I used to write a lot

I used to write a lot in my about what the kids did when they lived at home. But I have never attempted to cover my wives' activities comprehensively.

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11/16/2002, Saturday. Photo shoot at Graceland Cemetery, a popular haunt for photographers.

The diary of doom. Packing, packing, packing.

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(11/15/2019, Friday) "Sheeleresque" (a la Charles Sheeler). The audio snapshot:

Lytton Strachey foxes Julianne Moore in Pedro Almodvar film

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**L'aventure dans le fediverse**.
Difficile de se faire une place. Ce qu'il crit a n'intresse pas, comme dans la vie relle. Il n'a pas d'amis, pas de copains et n'en a jamais eu. Alors pourquoi il espre en trouver ici Il n'a pas d'attrait. De physionomie il est repoussant parce qu'il croit avoir l'air dur, antipathique. Alors on fait mine de ne pas le voir et de ne pas l'entendre. Il est un mendiant de la relation sociale, ce mendiant qu'on ne voit pas dans

Packing and getting ready to move

Maybe if I spent some time somewhere I could actually see the real sky at night it would help me reset. Badwater Basin is starting to enter the cool season, and I have so missed it lately...

NGL, it getting almost dark at 4 PM is rough after having spent much of my summer north of the arctic circle. Could fall asleep in my car and get a suntan the whole time, but now It gets so dark and my body is like "huh what is this".

The big news!!!!

This image defined the times, and even more so now. (11/12/2016): J.G. Ballard's line from the novel High-Rise came to mind as being in the "gap": "Looking up at the endless tiers of balconies, he felt uneasily like a visitor to a malevolent zoo where terraces of vertically mounted cages contained creatures of random and ferocious cruelty."

Kim Gordon and the machines of torture

I get massages, I get voice lessons, I ride my bike, I go to tai chi class, I drive my car, I get little presents, I watch movies, I go to the gym, I rest in bed...*nothing* works. I can never really get any better.

I get a massage, string up some happy festive lights in my room (with a view of the ocean), put a good movie on, have a good dream...only to *still* wake up with blood pouring out of my nose, after the sleep I got wasn't very good. I feel so finished.

Cleaning up and podcasting. Thats what Sundays are about right

I'm back on the again after a couple of weeks away I'm looking this time at , thanks to some observations from Thomas Mallon and douard Louis.

Today's diary... Tiago is back.

Some diary juxtapositions over 110 years.

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ergnzt
7. November 2024 - Es geht weiter
3) 09:45 Uhr. Die FDP-Staatssekretre Hocker, Lukzic und Kluckert verlassen das Verkehrsministerium
2) - 09:00 Uhr: Scholz-Berater Jrg Kukies, bisher Beamter im Kanzleramt, soll neuer Finanzminister werden
1) - 08:45 Uhr: Volker tritt aus der aus und bleibt

Last presidential election, I went off on a horse ride to calm my nerves...how I wish I had the time to do that now...

Painting is Charles Burton Barber's "No Ride Today".

TFW you've got to go to a manicure, weightlifting at the gym, an acting class, another acting class, the voting booth, and then a dance party all in the space of two days...and you barely even feel like getting out of bed. That would be me today.

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The small reading group I'm in discussed Shakespeare's Sisters by Ramie Targoff.

We agreed it was difficult to keep the four women discussed straight, especially since, even though it seemed to be out of necessity, Targoff switches between their stories throughout the book.

However, we were able to pull out and examine the most interesting nuggets and appreciate that this book resurfaces women writers from the Renaissance that have fallen victim to the same fate of so many other women of history.

Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Anne Clifford all contributed to the lineage of women writing in English by stepping outside of society's expectations for them, whether it was writing extensively about their own lives, being "firsts" in publishing a certain genre, focusing on women protagonists, and even claiming credit for what they wrote.

They all also had interesting lives outside of their writing, and we are lucky to have so many documents about them to enable writers such as Targoff to piece them together to arrive at a narrative.

Interesting thing about :

If you have a song like The Reason, itll be sorted to R section instead of T but another song like Sweet Child of Mine, it stays in S section.

Not sure how alphabets work at Apple Park :/

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11/1/2020 Postscript: If youre 18 in 2024 you probably cant conceive of whats actually happening now in the US and globally. Its a good time to get nerdy about history.

And so ends another season of baseball. 162 games scheduled and 162 games played. Collectively, 2,430 games were played this season. I that baseball was the game of my youth. I collected cards, memorized stats, went to games, and even played some myself. But in 1994, I fell out of love with the whole enterprise with the Strike and the cancellation of the World Series that year. My return to the game has been in fits and starts, but 2024 was the season when I really began to feel some of that old yearning for the game rekindling in my old heart. The excitement to see records made and broken, and following the rhythms of the season, from streaks and slumps, to blowouts and blowups.

I didnt plan it or set out to say, This is the year I get back into baseball.

It just happened.

I went to my first ballgame when I was 7 years old. I watched the Cubs play the Braves at Wrigley Field. This was before the lights. The Braves won 7-5. I still have the program for the game where my Dad kept score. Its not the fancy multi-page programs with full color photos on glossy stock that you may see these days. Its just a simple bi-fold on heavy stock with the rosters of each team on one side and a scoring table on the other. The only color is on the cover, which is a stylized rendering of a man sliding into second base.

After that game, I decided my favorite player was Bill Buckner, a first baseman who got a hit that day. Dont ask me for any reasoning behind that decision. The workings of my 7 year old brain are a mystery, even to me. Maybe I liked the direct, alliterative name. Ive always been partial to those, so maybe it was that. Whatever the case, Bill Buckner was it. My baseball card from my T-Ball days bears witness to this fact.

Then 1986 happened. By this time, wed moved again to the expansive confines of Norfolk, Virginia within Hampton Roads metroplex of Southeastern Virginia. They had a AAA team affiliated with the New York Mets at the time called the Tidewater Tides. They played at Met Park, whose dimensions were the same as those at Shea Stadium where the Mets played. This is where I became a Mets fan and my allegiance shifted to Dwight Gooden.

It was in the 1986 World Series where Mookie Wilson hit a ball right-up the first base line to the awaiting glove of Bill Buckner, who through the vagary of chance failed to put his glove down completely on the ground, allowing the ball to roll past him to give Mookie the hit. This started a chain reaction of events that ultimately led to the Mets winning the game and the World Series itself.

With my minor league team linked to these Mets, they had my allegiance for the rest of the 1980s. But then the Atlanta Braves came along in the 90s to steal my attention.

Id seen most of the Braves pitching staff and many of their players come up through the Richmond Braves, who were the cross-state rivals of the Tides that came through town all the time. I saw the most dominant pitchers of that age just humble the hometown team, but became a fan of them at the same time and rooted for the Braves up until 94 and the Strike.

One of the effects of traveling around so much as a kid (and later as an adult), is a kind of rootlessness and the feeling that you dont really belong anywhere. I was from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, leading to an eclectic mishmash of accents, idioms, and sports team affiliations. I consider myself from Norfolk, mostly because its where I lived the longest as a kid, and its where most of the important milestones of childhood and my teen years happened. But we didnt have a major league team of any kind around us, and it was a Navy town, so everyone from around the country (and the world to an extent) all lived in the same place, denying it any real depth of cultural identity or team loyalties.

So most of the sports teams I followed were based more on key personal events than anything else. I liked the Cubs because that was my first baseball game. I liked the Mets because my hometown team was affiliated with them and they came through every year to play an exhibition game. I liked the Braves because Id seen many of their players and I was impressed by their ability.

But I never had any strong feelings towards them. I was happy when they did well, but I had no real emotional investment in any of them. I held a much more ecumenical view of things, as my true heart belonged to the sport itself more than any individual team. I tended to be a fan of players, rather than the livery they were wearing at the time.

Now in the warm September of my years, I felt the old pull of my youth tugging at me again. Nostalgia for me is painful a bittersweet longing for places I can never revisit and people I can never see again. I do my best to resist the siren song of sentimentality beckoning me to come and wallow in its inviting, shallow waters that feel like a warm embrace, but provide no comfort or relief, only a deepened sense of emptiness and loss.

But Ive hit the time of my life where the long years of striving is ended. I did what I set out to do and Ive accomplished everything I wanted. Ive traveled and lived around the world, met Presidents and Kings, and participated in history. The family is grown and while my labors have far from ended, their only purpose is to provide for the necessities of life. Any sense of personal investment is gone and many of the things that I set aside have risen again in my mind, beckoning a return to the simple pleasures of my youth. Not out of any sense of nostalgia or vain attempts at recapturing moments that can never return, but to just do the things that made me happy.

Among these is baseball. Of all the loves of my youth, this is the one that caused the deepest hurt in my heart, but time, experience, and plenty of therapy have granted me a measure of equanimity and the ability to just let things go. I live in Southern California now, which interestingly is the first place I actually chose to live. Every other place Ive lived in was a decision made by the government or through forced circumstance.

The great thing about the region is it has an embarrassment of sports teams. While I dont think Ill ever feel like Ill really belong, Ive definitely insinuated myself here and its dovetailed with my renewed interest in baseball. Weve got the Angels and Dodgers here, and while Ive been to a few Angels games and I dont have anything bad to say about them, I threw my lot in with the Dodgers.

I take that back, theres one thing that really bugs me about the Angels theyre in Anaheim. In Orange County. Yet they call themselves the Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim). I cant abide such blatant falsehoods and I wonder just who on earth this bit of chicanery is meant for. Everyone who lives here knows theyre not in LA or LA County, so the name can only be for people who dont live here and why would they care either way They ought to just go back to being the California Angels. Everyone was happy with that back then. They made movies about them and everything. Now theyre just kinda there and known more for wasting a generational talent and getting me free medium fries from McDonalds when they win a game.

But the Dodgers To a kid growing up on the East Coast, they were synonymous with LA and California. Fernando. Tommy Lasorda. Vin Scully. There was always a romantic notion of California born of TV and movies, and the Dodgers got wrapped up in all of that as well. And while the real world is obviously far from that concocted illusion, it had completely captured my imagination as a kid and its hold is so strong that I can never shake it.

I dont think its just me, either. I think a lot of people here live in two Californias the one we deal with every day and the romantic ideal of our imagination. Every time you get beat down by the traffic or the receipt at the grocery store, all it really takes is that one perfect sunset and the California of the mind re-asserts itself again for a while longer. There is magic here fleeting, near insubstantial, and elusive. But every once in awhile you have it in your grasp for just a moment and gifted a glimpse of Paradise before it flits away.

At any rate, when I moved out here, everyone was a Dodger fan unless they lived in Orange County (which I dont), so I figured why not. Theyre a team with a storied history with an equally historic ballpark, and if I was to be a true southern Californian, I was gonna be a Dodger fan.

I didnt jump in whole hog, but mostly in fits and starts. I thought it was odd the Houston Astros seemed to have the Dodger batters dialed in and then it came out that they were cheating, which not only offended whatever sense of justice was left in me, it revealed something else to me I was mad on behalf of a baseball team. I was in it.

I still didnt really get into the weeds until the pandemic season of 2020, when I was stuck at home and didnt have much to do except hang out with my family and listen to baseball games on the radio. Most of the games were being played during the day, so I ended up listening to almost every game that season while assembling puzzles, cooking, or re-arranging the house. With the shortened season and day games, I was able to really dial into the rhythms of the players and begin to understand the game management philosophy of Dave Roberts, the Dodgers manager.

By the time the post-season came around, I knew these players. I had a feel for how their at-bats would go in various situations (the types of pitches they bit on, what they tended to do when down in the count, etc) and also a good picture for when Roberts would yank a pitcher and why. It was the first time Id watched a World Series in maybe 25 years where I was completely dialed in and invested in at least one of the teams.

And then they won. And I was finally, completely, a Dodger fan. I bought a hat and got a T-shirt.

Over the following years, I attended games, bought merch and got excited when they signed Ohtani in the off season. After that, I followed this team more closely than previous years, and after attending probably the , I knew this team was something special.

They even had a Mookie.

And so the season ended and the Dodgers once again won their Division, heading into the post-season amidst a mix of hope and hesitation theyve been one of the best teams in baseball for the last ten years, but they were never quite able to get over that hump and win the whole fucking thing outside the pandemic season, which a lot of people dismiss.

After getting into a 0-2 hole against the Padres, there was a feeling of here we go again. The Padres have been the Nemesis these last few years, bouncing the Dodgers out in the first series of the post-season, but then something new happened.

The Dodgers bats woke up. Freddie Freeman, playing on a bum ankle and gutting his way through the post-season, became Mr. October and delivered clutch hits again and again, including the sweetest grand slam Ive ever seen in Game 1 of the World Series. The Dodgers rolled the Yankees 4 games to 1 and finally won in a full season, fulfilling all the expectations of the last decade and cementing Dave Roberts as one of the most exceptional managers of our times.

Amid the exultation and celebration, the season is now ended and we are bereft until Opening Day next Spring. The days will be shorter, football will assume its preeminence in the calendar, and the world will continue to turn about its axis.

Im extremely happy I returned to baseball and fortunate to follow one of the best teams in recent memory, who delivered real magic this year and enriched my life in many ways this season, providing a soundtrack to my summer and delivering fantastic experiences for me and my family. I wouldve been poorer for having missed it.

#Baseball #Diary #Dodgers #PersonalHistory #Tides

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Now brainstorming: a career as an actor. Didn't think I'd move to LA and try to make it in Hollywood, but at this point I've got little to lose and nothing to do...so why not

Going to get myself another round of PRF for my under-eyes (those dark circles are coming back...ugh), and a chemical peel for my face. My lymphatic drainage facial the other day has already worked wonders, so I think before long I might be in good shape from head to toe.