Phthursday Musings: Reveling in the Afterglow

Two weekends ago, on a Sunday after a race (writeup still forthcoming!), goofball and I drove north through weird rain for an encore appearance in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the auspices being that the two greatest baseball players going would be there.

The Brewers were hosting the Angels, which meant Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani and, you’d think, enough other quality dudes that the Angels should be an absolute behemoth. And yet the Angels haven’t won a single playoff game in over a decade. Baseball is a funny game.

But, the idea was, we wanted to see one of those guys do something memorable. And his second time up, this is what Shohei Ohtani did:

Since they started measuring and tracking in 2015, this was the highest home run on record, going 162 feet in the air before hitting high on the center field wall. We were in left center, good bleacher seats, and the ball off the bat was nowhere near anything else I’d seen before.

American Family Field is a really impressive facility, by the way. There’s a retractable roof - which was absolutely needed that day - and it’s a really stunning place to see a game. I really hope to be able to get to other stadiums in the next couple of years - Pittsburgh is supposed to be wonderful, and Cincinnati and Minnesota seem like real possibilities. But none of them have what Milwaukee has. By which I mean the sausage races. Sometimes the sausages even race hams:

The following Thursday - giving me an excellent excuse for not writing last week - I was at my charming child’s baseball game, and then on to Thalia Hall to see the indomitable Built To Spill for the 11th time. Prior to their set, as what seemed like some ridiculous joke, the PA system kept playing Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” over and over again. Then the band came out, and… started playing “Tom Sawyer”.

But it was all a ruse! This is what they actually did:

This was the first time I’ve seen Built To Spill (that’s the original and real BTS, you wacky K-pop kids) with the current lineup of Melanie Radford on bass and Teresa Esguerra on drums, and I’ve got to say, this was the loosest I’ve ever seen Doug Martsch, and I thought the way they chose to mic the band was inspired, and this was definitely among the best I’ve ever seen them.

I’m very grateful to be able to see such amazing performers, be they on a stage or on a diamond, and see them with such seeming regularity.

When I was younger, experiences like the above tended to have more of what I’ll call an afterglow. I remember concerts where I still felt up from them, if even just a bit, days later. I remember as a kid going to baseball games and having the feeling from having been at Wrigley Field stick with me to where when I’d watch the games the next couple days on TV, they felt so much more visceral to me, almost like a continuation of having just been there.

It’s understandable that it would be a little different today. I have tried to reconstruct a log of all concerts I’ve been to, and my list is at 374 and growing. When I’m there, they can still grab me. But the reality is that even in my 40s I’ve taken to doing things like leg stretches before and after shows where I expect to be standing for three hours at a time. And a lot of these shows are somehow still on weeknights, leading to relatively short nights where I’m met in the mornings by a typical avalanche of work requests. And there’s also this weird part of it… unless I write about it here, I’ve already posted, already messaged, already told anybody I’d be likely to tell all about a show within a half hour of it ending!

My dear wife will, from time to time, emphasize my need to relax, to stop trying to get so much done on Sundays, etc. And she’s right, and of course I’ve written about that more than once.

But what occurs to me is that I’m really missing that afterglow, and maybe that’s not so much a factor of age or volume of experiences as it might at first seem, and instead a factor of life circumstances curtailing those afterglows. We’re moving too fast from place to place, we’re not soaking it up. I mean, when a game ends, our priority seems to be to get out of the parking lot as soon as possible. What kind of afterglow is that?

When in need of afterglow, though - or, more precisely, when in need of an after-activity that accentuates everything prior - it seems like the secret is… dairy.

What’s better after a youth baseball game than having the entire team crash the ice cream parlor?

And on our way back from Milwaukee two weekends ago, was it not the perfect time to stop at… Mars Cheese Castle?

My 9 year old seems to believe that anything he experiences is just… how things are. This is understandable. And it means I have to keep swerving him by taking him to places like castles built to sell cheese. No, he was not expecting that.

We came home with a couple weird things, like a buffalo cheddar and a morel and leek jack. We did not however come home with the goat rodeo bamboozle. That was an afterglow I was not exactly prepared to experience.

Hey you! Come on out to a game or match with us in the next couple months. You know you want to. We’ll get to a Sox game some time soon, and definitely a couple Red Stars matches. Or name a good show to see. Let’s have an experience. Just don’t forget to build out some time for the afterglow.