my back is still achey breaky, but not of the ‘i can’t breathe’ variety. i’m also down over $200 in massages and drugs. plus, i broke down and bought a new mattress. ah, but the mattress is a bit of an indulgence. memory foam, queen size temperpedic knock off from overstock.com. ten inches of sweet, blissful, NASA designed gooey dream material. i can’t wait for it to get here. i’ve been ‘sleeping’ in a recliner on the sun porch as i can get in a position that kinda doesn’t hurt and get a few hours here and there. looking forward to using the bedroom again. that shit mattress i inherited … thing’s a torture chamber. the site of many an anguished night. it will be burned and not missed.

pitchers and catchers reported yesterday, at least for your san francisco giants. the first day of spring training always brings a smile. a little slice of hope. while the giants are still old and mediocre offensively, i gotta say they have a certain potential that they have lacked in years past. can’t wait to start hearing games again on the radio. baseball might be the only thing that keeps me from leaving this godforsaken country when i finish the phd. france is cool, i’m sure, spain, what have you, but i’d miss 2 balls, 2 strikes, 2 out, bottom of the third, lincecum dealing to ramirez, late june, warm summer breeze, cold domestic beer. it’s my soul.

mardi gras passed with me in traction. missed all parades but the southdowns parade that goes right by my house. luckily, lady of the barge (& ladies) were likewise downtrodden. we had a fat tuesday cookout over at the old home place. shippy brought a twelve pack and a log. we had steak and veggies and sausage and jalapenos. lovely till the end.

feels like home.

it’s also the first official day of spring break. all my students are “floating kegs” in gulf shores or destin. i’m writing papers in red stick. my goal was to get five new pages done today on my barry bonds paper. i have not met that goal. but it’s still early. but i might go out and watch the big ncaa game at a bar.

lefty just made me angrier than ever. we stepped outside earlier for a piss, and he saw my friend neil down the street. sprinted right for him. then he saw neil’s neighbor’s cat. suddenly he’s under her house. i called to him for five minutes. then comes flying out and heads for neil’s backyard where i again called for him for five minutes as he ran through a forest of bamboo. then he got under neil’s fence and into the guy’s yard behind neil’s place where he trapped the cat under a shed (sound familiar, hooch?). i then ran around the block (having just gotten out of the shower) and climbed into this guy’s backyard (who i don’t know, who could be armed to the teeth) and started calling for lefty under the shed. i then hear him go back under the fence and back into neil’s yard. again, i start running around the block, thinking, “i hope i catch lefty before he gets hit by a car so i can beat him to death with my own hands.” i came around the corner in front of my house to see lefty, in full sprint, chase the cat down the street, then across the street, and then under another neighbor’s house. the nice lady who lives there (whose name i forget) helped me finally trap him. she was out of ammunition, so i had to bring him home for punishing.

i banished him to the bedroom. he just walked out and looked at me, all sad and shit. i yelled, “get back in there!” he turned around and sulked back down the hall looking pathetic.

he probably doesn’t even know why he’s in trouble anymore.

and i don’t care.

***

a few weeks ago, i got it in my head that i’m losing my hair. and part of me doesn’t give a shit. really. what the fuck do i care? but there’s this other part of me that thinks, “well … maybe you should just try to push this thing along for juuuust a little longer.”

so i’m online looking for propecia. that’s the brand name of the drug finasteride, the miracle of modern medicine that grows your hair. i took propecia for awhile in the late ’90s in san francisco. i read about it in the paper and thought, “hey, my dad’s bald, maybe this is the trick to not ending up bald.” so i talked to my dermatologist and he says, “now’s the time.” i bought a three month supply for around $90 … lot of bread for hair, but i had money then, and had absolutely no sense of fiscal responsibility. so i took it. i never really noticed much. it wasn’t like i suddenly looked like sammy hagar (which is what i really wanted). the only person who ever commented on it at all was nader. i specifically remember him calling out to me from behind the bar one night at the five, “dude, that shit’s really working!” which made me wonder what the fuck i looked like to him before the propecia? anyway, after a few $90 refills i said, “to hell with this shit. so what if my hair falls out? fuck it.”

well …

the shit’s gotten a lot cheaper. i got a prescription from the lsu student health center. i faxed it to a company in australia. they sent me 90 5mg tablets of generic finasteride for $75. propecia is usually only prescribed in 1 mg pills. so i just got a pill cutter and quartered the little fuckers. suddenly, it goes from one dollar a day to $75 for 360 days. i’ll give it a year …

earlier tonight, i’m sitting at my dining room table, manipulating this shitty blue pill cutter i got at albertson’s, trying to cut these little blue pills into four equal pieces, thinking, “some day i’ll find true love, some day i’ll do wonderful things, some day i’ll have great kids, some day my dog will listen to me, some day i’ll make it to opening day, some day i’ll go on spring break, some day i’ll die” as i scraped tiny little fragments of magic blue hair pills into a recycled pill bottle.

our own lsu “geaux” tigers took on the harvard crimson last night at the new alex box stadium, conveniently located down the street from the old alex box stadium.  you can still park at the old alex box stadium and then just walk down to the new alex box stadium.  shit works out like that sometimes …

the contest lacked the passionate tailgating fan fervor that (i can only assume having never experienced it first hand) accompanies a home football game …

not to say that there isn’t a certain south east louisiana peculiarity bouncing around the ballpark in other ways …

for starters, we printed our tix off the internet. the first person we tried to give them to (some undergrad sitting behind a purple and gold folding table) reacted, well, strangely when i presented the tix. “Oh, those tickets … for those tickets you gotta go around the corner where they can scan those tickets.”

alright, you fucking prick.

things were weirder at the concession stand. chicago mel orders a strawberry frozen lemonade (interesting, because she doesn’t like strawberries or lemonade [¡wow!] yet she specifically wanted a strawberry frozen lemonade) and they bring her a cherry frozen lemonade. she asks to trade it in. the woman behind the counter, a middle aged, frumpy, agitated, career concession professional, turns to the undergrad who fucked it up and says, “that’s the second time you did that!” he gives a helpless kind of shrug, and she marches to the back, pushing him out of the way as if to say, “get the fuck out of my way you dumb motherfucker, i obviously have to do everything around here since you’re such a stupid piece of shit!” she starts rooting around in the cooler for a few seconds before turning and yelling, “no strawberry!” to which mel responds, “that’s fine, i’ll just take the cherry.”

i got one of those massive 90 ounce soft drinks in a plastic cup. it was a two hander, for sure. they give it to me with no lid. i’m walking around with this huge fucking drink looking for a lid. finally i head back up to the concession window and say, “hey, do you know where i can get a lid for this?” the girl says, “oh, we don’t have lids.”

alright …

we make it to the outfield bleachers (called the “home run” bleachers) and start shooting the shit.

how to heckle the harvard players:

"hey 38, what's the square root of 161?"

"hey 19, if a train leaves harvard yard traveling at 40 mph, and another leaves cambridge traveling at 42 mph ..."

"hey bullpen catcher, what's 4+4?"

we assumed they all had names like bryce billingham III, felix frankfurter, john quincy peddington adams, and so on (they did, too ...)

even though we knew that these young lads (every time chicago saw a picture of one of the players on the jumbo tron she says, "he looks just like a baby!") will one day become powerhouse pillars of society and will buy and sell us, our children, and our children's children for generations, we took comfort in the fact that, for tonight at least, the odds were high that they would get the living piss beaten out of them by the home team.

i predicted a 9-0 route. chicago had it at a more reasonable 8-2.

the crowd in the home run bleachers were not what you would call wine and cheese liberals. they were coon asses. white men, mostly. couple women, but mostly men and no non-whites at all.

when the game starts, i hear a guy behind me say "that's a big glove {something, something, something}" while i'm fucking with my camera. chicago leans in and says, "did you hear what that guy just said? i'll tell you later ..."

this is what she heard, and i have no reason to doubt her, but ... wow. supposedly it was, "that's a big glove on that nigger." now i cannot confirm or deny this, but chicago's got pretty good hearing (she can't see for shit) and, well, he was the only black kid on the lsu team. i didn't think the glove was that large, however.

the conversation in the home run bleachers did not improve. there was also a kid running around wearing a t-shirt with a picture of huge turkey standing in front of an american flag on it. the kid also had braces and was wearing a rawlings trapeeze infielder's glove. nice glove, but, jesus kid ...

we moved down the third base line after another weird exchange at the concession window. i walk up and ask this kid, "can i get a hot dog, a small popcorn, and a small nachos?" he starts to move, gets confused, then gets really flustered and says, "can you just repeat all that for me?" chicago thought his english wasn't too good, but i think he was just in over his head like everyone else who worked there.

things were much better in the non-home run bleacher section. we could put our feet up on the wall and were out of ear shot of red necks as we watched the tigers beat the holy hell out of those ivy league pussies. we stayed till the end.

final score: 10-2.

a great night for baseball.

the problem is that the all-star game’s home run derby has a totally illogical rules system and they sucked the life out of what was shaping up to be a compelling athletic competition this evening. to make a long story short, josh hamilton hit 28 home runs in the first round. 24 was the previous record. 500 foot moon shot after 500 foot moon shot. beating the living shit out of the baseball. he flew his 71 year old high school batting practice pitcher in to pitch to him. it was amazing … a truly beautiful moment.

after the first round, josh hamilton had 28, the next two guys had 8 a piece. game fucking over. place is going nuts, let’s all go to the bar and get drunk and marvel at the genius of what we just witnessed.

but oh no …

baseball, i.e. big time sports, i.e. capitalist swines of the highest order, have to drag the fucking contest out to damn near three hours, one can only assume, to ring every possible drop of advertising dollar out of the television time slot.

so after round one, it’s josh hamilton 28, two other guys, 8 a piece. enter round two. in round two, the total home runs you hit in round one are carried over. so if you hit 28 home runs in round one and the two guys tied for second hit 8 a piece, that’s the score going into round two. josh hamilton was still winning after round two and he didn’t even have to hit. based on his total in round one, he was still kicking ass. but he hit a few out nonetheless to give the fans a bit more of a show and, presumably, to stay loose.

here’s where it just gets dumb. in round three they wipe the slate clean. everyone is at zero. two guys are left, josh hamilton and another guy (whose name will not be honored here, not because he did anything wrong, but because he is obviously not the home run derby winner). the other guy wins 6 to 4 or some shit in the final round and wins the contest. josh hamilton hit 13 more home runs total and was probably a little worn out by the time he got to the third round because, oh i don’t know, maybe it’s because he hit 28 fucking MOON SHOTS in round one! the fix is in people! the fix is in!

if i would have won that award, i would have done the honorable thing and grabbed the mike during the presentation ceremony and said ‘josh hamilton can come pick this puppy up right now because he’s a bad mother fucker and i obviously don’t deserve it.’ if i had endorsements i was afraid of losing with such behavior, i would have toned it down a bit and just pissed on the trophy and then taken a dump on home plate.

fuck all y’all. the fix is in.

***

i spent hours today staring at the laptop trying to understand the ins/outs of this web site/blog. doesn’t look like i did much, but i am figuring stuff out – slowly. i gotta chill out tomorrow. do something a bit less neurotic. i think the basic functionality of the new site is almost there at this point. everything else will be uncharted territory of crazy ideas i have little idea of how to do (but i know more than i did yesterday).

we hit a rangers game last night.

pretty boring game in all honesty, but it’s always nice to be at the ballpark.

check this out … here’s the 1 billion dollar new dallas cowboys stadium under construction:

does it look unbelievably enormous? because it is. supposedly you’ll be able to stand the statue of liberty up inside of this thing when it’s done. they’ll probably sell a shitload of beer and foam fingers in this fucker.

that scottish cunt with the late night talk show is on the television while i’m typing this and somebody should really push that guy down a flight of stairs.

in texas its big tvs, big trucks, bug buckets of golf balls at the driving range, big football stadiums, and big asses. big ups, texas. i can do this for a little while.

going to the modern art museum downtown tomorrow, gonna try to hit the track on the 4th. shortly after that, i’ll be goin’ down river.