Mad-Town

There's nothing like a road trip, especially if it takes 3 hours of driving or less.

Fortunately for me, my buddy Al from b-school lives up in Madison, Wisconsin, home of the University of Wisconsin, thousands of hotties, and cheap beer. Al is always ready for guests, as his penchant for misbehavior and debauchery is strongly akin to mine, and he's in a great place to excercise his party muscle.

I spoke with my buddy Seamus, who's been dying to get up there. He found out at the last second that he had to work that night. That sucks.

Then my sister called and made some shitty comments when I mentioned that I wanted to go look at a bar up there. She snapped at me and I snapped back, and in the end she played the innocent. What a crock of crap.

Within seconds of hanging up on my sister, my mom called. (will I ever be old enough that my sister doesn't go run to ma every time someone/something pisses her off? I doubt it.) My mom launched into an absolute ass-ripping, and I'll spare all the details but to say that she has a hard time respecting me and that I'm a huge disappointment. She finished the call by saying, "Have a good time in Madison." I replied, "Have a good time in Madison?! I think I'm going to go kill myself!" I mean, have a great freakin' weekend!

Now that I had the motivation to prove that I could do something right, I threw my toothbrush and a flask of Ketel One into my bag and left. It was a little after 5, so I told Al I'd be there before 8. He said to call me when I got into the city, and that he'd direct me to whichever bar he was at.

Unfortunately, I forgot that it was the mother of all traffic weekends: Memorial Day. Everybody and their mother was on the tollroad up to Lake Geneva and the other resort towns in southern Wisco, so I was pretty screwed. What is typically a two-and-a-half hour car trip increased by an hour, so it was almost 9 when I showed up to the bar.

I was pissed as hell that I was so freakin' late. When I walked up to the Red Room, I immediately ordered Jaegerbombs and a Millter Lite--and did the same thing again about 10 minutes later. Al's roommates, Sampson and Brock, were staring at me in shock. "Dude, you're going to be on the floor if you keep it up like that," Sampson said. "You're a nice guy, Sampson, but you obviously don't know shit about me! Watch and learn!"

To be honest, I was nominally drunk (but not at all shitfaced) when we left the Red Room after about a half hour. I could feel the drinks sloshing around my empty stomach, but I was in no way drunk.

We went next door to Wondo's, which is a fairly typical college bar: hot waitresses, slutty patrons, lots of booze--my kind of joint. We started doing shots immediately, and I bet Sampson that I could rack up a $30 bar tab in under a half hour. (That doesn't sound like that much money, but remember: this is Wisconsin, not Chicago or New York.) Needless to say, I finished off the 8 drinks necessary to exceed our bet, and at that point I was starting to feel drunk.

Just then, a somewhat attractive blonde and brunette started sidling up to us, asking us for drinks. "Drinks? No chance," I said. "Show us your tits," Al said. Believe it or not, this is how easy the girls are in Madison: they were much, much, MUCH more offended that I turned down their demand for drinks than they were at Al's request.

The blonde girl was Wisconsin attractive, which means very flawed but very nice. It turned out she's also a big Star Wars fan, so we talked about Revenge of the Sith, and what she liked and didn't like about it. She said I reminded her of Anakin Skywalker. Funny: others have likened Drunken Pat more to Darth Vader.

After a little more Red Bull, the girl was starting to look downright attractive, in spite of her flaws. When she asked me if I wanted to try a fish bowl, I assumed it was some weird sex game or something, so I said, "Hell yeah!" and headed for the door. "Hey!" she said. "What about the fish bowl?" I sheepishly walked back over to the bar, confused as to why she and I weren't on our way to some bizzarre curled-up position in her dorm room.

I got back to the bar in just enough time to see the bartender hand her a rather literal fish bowl filled with some sort of blue liquid, ice, and about 10 straws. She said, "Here, have a taste." Taste? I don't taste; I chug. About halfway through the fishbowl (or at least 10 ounces of that crap), I still had no idea what it was. Just then Drunken Al started pulling on her shirt, and she reeled back with, "Hey! I'm not that kind of girl!" and immediately thereafter, "Oh my god, you drank like half of it already! You're screwed!" I mumbled something like, "Do you want to do the screwing?" when she and the fishbowl were pulled away by a short, fat blonde with big boobs. "Wench!" drunken Al screamed after her. She stopped and said, "Who's a wench?" But Al said, "Ah, screw them!" And they stumbled off.

We took that as a sign to resume the bar crawl, and we went all over the place. I lost track of how many bars we hit, but I remember somewhere in the vicinity of five or six, with multiple drinks at each. The fishbowl had, indeed, screwed me.

It was at Madison Avenue that I had the great pleasure of seeing Brock--who had been sitting off to the side most of the night in an early and vaginal drunken stupor--intentionally drop his beer so that he would not have to drink it. "What'd you do that for?!" Al screamed. "I don't want it, man. Screw that beer." He was completely done. I remember him suddenly not being there a few minutes later, presumably on his way home.

Then we went to Mad Hatter's, truly a sign of how drunk we were. It's a dump, impressive only for its hot barmaids and cheap pitchers of beer. We definitely did not need cheap pitchers at that point, but that's exactly what we had. Al happens to be in love with one of the bartenders there, but she was unfortunately not working. Ah well, we had a shot in honor of how hot she is anyway. Then a pitcher. And another shot. And a final pitcher. I started to hit on a hot girl with a big-ass blonde pony tail. She was very tall and receptive, but the wanna-be-her-boyfriend she got stuck out with on a date apparently didn't take to me too much. Well, fuck him, I kept hitting on her anyway, as Al and Sampson (Brock must have been safely tucked in at that point) took turns corralling him and buying him drinks so as to distract him. The girl was hot, but I was teetering on the edge of blackout, so I don't remember how (or why, or if) our conversation ended. By the time Al declared that it was time for food, I was a fucking mess. I could have been easily persuaded to join the Army, that's how hammered I was.

I have the vaugest whisps of recognition of being at BW3, a buffalo wing specialy chain. (It's owned the same guys who run the restaurant of the same name on Lincoln Ave.). Al said I mumbled incoherence, something like, "I need more cigarettes." With that, I stumbled out into the streets, a wild and loose maniac in a city all but totally unfamiliar to me.

I remember breaking up two guys who were on the verge of brawling; they gave each other a big hug and admitted they were just drunk (as I suspected). I somewhat remember going back into Mad Hatter's to resume hitting on the hot blonde, but I can't say for sure how long I was in there. I remember walking down the street, and I remember thanking the stars it wasn't raining. I remember it being about 2 in the morning.

Then, total darkness.

Next thing I knew, it was 5 in the morning, and I was standing in front of a gas station. I ran my fingers through my hair and, OUCH!, discovered a bumb the size of a baseball on the back of my head. I realized just then that the left side of my jaw was rather tender, and the area where the jaw met the right ear hurt as well. These injuries combined to create a freight train of pain that suddenly came flying forth into my head. I stood there for a moment, trying to get my shit together. Amazingly, I still had my watch, wallet, all credit and ID cards, and car keys.

My cell phone was dead, so I went into the gas station to buy some cigs and use the phone. The poor high school kid stuck working the late shift looked terrified. I was, of course, the kindest patron imaginable; it's just that he had to deal with Drunken Pat. He's never seen anything like it, and I doubt he ever will. Thankfully, Al had left me about 10 messages on voicemail with his street address. If he hadn't done so, I would have had no way of getting in touch with him, would have probably ended up spending the night in a hotel downtown, and might never have tracked down my car.

A cab showed up and asked me how to get to Al's house, and I started laughing. "Look, lady, this is my second time here, I just drove in 8 hours ago, I've got a bump on my head the size of a grapefruit, and I don't know where I've been for the last three hours. Call me crazy if I ask you to handle navigation duties." She gave me an evil look, and put the car in gear.

Of course, Al lives nowhere near the downtown bars, and I'm pretty sure I passed out on the ride. The cabbie wanted to help me in, but I told her to go find some other drunk to get home safely.

The doors of Al's house were all locked. Crap. I tried the garage code, which I found out later that I had remembered it correctly. Unfortunately, I totally lacked the motor functionalities required to type use the keypad. So I went around to the sliding door in back, and started wailing on the door. Angus the dog ran up and started barking. Thank god. One of those idiots should wake up. Sure enough, Sampson pulled the door aside and exclaimed, "Oh my god, bro, you look like shit!!! Get onto the couch!"

I dutifully dropped onto the couch, but Angus was intent on getting some action off me. I kept trying to throw him to the floor, but he was persistent as hell. Earlier in the night, I'd mentioned to Al that I thought he was crazy for not getting Angus' balls clipped, that there would be negative repercussions. Sure enough, I found myself being raped by a teenaged English Mastiff. After a few minutes of wrestling a canine, I had enough. I stumbled into Al's room, made sure the dog (and his libido) stayed in the hall, and passed out on the empty half of Al's bed.

The next morning, after universal declarations of amazement at my ability to find my way to safety in a strange city while completely blacked out, we attempted to dislodge from my mind the details of the night. We were wholly unsuccessful.

Al and I planned on stopping by my family's golf course in Kenosha, which Al had never seen. Neither of us had figured, however, to have first-class hangovers all morning. We didn't even leave Madison city limits until 2, and I was still in considerable disarry at that advanced hour. My head was throbbing, from the dual blow of hangover and mystery bump.

Before heading to golf, we stopped by a hot tub warehouse in West Allis, a suburb of Milwaukee. Al is intent on making his back porch the center of the Madison social universe, so he became very intently engaged in conversation with the fat-ass pool salesman. I stood there for about ten minutes until an enormous wave of nausea began to brew. I hustled back to the car, jacked the seat all the way back, and calmly talked myself down from puking. Abe finally knocked on the window, and said, "Sack up, Sleeping Beauty. I'm following you." We got back on the road and into Kenosha in no time.

Upon arriving at the course, I took reams of crap from the regulars (who were, needless to say, drunk) about how terrible I looked. I made them feel the still massive bump on my head (they were appalled), and I bought them a round of beers.

Though I own a golf course, I never took to the game but as a consolation prize, I've become the greatest golf cart driver in the history of man. Al's becoming a bit of a golf fanatic, and he flew through a nearly emptry 18 holes in (I'm not kidding) 2 hours. It was like speed golf. He didn't even bother to keep score.

We tossed about business ideas, as often happens on the golf course, and Al nagged at me to get my real estate license and move up to Madison. Seriously, if I move up there and maintain my current level of party, I would die of liver cancer within a year. But he's got some wild-sounding ideas that he always seems to make happen. I'm going to take the test, and maybe we'll just try to do business from two different cities. I know he's done a number of deals in Chicago already, so maybe we'll step it up down here. Maybe we'll both just split time between here and there. That's where we left it.

On the 18th green, I asked Al to toss me his cell phone so I could check my messages. I had three messages. The first two were Drunken Al mumbling his address. The third was the keeper.

"Hi, Pat, it's Maria. I'm just calling to see if you're still alive and got home okay, so give me a call. Hope you're okay. Bye."

I fell onto the grass laughing my ass off, as I threw the phone to Abe. He too started laughing hysterically. I guess I hooked up with a girl named Maria. (I hope it was good--not that it matters.) Unfortunately, because my phone was out of batteries, it didn't register her number in caller i.d., and she didn't leave her number. I'd love to find out a) if I had been able to perform with any semblance of skill in that state, and b) if she knew how I'd gotten the nasty bump on my head. The answer lies in Maria, but Maria lies in shadows.

We took my car to the cheap cigarette gas station at Sheridan and Russell, and did some browsing in my favorite porn shack, Sheridan News and Video. Then we picked up Al's car again back at the course. He was meeting up with his old roommate in Chicago, and he told me to call or stop by when I cleaned up. We followed each other for most of the way down, until Al pulled off onto the Edens. I took the tollroad past O'Hare, because you can drive so much faster on the tollway.

With my head still pounding something awful, I was lucky to make it across the street from my garage to my building. I got into my place at 8:56, almost exactly 24 hours after I had arrived in Madison, and I didn't even have the energy to take a shower. I was asleep before the clock said 9.

Mad-Town is pretty awesome.

Tuesday's Cubs Game

My buddy Seamus came over after work, to perform our "let's go to every Cub night game" ritual. We pounded a couple quick beers and smoked a few cigs, then unexpectedly the cleaning ladies showed up (ahem, three hours late), which forced us to move our micro-wrecking crew down to Pippin's. After listening to a short Ecuadorian guy piss and moan about his diswashing job in Spanish (which neither I nor Seamus understood in the least), we headed back to my place for a few more beers. I was very insistent that we ought pound three beers between the Chicago and Addison Red Line stops, to break up the boredom of that awful (ha ha) fifteen minute train ride to baseball-land. A lady came up to me and said, "There are narcs everywhere." We kind of blew her off, trying to keep the beers on the d.l.

Not surprisingly, however, we were ticketed for public consumption and disorderly conduct within seconds of stepping off the El car. "That sucks," I thought to myself. As we sat on the granite benches in same, the officer actually apologized for writing us up, and he said he thought our self-flagellations were hysterical. I don't remember exactly what sort of scene we made as we waited for our background checks to be called in, but I'm glad the armed gorrilla didn't take offense at our offensiveness. At one point, though, Seamus blurted out, "What the fuck are you lookin' at," to a kid in a Jeff Gordon shirt. As a die-hard Tony Stewart guy, Seamus despises everything to do with Jeff Gordon.

After receiving our copies of the citations, we scalped the best seats in the house--4th row directly behind first base--and, after drinking four beers and chain smoking for three innings, we only ended up sitting in our seats for just 4 outs. My memory became a bit hazy at that point, but I remember Seamus swearing at guys who were swearing, because there were children nearby. I was very drunk and confused about what was happening, so I said, "What in the fuck is going on right now?! I AM SO FUCKING DRUNK AND CONFUSED!" One of the fathers then turned around and yelled at us to leave, shouting, "My kids don't need to learn how to swear from some drunk assholes at the fucking Cubs game!" Funny, that's how I learned how to swear. We were way too drunk to pay attention to the game, and our neighbors completely hated us, so it was time to move downstairs for better alcohol access.

After stumbling around the concourse and holding court with various friends for an hour, we passed a girl who was wearing a Jeff Gordon hat and jacket. Merely seconds before, Gordon had finished possibly the single worst rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" in the history of Wrigley Field--people were booing his inability to remember the most basic things about the tune, like not knowing the song begins with "Take me out to the ballgame". Watching that little prick stand there like a dope, trying to find a clue in his tele-promp-ter, nervous as hell that the 40,000 downstairs would happily tear him to shreds--the whole scene was beyond awful.

Seamus walked up and said something like, "So you're really into Jeff Gordon, huh?" which prompted this chick go on and on about how she thinks Jeff Gordon is the cutest guy of all time, Seamus abruptly cut her off by slurring, "Hey, he's around here somewhere. Why don't you see if you can stalk him down and ask him if he'll suck YOUR dick?" Thankfully, her large-ish boyfriend was completely stunned speechless, and we slipped into the flow of humanity and away from them without an incident.

A couple minutes later, standing at a concession stand behind home plate, I started hitting on a really slutty looking girl who was standing in a beer line with some homo-ish pretty boy. I don't hesitate to flirt with any and all women, because fuck it--have you ever met a single girl? Hell no. Chicks are never single--they just wait to jump from one guy to the next, like the fabulous little tree monkies they are.

At first the girl said she was the dude's girlfriend, then she backed off from that line and said he was really her brother. I took this as a sign of improving the chances of trading fluids with her. The guy, it turns out, was relatively sackless and and said nothing as I hit on the girl, so whatever their relationship was, it was clear he was not going to get with her. We started with the typical, "What's your name? Where are you from? Are you tits real?" Much to my dismay, I forget the entire conversation. I think she might have been on something, but weren't we all?

Out of the blue, slutty girl said, "Wanna go fuck in the bathroom?" I put my arm around her and started off toward the bathroom. She pulled up short halfway there, so I said, "A hot girl asked a severely shitfaced guy if he wants to go fuck in the bathroom. How'd you think I was going to respond?!" She started to say something about how embarassing it'd be to screw in front of all the people in the bathroom, but I cut her off by jamming my tongue down her throat, right there in the concourse under Wrigley. Classy.

The game ended right about then, so after openly burning as the crowd filed out, the slutty girl, the dude, Seamus, and I headed over to Bernie's. I promptly ordered three screw-top bottles of beer--one for each of my pockets and one to drink. (The beers didn't last in my pockets very long.) I figure I was just shy of 20 beers by the end of the game, so those extra beers really laid on the haze. I lost track of myself for about an hour, and so was pleasantly surprised when I came out of my blackout, standing outside the front door of the bar. I looked in and saw that Seamus was now taking his turn at making out with the slutty girl. I was pissed for a second or two, that that bastard had pimped my perviously claimed turf.

Then the memory of where I had been for the last hour came rushing to mind: I had just puked my ass off in the bike check building next to the park. Accepting that my chances of going over there and pimping the girl back from my buddy were low, I cursed the vomit smeared all over my pants for putting me in such a helpless predicament and walked back into the bar.

I made the only reasonable move one might expect given the circumstances: I pounded three Jagerbombs, ostensibly in an effort to kill the puke taste in my mouth. The first was rough, the second one barely made it down, and the third lasted about thirteen seconds, at which all that brown liquid (and more) went flying right back into the bar from whence they came. Oops. Not a problem--I know the guys who own the bar, and they already hate me. Before last night's game, in fact, one of my buddies who bounces there stopped a new guy who'd asked for our IDs and said, "Hey, hey, you don't card these guys. They're Class-C celebrities around here." Class-C indeed.

The next thing I knew, Seamus was lobbing french fries at me, and I was sprawled out on a bench at the McDonald's on Clark. In a stunning retaliatory maneuver, I grabbed a burger and took a run at him, smeared the food all over his face and hair, and a wrestling match ensued. We were down on the ground beating the crap out of each other for several seconds, when an orca-fat McDonald's employee thundered towards us, screaming away like a banshee and interjecting her fat arms to separate us. After I caught my breath for a second, I unexpectedly found myself launching a full cup of Coke at the lady. She was screaming in fury as we sprinted onto the street. There's a strong chance that the McDonald's incident was videotaped by a security camera of some sort. I would have loved to get a copy of it, because I bet it's hysterical.

We jumped into a cab which was (thank Christ) driving past the McDonald's as we ran out. Upon entering the cab, we began to rant like champs about everything under the sun--drinking and puking, how bad the Cubs were, our obsession with tits and ass, and how slow the no-good cabbie shitfuck was driving. I must have really pissed the guy off, because the next thing I know, the guy was going about 100 m.p.h. down Lake Shore Drive. He turned around and screamed at me, "Is this fast enough for you?! Is this fast enough for you, you motherfucker?!" I rolled down the window and stuck my torso out of the window, howling like a deranged lunatic, loving every second of it.

Upon pulling up to my building, we discovered merely $4 between us--not nearly enough to cover the Wrigleyville-Gold Coast ride. So I whispered to Seamus, "Scatter NOW!" With a shrug over his left shoulder, he says, "I'm going back thattaway." We bolted out of the car and took off running--he in a ridiculously zig-zagging gait back down Chestnut Street (the cabbie didn't throw it in reverse and run him over, which was a very definite and horrifying possibility at that point), while I bolted up a ramp into a parking garage. It seemed like we made it home unschated.

I got upstairs to my place a couple minutes later and found that Seamus had beaten me home. (I don't know exactly how, but I also don't remember how long exactly it took me to stumble five hundred feet home, but he beat me.) He was passed out on the floor in front of my apartment, leaning his back against the door. He had also, to his great misfortune, just finished pissing himself. Also, he was mumbling something or other about Mexicans, but I couldn't hear what that was all about because I was laughing so hard. He got up from the lake of pee, I got him settled on the couch, and he passed out. I, unfortunately, didn't even have time to empty my pockets before proceeding to vomit my brains out in the bathroom for about two hours.

That was only Tuesday. I've been on a solid 5-day-out-of-6 day bender since Friday (Monday was an off-day), and I figure that span saw me consume a minimum of 100 units of alcohol. I'm sure that those stories are bad; too few of those memories have returned from the ether to write them down just yet, but Tuesday's Cubs game was a pretty awesome time all by itself.

Steeples and Such

There are so many churches in Chicago. It's really incredible. On my walk around the neighborhood today, I must have passed 50 sacred sites from every denomination and culture under the sun.

In today’s day and age, we're constantly challenged to find better ways of doing things. It sometimes forces us to change things that we became accustomed to over time, even if certain of those things we were accustomed to worked just fine. Somehow, we’re lead to believe that evolution must be the great end-all. The attitude toward most things is, "Let's tear it down, because that will make it better."

Churches stand for tradition, which is obviously the polar opposite of change. Religion exists to be a rock of faith and community during times of uncertainty. The world has changed a lot over the centuries, and religion always manages to weather the storm. Like the Dead said, "Believe it if you need it, if you don't just pass it on." Right now, I unfortunately don't feel the need for religion, but I know I can have it when I need it. But there are things about religion that are cripplingly disappointing to me.

Since I was raised in the Catholic community, I can speak to that creed with great insight. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think some of my basic issues apply in many ways to other faiths as well. In my opinion, the Catholic faith (and other religions, for that matter) went terribly awry when it chose to liberalize. I would be more inclined to ingratiate myself with the traditions if there were more real traditions to speak of. Latin masses represented a kind of secret language at a club meeting, which I would find appealing. (I sat through a bit of a Latin mass at the Vatican a few years ago. It makes the ceremonies seem somehow more religious.) Many young people, in my opinion, would be more closely involved in the Church if it regained some of the secret society factors which prevailed pre-Vatican II. Most of that boundary went the way of change, and now Catholicism seems to have become just another religion. We would do well to resurrect the Church if we replaced today's “Padre Joe, jeans-wearing dude” with retro-style “Father McManus, warrior of God.”

The view of the younger generation toward priests is pretty negative. I won't list the reasons people are mystified by the call to cloth, because everybody's heard them. No one points out that, actually, the priest’s resume is very cool—grab a couple free degrees from the best schools in the world on the church's dime; write a couple of scholarly books or teach; look over a parish for a little while. My big complaint with that set up is: you could do all of those things and still be married. It should be natural to expect that men of a true calling should also be expected to maintain a scared union established before God. The kind of person who joins the priesthood is highly unlikely to be the divorcing type.

We should think about letting priests marry, but revive some of the old traditions. It’d give the whole thing a much-needed shot in the arm, and it’d revitalize the institution.

So as it stands, Chicago is peppered with gorgeous churches, but fewer and fewer people are attending their services. Religion stands for something that's ultimately extremely vital to humanity's well-being. But with the way things are, I don't feel the need to go as often I probably should. Yet I am for the most part a good person, I treat other people with respect (well, most of the time at least), I attend to my own relationship with God, etc etc. It's likely that someday I will become more of a churchgoer, and I know the church will be waiting to have me. That's quite excellent when you get down to it.

Tapestry

Despite my sometimes stupefying inability to pay attention, I never really get bored. If you take the time to pay attention to any given situation or setting, it's not overly difficult to find entertainment in nearly limitless portions. The world supplies us with an unlimited supply of scenes left and right, each worthy of your attention. It's all just a matter of opening your mind to your surroundings. You can do it if you try.

Chicago provides me with the wonderful opportunities to be active in a primarily empty environment (like walking through Lincoln Park), or to sit around and do nothing at all in the midst furious human activity (like reading a newspaper in Daley Plaza). This scene is fairly common in all organized metropolitan areas, but I think my city pulls it off the best.

There is a color and lightness to things here that is very singular to American cities. At times, on many streets throughout the city, you almost (just almost) feel like you could be in a European semi-urban area. Though speckled with taller buildings, the majority of North Side neighborhoods have remained true to the townhouse style of residential living. This factor permits a terrific feeling to this place, as it allows for trees to line bright and airy streets.

Life is just a matter of executing a series of small movements in order to effect a minute alteration to our surroundings. From that perspective, the world around us is just as important as we are. Sensory is reality. Fucking with sensory is terrific, and this place is my great backdrop.

They say, "The wind isn't really that bad." This is mostly true unless you are in the downtown high-rise district, as well as any time between January and December. It gets windy here--no dout about it. It makes drinking not just the typical adventure, but an additional winter-long battle against frostbite.

They also say, "It's this cold in (insert the name of any other northern city)." Given the wind factor, it gets colder than I wish I knew. You basically cannot feel your body when the windchill hits single digits, and that hurts like a mofo. Screw Buffalo and Montreal.

We like to tell ourselves, "It's really fucking cold for May!" which is eternally coupled with, "I can't believe it's this warm into October." You must bundle up for the first 1/4 of the baseball season, but you'll get a nasty sunburn at the start of the football season. It's been that way for as long as I can remember, yet people always seem surprised by it. We just tell ourselves these things to keep our underdressed selves active during a typically frigid spring afternoon. Is everybody retarded or what?

So, that's my basic tapestry. At this moment, the weather is getting nice. Winter sucks, so I tend to take it easy. Summer rocks, and I tend to take it too far.

Prior to Henry

I was reclining on the couch this afternoon, watching Mark Prior pitch a gem, when all of a sudden Len Kasper said, “He’s really getting it up there. He just hit 95 on the gun.”

I froze.

A grand slam and a three run homer followed in short order.

Prior tends to kick butt when he moves the ball around, but he’s a target for a shelling when he over-throws—the same can be said of Wood, but Wood doesn’t seem to move the ball as well (which is starting to look like a major problem). When Prior first came up, he could just power past the opposition. But as he matures as a pitcher, and learns to rely more on control and movement, this guy is going to do some great things.

And, if his elbow hurts so much, why aren’t the coaches reminding him that 89 can be just as effective as 96?

What do I know? Bases loaded, one out, one run lead, opposition's park going nuts. A strikeout, an infield popup, or an easy grounder—those were his only hope. I think the adrenaline got the best of him, and he couldn’t resist laying up a fat fastball. And it almost blew foul. If it had, I bet he would have pitched 7 innings. Instead, he was yanked after giving up 8 over 5. It's a shame.

When he’s on, Prior is nothing short of overwhelming. Watch how many superstars get the heebie-jeebies from his curveball.

One more thing: I get really pissed when I read crap comments like this from Dusty Baker: "Everything's kind of up in the air. We had it set with the off-days and skipping somebody. Now we don't know. We just don't know." Well, maybe as the manager of the club, you should figure it the fuck out. Just an idea.

Random baseball query: who are the 2.17% of baseball writers who didn’t think Hank Aaron qualified for Cooperstown? Do they allow idiots to vote for the Hall of Fame? Oh yeah...Ron Santo...I forgot...

Across the Hall

I know about ten of the 500 people in my building. When I say, "I know them," I mean, "I recognize their faces in a vague sort of way." I know for certain the first names of some employees in the building, and that's about it. It’s sometimes difficult for people who've never really lived in a big building to understand that most high-rise inhabitants may recognize maybe 2% of the neighbors.

For example, boarding the elevator the other day, a girl pushed my floor number and I was slightly taken back. "Oh man," I thought, "is that my girl next door?" It's not my style to walk over there to introduce myself high out of the blue. Obviously, neither is it hers.

It's rare that I'm even slightly bothered by the people who live around me. The biggest nuisance they might pose are occasional food odors, but those too are oddities. It’s easy to deal with the hallway smelling like curry or browning garlic from time to time, but sometimes people can be ridiculous. The apartment across from the elevator is particularly offensive on occasion. Occasionally they whip up pork chops with the windows closed. If I can smell that all the way down the corridor and into my apartment, their place must be hazier than a smog alert day in Los Angeles.

Goulash scents come wafting through the hall from the south end every once in a while. I'm not positively sure whether or not the dish in question is actually goulash. The people at that end of the hall are Eastern Europeans of one nationality or another--whether it's Hungary or Estonia, I really have no idea. It smells really good from time to time. Maybe I’ll go down there one day and ask for a bowl…not a chance.

My building is essentially a series of interlocking concrete units, so sound basically doesn’t travel much in here. You can hear televisions and voices in the hallway, but never through two closed doors. The doors have about one third the thickness of the walls, but you still hear slamming because they are still quite heavy and constructed of metal. I hear sirens and car alarms once in a blue moon, since my floor is high enough up that street noise is a non-issue. So it’s more or less a vacuum of silence up here.

Noise complaints came my way on just two occasions—when my brother and I were having a huge drunken brawl a couple months ago, and last month when a few of us were still partying hard long after a Panic show. (I admit, by the way, that the complaints were totally warranted. I would have been pissed too, because we were LOUD.) Apart from those two incidents, I haven't had any sort of run-in with regard to noise for almost three years, further limiting opportunities for interaction.

I do not tend to steal my neighbors’ newspapers, but if a few pile up and it appears as though the person is out of town, I toss the old ones and take the paper of the day. (This is not to say that I am completely above the random drunken newspaper toss, but I rarely steal them per se.) I hope they're grateful to me for taking the time to get rid of their garbage, because I loved it when I'd get back from the airport late and see an empty doorstep.

Come to think of it, throwing away old newspapers is just about the most interaction I have with the neighbors, and even then I rarely take a glance at the names in the address field. What's in a name anyhow? Until you've been introduced to a person, a name is just two random words with little meaning. It does me no good whatsoever to be able to say, "There’s Joanne Peterson's door," because it’s most unlikely that I’ll ever get to know what "Joanne Peterson" actually means.

I used to clear out the Barron's for my across-the-hall neighbor. It either stopped coming or he started getting up early on Saturdays. I might have glanced at his name once or twice, but I completely forget it. (It was...something or other. Alex Marshall? John Sanders? Who cares?)

As I was leaving for an iPod stroll Friday afternoon, I overheard banter coming from guy-across-the-hall's apartment. He was apparently taking part in relationship conversation #97b: you're treating me like I'm nothing more to you than a friend. The odd thing was, in a shocking role reversal, the guy was arguing that position.

I thought, "Take, guy-across-the-hall, take!"