Baseball Fantasy

I ran into an old friend last night and we hung out for a while. We don't agree on anything. Politics, religion, culture wars, anything. As often as we discuss these things, there's never any rancor. Mystified head shaking, but no rancor.

But last night we got into it. He called me a moron, I called him a jackass. It nearly came to fisticuffs.

Ok, not really. But it was a pretty heated argument.

About Pete Rose.

Bart Giamatti's decision is still dividing this country, almost two decades later. And no one likes Bud Selig. So I've decided that I would like to be Commissioner of Baseball. I think I could bring a sense of whimsy (by which I mean "arbitrary and irresponsible exercise of power") to the job. Here are a few of the things I hope to accomplish in office:

1. Interleague play would be abolished.

Except maybe for one series per season. And the teams would play by the guests' rather than by the hosts' rules. That is, if the Giants are at the A's, they would play by NL rules. This is more gentlemanly and sportsmanlike, I think.

2. For an entire season, the Yankees and the Red Sox would play only one another, and after each game the players would have to line up and shake hands with the other team, Little League style.

The complications to the rest of the AL schedule would be more than outweighed by the potential for comedy and our collective delight in punishing the smuggest and whiniest (respectively) teams in baseball.

3. The American League would do away with the Designated Hitter. The DH would be replaced by the DS, the Designated Steroider.

Each team could select one player who would be allowed to use performance enhancing drugs. He would be required to sit out for all Interleague or World Series games, whether played in an NL park or not.

Alternately, the team could choose between having a DS and letting their pitchers bat off a tee. I am a pro-choice candidate.

4. It will be written into the MLB charter that they have the longest season in professional sports.

This rule is meant not so much to lengthen the baseball season, but as leverage to shorten the NHL season. I'm still fuzzy on the details. I'm imagining some kind of MLB/NBA coalition.

5. Rollie Fingers, Ozzie Smith, and Goose Gossage will be ordered to return to active duty.

Because they're fun. No one's fun anymore (said the grouchy old dude). There might also be a rule that Rickey Henderson has to come back up from the minors and keep playing until he's eligible for Social Security.

You know, next year.

I loves me some Rickey. How can you not?

I was also thinking about making some rules about how the Mariners and the poor benighted Wichita Linemen (my ill-managed fantasy team) would have to make it to the playoffs. But that's a bit capricious, even for the "capricious despotism platform" on which I am running.


This ad for "Feemus for Commissioner" was approved by Feemus.

I'm "It"!

Ok, I've been tagged. Not in the sense that I have been spray painted by urban youths, but in the sense that my e-friend Claudia (after she was "it") has e-tapped me. I now have to say five unique or interesting things about myself. Dear God, I wish I were interesting.

1. I didn't graduate from high school. Although I think I did take a correspondence course and finally get the degree. I think.

2. When I was in junior high, I was hit by the school bus. I was trapped under the wheel for a loooong time while they tried to figure out how to get it off without crushing me when the clutch was released. Of course, since I was in junior high, my biggest worry wasn't the ton of metal pressing on my back. I was worried that I would be in trouble for making all those kids late. I got the nickname "chock block" out of this incident.

3. I eat bell peppers with peanut butter. Unrelated to marijuana.

4. I've had over thirty jobs.

5. I have a phobia about the eye doctor. I'm not that keen on doctors in general (I once broke my knee and didn't go to the doctor for over a day because I was sure it would get better on its own), but the eye doctor is a special case.


Whew.

Best Student Excuse EVER

I had a student tell me this week that he would have to miss class for three weeks because he had scheduled some meetings that conflicted.

The meetings were for a student panel on the Committee for Curricular Review.

He told me this without a trace of irony. When I asked him if it might not be helpful to be familiar with, you know, the curriculum in order to participate in curricular review, he just looked at me blankly.

"So, uh, what can I do to make up class?"

War on Women Still at Orange Alert

The Maryland courts have ruled that a woman cannot withdraw legal consent after intercourse has commenced.

I actually get the impulse behind this. As much as we'd like to believe it's so, consent isn't always necessarily transparent, and of course things get cloudier once things get grindier. And from a legal standpoint, I understand that it makes things tricky if someone has consented to sex and the sex has begun before she withdraws her consent.

I totally get that. I do.

But to say that once sex has begun a man doesn't have to listen to "no" is just mind-bogglingly stupid. And dangerous. And to frame it as protecting the rights of the accused is cynical and offensive.

Presumably a man still has the right to withdraw his consent after intercourse has begun.

It's called pulling out and going to sleep (it's my "patented move").

Presumably men aren't going to be legally forced by this new legislation to stay awake and satisfy their partners ('cause I've got an early morning) just because they gave their consent before intercourse commenced (when I wasn't so tired).

So, apparently this law is only designed to compel the receptive partner to participate in sex as long as the penetrative partner wants it, and not the other way arounf. It's designed to legally compel the physically weaker to submit to the demands of the physically stronger.

That's swell.

There has to be a better way to deal with what is admittedly a difficult legal situation.

War on Christmas? Bring it on!

I'm annoyed enough to take on some other holidays, too. I'm looking at you, Flag Day. You want a piece of me, St. Patrick's Day? Yeah?

Bring. It. On.

A campus newspaper is accusing the university where I work of a "systematic attack on religious holidays" and of engaging in "political correctness" that "alienates...the majority." The author accuses the university of "an assault" on holy days.

The author of the article is angry because the day planners that were handed out at the beginning of the year don't have Christmas on them.

Boo fucking hoo. You must be soooo alienated.

I'm assuming that the author of the article knows when Christmas is, so presumably she's not worried about missing it. She's worried about not having official acknowledgment of something that's important to her. I get that, but I hardly think that leaving off a date from a calendar is tantamount to a "systematic attack."

But I guess "pointless omission" doesn't sound as scary as "systematic attack."

The aggrieved, put-upon tone is all too familiar. Everybody on the Pat Buchanan side of the culture wars has the same tone, although as far as I know no one is preventing anyone from celebrating Christmas. But the culture warriors manage to feel "assaulted" and marginalized just by having a date left off a calendar. And these are the same people who bitch about the "victim mentality." Sheesh.

She mentions, with magnanimous ecumenicalism, that Yom Kippur and Ramadan are also omitted. She fails to mention that the University has all major Christian holidays off, but doesn't even have the holiest of Jewish holidays off, despite a student and faculty population that's about 1/4 Jewish. She also doesn't seem to know much about her own faith, as she focuses nearly all her energies on Christmas, and gives Easter only a passing mention. Maybe she doesn't know that Easter is the most sacred day in the Christian calendar.

I think that's what annoys me most. The people who bellyache the loudest about the "War on Christmas" are usually not the devout, who are typically happy enough to have secular institutions staying the fuck out of their faith. It's just reactionary dickheads who worry that if we take Christmas off the day planner today, then tomorrow we might come after their whacking great piles of unearned money. It's all about the power (and the Benjamins), baby. And they could really care fuck all about Baby Jesus.

But what really gets my goat is this: why the fuck is the university buying day planners for the students? Can't they buy their own fucking day planners? I didn't get a day planner.

'Twas in Another Lifetime, One of Vomit and Blood

Once upon a time, I was a bartender. During the decade or so I did this, I worked in some nice places and I worked in some real shitholes. I remember one place where we had to pull up the flooring because we couldn't get the bloodstains or the vomit stench out of it. So we just pulled it up and let people bleed and puke on the concrete.

Classy.

I worked for a while at a downtown nightclub. I quit after the second shooting death. Slow learner is old Feemus.

Another place was right next to the methadone clinic. That was a strange clientele.

The customer I remember with the most skeeved-outness was this guy who would come in and drink endless cups of coffee. He never ate and he never had a drink. Just drank coffee. And smoked.

He smoked Top Tobacco, I remember. And for rolling papers, he tore pages out of a Gideon Bible.

No joke.

I don't know where he got all these Bibles, but every night there he was, rolling cigarettes in pages from the Gideon Bible. I remember that they were the kind with red ink for the words of Jesus.

Drinking coffee and smoking and writing feverishly in his notebook. God only knows what he was writing. Probably page after page of "I'm gonna knife that fucking bartender. I'm gonna knife that fucking bartender..."

I've always thought that if I were to write a novel or a memoir, I would change it so that he was writing all his thoughts down on ZigZags. I think that would be funnier.

No point to this post, just a random memory. Misty and watercolored. Sort of.