You’re probably sick of seeing pictures of Coors Field, but we went to the game last night, and my photos are here. Here’s another bulleted list of the details:

• This game was against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, which happens to be John Sheppard’s most favorite subject in the world to talk about that doesn’t have to do with book publishing.
• While I don’t find this story about Rays’ Elijah Dukes threatening his wife by sending a picture of a gun with his cell phone that hilarious, I do find it hilarious that all of the “targeted” ads on the web page are all ads for cell phones. It’s like they’re saying “and if you want to threaten your wife like Dukes, buy a Blackberry from Verizon!!
• This was a Friday night game, which meant high energy levels, aka high blood alcohol content.
• We got there early, partially because of my gimpdom, partially to get a bite to eat first, and partially because the first 5000 fans got a free Brad Hawpe jersey t-shirt. I was thinking that would be handy if I ever had to paint a room or something, but they didn’t give out Barney-purple shirts, just white, so maybe I will keep it in reserve for some future game. (I mean, provided I don’t wash it once and it turns into a GI Joe doll outfit.)
• We ate at the chophouse place on the northeast corner of the field again. I had a buffalo cheese bratwurst again. I still liked it, but I’m becoming less enthused by that restaurant, because the line and how they put together the food is totally fucked up, and if even three people are ahead of you, it’s like a 20 minute wait. But still, it was good.
• Sarah got club box seats from work. I thought this just meant we would be sitting in the first deck, case closed. But really, when you get to that level, it has a sealed-in, air-conditioned concourse with fancier food and drinks, nice furniture to sit at, access to the outside patios that circle the outer part of the stadium, and they only let you in if you have club tickets. So that was really nice, especially the air conditioning part, because it was like 90.
• Our seats were in the second row, section 238. That’s right between third and home. I thought the tickets might not be as good as sitting in the 100-sections, but since we were right up front, they were pretty decent. You also get a little bit of a lift in elevation that makes it easier to see everything.
• We also had food and drink service from our seats, which was new to me. Some dude ran around and took your orders. I got some pretzel bites, but they were borderline horrible. I should have stuck to nachos, or maybe cracker jack.
• I saw someone splinter a bat in the first couple of innings, which was neat to see up close. No bat to the beer guy’s head, though. There were still many fly balls in odd places. There was also a fan interference fuckup when someone hit to the right wall, the Rays first base ran to get it, he pretty much had it, and some dumbfuck reached out over the wall to catch it and dropped it. People weren’t happy about that, but at least it wasn’t at Wrigley Field.
• I forget who pitched for the Rays, but late in the game, ther were some very colossal fielding fuckups by their pitcher. Once something really stupid happened, like someone hit a line drive that bounced in front of the mound, hit the pitcher’s arm, and then dropped to the ground, and it took him like 45 minutes to figure it out and get the ball to first base.
• Both Atkins and Hawpe hit back-to-back home runs in the first inning. They were both the typical 5280-foot-altered hits where the ball went way the hell up, then picked up additional lift like the second stage of a rocket, and floated out. With four runs in the first inning, it got really lopsided really fast.
• They did this thing for Frontier airlines between innings, where they use a bungee to shoot a fly ball out and some fan has to catch two of three to get a free ticket to fly anywhere on Frontier (which is probably a lower value than the aforementioned super-shrink t-shirt.) Anyway, they have the dude go back like 100 yards, and the cheerleader types fuck up the bungee and the ball goes like ten yards, three times in a row. So they just gave him the ticket anyway.
• This drunken whore chick sat right behind us and would not shut the fuck up. She sortof looked like a trashier Mischa Barton type, and had to mention every alcoholic drink she’s ever drank, every female friend she had a major falling out with because guy friends are so much better, and every guy she’s ever fucked. Why does this happen at every game I go to?
• In the 7th inning, there was this huge chain where all of the bases got loaded, and then people kept hitting in single-base runs, pushing the score up to 9-2.
• At the top of the 8th, I needed to gimp up the stairs, and the bugs were starting to come out, so we decided it would be nice to watch the game from inside, and slowly work our way toward the exit. We did duck back in at the bottom of the 8th, when there was another three runs.
• In the top of the ninth, the Rays needed to hit in ten runs to tie it up. That didn’t happen.

Overall, not a bad game. Lopsided, but the Rockies are slowly growing on me, at least while they’re winning a few games. I’m sure that will change when we see them play the Yankees on Tuesday.

So I just got back to seeing the Rockies-Astros game. Rather than try to write this up in any cohesive way, you get a bulleted list:

• Coors Field is really nice. It does remind me a lot of Miller Stadium in Milwaukee, except if you’re sitting right of the plate, you see a giant mountain range on the horizon.
• The stadium is literally one block from my apartment. I cross one street, cross another, walk a block, cross a street, there’s the north entrance.
• I had to gimp in on the cane, but for whatever reason, that meant I did not get searched, while I watched a group of schoolchildren getting wanded.
• Aside from the typical hot dogs and cracker jack, there’s a microbrew attached to a semi-nice restaurant. I went there (because buying a bunch of to-go carryable food and a gallon of Coke in a giant bucket is a lot less fun when you have to carry it all in one hand) and I got a spicy buffalo and cheddar bratwurst. It wasn’t bad.
• My seats: extend the line from third to home in that direction, and I was 15 rows up from the wall. If you’re sitting down, the dugout is immediately to your right (I mean right across the aisle immediately) and half of your field of vision (to the left) is the net, but everything to the right is a really good view of the field.
• Walking down all of the steps to my seat was absolute murder. I knew two things: I could not under any circumstances go to the bathroom, and I would most likely be killed when trying to get out if I stayed the entire nine innings.
• Over half of the attendees were either geriatric or pediatric.
• I left the house and it was 60, so I wore a jacket. When I got to my seat, it was very hot and sunny, so I dropped the jacket and cursed the fact that I would be getting horribly sunburned. Seven minutes later, a cloud rolled in, it looked moments from a t-storm, and it was 60. Repeat this 297 more times.
• The game starts. I am amazed at how young NL players look. When I was a kid, the Astros looked like giants. Now they look like scrawny punks you’d see loitering outside of a 7-Eleven.
• They seem to change the ball out an insane number of times. I read somewhere it’s because of the humidity. They keep the fresh balls in a humidor.
• One of the first Colorado hits is a massive home run. Based on what John Sheppard has told me, I assume there will be about 28 more home runs this game, due to the altitude.
• …Well, except there is a freakish windstorm, and there are bursts of 20-25 mph winds going right at home plate. Hank Aaron could hit a full-on slam to the back wall and have it end up behind the umpire.
• Because of said winds, at least ten pop fly balls go up, behind the batter, over the net, and land within 20 rows of me. In good health, I probably can’t catch a pop fly if the ball’s painted orange, so I’m somewhat scared shitless since I can’t walk or run, I don’t have a glove, and it’s cloudy out. And given my luck, I absolutely know I will get beaned, and some other fuck will take the ball away from me.
• Of the women from age 20-40 ate the game, 95% of them have the same exact haircut.
• There’s a group of grumpy old men a few rows in front of me, all of them taking score on paper. At least one of the vendors knows them on a first-name basis.
• I really want to root for the Rockies, but they’re fairly pathetic. Houston scores four runs in two innings; the Rockies can’t even hit the ball, and it’s their stadium.
• A group of women in their early twenties sit a few rows behind me, at about the 5th inning, and they will not shut up. Their overly loud conversations were about the most inane things, and they were so stupid I don’t even remember. But when certain Rockies players came to bat, they would SCREAM AND SCREAM their names. Their first names, only. It was not based on most popular players - I think it was largely based on who they wanted to fuck. I would have assumed they worked at a tanning salon or something. But later I deduce from their excessively loud conversation that they are third-year medical students.
• The game got worse and worse, and I promised myself that if the Astros got ten points ahead, I would leave.
• Here’s where it gets interesting - Lance Berkman is at bat for the Astros. He swings, and loses his bat which HITS A BEER GUY IN THE BACK OF THE HEAD. Beer guy hits the deck, Coors is everywhere, and the crew of white-haired old ladies that check your ticket stubs freak the fuck out. They try to stop the game; cops are all over; paramedics jump out of nowhere; everyone is standing up to see if there’s anything cool to see. (The game does not stop, BTW.) One of the old ladies took the bat, and everyone in the section starts chanting “GIVE HIM THE BAT! GIVE HIM THE BAT!” I mean, if you get clocked in the head with a bat, you might as well get to take it home and put it on the bookshelf as a conversation piece, right? Also, everyone in the section started chanting for Berkman to apologize to the guy, and he didn’t. So everyone booed, and only because of the fact that nobody outside of our section could figure out what the fuck was going on, there was no riot.
• I decide maybe I should root for the Rockies.
• It looks like it’s about to pour rain, and I feel a drop or two. I also realize that it will take me 45 minutes to climb the stairs to the main level. See above comment about being trampled.
• Top of the 8th. 6-4 Astros. There’s no way they’re going to pull out of this one. I get up and leave.
• At home, I get on MLB.com. THEY PULLED IT TOGETHER IN THE LAST INNING AND WON 7-6!!! FUCK!!!
• From now on, I am not leaving a baseball game, even if it’s 28-1 at the bottom of the ninth and the stadium is on fire.

Just got back from the dentist. I’ve been having some fillings redone, and today was stuff on the back side of my top teeth. I’m totally numbed out, and can’t feel my top lip or the bottom of my nose. It’s very weird. This is a new dentist, which is actually in the building next to ours, which saves a lot of time. He’s also a pretty nice guy, and best of all, he’s in-network for my insurance, so everything is cheaper. While I do not love dentists, this one has been pretty good. My last dentist was a total shithole, and cost me a lot of time and money. Then when I moved and changed dentists, he still called me every day for a month trying to get me to come in for an appointment.

So here I am, a dreary Saturday afternoon, where the sky can’t decide on whether or not to start pouring. I haven’t eaten all day, and I’d love to now, but I’m afraid of chewing off my upper lip and not realizing it. Both Sarah and I have been low-level sick since we got back, probably a cold that was recycled in the plane’s air system, via the 28 unruly toddlers on the flight. I think I’m pulling out of it, though. Maybe I’d drink another orange juice if I wasn’t afraid of spilling it all over my shirt from the lack of drinking skills the novocaine brought on.

Oh yeah, and last night, I woke up at like four in the morning to get a drink. And we have one of those huge family-size jugs of PoM juice, the pomegrante juice that is supposed to miraculously cure your heart, and is overpriced accordingly. So I decide to drink a glass of that in my half-asleep state. And when I try to turn off the factory-sealed cap, my thumb goes through the outside of the shitty plastic jug, and bright red-purple juice explodes everywhere. And my first reaction was ‘duct tape’, but I couldn’t find any, and I also worried that the adhesive would contaminate the juice. So I got a giant glass and poured off the remaining stuff, so the liquid level was below the hole, and then I spent forever wiping up juice from everywhere in the kitchen. So the PoM corporation is getting a nastygram, when I get around to it. I hope at the very least they will send me a coupon, because that shit is expensive. I think it costs ten times as much as gasoline in Manhattan.

I have tickets to two baseball games in the near future. One is the Yankees-Twins game next weekend, and the other is a Mets game about two weeks later, and I forget who they are playing. (Wait, I just looked it up, and it’s the DC Nationals, aka the Montreal Expos revisited.) I don’t know why I’m suddenly so interested in baseball, other than that I enjoyed going to the game last week. I guess I also want to see a game in both stadiums before they get imploded and turned into parking lots for the new billion-dollar stadiums. It’s on the ever-growing-but-it-should-be-shrinking master list of shit we want to do in this city that we never do, even though we’ve lived here howevermany years. Yes, New Yorkers gag and retch at the idea of seeing the statue of liberty, but I don’t want to move away from here someday and never have seen it. There are a lot of things I wish I would have seen in Seattle before I left: a Mariners game in the Kingdome (RIP), the underground tour, about a million restaurants, the Boeing junkyard, and a bunch of other stuff. I can go back to do that, but why didn’t I do it when I lived there, and save me a thousand-dollar trip? So, it’s up to the Bronx to see the bombers, and out to Shea to see the blue, orange, and black.

(BTW, Jesus Christ, tickets are expensive, especially for the Yankees games. You can’t even get seats to the upcoming Red Sox series, unless you want to pay like a grand. The Twins tickets are in the second-to-top tier, and cost $126 for 2, courtesy of an online scalper. I’m fully expecting ten dollar cokes and 12.50 hotdogs when we get there.)

Okay, I need to look into some applesauce or something I can eat, because I’m starving.

[Before I begin, does anyone know anything about WiFi? I have a router next to my Mac, and when I’m in the next room on my laptop, I’m lucky to have it work for five minutes before the signal drops. When I have a signal, it’s 100% excellent, no problem, but then BAM it’s gone. This happens even if the laptop is physically touching the router. There are a lot of other routers in the building, and I’ve tried fucking with the channel settings a bit, but to no avail. This is extremely frustrating, because every page I’ve found on google says “well, have you tried moving into a cabin in the woods with no walls?” as like step one. I also don’t want to dump a lot of cash into repeaters or antennae just to find out it’s a fundamental problem of living in NYC with too many hotspots. Oh, and I mention all of this because I already wrote this entire entry, and on like the last word, the connection dropped, and then when I went to the other computer to fix it, it overwrote the backup file with a blank file. I was seriously on the verge of smashing my laptop into little tiny pieces with a hammer. I still might. Anyway.]

So I’m back from Milwaukee, and the trip went well. We spent a lot of time with Sarah’s family, and that was all good. We also went to the art museum (where Sarah’s dad works), Irish Fest, the public museum, a Brewers game, and did a lot of driving around and seeing all of the places where Sarah grew up. We also drove down to Kenosha to meet up with John Sheppard and his better half. It was a pretty packed 4-day weekend.

Milwaukee, to me, seems like a Chicago-lite. It’s smaller, and doesn’t have as many of the big things, but it’s also easier to get around, it’s cleaner, maybe a bit quieter, and more relaxed. But a lot of things remind me of the Chicago I knew as the kid, like the little corner bars with the giant Old Style signs out front, the giant, old brick factories and chimneys from the breweries, and the general feel of the place, the way houses are built and how stores are laid out. It really made me think back to my grandparents’ old neighborhood (which is Larry’s current neighborhood.)

The only time I’ve been to Milwaukee was for the metalfest, in ‘93. We drove by the big Eagles lodge that was the venue for that show, and I saw the only things I experienced on that trip: the hall, the street where Ray parked and we tried to sleep, the McDonald’s next door, and the quick pick minimart across the street. The other indelible event that I associate with Milwaukee is Jeffrey Dahmer’s capture. I remember in 1991, reading all of the news magazines in the Osco drug at Concord Mall, going over all of the facts of the butchery that he ran in his apartment. Turns out his lair at the Oxford Apartments on 25th and Kilborn was maybe three blocks from the metalfest. Oddly enough, when Sarah was born, her parents lived in a house just a couple of blocks down Kilborn. When we were driving around one night, we tried to locate the spot of his old apartment, but they tore it down years ago, and now it’s just a vacant lot with some old chainlink around it. Driving in the neighborhood was weird though, because I always pictured the area as an ultra-urban slum, like maybe where I lived in Washington Heights. But the neighborhood looked more like the rougher parts of Elkhart, by the projects.

The other big surprise was that I really enjoyed the Brewers game. I haven’t followed baseball since I was a kid, and even then it was only half-heartedly. I’ve never seen a professional game before, and this was my first. It was against the Astros, which is funny because my peewee league team was the Astrobowl Astros, and because of that, I was vaguely an Astros fan when they had the stupid-looking bright orange jerseys, the AstroDome (with AstroTurf), and Nolan Ryan on the mound. Now that all of that has changed, not really a fan, for whatever stupid reason.

We went with Sarah’s sister, and her boyfriend and group of friends that all had season tickets. We first went to their place and did some indoor tailgating, and they had some bratwurst grilling away in a soup of onions and peppers. Those were pretty much the best damn brats I’ve ever had, especially with some sauerkraut and a good bun. We ended up eating and listening to everyone’s bitchfest about the Brewers, and before long, we were into the first inning, but not yet at the stadium. We took off in different cars, and we paid the $12 for “preferred” parking. Dan and the others parked illegally at the back of the VA hospital for free, and we ended up walking up to the gate at the same exact time.

Miller Park is a pretty decent place to see a game. It has a retractable roof, modern seats and shops and all of that (no pee trough in the bathroom), and they have a lot of new LCD screens and score things everywhere, so you can always see all of the stats, and also keep up on other MLB games in progress. Lots of people were there. Lots of mullets. Lots of beer. I think I was the only sober person there, but that only added to the energy. I was surprised at how close we were for $38 seats, and watching a game in person is nothing like TV. In fact, watching on TV really sucks in comparison.

The game itself was sedate - it got tied at 2 by the second inning, and went on scoreless until the bottom of the 9th, when the Brewers got one in. But all of the little stuff made it interesting. Bernie Brewer, the mascot, slides down this huge slide whenever there’s a run. He used to slide into a giant beer mug, but I’m sure some parental nazi group got that taken out. There’s also the sausage race, where a group of people dressed as various kinds of sausages race across the field. (Italian sausage won.) The place went nuts when the first home run went over the wall. And at the very end, when they were getting everyone really riled up, they did this whole “more cowbell” thing on the video screen, playing the SNL sketch intercut with various home runs hit during the season, which was pretty hilarious. There were only 30,000 there, with a lot of empty seats at the top, but the crowd had a lot of energy (and a lot of beer), so it was a lot of fun.

Coincidentally, we were shopping at Target (so good to be out of NYC…) and I found a “more cowbell” CD, which has a dozen or so tracks featuring cowbell. It was a good buy at $8.99, although I’m a little don’t-fear-the-reapered-out for now.

Irishfest was also a blast. It’s the biggest one in the country, and it’s held at these fest grounds that are used for a lot of other festivals. So there were the same food courts and concert venues and all, but also a ton of tents selling Irish crafts and shirts and whatnot. I’d like to say I got some incredible food, but the lines were so long, I used the shortest-wait approach and grabbed a hotdog and fries. We saw two musical groups, one that was more drum-oriented, and we had a front-row seat for the Billy Mitchell Scottish group. They were bagpipes and drums, plus some dancing too. The whole thing reminded me of Simms and all of the times we watched So I Married an Axe Murderer. This alumnus of the group, who was 150% Scottish, was sitting behind us and making comments to a friend in his thick-as-hell accent, and it greatly tempted me to ask him to call Simms on the phone and leave a message on his machine, like “if it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!”

In Kenosha, we met with John and Helen at The Brat Stop, which was also had a pretty good bratwurst. I also had some fried cheese curds, and I’m glad they aren’t available here, or I’d be pricing out bypass surgery by now. It was good to see John again, and also good to see tons of cheese and Green Bay Packers stuff available. We also stopped at the Mars Cheese Castle. Unfortunately, this was not a castle made out of cheese, but rather a store that sells a ton of cheese. Fortunately, there were free samples. We also stopped at the largest grocery store I’ve ever seen in my life. It had a beverage section bigger than most groceries in New York. And if you have been to a super-huge Kroger in the Midwest, well this place’s freezer section was bigger than this. It was truly awesome, except I couldn’t bring any of it back on the plane, so it wasn’t.

And that’s all. Well, we went to the museums, and the art museum has a pretty funky building, with these big spines that open and close, and no right angles in sight. And we had a lot of food, which was good. And now I’m back to the daily grind. And no, we’re not moving to Wisconsin. (I still can’t believe I can’t write about anything without someone mis-reading an ulterior motive into it.)

Anyway, pictures on flickr. Back to work.