawn to watching "Bored To Death" on dvd in the other wing of our abode - poetic... well, now that I type it out, the Jonathan Ames created series did exemplify how I felt about the football game. But that seems to be how it is with football and just football.
I'm no stranger to the sports world and do my best to immerse myself in live sporting events whenever I get the chance. Nothing screams good ol' man fun than cold beer and something involving one team's conquest of another; be that reading the Rise and Fall of Roman Civilization or watching early 1990's Bulls v Blazers NBA Championship on ESPN Classic is situational and both have their blood sweat and tearful merit. Admittedly I'm a baseball man over anything else - my reasoning being null and void to the context of this article but baseball fan through and through. And arguably tenfold the intrigue of football - as is almost any other sport.
Now before you douse your pigskins in gasoline and come pounding at my door hear me out. Football is seemingly the only sport in which once a team gets so far ahead the game is over, no matter the time left on the board. I've seen countless baseball, basketball, hockey, and soccer games, tennis matches, and golf tourneys in which the tide can turn in a single inning, five minute period, or back nine from a huge deficit to a brand new game in the top of the tenth. Once you hit the fourth quarter and the score is 31 to 0... unless your banking on your fantasy players to post some bigger numbers than before - or any numbers, depending - you might as well put on the news and start flossing because the game is done, there is no coming back from that within the matter of fifteen minutes. Whereas in baseball my beloved Padres fell short to LA Dodgers one game in late summer by giving up four consecutive home runs in the ninth inning to take the game to extra innings and eventually dropping another long ball in the eleventh or twelfth to lose it. Tiger Woods, although recently gutted by the media and proclaimed to be in his December - barely arguable at best by the way - is the face of golf, and yet he has dropped a tournament that was basically in the bag in a matter of a few holes. The US soccer team in the last World Cup came back down three goals to nil in the last few minutes of the second half to tie the game. The examples run throughout every sport and what my argument boils down to is interest.
Interest, be it in our savings accounts to our movie choices, is the deciding factor in everything in our lives... duh, where's the interesting statement in that?, you ask. Well - in the column of opinion - football just doesn't spark mine when the odds are insurmountable by three possessions; let alone four in the example of the Chargers game - and that including that the 49ers not only get four touchdowns but get four two point conversions within 12 minutes... ain't gonna happen. And yes, we've all seen that YouTube video of some high school team in Texas which kicked for two or three onsides only to convert those into touchdowns, et cetera, et cetera - and yes, it CAN happen. But the freak occurrence of football versus any other sport bringing to stage that kind of event are about as likely as me willingly shitting my pants during a cocktail function - one could certainly still bet on it, but I wouldn't.
So everything being said and laid out there I'm hoping not to received a helment on a stake aflame in some deep south cross burning fashion in my front yard for ever badmouthing the great tradition of football. I love the game, I'm a die hard Sunday warrior, beer guzzling, bbq'ing, Raider hating fan... but goddamn does the game just act like a wet fart when taken past that point of no return. So I repeat: I love the game, but I love the good game - even when it's my team steamrolling, I reach for the clicker... then you just hit reruns of fucking I Love Raymond...
Maybe there is some curling on ESPN360.com.

retroCamera

Found this great new app on the droid system. retroCamera, gives you some funky options for snapping photos. here's a few I've been playing with.

FORT LOWELL RECORDS: 4th ANNUAL VINYL REVIVAL RECORD FAIR

FORT LOWELL RECORDS: 4th ANNUAL VINYL REVIVAL RECORD FAIR: " Saturday, September 4 Hotel Congress presents... 9am-3pm - Vinyl Revival Record Fair 11am-3pm - Fort Lowell Records Showcase - Live perform..."

I'll totally be here. Check it out on FB or foursquare.

a warm guitar

What do we look for in the loves of our lives? Something warm to cuddle up to and relax with. These aspects sanctify the marriage between myself and alcohol, cigarettes, alcohol, my pipe, marijuana, and my guitar. Looking through the guitar center catalog today I was searching for one word: WARM.

In none of the descriptions could I find this wonderful adjective. A warm tone, a warm sound, producing warm chords, and easy - slippery warm riffs that blaze to the wind in warm sound waves, alive like the fire from a match - heating whatever little possible it can touch.

But alas. None. When my Epiphone Fat Boy body, Phoebe, snapped her neck I made the desperation "on the road" buy of a thinner, hard word takamine that couldn't even hold a match to the noise of that Epiphone. Haven't found a steel string that can match my original strap... kind of makes me nostalgic for a number of past lives.

Time and Time away.

For as much time as I spend at the computer, I don't want to admit I spend as much time at the computer. School is starting back up again at the middle of this month, which means I'll basically be at this screen from when the kids go to be til the time I pass out. Which means I'll get a lot of work done, but it also means that I'll fuck around a lot more doing nothing but searching out comical lists on Cracked.com, or trying to figure out something meaningful to write about on blogger.

I was reading a piece to my wife a few months ago, frankly one of the last things that I've written. I'm about halfway through what I've written, which I thought was inspirational and opening new paths in my thought to paper process, etc. and I just get this look from her that basically speaks of a being listening to the most contrived bullshit they've ever listened to. Upon my query I pretty much got that answer. But she said to me: whenever you write, it sounds like you want to be the next Rimbauld or Ginsberg. I thought about it and frankly... well, frankly I thought why the fuck wouldn't I want to be the next great influential thing. I know that I'm not and no where even close (let's be honest here, I'm no where even close to being published) but why wouldn't I want to write flowery words which span the space of emotion from cheer to gloom? What's so wrong with that? No artist has ever done what they've done in the purity of art to please the people around them. No one should have to censor the medium because of they way it speaks. If the poem speaks of great Gawain-ish features and long flourishing lines of etc etc etc... why not?

Now, publishing is a different story indeed. Do you know how man

y edits it took for Kerouac's On The Road to be accepted by the publisher? That original scroll edition is no joke. So the editing process is fine tuned based on the necessities of the audience, or paying stage, if you will; but frankly, the original pulp of the words that flow stem from the purest thought process that we all have. This blog, your blog, if it is a spew of information and thought, mish mashed or not, there is a certain purity and beauty about it... a personalization that major edits fall short of, a ying yang of both careful contemplation and complete disregard of word for word.

I don't know. Just a thought. Kind of out of gas on the issue.

But, and I come back to it way to fucking often (it is tattooed on my goddamn arm), as old Chuck says: as the spirit wanes the form appears.

Don't let the form appear, at least not until you see a check dangling in front of your face.

Cheers.

test.

test of the droid blog.

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1st Tattoo and dreams of Chicago

Getting my first tattoo tomorrow. Must admit that I'm a tad nervous. I guess it's like any situation that you're not familiar with; tattoo, job interview, diving competition, what ever. But that tattoo that I'm going to get is going to be on my right bicep/forearm. It is Charles Bukowski's ART:

as the

spirit

wanes

the

form

appears.

I found a really cool font online called Last Words (I'm sure it is googlable... hmmm) which seems appropriate since it is one of the last things that Bukowski wrote. Son of a bitch was a drunk crazy man who knew just what he wanted out of it all. To Bukowski the poem was a description of his own fall in to the "form" of poetry, a sort of unwilling sojourn from his own original thoughts on paper towards the use of poetic tools; in a sense, towards death. So as Chuck's spirit was flowing out of him he found nothing better but to fall into the forms of poetry that he'd scoffed so plainly at in so many lines before.

But I guess when it comes down to the inner meaning for me it means that I can't ever let that fire die... which seems to have been a theme of this blog from the beginning. (All the little that is written of it.) To me it means to keep striving, to never let that fire burn out, don't let my spirit fade and fall into the forms, the molds, rather, that society has put up for whatever form of sociology that I'm categorized in.

Look at that silly mother fucker up there with a ashtray full of butts, forty ounce, naked woman half his age seemingly blasted on something that isn't affecting Bukowski... Not saying this is what I want, but look at the power; he's right where he wants to be.

Secondly I'm grooving on the second run through of the night to Alkaline Trio's "Goddamnit" on vinyl. Memoirs of Chicago and Carbondale respectively groove on my membrane. Much love to those who brought me into cultures I only knew from hallway passings in high school.

Peace and Carrots.