Areas of Unrest

26 September 1999 - From Bad to Verse

QOTD: "Taureaux piscine is the only sport I have ever encountered that has only one rule: If you and the bull are in the pool at the same time, you win." - Calvin Trillin

Reading: Reginald Hill, On Beulah Height

Listening to: Paris Combo

I have a long list of things I want to write about, but I also had planned to get to bed at a decent hour tonight. I have to get out of the house by 7 at the latest tomorrow morning since I have a meeting in Azusa at 8 and it is already 11:30 p.m. so there's not much chance of getting eight hours of sleep unless someone lends me a time machine. This has just been one of those amazingly hectic weekends, between the usual walking routine, a game day (Lonny, Lauren, Gene, John, Larry and I played a few rounds of Guillotine, as well as a game each of Illuminati, Medici and Acquire), and a fit of organizational mania that had me filing away a tall stack of memorabilia. The memory box goes back to my mother making us save playbills, but the idea of using hanging file folders for each year is my own. I also have folders for each significant vacation and, of course, right after I finished the filing, I started to tackle the dining room table and found some more Alaska brochures to file. And I still have to pay bills and pack for a trip to Boulder.

So instead of a long thoughtful rant, I'll just write a few brief snippets. First, I have an idea for a combination alehouse and comedy club. I'm going to call it BrewHaHa.

Secondly, I have two silly bits of poetry to pass along. One is something I came up with while playing with magnetic poetry in my office:

Once upon a time
she kissed a dragon
Love became fire
I am sure that someone could write a lengthy interpretation of this, probably focusing on how love tends to devour women and so on, but I was really thinking of a story I once heard about Gertrude waiting for the perfect knight. Only at the end of the story do you learn that Gertrude is a dragon. Her conclusion is that "knights are nice, but it's hard to take off the wrappers."

The other bit was inspired by David Brand's Haiku For Jews. My own "chai-ku" (which also draws heavily on an old joke) is:

The pope visits us
on the day of Yom Kippur
Gut yontiff, pontiff!

Finally, on a serious note, I am worried about baseball. I mean, I expect the Red Sox to drag things out like this, looking for ways to break my heart after getting my hopes up. But do the Mets have to do it also?

I promise more substance and fewer puns in the next entry. However, I will never promise not to whine about baseball. Which does remind me of a cute story from over 14 years ago. I had just had my first date with Robert on a Friday night and Sunday afternoon I went to a museum with my friend, Lisa. And Robert was pretty much all I talked about. Which amused her to no end, as it had been a long time since I'd been anywhere near that smitten. She made some comment about it being inevitable that I'd find out something dreadful about him and I said "what am I going to find out? That he's a Yankees fan?"

The next weekend I went out to dinner with him again. And he started telling me about how his mother had sold his entire baseball card collection. "And I had all of the 1960-1965 Yankees!" he said. (I may have the years wrong, but you get the idea.)

"Oh, are you a Yankees fan?" I asked. He couldn't understand why I laughed so hard when he said "yes".