Reconnecting

I haven't posted here for ages. I will be working on a new website for my music, studies, political observations plus other interests and linking this blogsite to it.

The Lost Year

I am already going to qualify the title of this post. 1980-81, my junior year in high school was not so much lost as it was introspective. After a sophomore year that was – at least for me – rather eventful in terms of social relationships and school participation, I withdrew to a great extent the following year. There are probably some standard psychological templates that one could apply in order to dig up the reasons for this but as I have no background in that discipline I will turn solely to my thoughts, feelings and actions as I recall them at the time.

There are two things I remember about the first week of my junior year: The first was briefly having Mr. Cross for my history elective, Conflict in America. He was my world history teacher in ninth-grade (which was still junior high). It was kind of strange (in a good way) to have him again, however the school rejiggered the schedule and gave him another ninth-grade world history class and Conflict in America was taken over by Mr. Shelton. They were both great teachers, Shelton was a little more traditional in technique but very knowledgeable (and nice). The second memory is one that sort of put the cap on the events of my sophomore year. While walking across the campus (torn up as it was by landscaping) I thought I saw Stephanie Smith (see older post “Everything I remember”). She had very short, buzzed hair and it was dark not bleached as it was the year before. She gave me kind of a strange look that I assumed was due to the fact that my hair was really long then. When she was interested in me six months previous I had just cut my hair for the tennis team. The weird thing is that I never saw her again except in the LA Times picture (again see older post) and in retrospect it might have been her sister Skipper in which case I probably read more into her look that was warranted.

This was also the first school year since 3^rd grade that I wasn’t involved in school band and/or orchestra. Band had been, apart from John, Rob, Eric, and Steve, my main social outlet since junior high, the band crowd also overlapped with the Dungeons and Dragons group (no surprise) although with Tal  (the main D & D guy) going to Millikan High that group pretty much ended after junior high. However, I my involvement in music in general actually increased during my junior year. I still took private horn lessons, I started taking piano lessons again and I began guitar lessons from my mom through the local park and rec. I didn’t register for school music because I wanted to take drafting and electronics. I thought I would be doing something in the electronics industry as a career and those classes conflicted with band and orchestra.  I also had only 6 classes and, since I had just been hired at Nevin’s Donuts, took “work experience” for the seventh class.

Music was a huge part of the tapestry that was 11^th grade. My infatuation with all things (Todd) Rundgren that began the year before continued to grow. Todd can be a fairly lonely pursuit as his music only seems to connect with a small segment of the population and none of my friends really liked him (Well, Rob actually liked some of his solo albums). However, those with whom he does connect become fairly rabid fans (just go to a concert, you’ll see), following him on all his divergent career-defying paths. Rob and I though had a lot of similar tastes in music. We were both really in to Pink Floyd and we continued to expand our respective Floyd collections throughout that year. We also became fairly heavy Rush fans. Rob was introduced to them by Darren R. in history class the previous year. Rob was still at Oak Jr. High and at the end of each year Mr. Cross taught a music unit where everyone had to analyze a song and bring it to play for the class. Darren brought in Rush’s 2112. Soon after, Rob bought the album and brought it over to my house and I was equally enthralled.

2112 is in particular an ideal album for teenage boys. It combines heavy metal, sci-fi and a mock-philosophical depth (courtesy of Ayn Rand). So we ended up collecting the entire Rush catalog between us and I spent many an evening digging 2112 and Hemispheres in particular. Some of their music from that era is still fun if you ignore the lyrics. We also attended our first-ever rock concert which was…you guessed it…Rush! Spring 1981, I think at the Fabulous Forum. We even spent $30 (!) on tickets from a scalper (Murray’s Tickets) to get seats on the floor. It was an ok concert. They were touring the Moving Pictures album which I think is actually one of their best. No more “middle-brow philosophizing” and a less pretentious musical stance helped matters, though at the time I was a little disappointed that it didn’t have any +15-minute epics.

Rush started us in a general “proggy” direction as we both got in to Yes, Rick Wakeman, Jethro Tull, ELP and the like. But we also started exploring blues (see “Winter in Socal” post), heavy metal (Black Sabbath primarily) reggae and a bit of new wave/punk. We had been into Elvis Costello for a few years and I think 80-81 is when we started liking X. It is hard to overstate the importance of music during the teenage years. There is a sense of wonder associated with each new musical discovery and it reaches deep into the same neurons that are receptive to religious and spiritual experiences. Those of us who were located at various points along the Freak-Geek continuum found the solace and transcendence that was missing in the rest of our world in many of the messages conveyed by these bands whether doomy, universalist, angry or phantastic.

My exploration of music led naturally into an exploration of spirituality. I grew up in, and still attended, the United Church of Christ. Rob and I were both confirmed and attended the high-school Sunday school class along with Shauna, Jeff, Julie, Cathy, Joe, Holly (not the former girlfriend), Lisa, and for a while another Cathy (my informer from 7^th grade) and another girl. Cathy #2 and the other girl left at some point for a more conservative denomination. The UCC was, and still is, a pretty liberal church. I find myself missing that aspect of Christianity now that I attend a more traditional church. Our church school leader, Mike, allowed us to discuss all manner of things from spirituality to sexuality to social issues, and tried to facilitate an atmosphere where we would be comfortable expressing anything with confidence that it would stay within the confines of the class. I don’t think we fully took advantage of the situation but I think a lot of good came out of it regardless.

On my own I was becoming interested in Eastern religion as part of a continuing search for truth and transcendence so I read up on Buddhism, Hinduism as well as Native American religion…including Castenada. I burned much incense (no pot yet), listened to Floyd and read a lot of books. An interest in astronomy went hand-in-hand with these explorations as did a liberal political sense that I have since regained after an unfathomable dalliance with the “other side.” The wonders of the physical universe met up with the wonders of the spiritual realms. Both infused my growing political awareness and in the throes of it all I thought I was very close to figuring it “all” out. This state of affairs almost compensated for the fact that I had no girlfriend, nor even any prospects. I do miss the excitement of discovering, or thinking I had discovered great spiritual truths. Somewhere along the line I have lost the exhilaration that contemplating the unknown can bring. I am reduced to ingesting espresso a few times a week in order to recover a modicum of that sensibility. I hope it is just a stage and that it will return at some point.

This period of navel-gazing intensified my innate introversion to the extent that most of my classmates saw me as the “loner hippie guy,” if they noticed me at all. One English teacher, Mrs. Busenkell, told me that she felt bad seeing me sitting so quietly in the back. She was so happy one day when I made a jokingly negative comment about the police (see older post), “Steve, I’m so happy you finally said something!” My electronics class was different, though. First of all, John was in it with me and you can’t remain quietly in the background if John is there. Second, we had quite a group of characters at our table, Jon D, Chip O, Richard G and a couple freshmen one of whom (I’ll remember his name at some point) I met at a party a year later: we were both crazy drunk after slamming a pitcher and we peed in a neighbor’s juniper bushes. Of all the things I have done drunk that is the one I’m most ashamed of. Anyhow, we had fun; that was when Frazer Smith was really popular as a KLOS dj and we would always discuss his antics in class. I really dug that class in general. I learned a heck of a lot, much now forgotten.

Work was a minor social outlet for me, at Nevin’s I worked with several people in my grade, Valerie, Steve, Charlie and this guy whose name I forget. He was a Mormon and a burgeoning John Birch-er (yeah, scary) but we had great conversations about music. He was really in to the Beatles, Badfinger, that kind of thing. He convinced me to buy George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band and I certainly don’t regret either purchase. Nevin’s ended up closing for remodel at the end of 1980 and I got a job at Hanrow Industries assembling the “Airlift Agitator” which was a device that cleaned grease from auto parts. I was the only employee of the owner, Dick Hanning. He was a cool German guy but the job was rather boring. The hours became infrequent and I used that as an excuse to quit and look for something else. Just before Summer I got a job as Tobin’s Draperies which turned out to be really cool because the owner encouraged me to bring in my guitar and practice when it got slow. I could even sit and read while waiting for phone calls. Pretty dang cool! Unfortunately that job had to end when I began my senior year because I went back to seven classes which meant I got out too late for the job. However, Nevin’s reopened that fall so I started working there again. But that is another story…

Probably the most obvious indication of my social state-of-mind that year is that fact that I didn’t have anyone sign my yearbook. It’s not that people refused to sign it; I just didn’t bring it to my classes. I had been so quiet all year that I just couldn’t see bringing the yearbook and asking anyone to sign it, or at least anyone other than my friends who didn’t include any girls. It’s pretty lame to have a yearbook that only dudes signed. I don’t remember if anyone asked where it was, but I would have just told them I didn’t get one that year.

All in all, not bad, not bad at all (God, I’m paraphrasing Reagan!). I had fun listening to music, playing music, playing baseball with Rob, Eric and Kurt, and trying to figure out the meaning of life. I didn’t come within a mile of having sex, which was a major bummer, but we were all in that boat. At least there was Penthouse.

Hawaii Part 2

 Hawaii Pt 1 ended after I was hired at Perry's Smorgy and I regaled how the main managers, Jim and Dave ( I remembered his name finally) were total dicks. In fact after the episode with Dave and the lovely Samoan coffee server I remember asking Eric if he had ever met Dave and Eric made a spurting motion with his hands as if out of the top of his head. That told me all I needed to know. Rob managed to escape Perry's first. He saw an add in the paper for The Photo Stores. They were always advertising for counter/sales help. Rob went in to Outrigger Photo for an interview with Maria and she hired him on the spot with the question "Well, do you want to give it a shot?" Maria was the wife of Steve who was sort of the general manager of all the stores. Apparently his brother was the owner. Rob's first impression of Steve was positive; in fact, he said he reminded him of Eric's dad. So immediately after Rob was hired, I went in to apply and was asked the same, "Want to give it a shot question?" Man, I was sooo happy to be free of Perry's! Even though this job paid less per hour, we were full time (Perry's was part time, just like Wal Mart, trying to avoid having to pay for benefits) and no more 6:00 AM start time. 3:00 PM baby! This allowed for drinking and sleeping in. We were also eligible for "spiffs" (what a stupid term) based on how much film processing we sold as well as "guiding" people to the more profitable camera brands...Ricoh and Vivitar, primarily.

 

The bloom fell off the rose rather quickly...especially for Rob. First of all, Steve (manager) knew we were friends but somehow he thought Rob was some other Rob who had a bit of a shady past, so he made sure to put me in a separate store: Tower Photo on Lewer's St. Later on he realized he had made a mistake. Second, Rob was relegated to the back room at Outrigger Photo with all the telescopes and binoculars, i.e. no chance for spiffs. He was actually forbidden to cross the line into the main store, which led to some guy ripping the store off and Rob couldn't stop him since he couldn't cross said line...pretty funny actually.

That said, I actually kind of felt sorry for Maria, she was cute in a world weary soccer-mom kind of way and I think she ended up in a life that she would not have wished for herself. Hell, she had to wear the same lame smocks that the rest of us did. If she seemed bitter I couldn't completely blame her, even when it was taken out on us. And to be honest, I wasn't on the end of it in the way Rob was. He had to work at the same store as she. I worked with a couple local guys, Matt and Layne. They were both cool. Layne was a good-natured gay chap and Matt was a cool techno kind of guy. He believed in IBM over Apple and Nikon over Canon...I had neither a computer nor a camera at the time so I had no opinion there. He got called out by the boss for reading The Wishsong of Shannara while on the clock. We all got on well. Peter was another guy that worked my shift for a while until he was fired for stealing. Apparently he was shoveling like 1/3 of all cash he took in into his pocket. He got caught by the hoards of Merit shoppers they were apparently sending in during his shift.

Right after I was hired at Perry's I also got a gig teaching guitar at Floyd's of Hawaii on Kapahulu. The dude that interviewed me, Carl, wanted me to have another job before he ok'd me to teach. As I had only recently arrived he wanted to make sure I stayed around for a while, fair enough. I also ended up teaching at their Kailua store and soon had enough students that I was able to quit the Photo Stores.

 

Also around this time we decided to find another place to live. Three guys in a small-than-studio size hotel room was just to many. Especially since I had to sleep on the floor...well, I was the last one to arrive. We found a pretty nice two-bedroom apartment a few blocks away. It was owned by a middle aged Japanese gentleman called Ray K. He was really cool. When he came to collect the rent he would always bring a box of fruit and vegetables, and sometimes beer. He probably thought that 3 kids in their early twenties weren't always eating properly..not many vitamins in Top Ramen. Actually we did ok, finances forced Rob and I into a lot of rice and zucchini! Eric usually ate at work, the Shorebird; they had a good salad bar and hamburger stand.

So that was how things stabilized for a while: Rob and I at the Photo Stores w/ me supplementing my income by teaching and Eric as kitchen manager at the Shorebird. We hung out with Tony a guy from Bermuda who worked the front desk at the Prince (our previous abode, the one with the hookers).

The New America

8/24/12

We just laid off 7 people at work today and that is just at our branch, folks were let go at all 80+ locations. [8/29 update: company 401k match has also been suspended] Some were let go due to a local attempt at expansion that failed and the others were laid off due to a need to maximize short term profits. Likely this decision came from TPG Capital who are the financial backers of the company for which I work. The thing is, the company is apparently quite profitable both in terms of net dollars retained and in terms or year-to-year growth. This is but one illustration of the problems with corporate America in the 21st century: the emphasis on short term profit at the expense of the long term stability, a stability which must include a labor force that is capable of actually purchasing the goods that these corporations manufacture/distribute etc. Companies and their investors in this post-Fordist economy (Henry, not Gerald) are more concerned with how much they will be able to sell their holdings for at some date in the near future than how the company and its employees will do in the long term. And it got much worse in the Bush years (yes, George W).

 

Two examples will serve to illustrate the difficulties faced by those laid off in our specific case: first, the company does not reimburse for unused vacation or sick time (even though that it technically illegal in California and some other states, they found a federal loophole as a way of getting around it) second, regardless of how long one has been employed with the company you get a mere two weeks severance pay. One fellow had been there for 17 years...still just two weeks severance. And in this economy, two weeks is an insult. Especially with the cost of COBRA or private insurance. None of the wages paid to these people are high enough for them to save the ideal 3-6 months salary as reserve against such a layoff, especially when many have spouses that are currently out of work. Likewise an unemployment payment that maxes out at $450 per week is entirely inadequate.

This kind of action is what makes the 2012 election especially important. Even though Obama is hardly an adequate defender of the middle and lower classes against corporate greed, at least through actions like the Affordable Care Act and increasing the term for which one can receive unemployment, he is attempting to make the transition less painful for those who have become unemployed. Romney and Ryan have already promised to repeal the ACA and gut other safety nets as well. Likewise, we already have five members of the Supreme Court who routinely rule in the interests of corporations (Citizen's United, Wal Mart) against the people and we simply must not let a potential four retirees in the near future be replaced by a Republicans administration.

In closing let me make the point that the attitude represented by these actions is endemic of our current corporate structure. Correcting it is not a matter of convincing individuals within the structure to be compassionate et al, it is a matter of legislating the way the corporations as a whole behave and taxing them, their officers and their investors in order to fund a sustainable livelihood for those dispossessed by their actions. In so doing we are sadly recognizing both the fact that short of a revolution they are not going away, and also that the result of their actions may be high unemployment for some time to come. They are profitable in part by virtue of their outsourcing/downsizing: fine, but they should in turn contribute in a greater way to maintaining the lives of those who are the victims of these actions.

Dylan, Opera and Expressions of the Soul

I just woke up from a dream in which Jen and I were in a bar with two pianos and people like Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Bob Dylan and me (!) were jamming on them. There may have been other famous folk, dead or alive, but I can't remember them now. It began with Paul doing a kind of Jerry Lee Lewis riff, then various folks joined in, two or three on each piano. The jam eventually evolved to into a sort of open improv with elements of Cecil Taylor and maybe Henry Cowell...it was cool. Then Dylan brought it down (in the musical, not emotional sense) and began playing and singing a song by himself. Jen and I were standing in the bend of his piano and this brunette chick slid down the lid and planted a deep soul kiss on Bob, twice. There was an attractive blonde gal standing behind Bob and the brunette whispered to me, "Who is that?" I told her, "That is Mrs. Bob Dylan." My impression at the time was that the brunette was interested in Mrs Dylan in the same way she was interested in Bob. Unfortunately my dream never lived up to that promise. The unvoiced question hovering around the room was why this girl would be so stirred up by this old gravelly voiced dude, and both in the dream and upon waking I was brought back to what has been a longtime consideration about the nature of the human voice and the ways that it can project, impart and otherwise express the unexpressable.


I think this dream reflected a conversation Rob and I had when he was up last week about singers like Dylan and Johnny Cash who have/had a certain quality to their voice that transcends the effects of age or other seeming limitations. In fact in both cases - Dylan now and Johnny Cash (notice that we can call Bob Dylan "Dylan" but one would never call Johnny Cash "Cash"? It just seems wrong and somehow disrespectful) in his last recordings - one can hear their lives and depth of experience in every bit of gravel, every quaver of the voice such that we can, at least while we're listening, connect their experience to our own lives.

I think this ability is lost in today's "American Idol" centered version of popular culture. For some reason we care that a singer is able to muster up enough vocal gymnastics to sing an old Queen song, but we have little time for an insightful lyric delivered with true conviction. I don't even mean to disparage Queen here. Whatever the limitations of their brand of schlock-rock (and I am a fan of some of it) at least they followed their own muse to an extent and did some fairly weird and creative stuff. I also don't think Freddie Mercury would have made it beyond the first, maybe second round of American Idol. I must admit, though the idea of Freddie encountering Simon Cowell at his bitchiest is quite an entertaining thought. 


I also don't want to give the impression that I think only old gravelly folk singers represent the quality that I am speaking of. I have noticed this effect in the cantor of a local synagogue whose choir I used to direct (he was somehow able to summon the combined experience of the entire Hebrew nation when he chanted), I mentioned it with respect to Karen Carpenter in an earlier blog and I have heard it in the trained voices of opera singers: Maria Callas, Tito Gobbi, Jon Vickers, Lucia Popp, Jan DeGaetani, Mirella Freni. 

In some respects, I think that opera is at the same time both the most difficult medium in which to accomplish this and potentially the most powerful. The difficulty lies first in the fact that there is a certain standardization of technique that doesn't allow for the kind of individual and spontaneous self-expression common to other genres of music. Second, the fact that the opera singer is portraying a character set to music by someone else often temporally separated from them by hundreds of years means that it is not enough to draw solely on one's own experience. One must inhabit the state of mind of the respective character (act, in other words) as well as that of the composer all filtered first through the visions of the stage and music director. Given this state of affairs, is it any surprise that singers are often at odds with their directors?


However, when you link the transcendent ability of opera singers like those mentioned above to the genius of the likes of Verdi, Britten and others the results can be shattering. I will note as examples Freni as Violetta (La Traviata), Vickers in Peter Grimes, Callas and Gobbi in Tosca, and in a comedy, Lucia Popp in Don Pasquale. A sort of left-field example is Jan DeGaetani singing Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire; she is able to imbue this work with a touching devastation that I'm sure Schoenberg would have enjoyed immensely.

I don't mean for this list of singers to be exhaustive by any stretch, and it obviously represents favorites of mine. And while I don't claim to have extensive familiarity with many current opera singers (nor with a lot of past singers for that matter) I must say that my overall impression of the current state of the art is that the American Idol phenomenon is extending into opera. Over the last 20 or so years I have read about, and to a degree witnessed, a greater emphasis on physical appearance (not that this is exclusive to today, witness Callas' struggle with her weight) and a certain generic level of technique at the expense of the individual, expressive voice. I know that Maria Callas is a divisive figure among opera fans, even in her prime. But I think it is safe to say that her unique expressiveness, to say nothing of her technical idiosyncrasies, would probably not be welcome today. 


As to why this state of affairs exists today I invite opinions: Certainly the continuing expansion of mass media as part of the "global village" leads to a generalization of art. And while this is offset somewhat by easier access to media - with the explosion of home studios, blogs, Youtube et al - by unknown and amateur artists, there is currently a greater gap between the upper artistic one percent (http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/07/13/women_dominate_forbes_list_of_higihest_paid_celebrities_under_30.html) and the local amateur or semi-pro musician. Whether this is a temporary situation that awaits the retrenching of the music industry, or just the beginning of a dystopian path towards even greater conformity remains to be seen.

Smith and Rand

Last week I read a short science fiction book called The Unending Night  by a guy called George Smith. It was a used book store find and was apparently written in 1964. However, there is no copyright date in the book itself. The story concerns two scientist brothers who develop a technique for building massive nuclear fusion generators able to provide all the energy that Earth and the newly settled Mars could ever need. The one brother, Lee, is concerned about the strength of the magnetic fields required to keep the super hot plasma away from the containers of radioactive material. The other brother, Lance is completely believes Lee to be a needless worry-wart and insists that the schedule to fire up the generators be maintained. Lance is a believer in the necessity of the great thinkers and producers to lead the rest of humanity to greater things at the expense of those lesser folk (like his brother) who stand in the way of progress. He is supported and encouraged by a tall, beautiful, blonde writer whose opinion of the "regular folk" is even more degenerate.

In the course of reading this narrative I couldn't help thinking of some of the characters in Ayn Rand's novels, especially The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Smith portrays Kristy Konrad as his version of Rand's Dagny Taggert and Lance seems to be modeled after Howard Roark. However, they are far from protagonists. In fact it is due to Lance's hubris (with full support from Kristy) that the fusion plant on Mars explodes and sends the planet hurtling towards Earth. This made me wonder if Smith specifically wrote these characters as a rejection of the quasi-Nietzschean supermen that populate Rand's novels. 

I say this as one who went through a Libertarian phase and for a time enjoyed reading Ayn Rand's novels and essays. I still believe in the ideal  that government should interfere as little as possible in our lives, especially regarding civil liberties. However, my support for the Libertarian economic philosophy ultimately collapsed. Corporate oppression is just as problematic as oppression by the government, especially given the identity of personhood granted to corporate entities and the recent SCOTUS "Citizens United" decision that rejected limits to corporate spending on political campaigns. This will foster the continuing increase of corporate control over our lives. A control that has been manifest by the oppressive use of advertising and its encouragement of mindless consumerism and will now likely assert total control over the one antidote the people had available in the past: the political system.

Anyhow, The Unending Night is an enjoyable and fast read. Smith is certainly no Ray Bradbury but on the other hand he is (was?) no Ayn Rand either, exhibiting a pointed brevity and fast pace instead of a turgid narrative beholden to a questionable philosophy.

Baseball

As I watch the Dodgers play the Astros tonight I am thinking back on my history with the game, primarily as a spectator. I didn’t pay much attention to baseball as a young kid. My dad would watch the occasional Dodger game as well as the playoffs and World Series but I have no recollection of them until 1977 when the Dodgers played the Yanks for the championship. The earliest mention of baseball that I remember was during a Cub Scout meeting in 1973 when my dad and Chris R were discussing the World Series between Oakland and the Mets. Both of them said they were rooting for the Mets. Ultimately to no avail. Probably earlier that year Chris told us about an Angel game his folks took him to where he saw President Nixon.

Oddly enough, a math teacher was responsible for instilling my rabid interest beginning in the 1978 season. Mr. Mauger told us how they figured our batting averages and that .300 was considered good. I had never really thought about it before and began checking out the Dodger box scores in the L.A. Times. That led me to start watching and listening to games. This was, of course, during the days of the longtime Dodger infield of Garvey, Lopes, Russell and Cey. I followed them as well as Reggie Smith, Dusty Baker and the pitchers Don Sutton, Bert Hooten, Bill Welch et al.

By high school I was totally on board as a fan, although oddly enough I went to more Angel games than Dodger games. I may to this day have seen the Angels live more often than the Dodgers. This is because Rob and his family were and are major Angel fans and they took me to a bunch of games. I recall the 1979 season in particular when Don Baylor drove in something like 130 runs and the Angels made it to the division playoffs. It was a fun year. Rob’s grandpa took us often. I think he had been following them from the beginning. He was always concerned that someone was going to spill their beer on him…either a fan or a vendor. I even got to go with him when I was back for a visit while we were living in Hawaii. As mentioned in an earlier post, he helped get me on a flight to Hawaii after graduation. This time I remember him asking if I thought we were going to put down roots on the island. I sensed that he was missing Rob quite a bit.

However, all three of us (me, Rob and Eric) did go to a couple Dodger games. Eric’s dad took us to one and there was this really annoying guy in the stands who had the loudest unamplified voice I have ever heard. He kept yelling at the Dodger hitters “C’mon Cey this isn’t batting practice!” “C’mon Garvey, this isn’t batting practice!” People were yelling at him to “shut up!” but he just said “No! Huhuhuhuh!” I hate drunk assholes. We also got ice cream sandwiches and Rob got a Dodger Dog which has a fair bit of the hot dog sticking out of the bun. Eric and I kept teasing him as he tried to take the first bite. Pretty childish, but at least we weren’t yelling.

My mom let me stay home “sick” from school on opening day of 1981 so I could listen to what was an afternoon game between the Dodgers and Astros. It turned out to be Fernando Valenzuela’s first start and he pitched a complete game shutout and they won 5-0. There was unfortunately a strike that year so there was no play in the middle of the summer. Happily, the Dodgers ended up beating the Yankees in the World Series and Valenzuela took both the Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards.

My only experience actually playing was with a literal sandlot game that Rob, Eric and I and later Eric’s brother Kurt developed. It involved souvenir bats and tennis balls and was a strictly one-on-one game. We got fairly elaborate with it keeping stats and instituting playoffs and a championship. It was pretty damn fun and one of those unconscious creative forms of play that I think are better than organized sports. I’d play it again today. We played using a wing of a local elementary school as a backstop, occasionally getting booted by administrators who thought an intermittent tennis ball against the wall would cause the structure to collapse or something. Just another example of the man trying to keep us down! Naw, but it was pretty stupid.                                                            

By the 1988 season I was living in Sacramento and that was of course just an amazing year for the Dodgers. Gibson and Hersheiser…need I saw more? I was watching “the game” (first WS game against Oakland) in my little studio apartment. I was on my knees in front of the tv by the time Gibson came up for his pinch hit. When he hit that home run to win the game I jumped up with my fist in the air and hit my knuckles on the ceiling . . .not even noticing the pain. It was just one of those few amazing sports moments that one gets to see once or twice in a lifetime. Later that year I paid tribute to Gibson’s fist pump while performing in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers.

After that I lost some interest in baseball due to a more intense focus on school, especially as a graduate, and then with the 1994 strike. I sort of followed for the next 17-18 years but not much during the regular season. I did enjoy seeing the Angels win the World Series in 2002, but it wasn’t until 2012 (now) that I began to watch games with any sort of regularity. And thus far the Dodgers are doing great, first place with a seven game lead on May 26^th.