writing explosion

So, while my blogging here has leveled off considerably, I continue to do a lot of writing in other places.

I've mentioned www.muzzleofbees.com which continues to be the place my writing appears that I am most proud of and excited about. I spent a day with Ryan Matteson the founder and main editor of the blog over the summer at the Pitchfork festival in Chicago, and am so impressed by him. You won't meet a more authentic guy. He has a genuine interest in music and musicians that he's been able to translate into a successful blog, but more than that, he's on track to be a successful "new-school" contributor to the music business in general. He seems to understand that success is measured not by one's ability to quickly amass wealth, but rather it is a mixture of strong, honest friendships/business relationships and an anti-cynic philosophy. Cynicism prevails in music criticism especially, but Ryan's blog is mostly about promotion and spotlighting and never a space for cutting down. And I say "mostly" because the only cynicism that I read on muzzleofbees is usually in an article by me. I still have a lot to learn and am grateful for serendipitous relationships with people like Ryan who, just by example, push me out of the cynic's self-conscious cycle.

I have also recently been doing a bit of freelance writing for the magazine American Songwriter -- at least, I've been writing for their website. It's my first freelance experience. So far it's been just three pieces: A review of the Pitchfork fest, a review of a Soundgarden concert, and a record review of the new Ray Lamontagne record. I was particularly proud of the first I'm realizing that it focuses a bit on cynicism as well (a state of mind frequently on my mind, it seems). I spent a long time writing that article and thinking carefully about my argument there and I think it is a decent piece of writing. I probably spent 10 hours writing it and got paid exactly one dollar an hour for my work, their going rate ($10 per piece). The Ray Lamontagne review has also been fun to watch because of all the comments it got. People, on the whole, didn't like my review and one goes as far as to say "this isn't just a bad review, it's a bad REVIEWER!" That made me frown first, but it quickly turned to a smile when I realized that I might have had the very same response if any of my favorite artists' records were negatively reviewed. I actually felt a bit proud that my review had prompted such a large response.

The best thing by far that these writing gigs provide, despite the low/no paychecks is access to amazing live and recorded music. That Soundgarden show, for example, was sold out. They were to play for an audience in the tens of thousands a few nights later at Lollapalooza and I saw them in a small theatre and was relatively close to the stage. Also, I've been able to see a few of my favorite bands not just once but numerous times over the summer. I saw Dawes, my favorite new band, FOUR times this summer and another favorite The National three times. This is a near unspeakable privilege for a kid who has always loved live music but has never had deep enough pockets to experience it on even a fraction of this scale. So, I'm feeling blessed.

Additionally, I've started to do some "blogging" (if that's what you can call it) over on a Tumblr page. The focus here is mostly MoB's runnoff -- ideas that I have for music writing that don't quite seem to fit that particular writing space. I've stated there that I'm interested, particularly, in exploring the craft of songwriting. That is a big net, though, so I have some liberty to deviate a bit. The last post there about songs that sound similar should be a fun one to explore. I love thinking about the ways that music is constantly overlapping as influences, almost like implicit or subtextual references to other music and styles. So that should be fun.

Finally, I'm going to start trying to use this space --a blog I've titled "Sonic Rhetorics" -- to start collecting ideas and musings about my academic writing. I created it a year or so ago, but have never used it. I'll start using it this semester for a course I am taking, and we'll see what happens from there. Right now the best thing about it is the title banner.

This leads to a bit of an admission of fear: for all the writing that I have been doing this year, only a small percent of it has been academic writing. This worries me a bit. I know that in order to be successful in my career as an academic, I have to start producing and publishing my work. This is a bit daunting for me, but I have begun to make moves to help these two kinds of writing -- the kind that I want/like to do and the kind that I have to do -- and merge them. I am fairly certain that my dissertation will be a historical look at American music (focused in around the turn of the last century). I want to argue for music as rhetoric -- as persuasive discourse -- that is deeply embedded in culture, ideology and national/regional (and personal) identity. It is my hope that my writing in the last year will prime the pump on my more academic stuff. We'll see.

So that's my update for now. I still see blog as an important home base for me and so will continue to use it from time to time as such.

Fasting and Feasting

In order to maximize productivity, and in the name of curbing some of my distractions (oh all right--my biggest distraction) , I am going to try an experiment next week. Starting this evening, I am going to seriously restrict my internet usage for one week. By restrict, I mean that I am not going to use it for anything except work (which would entail email and using the library for research). Even with my email, I am going to designate "email check" times--maybe three times a day near meal times. I am one of those people who keeps his email inbox totally free of unread items, which means that I am constantly checking it. It's pretty ridiculous, actually.

The biggest "sacrifice" will be leaving my Google Reader RSS feed aggregator alone for the whole week. I rarely surf the internet anymore, preferring to have my interests sucked nicely into a common place via rss feeds. But I have A LOT of subscriptions and get hundreds of updates every day. I probably spend at LEAST an hour throughout the day cruising through them. Next Saturday, when I break the fast, I'll post some stats on how many unread items I have. My guess? I think it will be well over 1000.

What am I going to do instead? Read. I have several books I need to read in addition to the articles assigned as part of my regular week's work. A friend of mine (in my cohort in the program) and I were talking about the difficulty of diving into scholarship in the field without much theoretical training to support the jump. We were both Lit majors and started the program without MAs, so swimming through professional scholarship can be a bit rough, especially when those scholars base their arguments or use as examples prominent, complicated critical theory. For example, in my current study of Visual Rhetoric, many of the articles that I am reading site semiotics, structuralism and post structuralism as important theoretical concepts for their analysis. But if I have never done much study of those theories (and considering that even the theory that I have done some study of is very abstract--as theory tends to be--and therefore difficult to completely grasp), it makes reading the article very difficult. I suppose this is the case for a lot of new graduate students, so rather than complain anymore, I am going to take on the problem on my own. In the future, I am going to have "theory Saturdays" where I spend at least an hour on the weekend away from the assigned texts of that week and focus on one or two of the theorists mentioned in the readings. Summer will also be a good time to get my theory on...feasting on knowledge.

But since it's crunch time, I just need to read as much as I can all the time, thus the timely fast. Fasting from food, as I know from past experience, always gives me a feeling of (hunger) cleansing clarity in my corporeal constitution, so I am hoping this will do the same for my mind, man. Groovy.

good (and bad) distractions

I know, I know. I never finished my Jr. college treatise. I'll come back around to it eventually. It remains an important topic to explore (and one that people seem to have some interesting things to say about), but I've lost my original steam, so I better move on rather than remain in the between-lands.

We've reached that point in the semester where the panic starts--that place where I have filled my shelves with potential sources for my end-of-the semester writing projects, but have, as of yet, not been able to comprehend, glean, or even crack open most of them. Basically, I have a month until the end of the semester--which seems like a long time, but it will sneak by so quickly and soon I will be holed up in my basement working it. Grumpily.

First paper, due April, 28th. I'll be writing on blogging (again) and rhetorical communities. I have one good source on the subject--and hope that it flowers a few times. Grief.

Second paper, due date is flexible, but I am shooting for May 4th (one week later). This one is tougher to define--I am still working on the precise subject of my paper. I am trying to survey the histories of visual studies--both visual culture and visual rhetoric and so I can somehow draw a line between their connection. I haven't yet put a finger on good reason--a "so what?"--for the project, other than I want to know more about it. And that's not gonna cut it for 15-20 pages. I need a reason. A lens. Something specific to ground my study and give me something to look for... instead of just the hundreds and hundreds of scary pages of peruse! panicpanicpanicpanic

To remain sane, I have my share of distractions. Which (as part of a vicious cycle) often end up taking up more of my time than they should, reducing sanity further rather than helping to maintain it.

One thing I did this week was make a list of bands the I like that are coming out with new albums this summer:

The Cure (May 6?--this one is unconfirmed)
Death Cab for Cutie (May 13)
Jason Mraz (May 20)
My Morning Jacket (June 10)
Coldplay (June 17)
My Brightest Diamond (June 17)
Weezer (June)

Some of those I am more excited about than others--but still: sweet.

I get to see two really great shows in the second week of April: Bon Iver and Ben Folds. Tina even gets to accompany me to see BF since my parents will be with us when he comes (yay for family visits!).

I love this blog that I happened upon today. But you already knew that I think Andrew Bird is the bees knees. This is some of the "composition study" that I think needs more attention in my field. There have gotta be some interesting questions to wander through connecting the creative/invention processes of all kinds of composition--the layers at play are made up of similar stuffs, even if the details are different. Blast you disciplinary boundaries. Just you try and stop my illegal immigration.

I suppose that is the end of my post, though it is just the beginning of my distractions.

What blogging is like for me... (a reader survey)

Writing...we're all doing more of it, aren't we fellow bloggers? I am now halfway done (ok, maybe 3/8ths) done with the writing I need to accomplish by late next week. This past week's writing was tortuous. Really, really hard--the kind of hard where it takes halves of hours to write single sentences.

That kind of writing is difficult to get through. It becomes not fun. It threatens to engulf your sanity... and it really did engulf mine. Brain power was lost to the extent that I lost my PDA one day and only a few days later lost my wallet. These are costly tragedies for another post. (Wallet search swallowed up nearly a whole work day yesterday to no avail--PDA search will resume on Sunday when I return to the scene of the crime-of-memory).

As I start the writing for my last project, which is also my first serious seminar paper proper and I am hoping to have a different experience. I want to have some fun with this business because the subject is right for it (see below), the professor is open to fun-serious approaches to topi, and I really can't endure another week of brain wringing. I mean, it was my PDA and wallet last week, next week by this time I could very well be leaving the house without any pants on.

My writing project on the plate for the next 7 days, is really an extension of what I was trying to muddle through in this post a few months ago. Which means that it is about the very thing that I am doing right now: Blogging (specifically, genres of personal writing on the web)--and here's where you can help, dear readers!

I am interested in examining the following questions and your takes on them would be very (very!) useful:

1. Do you imagine your blogging to have an underlying theme?
2. What is it about blogging that is attractive to you? What makes it worth your while? What "work" does it get done? In essence, why do you blog?
3. How much do you worry about your posts--what you write, what not to write, who you might offend, etc. and connected to this question--do you think much about how others may perceive you via your blog? (this may be especially true when you think about people who you may not have ever met who read your blog and get a sense of the "you" presented there.)
4. How often do you read blogs of people you have never met? What attracts you to those blogs, for which there is no real "communication" factor involved?
5. Finally, do you use any kind of rss feed reader to view your blogs (do you even know what that is?--if not please indicate)? If not, do you use tool bar bookmarks--or just links from the blogs you read to the other blogs you read?

Sorry. I know that is a lot. Feel free to answer only those that you want--but the information that you doll out will be very useful to me so, if you have the time, put some thought into it!

UPDATE! Found the wallet this evening in the one place that we hadn't looked because...well you'll see why. I went in to Jonas's room to get him a belt, and saw something dark in the crib. Who knows how it got in there--just glad that it was and not in the hands of some, dark, dishonest stranger .

Is it really a blog if...

...the dude never posts?

I am sorry folks. Wasn't I just whining about how I seemed to have so much to say that I needed two blogs to contain it? I just typed and then deleted a pledge to post daily as an exercise in both writing and discipline, but let's face it: It probably won't happen. So at least I am being honest with myself about it... or something.

This week it's gotten a bit colder. Tina taught me the proper (or at least fancy) way to wear a scarf. It's been harder to get out of bed--especially after being up half the night with restless kids with runny noses. This morning was the first morning that I full on skipped both parts of my other daily activities pledge (30 min study/30 min exercise) that I started after General Conference. So, with all of these horses on the move, it's hard to know which ones to get get back on after the initial fall.

More posts in the near future: likely.

Potential for anything very thought provoking or worth-your-while in those posts: unlikely.

Keep checking back anyway though.

Mamma, if that's moving up, then I'm...

Moving out. Well--maybe just setting up duel residences. Don't worry, Mamma--I'm talking about blog residences. I think that it in the end it is only somewhat (rather than completely) presumptuous of me to move over into two spaces--lest, as one reader puts it--I subject myself (literally and figuratively) to being seen in my swim shorts by folks who didn't sign up for that kind of show (thanks, Audrey).

Throwing up some generic boundaries, which are (as we are learning in that class I mentioned) not very thick and allow for some modulation, will allow, I hope, for a bit more pointed kinds of topics and discussions on both blog spaces. Here is how it will break down as far as I see it at the moment:

My new blog, Stone's Soup (and if you have never read the fable "Stone Soup," you should go to the library and check it out--it usually appears as a picture book and there are at least 10 versions), will be a place where I talk about the issues that, arguably, I care about most: family, friendships, faith, flowers, fiddles, and fish sticks (Okay--got a little carried away with the alliteration there). The Guide will stay basically the same, sans long vacation monologues and other topics where it is likely that there may be swim trunks sightings (again, both literally and figuratively).

So your question may be, "which should I read?" And I guess that is the beauty. You can read both, but at least now you will be more prepared for what you're going to get.

In search for a genre: a blog in crisis

There has been relative radio silence from the Guide (I’m taking to referring to my blog in the third person) in the last few weeks. Understand that it is not from lack of things to say. Rather, it may be attributed to the relative plethora ("Effe, would you say that he has a plethora of piñatas?") of things to say, share and talk about, but the absolute lack of time to say and share them. So for this, dear readers, I apologize.

We are entering the second month of school out here at the UIUC and me and the Academians (yes, I just made that term up) are up to some serious no good. Well, okay—there is actually much good to be said about what is happening here. Which leads me to the first (and only) topic for this evening’s humble post:

I am taking this cool (if mindblowing) class in Genre Theory. In it we have been reading theory about why and how genre is a (sometimes) useful way of classifying and organizing text, action, speech, etc. It’s got me thinking about the genre of this here blog. It’s feeling kind of random for me. Part of the reason that I am feeling this way is that I don’t really have a clear idea of its readership, yet I know that it is no longer just a vacuum blog with no audience whatsoever (it used to be that way). I’ve been teaching my students that composition, to be effective, should have a clear idea of the intended audience. Some blogs do a really good job of this kind of “audience awareness.” Tina and her friends have a nice blog circle going. Michelle, too, seems very aware of and secure in her blog genre. Other bloggers, while not necessarily doing the blog-as-a-way-to-keep-in-touch, organize their blogs around some sort of central theme or rhetorical purpose (I’m thinking of you in particular here, Brandon). I like the idea of blogging within a genre—it seems to give a certain pointedness and purpose to the prose. Blogs that fit within a certain genre somehow communicate more clearly. Maybe it’s because the reader doesn’t have to peruse through the writing to decide if a post has something that they will be interested in. They already know that it will—previous “generic” experience has already proven this to them (and for those of you only used to seeing the word "generic" in a retail situation, work with me here).

This isn’t to say that bloggers like Michelle and Tina only blog about one topic (although they may). Michelle, as most of the readers of this blog will know, blogs about a variety of topics, from Zane wrangling, to gardening, to (most recently) sewing and textile design (which she may not think that I take notice of or think is cool—but I dooo (read that last part like Nacho Libre)). But there is something unifying about the prose that exists there. Perhaps it is Michelle’s personality, wit, writing style (most likely a combination of each of these) that makes the blog compelling to read. Whatever the reason that we read it, it retains certain generic elements that provide readers with expectations for what a new post will contain before we ever click on it. Would you agree (and thanks for letting me use you as an example Shell). A lot of folks’ blogs that I read and admire in the wide world of the academe have similar unifying generic undertones in their blogs. Many of them (actually all of them) are liberal arts professors or grad students, so a common theme in their blog writing is, um, writing (what they are working on, what they hope to do future work about, how their projects are coming along, dissertation progress, etc.). Many of them have other (often related) interests which see some light from time to time—and usually these interests are totally awesome and hilarious (I am thinking specifically of Spencer’s “Found Friday” series.) But usually (I may even go for that “always” change again), those interests outside of what may be considered academic, are interesting in that they serve to give clues toward their personalities—perhaps (and especially when we don’t know them as well), to make more “human” connections with them. That's always nice.

Anyway—that is a lot to say to get to my point which is basically this: I don’t feel like my blog really has a very unified genre that it fits within…and I kinda wish that it did. It is attempting, at once, to be a family, friend, academic, music, food, faith, book review, art, & random funny stuff blog. It has no real sense of audience, I think. If we took a poll, I think we would find that the majority of my readership is family—there are a few of my closest friends sprinkled in there (though I think that you might be the only one reading, Mat), and perhaps one person in the academic world reads (thanks Spencer). If I have left you out, don’t be offended—only let it add to my continued struggle for some sort of understanding of who I am writing for.

Part of me wants to say that I am writing mostly for myself. But I think that isn’t really true. We write, usually, not just because we have something to say but because we have something to share—and that would require (by necessity) an audience. I do maintain an offline journal that I am trying to be better about writing in for the writing that may fit into the former genre. That solves part of the problem, I guess. I’m also thinking about the future of this blog space. Over the next few years, there is the potential of this blog being read by more of my peers within the academy. Especially if I publicize it as a space where I am talking about academic things. This, in many ways, puts pressure on what topics I should or shouldn’t entertain. Maybe it shouldn’t—but it will. Anyone who blogs is aware of the sensitivity that a real audience requires. Who, for example, has ever posted something—maybe even a sentence—and then deleted it? Who has ever deleted a comment? Self censorship seems like a kind of sad state to be in. But I really think that it is a reality for all writers to at least some extent.

Maybe faithful readers of the Guide will say, "No, Jon. Just leave it be. You don’t post that often anyway." And maybe you’re right. But I can’t help the thought that my mom is just not going to care about the Andrew Bird concert that I went to Friday night that I want to blog about. My brother Nick (and perhaps many others) probably didn’t get this far down on this particular semi-academic sounding post (if you did, Nick, way to be man. Way to be.). And there are other, potential future academic colleagues of mine who may have a passing interest in my home life, but potentially not in long descriptions of family vacations (like the series that appeared here over the summer). Taking the idea of “faithful” readers in a different direction, my interest in and pursuit of faith is something that surely puts me outside of the academic blog norm.

So there you have it: a blog in genre crisis. I am considering several alternatives—though the most obvious (multiple blog spaces) just doesn’t seem to fit at the moment. There are other ways to manage the variety of topics that I mention above--tagging is one obvious way. But even that doesn't solve the tension that I feel when I write about all the things that are of interest to me for a (maybe too) diverse audience. Never fear, I will continue as commenced until I figure this out. Until then, dear readers of the Guide, endure.

Update: After talking it over with Tina, I think I may move to two blog spaces (though that still sounds a bit presumptuous to me). Details to follow.

From time to time

Intimidation in advanced Literature classes is inevitable. There are always plenty of smarty-pants' as well as genuinely smart people in the class that seem to know more about the subject than I do. Or at least understand the discourse enough to sound articulate when they talk about the literature. I can usually combat this tendency with either becoming a smarty-pants myself, or by actually learning the subject well enough to make meaningful contributions to the academic discussion going on. I am having trouble doing so in my Milton class. If you have read Milton you know that he is prolific, complicated and very dense. My professor, a Harvard man, is a smart guy--and I took the class more because of his reputation than because of a Miltonist impulse. So far, just feel dumb. I don’t feel like I am among friends, and there are probably 50 people in my class, so shining brightly enough to encourage my instructor's praise will be a challenge.
*
Dr. Blasingame wrote me a nice letter of recommendation yesterday for a scholarship. He also mentioned that he knows some publishers in Utah, one of which is very famous, whom he said he would be willing to submit a finished manuscript from me. He has been such a great support to my budding interests in really all things literary. It’s got me thinking again about my short story series about my San Francisco mission experience. He mentioned that in order to submit something to these dudes, I would have to have a finished product...something at least 300 pages. I maybe have 25. Probably not even that, but still, I have started thinking about that again. I would like to significantly expand this work. I think that I will take a creative non-fiction class this summer, in fact I would really like to try to make the project part of my summer activities, among GREing, and finalizing where will be applying to grad school.
Anyway, I really have only written about two areas of the mission (the Mission and Palo Alto), and neither with a whole lot of detail. There is a ton of stuff that I could explore:
Petaluma, Marin, Foster City, the Sunset—let alone the some of the substories: Crabtree, Mclane, Hall, The Great Fall, etc. So anyway, encouragement sure is nice. From time to time.

Fathers and Sons

Muted electronic beeping, shadows, and the sound of squirting jelly. I wonder if it’s cold as I watch it spread upon the smooth, rounding surface of Tina’s belly. The space of the propped open door, a golden rectangle of light. Concentrated. Glowing. First Born.
…but, silence.
“Dual-lobed placenta.” Nurse says. “See here where the cord is inserted between these two masses? Umbilical cords are typically inserted into a single placental mass.”
“What does that mean for the baby?” A whisper from my wife.
“A dual-lobed insertion sometimes means a dangerous delivery. Occasionally, the cord can detach prematurely and cut off the oxygen to the baby and cause hemorrhaging within the mother… but I am sure everything will be fine. We’ll just need to watch it.”
I watch the ultrasound screen. I see the lines that mean cord, placenta, blood flow—they ungulate and fold into each other: A river at its source, a tree truck; its branches.
My eyes turn back toward Tina’s protrusion, sticky and slick. For a moment I am Nostrodomis, a prophet, a soothsayer. I see shades of a 9-monthed future: Tina, legs splayed, blue, her eyes silently screaming: Lights, Doctor, Nurse, Blood, Chaos, but no child...
Suddenly back at Ultrasound my own eyes focus again on the fuzzy, grey screen. But now I see spine, eye socket, leg, toes and then… penis.
“Do you want to know the sex?’ Nurse says.
“It’s a boy,” I say.
***
My father is a singer of made up songs. I learned to sing my address and phone number before I could read. If I happened to stray, I knew my song “285 South 400 East!” It was sure to lead me home. Even then I knew the songs were silly—bits and pieces of real melodies, but twisted to serve a practical purpose. Like the notes of a little boy’s address or an harmonic offering of affection directed towards my mother. He sang me through Big Wheel park rides and puddle splashes, surprised and warmed with metaphor when I show him my smiling reflection in a dirty, stagnant, pool of melted snow.
Later, he disciplines, but hesitantly. I am Eldest. I remember a conversation he has with my mom about whether or not to use a belt for a grievous act of child villainy that I had committed. He doesn’t.
Later still, in a library adjacent to my school and his office I remember his face, a combination of consternation and fear as he searches the isles to break up my first kiss. One of his students had tipped him off… too late.
My dad paints. But his lessons were broad stroked—impressionistic. My dad writes. But publishing was never the motivation for our relationship. My dad teaches religion professionally, but he rarely, if ever, preached to me when I lived in his house.
My dad hates to camp. He can barely set up the damn tent. But we went anyway. At the annual “Fathers and Sons” church campout, I was humiliated that long after the neighboring family’s tents seemed appear magically like so many morning mushrooms, we would still be struggling and hammering, staking and yanking the mildewed, twenty year old tent that my dad said “worked great” on his honeymoon. The next morning we would leave right after breakfast.
One teenage evening, much later, I am up late messing around with the cat. Amidst the tormenting, the mutt-cat scratches me deeply across the wrist. I stumble out into the bathroom adjacent to my bedroom, pissed, and began cleaning the bleeding wound. My dad comes in to see what the matter is. Our eyes make contact in the mirror, and I pass out. I fall backwards toward the shower curtain. My back hits the edge of the tub just above my hips and I accomplish a handless backbend.
My fainting immediately transports me to a dreamscape. The dreams are un-stoppable, and full story lines play themselves out. There is a nauseating tug from the other dimension, but I resist. I hear the words. They drift into my gathering consciousness like disconnected memories or precognitions and the words are neither present, past or future. They are spoken tenderly by a distant voice that sounds like my own.
“Sweet... sweetheart! Sweetheart! Wake up!” I force my eyelids open and find myself in a place I hadn’t been in years: my father’s arms. In a moment it is weird and I wiggle out, “I’m alright, Dad. Why does my back hurt?”
***
Seth is almost two. He too sings songs and gives hugs and bold, slobbery kisses on the mouth. These kisses seem a symbol of his smallness. I will know the very moment when he is my little-boy-no-longer because of an announcement of his emancipation from them. Without shame, I call him “sweetheart.”
He sits this morning watching Dora, Boots and Blue. Weeks ago we discovered that he knew every single one of his letters, and he can count to the teens even though he skips 4 and 5. We hadn’t spent much time going over that stuff with him-- thinking it was too soon to start. It must be the T.V.
He looks at me, beautiful, and smiles. Earlier in the year, he bumped his face on the tile at grandma and grandpa’s house and chipped a little corner off of one of his front teeth. At first I was disappointed, but know now that it just adds to his charm.
“Hi daddy,” he says and then does his favorite new thing: He lifts his little hand and concentrating, rotates it from side to side, waving. He watches his own hand, as if to make sure that he is doing it right. Satisfied, he looks up at me with his nose squished, grinning:
“Wun, two, fee, six! Seben! Et-nine-ten, eeyeben, telve fiteen fiteen fiteen!” He says, and runs up to me throwing his arms around me.
“Oh, daddy. Lub.”
“I love you too, Seffers,” I say.
***
In a digital snapshot that sits in megabytes on my hard drive, a doctor’s hand is gloved and bloody. She lifts up the opaque, purple, shell-casing: a chrysalis. Two distinct lobes can be seen, while a crying, pink baby is nuzzled, sucking, in the background.

What is there to like about baseball?

What is there to like about baseball?

My wife is the sports fan in our house. In fact, when ever sports becomes the topic of conversation, I tell my friends and new acquaintances that I am barely a man when it comes to sports. I played little league for a year and a half, got cut from the 8th grade basketball team, and swam in high school because there weren’t enough guys on the team. So, watching or following any sport is something that I only do in the case of a really exciting basketball championship, or in an attempt to “do something that my wife wants to do for a change,” or if I happen to be the only other barely-a-man in a room full of full-fledged men.
I suppose that I could see the general benefits in being a baseball fan. Baseball caps are fashionable—I own and like to wear at least two of them. There are plenty of statistics and history to memorize and regurgitate. Baseball cards can sometimes be fairly valuable, especially if your mom doesn’t sell your collection at a garage sale.

What is there to like about baseball?

Pretty much nothing. More fun has been had staring at a wall. But, seriously—what is the draw? The first major problem is the time commitment required by the average fan. The game itself lasts 3 1/2 hours, two more than absolutely necessary. Why have nine innings when five would suffice? At three hours a game, even if you only have 3 or 4 teams you follow at two or three games a week per team we are talking like 40 hours a week! I am sorry, but I have to work.
And also, where is the action? Every two hours or so somebody hits a ball that actually gets them on base, and even that is only marginally exciting, because nine times out of ten the inning will end before that player gets to advance, let alone score. Sure, there is the occasional homerun, but I tend to feel more contempt for these players than admiration. The Barry Bonds and Mark McGuires of the world seem to have some kind of unfair advantage over the rest of baseballdom. Who do they think they are hitting the ball so far when most everybody else mostly just swings.
Plus, baseball has to be the only sport when the defense pretty much just has to stand there and do nothing else and they are still effective. I know what its like. I have stood in right field for inning after inning with no ball coming in a direction even remotely close to where I am. I still got the same high fives and “way to look alive” comments on the way back to the dugout. So, if looking alive is the requisite for baseball defense, sign me up and pay me a million dollars: I am alive.
And grief!, the poor pitcher and catcher. I’ve seen the footage of that pitcher who gave himself a compound fracture by the simple act of throwing a ball over and over and over again at a target 15 yards ahead. Who’s idea was it to have one or two guys be the pitchers for a whole team? Why not rotate the players through and give each of them a shot at a strike out. At least that would give the guy in right field a chance to look a little more alive. And the catcher! Can you imagine squatting like that for any longer than two minutes, let alone the eternity that makes up a half an inning? I have only two words for you: knee surgery! Ok, one more—hemorrhoids! Poor, tortured souls (and bums).

What is there to like about baseball?

After a couple of attempts at writing an answer to this question, I have determined that there is only one real reason to like baseball, and the circumstance surrounding that reason can not be accomplished at home with a baseball game on TV. Finding a reason to like baseball can only be accomplished when you have been able to secure for yourself tickets to a real major league baseball game. The tickets have to be for seats in the lower deck of the stadium, unless you like nosebleeds because that’s what you’re to get one sitting in the upper deck of some of the country’s arenas.
Once you have got to the stadium and have found your seat, and stood and sang the National Anthem the reason for liking the sport will have already started to form in your mind. The first pitch will be thrown out by a war veteran or civic servant or movie star and then the game will begin. You will eat peanuts and licorice and drink soda or maybe beer. If you are lucky the stadium you are at will have a great snack section with two foot hotdogs or garlic fries or something else tasty and indulgent.
The first hit will be a foul near your section and you will see the struggle and shuffle of the fans to retrieve the ball. You will start hoping that the next foul ball comes to you. You will cheer (root, root, root) for the home team when they score or keep the other team from scoring. You will boo good naturedly when the other team scores. You will get worked up over a bad call and you might swear loudly at the umpire who made the call.
Yes, at a baseball game you become part of a tradition. You feel a little more American. You are a direct participating part of something that thousands, maybe millions of others are experiencing with you simultaneously. And that is really the only thing to like about baseball.