Last week, in a fit of nostalgia/stupidity, I decided to make a playlist in iTunes consisting solely of music I would have listened to in the summer of 1989. I use iTunes for music while I’m sitting here at my desk working, and also use it for my iPod for in the car or when I’m walking around or at the gym. This was harder than it seems, because I lost a lot of tapes back in the day (my car had a hole in the floor) and I can’t remember all of my music from back then. (My brain also has a hole in it.) There’s also the issue that everything I have in iTunes is ripped from CD, and although I spent a good deal of the late 90s trying to recreate my old music library by sending CDexchange my paycheck every week, there are many holes in my collection. Not every tape from the 80s made its way to CD, and not all of those ended up in the iTunes store.

The biggest factor in doing this is that certain songs greatly remind me of the feel of that area, which is what I wanted to capture. I wanted to be able to drive around with the playlist going and forget I was in a 2008 Yaris in Southern California and have that brief thought that it was 1989 and I was driving the back roads from Goshen to Elkhart in a 1976 Camaro (with holes in the floor). That meant two things: some of the music I’d have in the car back then wouldn’t make the cut. For example, even if I had any of Voivod’s first three albums, I don’t think I could stand listening to a single second of them, let alone put them on the list. I probably would not want to load up the list with vintage Metallica, although I put a couple of specific songs on there. Most of the rest of the stuff is either prog-rock (although no Rush, because for whatever reason, I’m really sick of them at the moment) or various pop-rock stuff I’m embarassed to own, but I listen to constantly.

I have not been horribly nostalgic lately, because it’s something I’ve been really unsure of. I never thought about it before, but I started seeing someone for DBT therapy, and there’s this concept that being heavily buried in either your past or your future can be unhealthy. For example, if you were the Al Bundy type who always gravitated toward living in the past thought of scoring three touchdowns for Polk High School, it could be indicative that you are avoiding or having problems with what’s happening in the present. And I find that when I’m most depressed, I’m usually looking back to some era and avoiding what’s happening at that moment. (Case in point: I wrote Summer Rain when I was heavily depressed.) I’m sure there’s some balance, in remembering the past but keeping this strong sense of mindfulness and moving forward with life, without being in a constant bubble of “I wish things were as great as 1992” or whatever.

And next year is twenty years from when I graduated high school. Aside from the great feeling of depressing in thinking that so much time has passed since then, there will probably be a barrage of various emails and reunions and whatnot, and I don’t have a great desire to deal with that. But nostalgia is such a huge pull on the internets. You have all of these classmates sites, and high schools have reunion pages, and half of the function of facebook is to find people you haven’t talked to in a decade and see how many kids they’ve popped out. At first, I thought facebook was interesting in that I did find a lot of old high school pals, until I realized I had pretty much nothing in common with them anymore, and couldn’t really talk to them about anything.

I had part of a white filling fall out while flossing on Saturday. I didn’t know what it was at first and was like “what the hell did I eat?” but then felt a huge gap in the back of a tooth. I found a dentist just up the street from us, and I will start that whole process at 8

AM tomorrow. I always hate going to a new dentist, because they always look in my mouth and see their next four boat payments. I really don’t care about the pain or drilling - they could drill all of my teeth for days straight like some kind of Daytona 500 marathon, as long as it was free. The most painful part of a root canal for me is getting the bill in the mail and seeing what my insurance didn’t cover.

Just finished reading that Halberstam book on the ‘49 baseball season, and it was pretty decent. I’ve read an insane number of baseball books this year, and should probably get back to fiction soon. Suggestions always welcome.

Speaking of unnecessary medical appointments, gotta go drive up to Santa Monica to see a rheumatologist. But first, I need to tweak my playlist for the trip up there.

Ah, the Twilight Zone. I’m in the middle of a half-dozen or so episodes that show up every night on cable, halfway paying attention. It’s always fun when another episode rolls onscreen, and I can remember the general plot of the episode before Mr. Serling appears. The current one is some weird Civil War-based (read “we have no money for a set this week”) story about people returning from Gettysburg down a trail, and a widow seeing soldiers that are really dead. Or something. It’s better than watching NBA wrapup coverage, anyway.

Baseball season and the Twilight Zone always go hand-in-hand for me. When I was a kid and in love with Serling’s master work, I would stay up late to watch the episodes on WGN. They were on at 10

Monday thru Friday, and in grade school, that meant I could only watch on Friday, unless it was a vacation, then I got in five episodes. Anyway, WGN was the home station of the Cubs. And when there was a west-coast away game, sometimes the 10 time slot would get pre-empted for a little Cubs@Giants action, which always thoroughly pissed me off. And considering this was the early 80s, when only the Mets kept Chicago out of the dead last spot in the NL East. But aside from that, most commercial blocks had a bumper announcing the next game.

Much like the Cubs, the only think keeping the Rockies out of the bottom slot of the NL West are the Padres. The pitching rotation has fallen apart; defensive ace Troy Tulowitzki will be injured for weeks if not months; the big bats are not so big; and things are not well. And the thing is, last year, my first game was on June 7th, and they were not doing that well prior to that. Maybe if I would have started in April, I would have seen as many losses as I have this year. I think the rational thing to do would be to give it up and become a Dodgers fan, or even better, a Diamondbacks fan. But for me, it’s about the nostalgia (which is the wrong word, when describing a team I’ve followed for less than a year - loyalty maybe), and because I am not paid according to the team’s performance, it doesn’t matter that much. They won today, so that’s good.

I am drinking a large glass of sugar-free Kool-Aid right now, and it’s not a 100% replacement for the real thing. But I am slowly getting off the sugar kick, and I even drank a Coke Zero without retching yesterday. The whole diet thing is getting better, and as of yesterday, I’m below 200 pounds for the first time in about ten years. The headaches and random crashes are about over, and I’m running fine on the smaller amount I’m eating. And to be clear, this diet is not a “diet”, like where you only eat grapefruits or bacon bits or whatever. It’s just portion control, a hard limit on fast food, and cutting out all of this sugar. This is roughly like what I did in 1997, and I was able to drop about 30-some pounds with no problems (until I went back to Cokes and junk food.)

I have a new idea for a blog-like project, and I have been hacking away at that. Stay tuned.

When I was younger, I think that I had a very limited set of environmental references, so it was always easy for me to unconsciously tell where I was based on my surroundings. Like, when I was in a big city with old brick buildings and graffiti and air pollution, I was in Chicago; when I was in a subdivision, it was Elkhart; a lake meant I was somewhere in Michigan, and so on. This isn’t a very sustainable model, unless you commute between Dubai and Alaska, although there were a lot of unconscious and minor details that, for example, told me the difference between Toronto and Portland, although I probably couldn’t quantify that with a lot of thought. Anyway, this model is probably why I spent the first few years of my stay in New York saying “wow, this really reminds me of Chicago” to the most asinine small details.

Now that I’ve lived in more than a half-dozen cities and spent a week or more in at least a dozen more, this system is fundamentally flawed. I spent a lot of time in Denver thinking about Seattle. And today, I was driving around and I completely forgot where I was. And I don’t mean that I thought I was on Lincoln and I was really on Sepulveda; I mean I was in Marina Del Rey and I was certain for a moment that I was in Bellevue, Washington, then I corrected myself and started thinking Aurora, Colorado. And I don’t mean that I’m in some serious mental disorder where I will start thinking I’m inside The Wizard of Oz in the near future. I mean that I *feel* like I am in these places, just like how sometimes I smell the exhaust of a diesel engine, and the particulate soot will make me feel like it’s 1992 and I’m in my VW Rabbit diesel again. And that’s weird.

My right foot is gimped up again, just in the big toe. It’s a joint closer to the tip than usual, so it’s not incredibly painful, and I’m walking and wearing real shoes. I went to a new podiatrist today, but he wouldn’t do anything for it, and referred me to a specialist. He did take me for a $350 set of orthotics, which I do probably need. So I got a set of imprints taken, and a Monday appointment with a rheumatologist. And I am further convinced I need a doctor that specializes in everything. See, some podiatrists would have tapped the toe and shot in some cortizone; some would have given me a script for some drugs; others would have said “not my job” and send me to the next stop on the scavenger hunt. There’s no guarantee that the rheumatologist won’t say “hell no” on Monday and refer me to a GP or internist or something. And this guy used the excuse of “well, I wouldn’t do dental work…” But my analogy is that I wouldn’t want to bring my car to one Toyota dealer to get work on the left tires, then drive to Burbank and get another appointment and get another Toyota dealer to work on the spare and the right front tire, and so on. I would love to have one doc that could get me on all the pills I need, do that dental cleaning, talk to me about my stress, get me some crazymeds, and check me out for a new set of glasses. I’d pay a premium, as long as I didn’t have to fill the same form out 87 times.

Sarah is gone until tomorrow afternoon, for her first trip (for work) back to New York since we left. She had a trip to SF right before we went to Milwaukee, then the Milwaukee trip, then a day trip to SF on Tuesday, then she left for NY on Wednesday. So I have been watching a lot of TV. (Also reading, but more on that some other time.) Last night I watched a show on the Unabomber, which is old hat to me, but a good waste of an hour. One of the things that struck me is that he was in this psychological experiment in which they told him he would debate an essay he wrote with another student in the experiment, but the other guy would be part of the gig, and would fuck with the first student, so the shrinks could measure his stress or see how his skin response changed or whatever else. And they postulated that this may have somehow fucked with Ted K. in such a way that he’d later grow a gnarly beard, buy a hooded sweatshirt and mirrorshades, and start mailing off surprises to college professors.

Way back in 1992, I took this psych 101 class, and had to sign up for I think three experiments. One was something idiotic, like sorting blocks. But the other two were really fucked up in a way similar to the Harvard one they mentioned in the show. Maybe they were not as bad, since I have not written a manifesto and started blowing up planes. (Well, not yet.) Anyway, here are explanations of both experiments, as well as I can remember.

First, I was supposed to read over three applications to the study and a bunch of letters written by three women my age. (I heard a rumor that if you signed up for the experments that specified they were for males only, cool stuff would happen. Because this was the home of the Kinsey Institute, I was swinging for the fences on this one. No such luck.) After I would read all of this stuff, an interviewer would ask me a bunch of questions, and then I would pick a lucky contestant, meet the woman, talk for a bit, and then another battery of questions, presumably to see how she matched up to my assumptions.

The application packets were pretty detailed, and included photos, essays, and questions answered, in handwriting. Some were of the “what is the worst thing you’ve ever done,” “if you had to lie to not hurt someone’s feelings…”, and that sort of thing. I pored over these applications and savored every last bit. This was like a first date, or a round of a TV dating game show, except for college credit. I talked to the test admin about the different women, and then made my choice. She left the room to go get Jane Doe #2, and I waited, in a bizarre excitement.

When she came back, she was alone, and said something like “oh, Jane Doe had to leave, so we can’t do the second half of the experiment, but we’ll sign your permission slip so you get credit for the session,” and I got a kick in the ass out the door. What? I don’t remember if I was single or not at the time, or how far in the desert of nothingness I was then, but I really wanted to meet this chick. I mean, maybe nothing would happen, but still, the thought of this predetermined first date was a slight bump of relationship coke to snort into my system, and now it was snatched away. But wait - was she really not there, or was the whole thing some kind of sick setup to see how hard-up perverts would choose between three “women” based on their cursive handwriting and answers to dumb questions? What really baked my noodle six beers later is, would I have chosen the same woman if I knew it was fake? And did the test administrator write out all three applications, implying that she wanted to fuck me? Don’t think about it too much, trust me.

Okay, next experiment. I was in a room with maybe a dozen or so other guys. A guy gives up some paper, and shows us a series of videos, in which a man and a woman somehow disagree about something in some situation. We then have to rate them from 1 being all her fault, 10 being all his fault, and 5 being a push. (Maybe it was 0-10, whatever.) The videos were these badly acted scenarios where the guy comes home and says “where’s my food?” and she’s sitting on the couch watching General Hospital , but some are his fault, and they range from slight disagreement with profuse apology to “throw all his/her shit out a third story window.” We all watch the videos, mark our scores, and the tape ends.

Another guy walks in as the tape is being changed, and asks admin #1 if he can give us a quick worksheet of math problems for us to do. So he hands these out, and times us on doing the dozen or so problems. Some are fairly simple algebra, but they slowly get into absolute absurdity, like “next number in the series,” when the numbers are completely random. As we work on this, the dude turns into a complete dick about getting us to finish, saying “come on, these are easy,” and going up to people and individually harassing them, saying “just put down anything. are these too hard for you?” and so on.

So we go back to the videos, and by this point, everyone is totally ballistic. They’re pissed off at the guy #2, and pissed about the test, and all of a sudden, every damn scenario is absolutely, positively the woman’s fault. Only, I think it’s the same set of videos in a different order. I figured out the deal here before we even got to the next videos, but I’m not sure anyone else did, and I don’t think it was explained after the experiment.

The irony of the whole thing is that I think I slept through two tests in the class, and ended up flunking it, so the experiments didn’t matter. But it turns out the professor was in grad school and worked with the people who taught that ape sign language, so I heard a few good stories out of that one.

Rockies won against the Cubs today. I paid the $18 for a season pass to the MLB audio, and it turns out they just pipe 850 KOA AM through the internets to you, which is a cool deal. They send the whole thing, including commercials, local news, the entire deal, which is neat. And Saturday night, we’ve got tickets at Dodger Stadium for the Rockies. Let’s hope I can walk with no problem, or it’s going to be a really long nine innings.

I’m back. We left Friday for Milwaukee, for our big wedding party, which went well. After we eloped six months ago, we agreed it would be best to have some kind of party for the relatives, so my extended family could meet Sarah’s and vice-versa, and so we could see some of the distant relatives we’d normally only see in the event of a funeral. So Sarah’s dad planned the big Saturday night event, and her mom planned a smaller immediate family dinner on Friday, and we managed the list of addresses and tried to find out where second cousins once removed lived after 20 years of being MIA, and then printed and sent all of the invites.

The Saturday event was at the Milwaukee Athletic Club, and we got a room there for the weekend, as did many other people. The place is almost a century old, and still looks very old-school, from the lobby to the wallpaper to the phone booths that resembled confessionals in the lobby, similar to the ones in the Indiana Student Union. They also allegedly have very good pools and saunas and exercise equipment, but out exercise for the weekend was just keeping up with everything, so I never got down there.

We strongly stressed that this would not be a wedding wedding; there was no ceremony, no white dress or tuxedo, no wedding party, no vows, no flower girl, none of that at all. We also said no gifts, but that was largely ignored. There was music and a dance floor, but not a lot of dancing. Despite all of this, and that we didn’t do the planning, I was still very stressed out about what to wear and how to look and act, and all that. But we got in on Thursday night with no problem (other than a 22-inning Rockies game that I was trying to follow on the web, and eventually had to give up.) And Friday during the day was lax; I went to Miller Park with Frank (father-in-law) and Matthew (brother-in-law) and we attempted to take the tour. There was a high school baseball tournament, though, so we got to sit in the section behind the plate with maybe a hundred other people total in the stadium. It’s very weird to be sitting in a big-league park and hear the “plink!” of an aluminum bat hit after hit.

Both Friday and Saturday dinners went the same, but on different scales. On Friday, there were about two dozen people, so I got a chance to talk to everyone, and I think I’d met everyone there before. There were three tables, and people were seated strategically, so some folks would get a chance to talk to other folks and so on. Food was good, cake was excellent, and we got home unscathed.

Saturday was a much bigger deal. I think we had about 100 people total, and I knew maybe 30-40% of them. So there was a mad rush of people being introduced, and I had no chance whatsoever to get their names. Add to this that I had a slight cold and was tripping on heavy amounts of dayquil, which is not conducive to having the same conversation 100 times in a row. I barely got to eat dinner, and the desserts were all gone before I knew they were available. But a lot of people got to meet other people. I met a bunch of Sarah’s paternal side of the family, which I previously hadn’t. Sarah’s grandparents had a good time talking to my folks, and her cousin the children’s librarian spent a long time hanging out with my 10-year-old nephew Phillip, talking books. There were a lot of people that didn’t get a chance to talk to other people, but with that many and only a few hours, you can’t run all of the permutations.

Sarah’s friend’s Guy and Scott came out from New York, although I barely got to talk to them in the shuffle. Her friend Ben Mack came out and we talked more. A flew in from San Francisco, and Simms and the Bill Perry family came up from Bloomington. John and Helen drove up from Chicagoland. That was the group at our table, which made for some strange conversation. After the evening wound down, most of this group rolled over to Real Chili for a bowl of the Milwaukee tradition. (Simms’ is better, though.) We also had a beautiful Sunday, and Simms and A and I went walking around and wandered the public market a bit. (They had a Big Kahuna burger, but it wasn’t too great.)

And that’s that. Sorry the description was not that incredible - it was too much of a whirlwind to really get any more details down. I will have pictures; a dozen or so people with digicams said they’d hook up with me later on photo sharing, and there’s my camera (with almost no pics.) I also dropped off a dozen disposables last night, which will go to CD and get uploaded.

I have a hundred errands today, plus work, plus I will need to get started on an armful of thank you notes. So in advance of those, which will probably go out in June, thank you to all of you who came out for the party!

I’m back. I have been since Friday night, after a minor scare in which my airline (Frontier) went bankrupt on the day I was supposed to fly out. Luckily they were still flying, because I probably would have hitchhiked home, or maybe bought a $8000 plane ticket, just to get out of there.

I think everything in my last post summed up what the return to Denver was like, although by the end of the week, it was greatly magnified. I realized there is no single place in Denver I really wanted to eat, except for McDonald’s or maybe Qdoba. And I was staying in a hotel by the office, which is in an area that basically has a Target and a gas station. (Also, five miles away is a Sonic.) So when I got out of work each night, all I wanted to do was sit in bed and flip channels, jumping back and forth between nine different CSI/Law and Order shows at the same time, while watching my hands turn into dust from the lack of humidity. And now I’m filling out an expense report that’s basically 17 receipts from Burger King.

The game on Tuesday was great, though. I got there super early, and parked in the lot that was right outside our apartment and my office, the one I used to watch from my desk. It was only $10, which gives you an idea of the relevance of a game early in the season against the Braves. Anyway, I went to Breckenridge, one of the sports bar places on Blake Street, to kill some time and watch Detroit lose again. I am not a big sports bar person, but this place had some okay food and nice people, so it was a good place to go for some nachos (unless it was during a Broncos game and you weren’t a Broncos fan.) Instead of going in gate B, where I usually went, I got there early enough for batting practice, so I went in the outfield bleacher entrance, and got to watch the home team belt out a few. It felt so good to see Coors Field again, to look out and remember all of the places I sat - this one for the NLCS, this one for the World Series, this one for the tarp game when it poured rain sideways, and so on.

Once they opened the concourse and I walked over to the Sand Lot bar, I smelled the hot dogs on the grill and that one scent immediately represented the whole baseball season last year. I got my bratwurst, watched the visiting team bat, and listened to that Rob Thomas song “Streetcar Symphony”, which they always play before the game, and is another thing that immediately makes me think of the summer months I spent up in section 331, watching the makings of that 20/21 streak brew on the field.

I had club seats (which is now called the Wells-Fargo Club level), so I caught an elevator up there, got my cracker jacks, and settled in. There were some small updates to the stadium, mostly a lot of propaganda about being the 2007 NL champions: a new logo on the top of the scoreboard, the tops of the dugouts, flags above left field, and so on. The scoreboard had a slight improvement in graphics, and I got to watch the new round of Rockies commercials, which are pretty awful. They also have these new player blurb things in the pre-game slideshow that are a good idea, but are fairly pathetic. All of the trivia stats are things like “tied for 4th place in total RBIs for the team record for players with three vowels in their name”. Christ, a two-second web search could pull up more impressive factiods. How about “career leader in batting average for all active MLB players” (Todd Helton), or “highest batting average, hits, RBIs, doubles, extra base hits, and total bases in the NL in 2007”. (Matt Holliday) Eh.

(Here’s a weird fact - Todd Helton played football in college and was backup quarterback to Peyton Manning. Outfielder Seth Smith also played football in college and was backup quarterback to Eli Manning.)

Anyway, the game - it was cold as FUCK. It started at about 50, but the winds picked up, and after about the second inning, I started hoping it would start snowing after the fifth inning so I could leave. It always feels so weird to be in this below-zero weather and remember when it was like 105 degrees last summer, and I was going to day games with my laptop bag packed in blue ice packs so I could stick my hands in them and try to avoid heatstroke. But I had the similar strategy of retreating to the clubhouse after the third inning, except instead of sucking in the air conditioning, I was sitting over a heater, trying to get the feeling back in my fingers and toes.

The game rambled on, and the Rockies pulled it out, although it was not as interesting as the game the next day, in which the pitcher hit like five Rockies, and in the sixth inning, there were two three-run homers. Another weird moment came when I pushed through the crowd going out, and found I had to walk the same way “home” as I did after all of the games last year, except this time, instead of going in the apartment building, I walked past it, got to the car, and drove half an hour.

I think that’s the thing that fucked with me the most. I am really glad I moved to LA. (Hell, going from a snowstorm to 90 degree weather and tropical humidity tells me that.) But when I was in Denver, I really wanted to come home to 2200 Market and see Sarah and the cats and all of my stuff waiting for me. When I was at work, I really thought I’d hop on I-25 at 6

, head north, and open the door to two four-legged ravenous felines awaiting their dinner. And to see that apartment sitting vacant made me sad in a really weird way. And some people’s reaction to that would be “oh, you miss Denver”. But it’s not that. It’s definitely more complicated. Anyway, by Friday, I was desperate to get the fuck out of town, and I did, and I am so happy to be back here. I’m glad I made a few bucks, but there’s something to be said about looking out at palm trees and a high of 79 today.

So I just dropped Sarah off at LAX - she will be gone until Wednesday on a quick business trip. In the meantime, I have a complete fuckload of stuff to do. Everybody in the world wants work from me this week, and THIS week happens to be a short week, and I have so much to do for this Milwaukee trip, which is for our wedding reception family reunion thing. I am supposed to be putting together this slideshow on the Mac, and despite all of this iBullshit, there’s not an easy way to do exactly what I want. Now I am making a book in iPhoto and then exporting the book to a slideshow, and exporting that to a movie. So that’s a major pain in the ass. And I hope this whole thing can go without a major hitch, although I now have about 150 people who are all expecting an entire weekend of facetime with us, and when you do the math, you realize a certain amount of load balancing has to happen. And this isn’t an IP network, so I can’t just go lease a Barracuda appliance to get this to work, so people will inevitably get pissed off. Also, I still don’t know what I’m wearing.

With that, I should get to work…