Another Clear Sheet Portrait

Here's another beardy-bespectacled portrait of yours truly:

Here's a link to the other two for comparison's sake. I'm feeling like polling my wards to see which they like best.

This one at least has my Sicilian volcanic-rock beaded necklace, a nice detail for such a small picture.

Baseball Attendance and Beach Cities

The title for this is ridiculous, as I have other things I want to say about this topic, I guess, and none of it can be easily reduced to simple post title.

I started looking up some information a few months ago when I was reading an article about an innovative baseball team that has poor attendance numbers.

I looked up the city on Google Maps and thought, That's what I'm looking at? I had no ideas the city looked like that, or that's what was meant when folks wrote about the difficulties of attending a game. Here's an overhead shot:

Despite the looks, this is an east coast beach-side city, and I didn't monkey with the cardinal directions.

Looks can be deceiving, especially with zoom factors, like below. This is the classic "west coast" city of Seattle, but zooming out, look to see how much land is west of the city"

Or being zoomed in too far shows a different problem, like below. The ballpark is almost centered in the frame, but it almost looks like an eat coast city, with the water to the right, or east.

That's San Francisco, with the park on the east side of the peninsula.

How about below?

This coastal city isn't even on an ocean. That's Chicago and Lake Michigan...

Anyway, back to my east coast beach city above. The arrow shows the location of the ballpark:

That's the bottom of the St. Petersburg peninsula in the metropolitan area of Tampa and helping to enclose what's called Tampa Bay. Tampa and St. Pete's is on the on the western side of the Floridian wang peninsula, so that accounts for the look of the city. The team tries to appeal to the baseball fans in Tampa all the way to Orlando, the large swath of central Florida, and counts quite a large number of loyal and oddly rabid fans.

Except the attendance of the Tampa Bay Rays tends to be at the bottom of the list each year.

The culprit is the park's location at the bottom of that peninsula. One player who grew up in nearby Lakeland says that if you draw a half-hour-drive's circle around the stadium, 70% of it would be water.

At least their lease is up in 19 years. Yikes.

My team being the Yankees, I suppose I'm supposed to have a hate-on for the Rays, but I don't. They're plucky and well-run, and have success despite the attendance or national recognition issues.

And, to end on a strange note, they're the only American sports team named solely after a body of water.

See:

• Green Bay is the name of the city as well as the body of water;
• Tampa is the name of the city, and St. Pete is the name of the community on the St. Petersburg peninsula;
• Tampa Bay is the name of the bay itself.

Sources in the Strangest Places

When islands break away from mainlands or are created by vomiting volcanic action in the sea, the life that develops there tends to do weird things. Big animals tend to shrink and tiny animals tend to grow. And this I mean in large-swath explanations. But check this out...have you heard about this?

Between five and ten thousand years ago the dwarf-pachyderms of Crete and possibly other Aegean and Mediterranean islands died out, or were hunted to extinction by enterprising humans. These elephants experienced what tends to happen to large animals on islands, as they saw their average size diminish relative to their African and Indian counterparts.

So, while the elephants themselves disappeared, their skeletons and fossils did not, and, it appears, were found by and subsequently inspired later humans. Check out a skull:

That large hole in the center of the skull is where the air intake would be for the animal's trunk. But, if you were a knowledgeable human at the time, you could be forgiven if you thought it resembled an eye-socket.

Hence: the legend of the cyclops looks to have originated with the skulls of newly extinct dwarf elephants.

How cool is that?

Late Night Editing

The stupid N key on this computer is crapping out, which makes this whole thing annoying...

Anyway, late last night I hit a groove in my attempt to rekindle some of my more creative motivations, and I was up late heavily editing something I wrote in the last pre-9/11 spring or summer.

As my experiment with vanishing a narrator went deeper, as I hemmed and hawed over how best to deliver action sequences, as I deleted the showy shit kids write to announce their triumph over words, I ended up composing one of the weirdest sentences I may have ever written. And in the context of the moment in the narrative it does its job, and it won't be as weird is it will look in a second, fully stripped of context.

But I wrote it. And I stopped and reread it...so, this is where we are...

Here it is, a weird collection of words:

"Five tiny electric tornadoes simultaneously teased out the atomic mist."

It makes full sense in the continuity of the previous and following sentences. Pretty sure, anyway.

Too Much Stuff

On a sleepless night after returning from Italy this past summer, I was messing around on the computer and found a teaching position in Paris at American University, no Ph.D. necessary. I thought long and hard about going after it, and thoughts of moving to Europe coalesced. Is it possible? I mean, of course it's possible. But really, for us, what would it look like.

And then sleep patterns returned to a form of normalcy, and we moved down the street, and that was the eye-opener for me.

Corrie is correct in her declarations that we have too much stuff, that she was feeling oppressed by our old place and the overflowing-ness of our stuff, but each time the word "stuff" has been used, imagine a spicier term, and by "our" stuff, it's generally understood to be "mine."

Like I said, all true.

So when we moved, it was me playing the part of Corrie, as in: WHY DO WE HAVE ALL THIS SHIT? How can we possibly ever entertain the idea of moving overseas when we have so much stuff?

This past weekend we got better organized, and our storage dungeon/writing cave got updated:

But again, the point remains: why do we have all this stuff?

There are boxes of comics, baseball cards, and random collectibles. There are tools and doodads and things meat for scrap-booking, a dozen years in the making (something that's actually Corrie's). There's camping supplies, baby stuff, and artwork---tons of artwork, so much art, and BOOKS!

Damn...I know that I have a helluva library, but it's almost unreasonable to consider moving all those books for the (CH to Oceanaire to Palm St to Bed-Stuy to Dwyce to Wells Branch to 3rd to here) eighth time...

At least we're getting down to the really important books. There's a tiny free library right across the street from us, the one's that look like bird houses, but are for locals to drop-a-book/take-a-book. I've been transferring bits of my library that have been deemed expendable ever since we moved in, living as an only-dropping-a-book patron.

And the books I'm dropping aren't garbage books, either. Here's a batch:

A Raisin in the Sun I got for a high school class, and it remains a classic, but I can't say I've opened it years. The copy of Dante's Inferno I picked up years ago and held onto for so long because it was presented in a page-for-page Italian on the left and an English translation on the right. Devil in the White City is essentially two true stories, one about the famous architect of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 White City creation and an infamous serial killer who preyed on the patrons of that fair. It's good, but I preferred the serial killer story. I'm married to an architect with legit opinions that aren't the same as a 19th century white guy.

I thought I'd written about Sanctuary before, but it's confined to the "go" pile. The Story of O, the original Fifty Shades was a Dollar Bookstore discovery, and I opted to keep Dreams From My Father over Obama's campaign trail book.

I could type ad nauseum about the books I'm trying to get rid of, or why I have them at all, and I'm afraid of boring the few people who actually read this. BUT REALLY, THERE WERE REASONS WHY I HAVE THESE BOOKS.

Here's another set:

Flight of the Iguana is from David Quammen, and is a collection of essays about nature. Catlin's paintings far overshadowed his letters, mainly because of the way he overwrote them and structured them in reverse, but that issue had been corrected in this edition, deftly edited by Peter Mathiessen, who, I learned this summer, was a favorite author Thomas Pynchon. Worse than Watergate...seems quaint today. Max Weber was a pioneer into the discipline called sociology today.

But really...essays on Berlin slums? WWI and WWII were some of the social consequences of his observations, and I have the a more in depth collection of the fantastic paintings from Catlin. The other two were easily parted with.

This sub-title caught me at some point: "Humans of the Sea:"

But John Lilly wrote these two research papers before I was born, and I'm sure in the last forty years more research has been done, and, like Robert Bakker's dinosaur book, the point being argued is mostly part of the current narrative: dolphins are remarkably brilliant and have abilities and sense beyond our comprehension (like how they can relay a three-dimensional image of a scenario from memory to another dolphin, something unknown to Lilly at the time).

In that same vein is the next book, A Sand County Almanac:

This collection of environmental essays helped change the national conversation on conservation efforts. But it was first published in 1949. Only republicans need to be convinced the environment shouldn't be destroyed in the name of money.

Why did I have these books for so long? Why couldn't I ever give them up?

I fear that my own connection to books like these, important but dispensable, is how I've surrounded myself with so much shit...this is the pack-rat mentality.

I'm not a hoarder, exactly, but when it comes to ideas my brain has deemed important, I certainly am one.

And I have a hard time convincing myself that letting go of the proof of these ideas is ever okay. I feel like that's a symptom of a broad issue that's afflicting this country and its culture right now: facts being the enemy.

Anyway, the boring inner turmoil of a languishing intellectual is just that: lots of blah blah blah.

"I'm trying, Ringo. I'm trying real hard to be the righteous man." --- Jules Winfield

Arm Day: Ocean Kayaks on a Saturday

We'd been planing for a while to take a day and go play on a boat. After broaching the topic with an adventurous toddler, he'd bring it up each weekend and ask to go "onna boat."

Finally we made the time and made it happen.

We headed down to Sunset Beach in Orange County, a few minutes out of Long Beach on PCH. Technically we were in/on Huntington Beach Harbor, but really it was the rich folks zone, people whose houses are on the water. I tried to capture an overhead picture from Google to get a sense of scale, along with a yellow line showing our progress, in only one direction (since our return trip was simply a backtracking:

We started off at the bottom of the above picture, wove our way from the ritzy neighborhood out to main channel while hugging what amounted to an edge, sprinted across the channel, tried to check out the wetlands, and finally made it to the DO NOT CROSS buoys that separate the fishing and kayaking zone from the military area.

That's about as much as my arms could handle in one direction.

The trip was very, very cool.

In the main channel, while Cass and I were leading our flotilla, about ten yards directly in front of our kayak a large sea lion surfaced to catch a breath. Both the boy and shared a hearty "Whoa!" as the marine animal swam right at us. It dove out of sight about foot off our bow. It seemed like it was as interested in us as we were in it.

We spotted various cormorants diving for fish, but it was hard for Cass to spot them. When he finally would, he would lose it after it dove again, and he was ask, repeatedly, "Dad, where'd duck go?" It was adorable. "See, son, that's a cormorant, not exactly a duck...with dense bones for diving...right there!" And it would be gone and the cycle would repeat.

I wore a life preserver to model good decisions for the boy. His has a Spider-Man design, something he had a difficult time returning after it was all said and done.

We had a difficult time when we made it to the wetlands, since we weren't allowed to disembark. That was likely for the best. The following sign illustrated the tides, I imagine:

Cass was an expert at steering with his paddle, and eventually got good with the paddle motion. He did want to venture further, but the decision was made by ma and pa to turn back. Our trip was for only two hours, which was about the max for parents who don't really spend time at the gym on the shoulder machine.

Cass had a blast, enjoying the whole thing, even when we were forced to face the sun for a few minutes. We snacked for a while, once at the closed inlet and again as we were getting ready to finish up, that time under the bridge close by to where we mustered/landed. That shady snack time was great.

Afterwards Corrie tried to take a selfie with all three of us, while Cass was playing with his oar, and got this neat action shot:

At one point, when we were heading to lunch after finishing up, Corrie mentioned something about how Cass's first boat ride had been a success. I had to remind her that his first boat ride, and actually first two boat rides, were Italian ferries to and from Sicily. We shared a laugh and shrugged and thought, whatta world...

Clear-Sheet Portraits

This seems to only happen when I have a beard...

Back in January, before we were out on the line, someone drew up a portrait of me, all beardy and bespectacled:

And just recently, right as I'm sporting a beard again, another clear-sheet portrait has been done:

I try to tell everyone I'm way more Squidward than Patrick Star...