the great chin semmel visited recently. one of those ‘back in the good ole days’ kinda visits. felt like we were still sitting around a shotgun apartment on guerrero street pondering the big decisions like where to drink tonight, where to go eat, which nags to throw into the five horse exacta box, which girl at the bar has the best body … you know, important shit.

***

what do you get when you take two fruitcakes and put them in a tandem kayak?

a rather nice little adventure …

lsu lakes is all of four feet deep and jacuzzi-like in temperature. it’s sort of like kayaking in a bath tub.

the sun never sets on a bad ass …

and since the kayak didn’t titanic, sushi was our just reward.

almost time to go to chelsea’s to watch the college world series.

geaux tigers.

i hope the beer is cold.

scott lekovish’s driveway was the spot for free throws. we had a hoop behind my house on westside, too, and one at my dad’s place, but i think about being at scotty’s when i think about shooting free throws. the driveway sloped downward towards the street, so you were always shooting slightly uphill, and if you missed a shot, the ball rolled all the way across the street and into an empty lot. up the hill down the hill up the hill down the hill …

scotty … now there’s a kid who could shoot free throws. at basketball summer camp, he routinely went around 90%. kid was a fucking machine. he could also kick field goals off a tee like nobody’s business. i swear i’ve seen him kick a fifty yard field goal, effortlessly. he coulda been a contender …

me, i was always a hack … but i’m no better or worse at 34 than i was at 13. i just shot 54% from the line. that’s about what i remember i was good for in summer camp.

still felt good, though …

turning in all your papers and your grades finds you doing new shit, like shooting 100 free throws at dusk and finally mowing the back yard and flea bombing the house and having complete control of the jukebox at red star and drinking sazeracs with neil and watching the celtics come back from 14 down with eight to play and reading john sinclair on the couch and swimming laps at the rec and sweating your balls off in this fucking muggy heat, my lord! my lord …

it’s going to be a long, long, long hot summer, as far as my eyes can see …

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.

yes.

i edited my final seminar paper a few nights ago at 3:00 a.m. after drinking a six pack at a post-semester party. the party was subdued; i think we’re all tired.

the last few nights, i have dreamed of editing and writing papers. check that out! forming complete sentences, ideas, revising. paragraphing the unconscious. reminds me of when i used to detassle corn in illinois. i’d close my eyes at night and see nothing but corn, Corn, CORN!

what a week … strangely torturous yet a bit out-of-sorts adventure:

old typewriters, broken spaces, blow torches, lost keys, lost beers, new music, old music, great music … poetry … the bleeding heart of jesus, julia’s rare name, old books, older bars, status updates, generations, philadelphia, smothered in hugs, dog breaks, long words, long nights, wrong words, wrong rights, sing-a-longs, donkey kong, diet coke, that corn floats!, mary’s harry oh’s, it snows, sleep, sweet, sleep, sweet, sleep, sweet, little, life.

snow!

so says jr. bush, three months before he leaves the flaming bag of dog shit called america on the front stoop of either john mccain or barack obama.

whatever party you’re for, you’ve got to feel empathy for the poor s.o.b. who inherits this calamity.

it’s kind of like the girl who got randy’s job after randy got fired. randy used to come to work at a corporate job i once had smelling like human shit. he smelt so bad h.r. had to tell him to go home and change his pants and wash his ass once in awhile. randy kept clothes and food on the shelves behind his desk. randy used to walk the halls wearing headphones that had a radio built in to them, antennae extended. one day randy walked into my office out the blue and started a story while pulling up his pants and putting on his belt. they suspected randy used to sleep in the office, but i think he did a lot more than that there …

we used to fuck with randy pretty bad. one time we hid a furby in the office and only turned it on when randy was alone. the furby would randomly shout out furby stuff once in awhile (as furby’s do), and randy would hear it. and randy would walk around, looking, and talking to the sound he couldn’t find. we’d watch from the hall as randy lost his mind. and we’d laugh at randy really hard. i was pulling down over $50K a year then … talk about derivatives!

president bush is randy.

and either john mccain or barack obama is the sweet little armenian girl who replaced randy.

and her chair smelled like randy.

and she didn’t last too long …