Phthursday Musings: Ten Years After

Ten years ago today, we were in Evanston. I was sitting, my wife was laying down, and my son was just trying to chill, like any good 25 week old fetus might.

Tomorrow is his 10th birthday.

When people get into conversations like oh where did all this time go? or like I can’t believe this has happened so fast or what not I usually think, well, no, this has kind of felt exactly like the duration it’s been. Today, though, it just kind of seems impossible to think in terms of 10 years.

I might at any given point be reflective about damn near anything, so nobody should be super surprised if I’m reflective right now, but here’s the thing: while on the one hand he’s totally ridiculous, he’s also wildly normal, to the point where I’m not sure what grand statement there is to make about this momentous occasion. And I like that. I like that he’s healthy and maybe even normal and I’ll add do that that while I have major existential concerns about a great many things, not the least of which being the overall state of the planet, I sincerely think we’re doing a good job of raising this kid to have a fair shot at success in his life, whatever he might attempt to define such success at, and that’s a pretty, pretty, pretty good headspace to be in.

We are - but, you know, we also aren’t, and never will be - a looooooooooooooong way from this:

So hey! It’s been a few weeks since META-SPIEL hit your inboxes, and that’s not like me.

I’ve been trying to write the “Murmur, Part Two” to follow last month’s “Murmur, Part One” and I’ve found it to be surprisingly difficult to write - many revisions and I’m not at all satisfied with what I’ve come up with. And this has kind of bogged down writing generally. And isn’t this how things besides writing work? You get stuck by something and it makes everything else stuck too?

Since writing is a thing that I do and not my literal work, I can’t really speak to what it would be like to be stuck but have to keep writing anyway. I’ve long admired columnists who, by hook or by crook, have just kept coming up with things to say, without seeming completely redundant. There’s a columnist for the Pantagraph in Bloomington, Bill Flick, and he just keeps writing things, and I don’t know how he does it. I think he’s been there for 84 years. Maybe he’s like F. Scott Fitzgerald and he keeps index cards with character names and ideas in some ancient file. Somebody please go tell Bill Flick that I said that maybe he’s like F. Scott Fitzgerald, so he can write about that too.

There’s also this, and this is a weird way to put it, but I guess maybe I haven’t been thinking so much about certain things I used to think more about. I’ve had a hard time getting much reading done, I’ve found myself even more averse than usual to political discourse, I’ve been very lax in running (though I’m working on that one as I hope you’ll soon find). There are reasons stacked on top of these reasons but they manifest in a way where I’m maybe just not adventuring quite so much, literally or mentally. And maybe this isn’t entirely a bad thing because I can definitely go on some excessive mental adventures…

I feel like that’s breaking a little bit though. Fall is my season. I think the daily and weekly rhythms improve. I hope so!

And then one last thing: I am almost completely off of conventional social media. I interact a little bit on Facebook, and I guess I’m paying a little more attention to Instagram, but as much as a cesspool as both Facebook and Twitter have been for so long, there was, you know, something happening in one of those realms.

I gave Mastodon a try and I like Mastodon in concept but in practice I haven’t gotten much out of it. Just today, though, I got an invite to BlueSky, and it looks like most of the people I follow on Twitter are already there, so I’m going to give it a whirl and see how that goes. (Yes, it’s invite only. No, I’m not sure why. No, I don’t have any invites to offer, since I’ve only been on there for less than a day!) Find me on BlueSky @huckelberry.bsky.social and if you do find me there, yeah, that profile picture is me and Hamlet, and yeah, he’s an old hamster, but he’s doing well, as you can see:

A new soccer season started two weeks ago, and we’ve got two wins so far. Every guy on this team is 9 years old (as of today!) and they can all play. It’s kind of baffling, honestly, how everyone seems to know what they’re doing!

We are the Cheeto Puffs.

I was not planning on being head coach again but I am. I think I have a certain level of anxiety about it. Not about winning and losing. More like… as the responsibility grows to coach these kids more so than to situation manage that there are emails and different game locations and needing to make sure everyone gets their playing time, I don’t know, it just induces a certain low level anxiety. I think once we get far enough into the season that will wane a little, but it’s definitely more than it was last year.

A couple of weeks ago there was an event at the school called a Bike Rodeo, where third and fourth graders brought their bikes to school and then had an outdoor session where they learned about bike safety from the local police and leaders of the local bicycling group, Cycle Brookfield, along with parents from the PTO. It was a cool event to help out at, being a PTO member and a Cycle Brookfield member. Parents: Your child’s bike helmet is not on correctly. Trust me.

The biggest takeaway for me though was, wow are these fourth graders bigger and older than these third graders. And mine is one of the tallest of the fourth graders. On his soccer team, he’s the tallest.

I asked at practice yesterday, who’s fast? Every kid raised their hand, and they meant it, and I think they’re right. How does this happen?

Since my last writing, something very odd has happened: This kid decided that his favorite team is the Milwaukee Brewers.

Now, when I was his age, my favorite team was the Milwaukee Brewers. They were a little removed from the World Series year but that mid ‘80s Brewers team was still loaded, especially from a batting perspective. Robin Yount! Paul Molitor! Jiiiiiim Gantner!

For him, it went like this. Back in April we went to an Angels - Brewers game with the specific intention of seeing Shohei Ohtani hit a home run, and oh did he hit a home run. At the time I wrote this about American Family Field:

Writing about the afterglow from being at an event, I also wrote this:

Well, it turns out, I was more right than I realized. Although we’ve been to several White Sox games, the overall stadium experience in Milwaukee was so much more visceral to him that he kept thinking about it.

We went back to Milwaukee four weeks ago, staying two nights along the Milwaukee - Wauwatosa border, just hanging around that neighborhood, the three of us plus my nephew. On the Sunday, we went to AmFam to see Padres - Brewers. My nephew adopted the Padres as his team a few years ago, and why not? They might have the best uniforms in the league, San Diego is awesome, and at that time they already had Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr., and this is when Tatis was possibly the coolest player in the league. So the opportunity to see the Padres was a really big deal to him.

The Brewers won that day 10 to 6, not to be confused with 10 from 6, the Bad Company greatest hits album, the title for which is supposed to mean 10 songs were taken from the first 6 albums, though in reality no songs at all were selected from Burnin’ Sky, even though the title track would have been a perfectly logical choice, and come on, did they really need two songs from Run with the Pack?

Anyway, at a critical point in the game, probably the most beloved player on the Brewers came to the plate as a pinch hitter with the bases loaded, and promptly cleared them with a double. This would be one Rowdy Tellez, and he looks like he could have been on the ‘82 Brewers, and he has a name appropriate for the ‘82 Brewers, and of course the fans’ favorite player is the guy named Rowdy. We are probably visible in this, though I’m having a hard time picking us out:

Well, when Rowdy was announced, the crowd roared, and when he hit the double the crowd roared, and let me tell you, this kid completely bought in to the crowd. I’d seen this before a couple of times when the crowd actually got temporarily excited at Chicago Fire matches (yes, this has actually been known to happen) but this was different, the crowd was excited, he got excited, he even had the right hat on for the occasion, and yeah, he’s a Brewers fan now and not quite so much of a Sox fan, and I totally get it. Only once or twice has the crowd at a Sox game really been into it - because, you know, they’ve lost almost every time we’ve seen them - and while I like The Downs just fine, there’s no denying that AmFam has a much cooler feel.

Now, it should be noted that my nephew, the kid wearing a Tatis jersey, was experiencing his jerk cousin all of a sudden morph into a superfan of the other team, so that was pretty weird.

Please note that I maintained my very cool neutrality by wearing my Expos hat.

You were worried, weren’t you? You were worried that I wasn’t going to share this 87 minute long performance of Ten Years After from Winterland in 1975:

You need to have faith, META-SPIELers.

Have an excellent autumnal equinox. We’ll be out this weekend at the USWNT match at Soldier Field, or we’ll be, well, whatever this is: