few have read it
fewer have bought it
and fewer still knock on my door asking for it.

by all accounts, this makes me an author
(one of little success, but still)
and has changed my outlook
on this poetry game.

for instance, this poem would never
have made the cut in my book
simply because it’s meandering
and meaningless words
contribute nothing to the reader
and fall dead like a mouse
caught dead in a trap.

however, on this night
with nothing left to do but what
for sleep, the shriek of sirens,
or a falling asteroid

it is as good a
company
as one can
ask for.

I’d say that seeing folks applying and affixing labels to others is a futile attempt to paint humanity in broad strokes, but we’ve shot beyond that now. It seems that the gut instinct of many in America is to grab ahold of a roller or paint sprayer and attempt to blanket entire swaths of people with labels. Conservative. Liberal. What makes this truly sad is that the political establishment, which most people spend vast amounts of time railing against, wants just that. Spend a bunch of time fighting each other, don’t bother looking over here.

There are times when I feel one e-mail or one Facebook status update away from moving to a small island somewhere and whittling things out of coconut shells for the rest of my life…

Sylvester Stallone & 1980′s action movies : “Modern” action movies :: hair bands : ____________ ?

If you filled “grunge bands” into the blank space… congratulations, you just wrote on your monitor. Go wipe it off. I’ll wait.

Seems that Sly has a beef with a certain action flick from the early 1990′s that he credits with the death of his type of action flick, and the ensuing 20 years haven’t done much to put that flame of hatred out. Let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth, shall we?

“It was the first ‘Batman’ movie,” Stallone told the Times, in reference to the 1989 movie adaptation starring Michael Keaton as the Caped Crusader. He went on to say, “The action movies changed radically when it became possible to Velcro your muscles on,” a clear dig at how the trim Keaton was encased in a sculpted Batsuit for the film. Stallone joked, “I wish I had thought of Velcro muscles myself… “I didn’t have to go to the gym for all those years.”

And by “go to the gym”, he of course means “go to my steroid dealer and inject myself repeatedly with artificial growth hormones that would stimulate muscle growth that was completely unnatural and artificial to my body build and chemistry”, BUT WHO’S COUNTING?

I completely understand his ire towards Micheal Keaton, Tim Burton, and pretty much everyone associated with that blockbuster down to the Key Grip and Best Boy because, in his mind, it completely spoiled the little tea party of mindless action flicks he’d been living in. Here’s the harsh reality: tastes change. It’s never a pleasant shift for those involved on the other end, but it does happen. For the purposes of our discussion, Sly was Bret Michaels to Michael Keaton’s Kurt Cobain – all it took was one crack in the dam and the whole thing just burst wide open.Stallone came from a time when action heroes didn’t need to say much or reload their guns for hours at a time. Along comes Batman and suddenly no one is interested in Cobra 2: Sly Shoots More Bad Guys In The Forehead Then Cleans His Gun With Stuff He Keeps In An Egg Carton In His Freezer. Go figure.

You see, that’s where the Bret Michaels comparison comes in handy, because against all odds and rational thought, Stallone still has a viable career going for himself – Bret is whoring himself out on reality TV and Stallone made a really, really bad Rocky sequel (which is about equal when you think about it). Now he has a new movie to promote and he’s willing to engage the fans he would more than likely upset with such comments, the fanboy faithful at San Diego’s Comic Con. This time, he’s pimping out an entire stable of aging warhorses in a throwback movie with better effects – The Expendables. This is how these things always come back around – as a nostalgia trip. Worked for damn near every band from the ’70′s who could dig up two or more founding members, so why not try it on the big screen?

Will I go to see it? Most definitely. Will I crack approximately 8,000 jokes about steroids, ‘roid rage, Ah-nold’s CGI re-touching, and every other thing that crosses my path? Oh yes I will. But that’s what these movies are about – having a laugh, watching a bunch of stuff get blown up, and then going home to your life where every problem is not resolved with the use of automatic weapons and plastic explosives. It’s good, wholesome, destructive, goofy fun. Apparently, someone forgot to fill Sly in on this…

Sports is an odd thing in that it conjures from what are normally rationally, sane, and emotionally stable human beings feelings that would, under different circumstances, land one in a padded cell with a neatly starched straitjacket.

Take hatred and disappointment. In normal everyday life, I try as hard as possible to not use the word hate – because there are in truth very few things that I actually hate and our culture is littered with words that are both over and misused. In sports? There’s plenty of things and people that I hate. Bill Simmons called it “Sports Hate” – meaning that you don’t actually hate that person or thing, but in the context of sports it’s the only way to possibly describe how you feel within the game. Disappointment is another. What’s so disappointing to me or other fans about a group of millionaires losing a game that would cause a near catatonic depressive state? Unless your life savings was on the game, there shouldn’t be anything – but in sports, it happens.

So I’m disappointed that the Celtics lost to the Lakers last night and missed a chance to win their 18th NBA championship. However, unlike the Patriots disastrous loss to the Giants in the Super Bowl, I can look at this glass as half full. Had someone told me in the last week of the regular season that Boston would be playing the Lakers for all the marbles in Game 7 without their starting center and only lose by 4, I’d have asked for a breathalyzer test immediately. Figure in that they also had to beat arguably three out of the top five players in the league (Dwayne Wade, Dwight Howard, and LeBron James) just to get to a point to play a fourth (Kobe Bryant), do it on two days rest, without anything from Ray Allen in six of the seven games, and in a hostile environment and I’d have guessed a loss by 40, not 4. Remember, this team couldn’t have looked worse heading into the playoffs – considering where the bar was set, this ending isn’t all that tragic.

Do I think they could have won it? Sure – if there’d been four days rest in between every game. At the end of the day, that’s probably the biggest reason for the loss aside from the excellent defense L.A. somehow discovered last night. Old guys need rest in order to recuperate and games 6 and 7 didn’t allow for much. Throw in Ray Allen losing his mojo and it was damn near a foregone conclusion. To push this thing to seven games and still be out there gunning down to the last second isn’t just admirable, it’s what every fan hopes for from their team – no quit.

In the end, despite the enormous vat of (sports) Haterade I have for Kobe Bryant, I can take losing to him because the man has game. For everything he didn’t do offensively in this series, Ray Allen defended Kobe about as well as anyone could expect. Body on body, hand in the face, nothing easy… and he was still making shots. There’s nothing you can do about that.

What I can’t abide is losing to a pansy like Pau Gasol. The man screamed, hollered, flopped, grimaced, and flailed every time he drove the lane as though he’d been shot by a harpoon. In the fourth quarter, he was breathed on, threw the ball straight into the air, let out one of his patented “Constipated Sylvester Stallone Rambo” grunt/screams and got the call. How Kevin Garnett didn’t clothesline him in this series will go down as one of the great unexplained sports miracles of our time. Then, to top things off, the icing baskets came from a guy who GROOMED HIS EYEBROWS BEFORE SHOOTING THE FREE THROWS. I’m pretty sure there’s a special circle of sports hell awaiting Sasha Vujacic and I can’t wait to see him limping around for the Clippers in his twilight years.

And what NBA Finals would be complete without a discussion of the refs? The surprise here was that the officiating was actually decent through much of the series – which either means David Stern decided to let this one be decided on the up-and-up or they’re getting a bit more subtle at rigging these things. Game 5 was especially nice in that the refs let the teams played and only started to reign things in when absolutely necessary. That’s all I ask in any game – let the athletes decide the game, not the refs. However, the Lakers shot something around 20 free throws in the fourth quarter last night – the Celtics had 17 all game. Doesn’t that smell a bit fishy? I mean, just a bit? Granted, it’s not why they lost, but it certainly didn’t help the cause either.

As Teddy KGB would say, they beat them straight up… pay them… pay them their money. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, right?

The irony of residing in Old Orchard Beach, Maine has never been lost on me. It goes deeper than the fact that, as a student at the University of New Hampshire that I regularly pelted Black Bear fans with various digs and insults during Hockey East battles – going so far as to write a song with which to serenade the opposition (don’t get excited, it wasn’t that great). It goes deeper than the trips up the Maine Turnpike my Dad and I would take to watch the Mariners (AHL affiliate to the Philadelphia Flyers and then later the Boston Bruins before moving to Providence, RI) at the Cumberland County Civic Center. It started with trips north to watch the Maine Guides play baseball at the ballpark in OOB.

I remember pulling into the drive leading to the ballpark and the way it curved to the left, the way the field became visible through the foliage, and the (what seemed to be to my young mind) huge concrete grandstand that rose out of the gravel that lined the area surrounding the stadium. I remember the night I met Oil Can Boyd and, despite not having much of a clue who he was, getting his autograph on a freshly-purchased Red Sox batting glove. I remember the sound guy cuing up Fats Domino’s “I’m Walking” every time the home team would draw a free trip to first and thinking it was the coolest thing in the world. I remember standing behind the grandstand with some other kids, waiting for foul tips to make it back over the screen and the press box into the concession area. I remember having to leave a doubleheader that I knew my Dad was looking forward to because of a bad headache and still feeling kinda guilty about it now.

Driving into town for my first date with Kim, it was somewhat surreal how familiar things looked – even though the roads had changed a bit over the years, it was still the same route my Dad and I had taken to see the Guides. Driving past and seeing the ballpark sign behind the police station still stands out in my mind. I also remember driving down to see the ballpark a year or two after moving to OOB and wanting to cry. Trees and shrubs and tall grass had taken over the infield. Part of the boxes on top of the grandstand had burned down. Everything was buried under a layer of green. It was like someone had forgotten to trim the lawn for the past decade and my childhood memories had gotten sucked into the vortex. In short, it sucked.

Then something pretty remarkable happened. After ten years of allowing the park to rot, a group of citizens got together and started to fix it up. They didn’t have a lot of money, no team waiting to move in, only a volunteer workforce, and no real agenda aside from being tired of watching a town resource go to waste. They cleared the field, put up a new outfield fence, painted the grandstand, replaced some seats, refurbished the clubhouse and concession stand, and re-sodded the infield. I had a chance to walk around the place one day about a year ago while the work was still around the halfway point, and the memories started coming back… not quite all the way, but they were there.

Flash forward to Sunday. The 2010 USCAA National Baseball Tournament opened up at the Old Orchard Beach Ballpark, and I got to see the finished product of what a group of committed citizens can really do when they put their minds to it. It was like walking into you old room some 20 years later in a lot of ways – everything seemed so much bigger back then, but it’s almost like you remembered it. Tonight, I got a chance to sit back and watch my first game at the park in over 20 year, and despite the cold weather it was perfect. Everything has changed, and yet very little has changed.

Thank you to all the volunteers who made it possible, who wouldn’t accept the small town politics that seemed to condemn a landmark to oblivion, and who made something great happen. Special congratulations go out to Tom LaChance, my brother-in-law, who lead the effort from day one out of a love of community and baseball – I’m proud of you and so are a ton of others.

With any luck, there’ll be more baseball and I’m hopeful that a team will wind up there some day soon. What level isn’t as important to me as it’ll be to take Kaelin there some time when she gets a bit older and enjoy a ball game. Like the old days.

Which isn’t to say that I’m ready to fit myself for a fanboy jumpsuit quite yet. Yes, I thrill at the thought of stepping into the Apple Store if only to gawk and drool over things which I don’t need right now and couldn’t afford if I did. Yes, I enjoy the doling out the following advice whenever someone asks me to help out with their PC hardware/software issues: “Buy a Mac”. However, I’m not so foolish as to think that there isn’t a downside (some would say a darkside) to Apple as well.

Take the article I read this morning from Newsweek called “Fortress Apple: Why Apple Needs To Loosen Up”, which outlines some basic problems with the insular way in which Steve Jobs and his minions conduct business. The crux of the argument comes form the inherent contradiction Apple has brought to light with the unveiling of the iPad and its lack of support for Flash. Their argument for not supporting what is one of the most widely used video formats on the web today is that it’s “closed and proprietary” and that they only want to support more “open” formats. Kinda funny when you consider how Apple won’t let anyone touch their toys unless they’re willing to dole out cash up front and then share the backend as well.

It’s not to say that Apple is inherently evil or any different than any other successful company – they make products people want, they charge for them, and max out any and all revenue streams available to them. It’s good business. The issue is that it’s awfully tough to lay down one set of rules for the game at one end of the field and then use altogether different rules at the other end – like saying a field goal is only worth three points on one side of the fifty and two points on the other.

Will it lead to their downfall? Probably not anytime soon, mostly because they make great products that everyone wants to get their grubby little paws on. But as more and more companies begin edging in on their turf, it could get messy and the way could become harsh for Jobs and his little army of black turtleneck-wearing fanboys in the future. Hopefully, I’ll have my new Mac by that point and be able to ride out the wave until the company comes back again. Either that, or I’ll really have to get weird and go to Linux…

jumprope

and hop
this day
into the
next. we
never
do much
but sing
here this
time of
year.  i
hope u
join us.

Suppose you awoke one morning wit the uneasy feeling that the world had, while you slept, somehow slipped a-tilt and rose to find that your dresser drawers were mysteriously open a fraction of an inch and that prescription bottles had tipped over in the medicine cabinet (although neither you nor anyone else in your household had ventured since bedtime to get an aspirin, a condom, or a Tums) and that pictures on the wall, shades on the lamps, and books in the case were askew. Outdoors, the taller buildings were posing a la Pisa, or, should you live in the country, streams were running slightly outside their grooves as fruits dropped like gargoyle ganglia from uniformly leaning trees. What would be your reaction to such a phenomenon? Honestly, now, and seriously too. How would you feel? Would you be scared? Confused? Puzzled and anxious? Would you telephone the police? Would you pray? Or would you numbly await an explanation, refusing to attempt to analyze the event or even to experience it with your full emotions until you had read the papers, tuned in the news, heard how experts from the universities were explaining the tilt, learned how the Pentagon planned to deal with it, were reassured by the President, who might insist, as Presidents will, that nothing really had gone wrong? Or instead of fear, bewilderment and anxiety, or in addition to fear, bewilderment, and anxiety, or instead of a hard impulse to dismiss the happening and get back to business-as-usual, or in addition to a hard impulse to dismiss the happening and get back to business-as-usual, do you imagine that a bright trace of delight, unnameable and indefensible, might tickle your spine; could you feel in an odd way elated – elated, perhaps, because, in a rational world where even disasters are familiar and damn near routine, something, of almost fairytale flavor had occurred?

From Even Cowgirls Get The Blues by Tom Robbins. Get it, read it, love it.

And yet I continue to go back. I’m like some sort of hybrid addict/sadomasochist who just can’t by without my daily lashings. It’s a sickness I tells ya.

Originally, I’d hoped to post this on Facebook by having it import posts from my blog’s RSS feed and then re-post them to my profile as notes. It’s a fairly simple process that’s worked in the past, albeit slowly. However, when I wiped out my old WordPress install earlier this week and started over, I found that the feed wasn’t registering with Facebook anymore. Simple solution would be to just re-enter the feed location, right? Apparently, you’ve never tried working with Facebook. After slogging through the Fire Swamp and killing at least 5 Rodents Of Unusual Size, I was able to re-enter my feed… which Facebook then couldn’t “find”. Funny, it works just fine in my feed reader – imagine that, something else Facebook messed with and then didn’t bother to fix. So here I am on my own little lonely outpost screaming at the stars like the angry sheepherder. (Wow, that came off a tad depressing and self-indulgent, didn’t it? Best get back on track.)

So I’m taking a week off, starting Friday. We’ll see how long it takes to get the shakes.

It seems like things are happening left and right for other teams, including the other members of the AFC East, and yet the only news items involving the Patriots seem to involve some member of the Kraft family attending a charity event or which college player is heading to New England based on some worthless mock draft. Now, if the team was humming along and seemed to finish the season in fine working order, I wouldn’t be too concerned. But this was a team that limped into the playoffs and then were beaten so badly by the Ravens that it was unwatchable.

Not that I think any of the moves made by the Bills, Dolphins, or Jets are all that momentous, but they represent some kind of forward progress. Meanwhile, the Patriots are like some uber-cautious guy who refuses to hit on a 15 despite everyone else around the table showing 5′s or 6′s. Maybe it works out, maybe it doesn’t – but you damn sure have to do something eventually, right?

The Bills are a mess and have hired yet another failed NFL head coach to turn their program around – good luck with that. The Jets have made some splashy moves by signing LaDanian Tomlinson and trading for Santonio Holmes and Antonio Cromartie – with a chance Cromartie winds up having the biggest impact. They’re already on the record saying Tomlinson will get 15 carries per game – great idea for a runningback who is already cooked and who will turn around and pout should anyone suggest otherwise; I wonder how Holmes will keep out of trouble in NYC. Meanwhile, Cromartie plays across from the best cornerback in the NFL and will have plenty of chances to make plays. Miami landed Brandon Marshall and could rebound with a tweak here and there.

The Patriots… re-signed their own players and have apparently not been interested enough in free agents to do squat. In some ways, I’m okay with that considering their recent track record, but still… Let’s just say I’m trying to talk myself into this whole “silent running” approach to the offseason and hoping that they surface for some decent moves during the draft this week. If not… maybe I won’t have to turn the cable on in the fall after all…