Drove over 7,000 miles in 19 days, seeing friends and family, watching lots of baseball, eating way too much junk food.
Saw the Boise Hawks play Salem-Keizer Volcanoes; Short Season A ball, affiliates of the Cubs and Giants. The guy who MC’d the betw inning entertainment (usually standing on one of the dugouts w/ cute kids from the crowd or the high school-age girl ushers) carried on like some fringe character from a David Lynch movie: bushy headed, Hawaiian shirt, pot belly, shorts, smarmy prime time DJ banter, something sleazy behind his steely smile. Fun baseball, although more raggedy than the majors, of course. The heckler sitting next to me mentioned a couple of players being almost washed up at 23 or 24. Someone needs to write a book ab some great minor league careers. Not just those guys who finally make it to the Bigs, but also guys who played their whole careers in the minors. The latter including a majority of major league managers today, right?
The shapes and colors of the canyon lands of S. Utah and N. Arizona are striking and beautiful but then you finally get to the Grand Canyon and it is so “grand” it takes your breath away, a miles wide and long and seemingly deep, craggy rock chasm in the earth. I might be one of the last Americans to see it b/c most of the other people there were Europeans.
Santa Fe, NM looks like a pastel beehive splayed across some shrubby desert foothills. On closer examination, however, it’s my first taste on this trip of tourist glitz: guys in fancy shoes w/out socks, women carefully tanned and accessorized, an upper middle class cheesy kitsch to the place. A lot of the art looked like stylized road signs or unused furniture. Georgia O’Keeffe would be embarrassed. All of which I say as if I knew what the fuck I was talking ab after a hour walk around downtown.
So I’m speeding betw Amarillo and Tulsa, banging radio stations betw audio books, when I find two guys and gal talking about health care reform. They say the health care proposals in congress will increase abortions by providing more tax dollars for abortions and/or requiring insurance companies to pay for abortions. Dripping w/ sarcasm they insinuate that the whole health care reform effort in congress is really a stealth effort by liberals, Democrats, so-called progressives, immoral secular humanists to promote abortions. The stuff ab liberal motives is right wing boilerplate crap (can’t you just see James Carville rubbing his hands together in diabolical glee, “More abortions, yes!”). Still, extending coverage to more Americans by sheer numbers alone probably would increase the number of abortions. What is the number of women now who don’t have abortions b/c they don’t have insurance coverage or can’t afford them? So these guys would have us believe that it is more important to prevent abortions (any abortions) than provide every American w/ basic health care, let alone allowing every woman the right to choose whether or not she gives birth. Righteous creeps.
Outside my motel in Tulsa stood a dense orchard of green leafy trees, from which a buzzing whine blared upon my arrival. A ringing metallic sound so startling I stood listening to it for minutes waiting for someone else to come along and explain it to me. I’d heard Cicadas b/f but never this screamingly loud. I would have asked how locals deal w/ them at night, sleeping, but I never noticed them over the air conditioner in my room. Never tried any fried Cicadas, either.
I wish I had taken a picture of people along side the road, sitting on the tailgate of their pickups, the back full of watermelons or some other assorted fruits and/or vegetables, sunflowers, etc.
What makes Busch Stadium is the fans, the sea of red. I liked the country music soundtrack (although I doubt enough that I’ll track any of it down) but that was all they played. And, honestly, the Stan ‘The Man’ Musial statue out front is too cartoonish, looking like some superhero baseball player from The Incredibles.
Parts of north St. Louis looks broken and neglected. Talk ab the recession there would be a cruel joke; it’s always a not-so-great depression in this part of town. Where’s the stimulus money supporting entrepreneurial efforts in these communities? And I don’t mean a Starbucks.
The immense public works in downtown Indianapolis look like this life-size model of classical imperial architecture made out of poured concrete.
The Cubs and White Sox, w/ their combative managers, Lou Pinella and Ozzie Guillen, have to be one of the best rivalries going in interleague play. Guillen, recently said of the Cub’s park, “Wrigley Field is just a bar.” My kind of bar, though. As baseball parks go, it’s charming w/out being ostentatious. The ivy, the spoked, half-wheel steel framing, the bleechers on top of brownstones across the street. You miss all the information delivered by the jumbotrons found at most MLB ballparks and then again you don’t, either. At the field level, anyhow, the aisles are roomier than the tightly engineered sardine can seating found in most newer parks. They serve this frothy pilsner called Old Style. They sing “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” louder than any other park I’ve attended. And, if they win— which hasn’t always been that often!— their victory song spills out into the street. Right, a bar, but a damn good bar.
At the White Sox new U.S. Cellular Field they have an open causeway like at Safeco. That’s where you can see the field from the main concourse all the way around the field. Nice feature. But, otherwise, Cellular feels a little non-descript and generic. Super big billboard ads ring the outfield. It does the job but seems, in Chicago of all places, lacking in character. Old Comiskey Park’s home plate in the parking lot is maybe the best Cellular has to offer.
The thing ab the Chicago style hot dog is that it’s not really ab the dog at all. So it’s 100% Vienna beef, big deal. They are no better than your average dog served at the local Cost Co. W/ the Chicago dog it’s really ab how you dress the dog. Ketchup, which I’m tempted to agree w/, is considered a sin. Instead, they insist upon serving the dog w/ a small salad on top. Not just any salad, though, but this particular Chicago style salad, which is hotly disputed, but goes something like this: shredded lettuce and tomato, glo-green relish, spear of pickled cucumber, sport peppers, and celery salt. They’re good.
Sculptor Henry Moore is one of those kinds of artists so iconic that reaction against his style only goes to affirm his greatness. Abstract, elemental, sexual, all curves, entangled, enveloping beauty; ab presence and absence, isolation and connectedness. Overly serious, perhaps. But always viscerally pleasing.
I lucked onto an orchestral music performance at Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion in Millenium Park. Should not be missed.
On a road trip, McDonald’s is a pit stop oasis b/c of their reliably clean bathrooms. So I’m in one near Milwaukee (some suburban mall expressway). There are at least five TVs in the place, one even broadcast on the mirror in the bathroom! All of them are set to the Fox News Channel. On Fox they’re talking ab the doubts and fears of Americans regarding the health care reform proposals in congress: they’ll ration health care, old and weak people will be euthanized, they’re an underhanded effort by godless liberals to increase abortions, they’re a guvment takeover by a blackcommiesocialist in the white house! Working stiffs, families, old people watch silently, munching down their burgers and fries. People ought to leaflet these places w/ the address for the
O Team’s website debunking these industry supported distortions.
Wisconsin is lush, green, and
fragrant farmland.
What is it ab big tree-lined streets in college towns like Flagstaff, Ann Arbor, Madison?
The Metrodome in Minneapolis brought back nightmares of the Kingdome. The cavernous concourse; shivering under the interrogation lights of the dome; the superball bounce of the indoor turf; the echoey blare of the sound system. But I saw some good baseball at the Kingdome and the Twins certainly have some storied history of their own at the Metrodome. Besides, they finally move into a new outdoor ballpark next year. It’ll feel to fans like a get out of jail free card. But what will happen to Kirby Puckett street?
What makes the Badlands so bad? It’s not that they are without beauty. The canyons, ravines, colored rocks, plains of prickly shrubs and dusty roads and vast horizons. It’s b/c it is merciless land and you know anybody living there w/out air conditioning would have to be tough as leather. Generally quiet but capable of ferocity like the lightening storms driving along I-90 through South Dakota and Wyoming.
Drove through Yellowstone too fast to see any bears.
Long road trips and audio books are a perfect combination. Enjoyed them so much I tried listening to one at home only to find I couldn’t stay focused w/out the wheel and scenery of the road.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: In case you haven’t heard of it, episodic panorama of life on the antebellum Mississippi. Important lessons from the story: fear and desire, equally, make people do stupid things; loyalties often defy common sense; w/out lying life would be dreadfully dreary.
The Old Man and the Sea: ode to heroism in work.
For Whom the Bell Tolls: Always enjoy stories ab the Spanish Civil War, but this one is weighted down by lots of the kind of corny romantic machismo you expect in Hemingway’s writing.
Nobody Move, Denis Johnson: More corny romantic machismo, actually. But also more humor and humility, messy desperation, and gritty sexuality. Good crime novel; good fast-food reading.
In Defense Of Food: Eat food, mostly plants. More leaves, less seeds. Avoid: processing; ingredients you don’t understand; “refined” sugar and carbohydrates (meaning: pop and white bread). Don’t rely on nutritional additives and don’t trust nutritional claims (including “organic”). Grow your own and/or shop your local farmer’s markets. Eat “real” food b/c the Western diet of fast food kills.
The Plot Against America, Philip Roth: What if fascism would have taken hold in America? What if aviator, national hero, and Hitler protégé Charles Lindbergh would have been elected President of the United States in 1940? Story told from the perspective of an 8 year-old Jewish boy from New Jersey. Equal parts funny and fucked up. The story achieves a believable balance of whimsy and tragedy but ends abruptly, leaving an incomplete, unsatisfying feeling.
Cobra II: Peloponnesian War-length account of invasion and occupation (although way more on the invasion) of Iraq. Would-be/should-be lessons learned: 1) The incredible arrogance of Rumsfeld and the Bush Team that they were going to transform the military approach to combat with efficiency management strategies from the corporate business world and “shock and awe” technology; 2) The compelling evidence that the domestic campaign for the war— shoddy intelligence ab WMD’s, trumped up links to terrorism, spreading the expectation that Iraqis would receive American soldiers as liberators, and a stubborn commitment to fighting a high-tech war w/ as few soldiers as possible— cost innocent Iraqi and American lives; 3) The incredible amount of “friendly fire” soldier’s face in combat; 4) The amazing acts of courage by soldiers in combat; dragging comrades to safety under a hail of deadly fire, etc; 5) The lack of adequate planning and commitment to empowering Iraqis to organize and rebuild their own country after overthrowing Saddam was as criminally irresponsible as the manipulations to snooker congress and the American people into supporting the original invasion.
Great way to see the country.
Currently playing:"Street Walker," Michael Jackson
