the grid.

this is for hales, i hope it makes you proud to be a new yorker. and it's not about baseball.

a must-watch, from the amazing new york: a documentary film:
manhattan's grid.

baseball.

you watch black and white film of the 1953 world series, and you think, that's so long ago. but then you think of how in the context of the history of the universe, that's, like, not even a second ago. then you notice, when you look beyond the black and whiteness, that the movements the players are making, the way the left-handers swing the bat - that sweet, buggy-whip, cracking in the air right in front of them, the way singles seem to drop in the outfield like accidents, the guy overrunning third base during a teammate's double, too eager to make it home, are all exactly like they are today, the game hasnt changed, no matter the giant outfield walls they had back then, or how no one wore batting gloves, and the men in the stands seemed to all be wearing bow-ties and straw hats.
and then you realize, this is why you love baseball. because 1953 to 2009, from your parents being little kids to you being a fucking adult, is no time at all to the universe really. and so we need to pool our eras together, and keep certain things alive throughout them, and do them the same, each and every generation, until the whole of it makes some mark, however minimal, in the fabric of time, all that infinite time. and baseball is a way of doing that, it's the kabuki we have in america, from the prairies to the los angeles canyons, to the asphalt fields in harlem, the solid sacrifice bunt - the barrel of the bat absorbing the ball like a peck on the cheek, to the sweet-spot-struck homerun, like releasing lightning from a bottle, it's always been like that, and i dont care how many people understand it, i dont care how much time there is between the spaces in the game, and how much space there is in the outfield and between the bases, that's why baseball is misinterpreted as slow. because, really, how fast could infinity ever seem?

untitled.

a cigarette upside down is like an exclamation point.

i flicked the ash too assiduously and the glowing cherry popped out.

she said, that means someone loves you.

it's me.

31 if.

i watch it as it loses form.

In first grade, he taught me how to stack the building blocks higher than I had been able to myself, sacrificing stability towards the top for ever-higher summits. The girls built sturdy, low-lying compounds, always with single entranceways. They seemed pedestrian. We erected undulating monoliths, avant garde towers that tried to emulate the impossibly giant buildings our fathers went to work in in midtown and down at the Battery, but that more closely predicted the Frank Gehry makeover that would come to the city years later. We'd build them as high as we could, and when Ms. Mellow told us playtime was over - we had to take them down - Roman would start deliberately deconstructing the blocks, while waiting for just the right time to give the bottom of a tower a subtle nudge with his velcro sneaker, sending the whole thing tumbling down in a terrifically loud crash.
The entire class would freeze.
'Roman!' Ms. Mellow would yell.
Shrugging, palms upturned, an expression that would have been purest innocence were it not for a deficit of blush in the cheeks: 'What?'
She could never prove a thing.

my insides crawl.

i said, they got something wrong with superman.
you said, what?
i said, it's cool that kryptonite is the only thing that can hurt him, but the problem is, he doesnt crave kryptonite. people have to hide it, and trick him into being near it. it's missing the human element of him feeling he needs it, gravitating to the one thing thatll kill him. it's too easy.
you said, well, it's from his home planet. maybe thats the metaphor theyre going for - his past is the only thing that can hurt him.
i said, good point.

untitled.

joseph campbell: now i just want to speak about the phases in the development of any mythology; how does it start and what happens to it. i think one can say this. that all of the high culchus, and low culchus, and primitive culchus, and charming, simple culchus, and great big enormous ones, have grown out of myths. they are founded on myths. and what these myths have given, has been inspiration, for aspiration.

the economic interpretation of history is for the birds.

economics is itself a function of aspiration. it's what people aspire to that creates the field in which economics works. and people who dont have any aspirations - you know - the problem of a businessman who cant get people to want anything.

it's the want. it's the aspiration. and what is wanted is not simply one, two, or three meals a day and a bed. that's not enough. it's gotta be much more than that, to make a life. now where do these aspirations come from? they come from a very wonderful, childlike thing. fascination.

...these fascinations are the creation of new activities.

i only date women from red states; what was first an observation became an instigation, and then, somewhere without my being consciously aware of it, became a preternatural intuition. the women i court, turn out, after the fact, to be from texas and florida and georgia.

i dont live in williamsburg anymore. that is not brooklyn. brooklyn is being one of only a handful of white people on the c train when you go home at night. tonite, i was one of two. and she got off before me. and i loved that.

im a sprinter - if not at heart, in muscle and gut memory. during high school, i used to crouch among countless black boys, bunched like eggs in cartons behind the starting line of the 50, in the armory on 168. that was an uncomfortable feeling of exhilaration that i felt more comfortable with than most any feeling i had felt before. i was a boy. and im younger now.

bruce springsteen: baby once i thought i knew. everything i needed - to know about you. sweet whisper, your tender touch.

i didnt really, know that much.

the guy sitting to my right on the c didnt look like 'an intellectual.' but in his lap was a wikipedia printout of singapore airlines flight 006.

On 31 October 2000, at 15:17 UTC, 23:17 Taipei local time, a Boeing 747-412[1] on the route attempted to take off from the wrong runway in Taipei during a typhoon, destroying the aircraft and killing 83 of the 179 occupants.

joke's on me, but it's - gonna be okay.

if i could. get through this lonesome day.

lonesome fall day.

yankees 10, angels 1.

how many angels can dance on the sweetspot of a-rod's bat?

nice and smooth: a-rod's bat is sweeter and thicker than a chico stick.

sweetspot bigger than prospect park in july. the angels, drunk on his sangria.

i saw your mother making a subway transfer in union square tonite. she was leaving the 4 with two friends and i was arriving with one memory. and i thought of you. (like i wasnt already.)

my sister recently said something about baseball that made me realize shes smarter than i am (and i liked that).

she said baseball doesnt need instant replay. it doesnt matter if an umpire gets a call wrong.

all that matters is that everyone is doing their thing.

baseball is not about the score. that's why it doesnt have a clock. it's about custom. tradition. it's people, not players. it's culture. it's culchu. it's myth.

stephen covey (paraphrased, as if he were talking about baseball - which he may as well be): it's about a compass, not a clock.

baseball tonite: johnny damon hit a grand slam against the yankees on this date in 04.

then - it made me literally sick to my stomach.

tonite - he hit a two-run homer for us. i yelped with joy and stood up and pumped my arm. alone in my apartment in real brooklyn. i dont think of him as a red sock anymore.

life is fluid.

palm l.o. hedcatt: due to intractability, it is incumbent upon you to ratchet down. (the only constant is change. change is intractable.)

i dont want to ratchet down.

i just want to ratchet up in the right places.

i dont know how things will be.

except i know theyll be different.

i cant wait. i can never wait.

fall is the only honest season. things are ripening and dying at the same time. green chlorophyll abandons leaves and reveals the colorful residues of their lives, like a cut reveals oxygenated red blood, the milk of life. fall is the delta of veins in your wrist: the image of it all at once, the cross-section, straight through the layers of life.

the chill in the air, as fresh on your skin as the day you were born.

the mecury's vertiginous improvisation is like a trombone.

the fall is jazz.

jazz is the most honest music. you dont know what will come next, but your intuition validates it after the fact. because maybe it knew it all along.

or maybe it didnt know it. but then, it knew that.

brooklyn is the fall of new york.

30 is the fall of life.

baseball is the only sport that awards its olive wreath in fall. the most honest crown.

me: i dont know how things will be.

except i know theyll be different.

i cant wait. i can never wait.