The Rockies-Brewers game yesterday wasn’t even funny in its cruelty. This one doesn’t even deserve the bulleted list. Basically, the Rockies drove in 8 runs by the bottom of the 2nd, including a 2nd inning of 7 runs that seemed like it would never end. The bases got loaded, and then it was doubles and triples and homers, and all of these people kept running in, and it was like the beaches of Normandy for the Brewers. The third inning: three more. The fourth inning: five more. Tony Graffanino, the Brewers’ star second baseman, jumped for a catch and tore out his knee. And the Brewers went through every single pitcher they had there. Yost seriously almost had to get a position player to pitch the 8th and 9th inning, which would be interesting from the freak anomaly standpoint. The game ended at 19-4. It was funny, one of the announcers on the radio said “the Brewers are down two touchdowns now” and the other said “it’s like the score to a Broncos-Packers game”.

In other weirdness, that pitch that hit Jason Hirsch in the leg in the first inning yesterday, it turns out it BROKE his leg. And he pitched six innings. That’s pretty hardcore.

Pictures, soon, whenever I get around to captioning them. Brooms galore. I also found a new place to eat at the ballpark, there is this cluster of shops hidden behind a tavern that have a lot of non-ballpark food like deli sandwiches and gourmet pizzas that aren’t rubbery Papa John’s personal pan things. Yesterday I cheated though, and bought a bunch of sodas and water from the vending machine in my building at $1.25 each instead of $5.75 each, and then put an icepack in my bag. Worked fine, even in the 95 degree heat.

Three Cubs games this weekend, and I can’t even remember what’s going on besides baseball. I am trying to write on this book, and it is going somewhat. And the zine, it’s in stasis until I get a couple of bios and releases from people. The layout is pretty close though. And the artwork is on its way. I hope to get it to the printer in another week or two. Or three. We’ll see.

OK, on to that writing.

I didn’t plan it, but we went to the Rockies-Brewers game last night. Sarah got tickets from work, and she had to miss Monday’s game, so we went last night. Here’s the details:

• We were in section 133, row 27,seats 1+2. That’s on the floor, behind home plate, about two sections in from where the screen starts on the left, and about halfway back. Pretty damn close, and the first time I’ve sat in the infield box in a night game.
• The screen messed up my use of binoculars for the most part. And my battery charger fucked up, so my camera was non-operational.
• Remember yesterday how I said I never wanted to get a hot dog again? It was dollar hot dog night. I passed this up and got a bratwurst, but that didn’t go so well.
• Jason Hirsh was back on the mound after a very bad sprain of his left leg. So the second Brewers batter line drives it right into the same leg. Every medical professional in the state of Colorado is suddenly on the field, and I seriously thought they were going to take him off on a stretcher. But he walked it off, took a couple of test pitches, and was fine.
• Ed Bellorin is a catcher that spent nine years in the minors, and got moved up from AAA to the Rockies to play his first major-league game that night. (Ianetta got sent down, because he can’t bat for shit these days.) In the second inning, he jammed his leg and ended his ML start with a blown hamstring. That sucks.
• Slow game, but by the middle of the sixth, it was 3-0 Brewers, and it looked like they’d lock it up.
• I go to take a piss. The Rockies hit a homer and two singles before I’m able to finish. I go to buy some nachos. The stupid bitch at the register takes 45 minutes examining someone’s ID, and the guy behind the counter doesn’t understand English and I’m screaming “NACHOS NACHOS NACHOS YOU STUPID FUCK WHAT DO YOU THINK I’M TRYING TO GET MY PASSPORT RENEWED JUST GIVE ME THE FUCKING NACHOS NOW!” By the time I get back to my seat, Garret Atkins singles and it’s now 3-2.
• Pitching change. Double. Intentional walk of Brad Hawpe. Single. Everyone is total apeshit. Couple of outs. Five runs in one inning, three while I’m at the urinal, and it’s 5-3.
• Todd Helton homers in the 7th. Hate the goatee, love the home runs.
• In the bottom of the 8th, the Rockies get in two runs because the ball went right through Prince Fielder’s hands; this was his second bone-headed error. To be fair, Holliday dropped the ball in a very obvious way twice that night. And as a side note, one of those resulted in a Prince Fielder triple. That dude is shorter than me and weighs about 50 pounds more, so it’s pretty amazing to see that he can walk, let alone run. It was hilarious.
• Todd Helton then hit another home run, driving in two other players, and making the score 11-3.
• Someone hit a foul back over the mesh and into the second deck, and a guy in the front row just quickly raised his bare hand and whap, caught it. It was the best fan catch I’ve ever seen, and it looked like he did it without thinking. Also, at some point, Jamie Carroll hit a foul ball very high in the third deck - it looked almost like it was going to go out. That was pretty cool.
• I believe the Brewers went through four or five pitchers, and their bullpen is already pretty fucked. Also, Jorje Julio pitched for the Rockies for the 8th, and that guy’s a demon - I think his slowest pitch was like 96 MPH.
• Before the 9th, they announced that Barry ‘Juice’ Bonds hit #756, and they showed the video on the screen. Every single person in the park was booing. I’m thinking of bringing a sign to the park today that says BARRY BONDS - 756*.
• In the top of the ninth, two doubles got the Brewers another run, but that was that. Final score: 11-4.

I have tickets a few sections over but in the same row for today’s 1

against the Brewers. Then tickets up in the 330s for the Cubs on Thu, Sat, and Sun. Lots of baseball. I need to invest in some better food to bring in with me, though.

Last night was the first home game in a series against the Brewers. Lazy as always, so here’s the bullet list:

• I felt slightly conflicted about the game when I bought tickets, because aside from the Rockies, I think the Brewers are my second-favorite team. And I now have a certain connection to Milwaukee, they have a great park, they are also somewhat of an underdog, and they have been doing well this year.
• The Brewers came off a brutal loss to the Phillies that burned through their entire bullpen, so their pitching was hurt. But, they have a hard-hitting offense, and at 5280 feet, that means home runs.
• No sausage race. No Bernie Brewer. No bratwurst, other than the crappy ones they sell at Coors Field. So that removes about 80% of the Brewers experience, unfortunately.
• It rained before the game, and looked pretty dreary outside, so I was fearful of even going. It was also much cooler than when I got rained on at the Phillies game, which would make it even worse. But it kept dry for the most part, aside from a sprinkle or two.
• There were only about 30,000 people there, which is probably the lowest attendance I’ve seen for a night game. Part of that was probably the rain, though.
• Every once in a while, I will smell a hot dog that someone else has, and think “damn, I need to get one too”, and when I do, it totally sucks. This happens pretty much every time I buy a hot dog at a baseball game. I will never learn.
• I was in section 332, the first row of the second part of the section. So I had a railing right in front of me, and I had to sit up to see over it. Otherwise, not bad seats.
• I bought a set of 10x50 binoculars, and those made things interesting. I didn’t mess with them during the game a lot, except to see who was warming up in the bullpen. But before the game, it was a good way to look into the dugout and how it was set up, and to see the players warming up. Like I saw Matsui’s translator with him on the field before he got started.
• Josh Fogg was the starting pitcher, and wasn’t throwing down major strikeouts, but he really had a way to keep the hits on the ground and very fieldable, which pretty much shut down the Brewers.
• Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun each had single homers, and both were pretty impressive. Fielder’s went into one of the exit ramps in right field, and this horde of people ran down the ramp, as it bounced and bounced away, which was funny to watch.
• In the first inning, Matsui almost hit a homer (hit right below the rail, then bounced out), and then Brad Hawpe hit a three-run homer. At this point, half the people there thought the game was over.
• In the second, Matt Holliday hit a two-run homer, and most of the people there thought the game was over.
• Nobody scored after Braun’s homer for the rest of the game, and it became one of those “who’s going to fuck up defensively and let the other team score nine runs” games, but it kept pretty tight.
• This Harley dealership does this stupid big-screen computer animated game with three pigs on bikes and you have to guess which one is going to win, and I swear at least half of the Brewers players were intently watching it to see which one would win.
• The “guess who said the quote” thing between innings was a Bob Eucker quote, and after they showed the answer, they showed a shot of Bob in the box, and that got more applause than anything else that night.
• The Rockies announcer always announces Matt Holliday’s name “Matt Hall-iday!” for some reason, and it always confused the fuck out of me because of Bill Hall of the Brewers, and I wondered what happened if they were both in one game. But it turns out the Brewers were keeping Hall out to give him some rest. He almost came in to pinch hit for Vargas, and was on deck, but it never happened.
• Fogg continued to pitch well all night, and had a very low pitch count. Vargas, not so much - I think he had one of the highest pitch counts of his career. He also had a fielding fuckup where someone hit a ball right at him, and he tried to catch it with his pitching hand, and it hit and went on to the shortstop. So he fucked the play, and his hand probably smarted a bit.
• In the 9th, it got really edgy. Then Troy Tulowitski had two majorly stupid errors. One, he pitched to first, but like twenty feet too high. The other, he tried to get to first instead of second on a double play and fucked it up. I am becoming more of a fan of his, because usually his fielding is excellent, but man he fucked up that inning.
• Final score: 6-2. Cubs fans rejoice, we cut down their lead for you.

Pictures, eh, eventually. Check the photo page.

One thing neat to me about Denver is we get these absolutely killer thunderstorms. I am not sure if it’s the altitude, the lack of humidity, or the rapid temp changes, but sometimes you get these wicked bursts where you swear someone is standing outside your window with a strobe gun. And to watch it at night is absolutely amazing, the way the bolts of lightning jump from the horizon and arc up to the dark clouds. We never had weather like this in Seattle, because the mountain ranges broke it up. New York sometimes had some dramatic storms, but when you’re in a brick shithouse apartment and your only view is your neighbor’s brick shithouse, it’s not as dramatic as having a full horizon view. I guess if you lucked out and were high up in a tall building, it would look cool with the lightning and the city below you, though. Probably the last place I had really good t-storms was in Bloomington.

And that reminds me of… Summer Rain. And it’s 15 years since that summer happened, which is a huge mindfuck for me, because so much of it feels like yesterday. And so much of it seems three universes ago, too. Of the many things that I recall from then, one of the strongest memories is watching these absolutely overwhelming rainstorms. There’s a scene in the book, which I probably don’t do justice to the environment, but I’m stuck at the north entrance of the IMU, and it’s pouring inches and inches of rain, to the point where the sound is overwhelming, like hearing a frying pan full of hot oil gurgle and explode at full tilt. And when a lightning strike hit, the darkness outside would suddenly get this brighter-than-day flashbulb for a split-second, and you’d see everything outside again like it was high noon. And every night I had a show at WQAX, it poured rain. If I did two shows a week, it would rain Tuesday and Thursday. If I subbed for someone on a Saturday, it poured. If I couldn’t make a show, no rain. That’s where the book title comes from.

And it’s also weird that it’s been 20 years since the summer when I got my driver’s license. I’ve gone on about this too much, the job at Taco Bell, my first CD player, my first car. It’s always weird to have a nice even number slapped on it. I mean, saying “I’ve been driving for 17 months and 12 days” is nothing like “I’ve been driving for 20 years”. And that’s a million worlds away - I’m 20 years and 1100 miles from there, and every old yuppie neighborhood is now a Mexican neighborhood, and one mall is dead and the other is dying, and my old Taco Bell is now a Mexican insurance agancy. But if I go to the Taco Bell on Colfax and order a Mexican pizza and a nachos with a Mountain Dew, it’s like a time machine back.

Anyway.

Vs. Brewers tonight at 7

, if it doesn’t rain. And again Weds. at 1. Cubs on Thu, Sat, and Sun. I am not a huge fan of the Lou or anything; it just randomly ended up that way. BTW I got the 2K7 baseball game for Playstation 3, and man I have no hand-eye coordination whatsoever. It uses every button on the controller in 7 different ways, plus joystick motion. I was damn surprised when I was able to actually pull off the simplest of single plays, and I think I got a batter to make ball contact maybe three times. The neat thing about this is it has a manager mode, where you pick your franchise, draft or boot players according to budget, set ticket prices, move people up/down from minors, all of this. Then you go through the entire schedule and play a season (or a season with less games) and for each game, you pick starting pitcher, lineup, etc. Then you can either sim the game (have the computer zap through and tell you who won/lost/etc) or you can manually play it, where you’re the pitcher or batters. Or you can just manage the game, where you go through pitch-for-pitch and say what you want the batter or pitcher to do. It’s fairly fast, and you can get through a nine-inning game in like five minutes.

Anyway, like an idiot, I picked the Rockies as my franchise, and I finished a season at like .228 or something horrific. A couple of things worked OK - I traded Todd Helton for like 65 other players, and got Kenny Rogers to pitch, which is a good fit for the starter-deficient Rockies. Since everything is pegged at the pre-2007 stats though, none of the real shining stars of the team are there. Matsui is in the minors, and if you bring him up, he’s not a great hitter. You have Kim pitching, and he has like a three-digit ERA, and absolutely nobody will take him in a trade. I tried to give him away and I couldn’t. So yeah. I only have two complaints about the game. One is, I wish after you simmed or managed a game, there was a way to watch highlights ESPN-style or something, or even sit through and watch all 9 innings in the real, 3-d stadium view mode. The other complaint is I don’t have the time to fuck with this shit. I should put the game away until after the Rockies don’t make the playoffs and it’s snowing outside, then I will manage like the next ten seasons.

Man I’ve wasted too much of my abbreviated day on this - I need to start writing.

I can’t believe my first car did not have air conditioning. I mean, I paid $300 for it, and I’m sure if it did have AC, I would have disconnected it to get a faster 0-60 time, because that and a loud stereo were about all I cared about then. But I was thinking about the fact that I spend all day indoors in the AC, and I go into our enclosed garage and get in the car with AC, and sometimes it can be days before I’m exposed to the outside air. That’s great when it’s 95 out, but it’s also weird, which made me think about life with no car AC.

That Camaro had an all-black interior, and no pleasant new-car smell anymore, so getting in after parking for an afternoon in the sun was never pleasant. And the only antidote to the summer sun was opening the huge side windows, and maybe running the vent fan setting, which worked about as effectively as crepe paper body armor. But I spent a lot of damn time in that car back then. And I remember driving down Cleveland Road, the back way to Mishawaka from Elkhart, thinking about how the soup of hot air would flood the car every time I stopped at an intersection.

The Camaro had no AC. My first Escort had no AC, but it also had no right side, so it never got hot. My Turismo had AC, but it was disconnected when I got it. Also, that car lasted a school year and blew up before the summer, so I never needed air. VW: disconnected air. Mustang: it had AC, but it was almost out of freon. If you drove a long roadtrip, it would spin enough to produce some cold, but otherwise it was useless. So that’s almost a decade of cars without AC, and then my second Escort (no thanks to Evergreen Ford) had a very good AC system, and the new car smell that made you want to keep the windows closed.

New car smell, by the way, is carcinogenic outgassing from the plastic. What’s good is bad.

I still have many fond memories of driving around in the summer, though, in that huge black beast of a car. It’s so strange: my current economy wagon-thing has more BHP than my Camaro, and weighs half as much, and gets maybe twice the milage if not more. And I was always horribly broke back then, making something like $100 a week if I was lucky, and there probably hasn’t been a day in 2007 that I had less than my 1987 net worth in my wallet without even trying. But my brain still goes back there.

I still have this conflict that I want this time right now to be the same, or bigger than what was then. Like when I’m 50, I want to be thinking “man, back in 2007…”, and I probably will be, but it’s easy to overlook that. (Hell, sometimes the right song hits the shuffle on my iPod and I’m thinking back to 1997, and I have absolutely no intention of ever going back to Seattle, and I have no desire to revisit any part of my life back then.) And the part that gets me is that I don’t want to ever write another Summer Rain, or dick around with short stories trying to capture some long-ago part of my past. But when I start thinking about these things, I do want to write them down, or use them as source material. It’s so tempting, but it’s also not what I want to do anymore.

I went back to “book three”, which is tentatively called The Device, and I keep yo-yoing between that and some other random project of the week, but I know I need to finish this first. I’m 65,000 words into it; it’s three parts, with the first one done, the second one getting there, and the third pretty mapped out. What I have now is pretty basic and doesn’t have the thickness or level of weirdness Rumored does. But the first draft of Rumored didn’t either - it took seven major drafts and about five years worth of work to get it there.

The zine deadline is tomorrow, and it is 16,500 words short of #11’s length. Maybe there will be some last-minute additions, and I guess I have to write an introduction, which is like a thousand words. But shit, I can’t keep waiting. I will just widen the margins or something.