Phthursday Musings: Spring Into Action

Sitting at my desk this morning, window open, 67 degrees outside, partly cloudy. This is how I think the world is supposed to smell, how it’s supposed to feel. It’s just a little cool for short sleeves, but not so much so that you’re compelled to do anything about it. You feel alive.

In talking to actual people in the real world instead of engaging in the nonsense that social media and mass media can bring, the thing I think people find most disturbing about climate change isn’t extreme weather, but rather a sense of loss of days like today. The days obviously still come, and they’re probably a lot more predictable than people might sometimes realize, but it’s the sense of loss that I think is especially profound to humans, and I’ve heard people talk in recent years about “losing spring” or something like that. Loss isn’t the same thing as the sense of loss, it should be stressed. The sense of loss can be preyed upon - indeed that is a hallmark of negative politics!

Today, I think, is the kind of day that justifies all of the days which must be justified.

In the last 14 days, I’ve been at 5 youth baseball games, 2 youth soccer games, 2 soccer practices, a pro soccer game, a pro hockey game, and 2 concerts.

That which is exhilarating tends to also be exhausting, and that’s one way to sum up peak spring.

Over the course of winter, we spend months substantially hiding from the world. Then suddenly we’re out and about, interacting with people, comparing notes about what our respective ten year olds might have lost / dropped / forgotten / worn backwards / written on each other’s arms / etc. / etc. / etc.

One thing about this is that with sports, unlike school, you can actually observe some of how your kid interacts with other kids. Your kids grow older, there are things you just don’t know about how they are, and sports give you a glimpse into some of that. (Other activities can also function like this, of course.)

One night at the old baseball game the assembled crowd of semi-frigid parents were asked if anyone could take the scoreboard. I said, sure! And I wound up in command of this glorious box:

I quite enjoyed declaring every time a kid reached base involving a batted ball to be a hit, though I doubt anyone noticed.

Believe it or not, I had never actually controlled one of these at a baseball game before. I don’t think I’d ever even gone up into the scorer’s room above home plate! I felt like I should have had a Smartie pop or two with me.

Now, I had a lot of other paragraphs in this section, but I got rid of a lot of them, and decided to keep this one as is, even though my transition is terrible:

My point is just that now we get to go tell a team full of ten year olds to run around like fools and they will mostly happily do so, and there’s something about it all which seems right and proper and a lot less normal than whatever the hell February is supposed to be.

On the subject of spring coming around and a team of young men going out and running around like fools, I am a fan of the Chicago White Sox.

The Sox are terrible, with a record of 6-25. They did inexplicably sweep the Tampa Bay Rays this past weekend, and yet they’re still on pace for what would be the worst record in modern major league history.

The whole thing is ridiculous but I’ve decided it’s not the sort of thing to get super worked up about. Ironically this is going to make it easier to go to games because of easier access to tickets. I’d rather see a deep playoff run, but I’ll roll with it and hope some of the young guys step up.

In figuring out what I wanted to write about here, I got to thinking about the worst sports team I was ever on.

I was 11, in sixth grade, playing basketball at the Boys Club. We actually had one really good player, but it didn’t seem to matter much. We lost our first 9 games.

As the season went on, we’d tend to hear positive things from our coach, even though they sometimes didn’t make a lot of sense. One game we went from playing man to man to playing a 2-3 full court zone. The other team’s point guard handled this by just dribbling through the zone. This did not stop our coach from declaring after the game that we had done a lot better when we started playing zone. Another game, which we lost by about 10, we were told afterwards that if we’d just had enough time we would have caught up to them, which seemed like a weird way to put it at the time and still does.

As it so happened, one other team also started 0-9, and we were scheduled to play each other in the final game. We thought, hey, we might actually win this one!

I remember getting to the Boys Club a little late and finding out I was only our fifth player there. Without me we would have had to forfeit! Kids tend to remember little details like that. I got out to the court and the game started.

We blew them out. The score was something like 41-10.

After the game, our coach essentially said we were lucky, that we hadn’t really played that well, and that we didn’t really deserve to win. To repeat, we won the game something like 41-10.

So, yeah, I try to be mindful of the things I say to the kids I coach, because I know that kids will tend to remember the especially stupid things adults say.

What does that all have to do with the White Sox? If you can figure it out, let me know. Better yet, let them know. They need any help they can get.

Today, I think, is the kind of day that justifies all of the days which must be justified.

Three hours later it started raining.

I had the privilege this past week of seeing the legendary Alejandro Escovedo at Fitzgerald’s, a place about one-tenth the size of where I think he ought to have been playing. I’ve seen Alejandro five times, and he’s always had a different band, and he’s always been fantastic.

I got a couple pictures, but I don’t think any of the band pictures are very good. I did however get a nice shot of Alejandro’s effects pedals, which might not be quite what you’d expect from a 73 year old Texan:

At one point he gave a long introduction, talking about a Texas singer-songwriter gathering he convened - I believe it’s this one - at which the assembled songwriters all played a song by another Texas singer-songwriter who inspired them. Then they broke into a weird subdued almost New Wave take on “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)”. It’s actually a Mickey Newbury song - Mickey Newbury being in the category of Guys My Dad Talks About That Even Your Dad Doesn’t Talk About. But it’s best known as a hit for a different Texas guy, which led to me finding this amazing video:

I maintain a detailed log of every concert I’ve been to, dating back to 1981. I’m missing some details and surely also missing some concerts, but every so often I get the inspiration and hunt down something new. This week I managed to add three shows that had never gotten logged.

In the process of doing that I’ve found that even with live shows my tastes have run more eclectic overall than I sometimes realize. I actually find that what I’m interested in today seems to keep getting broader, and in not exactly predictable directions, to the point where I’m non-ironically sharing Kenny Rogers videos with you all.

(At this time I’d also like to remind you all that Kenny Rogers Roasters is very much still a going concern with over 150 locations, primarily in Malaysia and nearby countries.)

The show I’ve been trying to nail down for literally years, evading numerous searches I’ve attempted, was one I took in on a trip out east when we drove our friend Drood back to his institution of higher learning. This was a time when I was so into the concept of indie-rock that I knew the names of famed clubs in a lot of cities and thought it was cool just to be at some of these places. So I went to an essentially random show one night, and then years later when I tried to reconstruct my concert log, I could not figure out who I had seen.

This week was the breakthrough though as I found scanned copies of the Boston Phoenix on Internet Archive, including the one I needed. On January 4, 1997, I went to the Middle East in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and saw Hypnotic Clambake - who, much like Kenny Rogers Roasters, are still a going concern, their website referencing their “proprietary blend of eclectic, genre bending, award winning jams”, 9 words which today would probably trigger my instincts to know when to walk away, and know when to run. But I do remember them being accordion fun, so by all means, if you’re somewhere near Erie, Pennsylvania in late July, go check them out.

I surprisingly don’t have a ticket for a show until we get all the way to August, so I wonder what crazy thing I’m liable to take in next. If you’re in the area and have a thought, speak up! Outlaw country, accordion jams, klezmer, Romanian folk ballads, Mexican pop, apparently I’m up for anything.

Ah, the thunderstorms are here. Spring indeed.

As the rain trickles away overnight, may it give way to a clean and pleasant morning where we can open the windows again. All the better if we can go a-frolicking. As humans we insufficiently frolic, skimpily scamper, inadequately cavort, meagerly gambol. Even if the rain persists into the morning, let’s not let it hold us back from a fine romp. We spend plenty of time fretting and kvetching and moping. Let’s spring into action.