All Star Break

Being a baseball fan on the left side of the country can be a pretty happy ride. Over the past few years, there have been a couple World Series parades, and plenty of playoff games played between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's. It's a pretty satisfying time right now, what with the no-hitter from Tim Lincecum and the A's roaring through the first half of the season with organized baseball's best record, it's hard to imagine how this couldn't be our national pastime.
Unless you've been reading any other section of the paper beyond the sports page. This past week, a judge ruled that the Los Angeles Dodgers must pay Giants fan Bryan Stow fifteen million dollars for their part of an incident three years ago that left Mister Stow in a wheelchair. That incident was off the field, after the game, in a parking lot, but the jury found that the Dodgers' lax security was to blame for the attack visited upon Stow after the season opener in 2011. Certainly there have been times when being a fan of any team is a lonely proposition, but it should never be a dangerous one. As one of the very few Denver Broncos fans in the heart of Silver and Black Oakland Raiders territory, I have felt nervous at times donning my orange and blue, but nothing like what Bryan Stow must have felt way back then. Permanent disability should not be part of the ticket price.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the state, the San Francisco Giants are considering a ban on "culturally insensitive attire" at AT&T Park. A couple of weeks ago, at AT&T Park’s Native American Heritage Night, two groups of fans had a disagreement over the issue of what should and shouldn't be worn. The San Francisco Examiner reported two Native American fans asked a third fan, who appeared to be Caucasian, to remove a headdress he was wearing. If you're getting a totally Northern California vibe from this proposal, you win the kewpie doll. 
Meanwhile, across the bay, the Oakland Athletics continue to play their games in the house that Al Davis built, or at least added on over the past twenty years, until it can barely support its own fans. Toilets overflow, and the lights won't always stay on. As for cultural sensitivity, Oakland lets the guys from Green Day throw out the first pitch. How much more sensitive can you get? 

What's The Point?

The subtitle of this blog is "Short Attention Span Theater." It's a borrow from the title of a TV series that used to show up on Comedy Central back in the early nineties. It made sense to me, as I started writing down what was on my mind on any given day, that I shouldn't ask for much more than that. There is still so much of Al Gore's Internet left to read, you shouldn't be stuck here too long, and truth be told, if there isn't something to grab you in the first few lines, you'll probably move on to the latest cat video. I can accept that. It's also true that if I take longer than a few lines to make my point, we've missed the connection.
If you're still reading this, then you understand my periodic and somewhat desperate need for an editor. If I would have opened by saying that I read in the news that Satya Nadella, Microsoft's new CEO, had issued a memo about the future of the tech behemoth that he only recently took over. That memo was more than three thousand words long. For your personal reference, up until that last "long," you had read one hundred and ninety-one words. Satya did go on. Not that the vision of Microsoft's direction could be contained in a couple of paragraphs, but it's a fantastic thing that there are journalists and bloggers out there who would distill those ideas and plans for us. Mergers and acquisitions. He would also like us to know that this will be a very important time for his company. There will be a lot of discussion among his employees. Xbox is fine. Quit your belly-aching. Microsoft cares about you, the customer.
Or something like that. You could read the whole thing, if you had a mind to. But that's not really our nature, currently. Ever since Abe Lincoln whittled down his Gettysburg Address to some two hundred forty words, Americans have been anxious to get to the bottom line. "Shall not perish from this earth." It would fit much better in that crawl you see at the bottom the screen on CNN or just about every other broadcast finding its way into your home these days. Reading is fundamental, but let's be honest, if I went on too much longer about this particular bit, even if it mentioned that Microsoft was planning on giving away new versions of its operating system to those who have been silly enough to buy into that whole Windows 8 thing, you might just glaze over and assume that if it were really important, somebody would have tweeted it by now. 
Of course, they haven't, since that whole giveaway thing is nonsense, as is a great many things you can read on Al Gore's Internet. Which makes me wonder why Mister Nadella didn't slap that whole missive on a fun YouTube clip and be done with it. Four hundred ninety-seven.

The Truth Hits Everybody

While vacationing in Boulder, I made a point of getting out early in the day to take a run. The Colorado sun was far less forgiving than the fog-shrouded mornings I have become accustomed to in California. I also found that I was covering larger chunks of road while I was away from my wife and son. There was nothing in particular for which I had to rush back. As long as I was available for meals, my mom would wait. I went North, South, and West. Then one morning I realized that I had callously overlooked the East.
By the fifth day, the altitude was no longer a concern, and so I headed down a trail near my mother's house with the expectation of seeing what there was to see. You see what you want to see, and you hear what you want to hear. I saw the bright sun reflecting off the concrete that stretched out in front of me. I saw a few shadows on the path and breathed deep as I passed through them. I saw mothers pushing strollers. I saw boys and girls pedaling their bikes. I saw other hearty souls putting in a few miles before the summer heat overwhelmed us all. I saw a man up ahead walking his black lab. I chose to follow him.
I did have some sense of where I was headed. Though this path was new to me, I knew that I was headed away from the mountains and my mother's house. I knew I needed to return there eventually, which is why when I had almost caught up with the black lab and his master I chose to break off my pursuit of the east and turn back in the direction from whence I had come. That's when I realized where I was.
I was on a  road just behind Mountain View Cemetery. Not the one in Oakland, where I would be returning soon enough, but the one in Boulder. This was the one that truly had a view of the mountains: The Foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The gate was open. Normally, I don't run through cemeteries, since it strikes me as profoundly rude and disrespectful. But I have relatives here. I came to Boulder to be with my family. The gate was open. I ran in.
I made my way around the perimeter, and then to the center walkway, remembering all those Memorial Days that my brothers and I spent trailing after my mother as she moved from one grave to another, placing iris she had cut fresh from our own garden on those she wanted to memorialize. I tried to remember where those plates were. There were no headstones here, the markers were all set flat into the ground, so as not to obscure the mountain view. And suddenly, I looked down: there was my grandmother and grandfather, lying together even though the dates would separate them by many years. They had come to rest here, right at the corner, in the center. This told me what I had already half-remembered from stories I had heard as a kid. Grandpa was one of the first to be buried in this new place, across town from the old graveyard that was full of Boulder's Old West past. He was part of the new pioneers. The ones that were going to bring Boulder out of the second world war and into a new age of prosperity. He didn't really get that chance. He was gone before he got to take over the pharmacy at the new medical center. He left behind a wife and a daughter, my mother. I had stopped running. I stood there for a moment, and then bent down to pat the warm metal surface that carried his name next to his wife's. Good to tag off with you grandpa. Nice to see you too, grandma.
The heat of the day was coming, I could feel it on the back of my neck. I looked up at the mountains, and back down at my legacy. I bid them adieu and was off again, running back to the west.

I Wish That Lunch Could Last Forever

You may never have had that awkward moment of talking to someone you haven't seen in a while, and they ask if you want to get together, so you suggest having lunch. Picking that midday meal is the sure bet for containing the potential commitment of time and energy. If it all goes dumpy wrong or embarrassing, you can always look at your watch and say, "Oh, I've got to get going." Last week I had lunch with the woman I grew up with, the one I occasionally refer to as "my childhood sweetheart." I didn't have that awkward feeling. I felt the years melt away and remembered, upon her reference, that we had known each other since we were three. The reference was in regard to my ordering the barbecue brisket sandwich. "You can be as messy as you like," she assured me, "We've known each other since we were three."
And that's why the "childhood sweetheart" label is just a little unfair. It implies a limit to the relationship that never really existed. The fact that we were friends before the implication of boyfriends or girlfriends or K-I-S-S-I-N-G or trees was even a wisp of a notion. As we sat across the table from one another, catching up on the time we had spent being grownups, parents, married, changing jobs, we kept sliding back to the stories of that extraordinary youth we shared. We played together. Oh how we played. We used our imaginations. I told her how much I appreciated being allowed to participate in those games of make-believe that boys don't often get to: our front yards became horse pastures or German POW camps. We recreated all five of the Planet of the Apes movies in repertory, with periodic improvisation, but always with great reverence to the details. I got to pretend. We made up stories. There was an afternoon that, along with my younger brother, we imagined a story in which all the GI Joes came to life, armaments included and decided to take on these three youngsters whose parents had gone and left them for the night. Long before Toy Story, we created a tragic tale of playthings gone bad. Tragic because I insisted on writing myself a death scene, noble to the end where I saved my friends by sacrificing myself. It's where I began to feel like a writer inside.
And there were still more stories to tell, so many in fact that she admonished me, when we began the second hour of holding down our table at the outdoor cafe, "I'm going to the bathroom. Stay right there." She needn't have worried. I was happy to stay if only for the incredible comfort I felt as I mined our collective reality. A reality that didn't feel constrained by age or youth. It just was. We talked about our kids and our spouses and the jobs we do and the history we shared and how it made us what we are today: Friends. When I realized that we had held down our table for more than two hours, our waitress had stopped coming by to refill our iced tea glasses, I felt the social cue to move the party elsewhere. But life intrudes and we really didn't have forever. Sooner or later the restaurant police would show up and ticket us for loitering or one of us would get a call from the cell phones that we never used to carry when we spent all those hours walking our dogs together or creating new variations on episodes of Hogan's Heroes. She drove me back to my mother's house, where she came in and we shared another flurry of reminiscences. It made me think of all the people in my life who had drifted away, I let them go. I wouldn't let her go. She's a keeper.

Future Shock

"In the not too distant future," those words have put a chill in my spine for about as long as I've been alive. Of course, that future has shifted over those years. The very idea that a movie would call itself "Frankenstein 1970" meant that there was a potential for a mad scientist to create life from his wicked and crazy experiments was a possibility. The fact that the movie was made in 1958 and I watched it the first time in 1968 didn't keep me from being frightened of that potential. Seven years later, I was convinced that it was only a short hop, skip and a roll before we would all adopt Rollerball as our planet's pastime. This was just a few years after I had to reckon with the notion that the progenitor of a race of super-intelligent apes had already arrived and the clock was ticking on the whole human race as the dominant species. 
But these are just movies, right? Imagine my surprise when I opened up the article about Louis Del Monte, who has this to say: "Today there's no legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be. If that continues, look at the exponential trend. We will reach the singularity in the timeframe most experts predict. From that point on you're going to see that the top species will no longer be humans, but machines." He wrote a book called "The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Will Artificial Intelligence Serve Us Or Replace Us?" and it's got a lot of science in it, but he insists it's not science fiction. He points to studies that suggest that machines are already becoming self-aware, or at least capable of lying and being concerned with self-preservation. Del Monte says, "By the end of this century most of the human race will have become cyborgs. The allure will be immortality. Machines will make breakthroughs in medical technology, most of the human race will have more leisure time, and we'll think we've never had it better. The concern I'm raising is that the machines will view us as an unpredictable and dangerous species." If this all sounds a little like the work or Doctor Charles Forbin or Miles Dyson, feel free to go ahead and change the channel. For me? The future is now. 

Target Shooting

You probably won't be able to find a well-regulated militia at your local Target store, even if you have a coupon. That's not because of the inherent irony of a store called "Target" selling nothing more powerful than a Nerf dart gun, but mostly because the folks at one of this nation's largest retailers is "respectfully requesting" that their customers leave their guns at home. From their corporate web site: "...starting today we will also respectfully request that guests not bring firearms to Target – even in communities where it is permitted by law." What sort of world are we living in when a discount store has to tell its customers that they don't need to pack heat when they stop by to pick up some new lawn chairs or charcoal briquettes before the next barbecue? The sort of world where citizens feel the need to exert their constitutional rights in increasingly bizarre ways. The number of armed incidents inside Target stores isn't necessarily on the uptick but those who feat that their Constitutional rights are being infringed want us to know that they need to be able to defend themselves at all times, even while shopping in the Health and Beauty aisle. 
Or even when they're taking the family out for a soft taco at their nearest Chipotle Mexican Grill. The powers that be at this chain has also made a respectful request of their patrons, since "the display of firearms in our restaurants has now created an environment that is potentially intimidating or uncomfortable for many of our customers." Not just handguns, by the way. Assault rifles. Loaded. "Just to prove a point." So here's the crazy part, to me anyway: Neither store is making a rule against bringing guns into their stores. They're asking nicely. Probably because they know the storm that would be stirred by making that kind of demand. Next thing you know, they'll be insisting that you can't yell "Fire" in a crowded Starbucks, mostly because somebody with an itchy trigger finger might pop off a couple rounds before flames caught up to their grande mocha latte. 
That's okay, since there's still a place where you can go where people know your name and the Second Amendment: Rifle, Colorado. There is a tavern called "Shooter's Grill" where patrons are encouraged to bring their shootin' irons. Their special includes a gun training course in addition to the baby back ribs. Of course, this makes mountains more sense in a town called "Rifle" in a restaurant called "Shooters." I guess Target just missed their marketing opportunity.

Must Be The Altitude

That used to be something else. This is the hardest part about growing up, and it's also the hardest part about going home again. I call Oakland "home," but I grew up somewhere else, and it's not there anymore. Well, it is, but it isn't. The fact that the gas station that used to sit on the corner adjacent to Arby's at which I worked so many years ago is now a pot shop is just one of the confounding juxtapositions that have occurred in my most recent return to the city at the base of the Rocky Mountains: Boulder.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that my youthful stomping grounds have evolved in ways that I might not have anticipated when I left. Twenty-two years ago is a long time for things to stay the same. It's plenty long enough, for example, for a state to pass legislation that makes buying and selling marijuana legal. It's long enough for more than a dozen different recreational and medicinal shops have opened within the city limits for the discerning pot-buyer. It's very different from when I was a kid, and I had to find this guy "Jim," who I didn't know but my friend knew and he was going to take us to a place where he was pretty sure a guy would probably sell us some pot if we had whatever it was that he might end up charging us. It was a deal. We were making a deal. And it was scary.
Okay, in retrospect, it wasn't that scary because it was in Boulder, Colorado after all and cannabis wasn't really that hard to find. It just felt that way when I was in college. But that was the way we used to start weekends: procuring liquor and drugs. You knew it was going to be a tough weekend if you got all the way to Saturday night and all you had to show for your efforts was a twelve-pack of Miller Lite in the refrigerator. What I'm suggesting is that the adventure was in the procurement, and now that the hunt has been taken out of the equation, I wonder what the underclassmen busy themselves with on those Friday afternoons.
Maybe they're studying. Maybe they're reflecting on the way that outdated dogma kept an absurd distinction between depressants in place for far too long. Or maybe they're wondering what changes are taking place in their own home towns.