Saturday, March 8th, 2008
For anyone who doesnt know, I am a Mets fan. This is the one sport i dont waver on in any way. In basketball I am a born Celtics fan, became a Bulls fan for a while but have since become a Celtics fan again. In football while i am a New York Football Giants fan i do like watching at least a dozen different teams every Sunday and if im engaged in a heated fantasy football battle and the Cowboys are playing the Giants and Terrell Owens catches an Eighty yard touchdown well then i just might jump out my chair a scream for joy while simultaneously acknowledging that my Giants are getting the pants beaten off of them. But when it comes to baseball there is only one team i root for and even care about and those are the New York Mets.
I am a slightly above average sports fan. Im not a crazy but i am also not one of those guys that everyone has running around their office trying to strike up conversations about what they think to be the major sports story of the day without having any real grasp about how the game is played or know anything about the past the present or the future of the team they claim to be such a huge fan of. I know my stuff, i root hard for my teams, when they fail it hurts me some, when they succeed i feel that i was integral to their success and when it comes to steroids in sports i will be the first one to call someone a cheater or a liar, ill be the first one to irrationally advocate that they go to jail and ill be the first one to say an asterisk isnt enough next to their name in Cooperstown. I say lets break out the fat sharpies, cross out the whole name and pretend they never existed.
However, and believe me it kills me to say this, as a Mets fan and a baseball fan, Omar, why havent you signed Barry Bonds yet?
I dont know how closely anyone has been following spring training but the good old Mets being just that, Good and Old, have already been wrecked by injuries and we havent even played a full week of games yet. Our outfield is falling apart, as Im typing this im sure Calros Beltran has pulled some kind of muscle in his back or groin, Endy Chavez was probably in a car accident and it wouldnt shock me to find out that Ryan Church is thinking about retiring or some such nonsense. We have no first baseman, we have a terrible bullpen, we have an unproven end of the rotation and to top it all of our starting out field is falling apart faster than (please insert remark about a failed presidential campaign of your choosing)! So what the hell are we going to do about it?
The answer came to me while i was driving to band practice today listening to the FAN (WFAN). I dont remember who the host was and they made the statement in such a matter of fact way at first i wasnt sure if i had heard them correctly and when they failed to continue the discussion i was sure i had misremembered but after thinking about it a little while longer, in the liquor store buying a case of New Castle, and in Daddy’s buying strings, the thought just would not leave my mind. “That is just too perfect,” I said to myself. “He can still hit and hes a free agent, we can platoon him in left and because it doesnt seem like anybody else wants him we can give him 8-10 million dollars for the one year and if it doesnt work it doesnt work, if it does well then World Series rings for everybody!” But then i caught myself. Hes a steroid user, a cheater and a liar, i dont want this kind of fellow on my beloved New York Mets. But i did and i do and i must. We need Barry Bonds. He is the absolute perfect player to solve the Mets outfield problem. he may not make the problem go away but he makes a large problem smaller and thats really all you’re ever looking for when your team has been plagued by injury.
How though do I justify his steroid laden past with my desire for the Mets to win a World Series? I have been thinking about this all day friends and i dont have an answer. I think the Mets should sign Barry Bonds but i also think they shouldnt. You cant justify behavior like Bonds’ by, when your need is great enough, ignoring the fact that he, along with Roger Clemens, is helping to ruin the game you, me and many other people hold so near and dear. thats what being a fan is. you want your team to win at any cost even if that means employing a liar and a cheat but shouldnt you also want your team to act ethically and morally and in the best interests of the sport?
These are all good questions and i wish i had the answers to them because it would make rooting for the Mets this year a lot less difficult. I think, if they do sign him, I’ll be just as unhappy as i would be if the dont sign him.
Such is the life of a Mets fan. You can never win.
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Thursday, February 21st, 2008
I made a decision last night that this would be my last post about American Idol unless something really unbelievable occurs. There are probably 100,000,000 people that blog about their every thought regarding American Idol and that is not why i got this blog. So, my final thoughts on this years American Idol are as follows: a girl is going to win. They were pretty good last night, not great, i could do without most of them but a few showed that they had some vocal chops and some personality and thats all im looking for when i watch this show. I counted 4 out of 24 contestants who fit this bill and they are all girls. The rest of them cannot sing and are socially awkward. Those are two things that i dont want in my pop stars.
The name of this blog is “A Combination of Things” and while it fits my blog it is actually the name of a song that I wrote a couple of years ago but finally recorded with the Joiner Inners last year. Its a pretty good song I think. I have always thought that it had a kind of Replacements feel to it. I think its kind of shambley and rough, not rough like tough but rough like not clean, a little sloppy, all good things. I’ve got a red notebook next to me as a write this and its first 3 pages are filled, front and back, with things i want to write about in this blog. Ive broken them down into some simple categories that you can see over to the right there, yeup right over there. If you allow me to ramble some more ill get to my point. I bring up the song because, i never at any point sat down and wrote out a set of new lyrics for the tune, i never felt inspired to do so. I had already given it the name and one night, i think i may have been watching a baseball game, I’m a Mets fan by the way but we’ll get to that at another date, I started sifting through this manila folder I have that is filled with yellow legal sheets and scraps of receipt paper and envelopes and Chinese food take out menus, all of them containing ideas for stories and books and movies and lyrics written in my very distinctive chicken scratch. I have accomplished very little in the time i have already put in on this planet but these manila folders with all of my many years of accumulated notes and thoughts i think shows me that i have the potential do something pretty great, I’m talking about great creatively. I’m not going to be president, although I’m not sure how great being president is, and I’m not going to cure cancer and I’m not going to climb a mountain because I’m afraid of heights and people that climb mountains are crazy not great. The end of this story is this, I was watching a Mets game and i was looking through this folder and pulling out anything that i thought might make a good lyric. i was remembering where i was and what i was doing when i was making these notes. I had my guitar next to me and a fresh legal pad with “A Combination of things” written across the top of it. when i thought i had enough lyric ideas i started writing them down and after a little trimming and a little editing and a little revising and a little more of all of them, i had myself a tune. a pretty good tune. Not a great tune, because i think I’ve only written one great song in my life and i only think that because everyone tells me it is but Combination of Things is a pretty good song and I’m proud of it i guess. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is this, This blog is going to be just like that song. I’m going to take little pieces of myself that i have accumulated throughout my existence and I’m going to write about them and by the end of what I’m writing my views on them may have changed. By the end of reviewing a movie i might find that i didnt like it that much when at the beginning of the review i said it was the greatest movie i have ever seen. Maybe ill review a record after one listen and hate it but maybe ill listen to it while I’m reviewing it and the guitars on the fourth track will do something i didnt notice before and i wont be able stop listening to it for a week. maybe the drums start to shake out a beat that is impossible for one man to play but you dont hear the second man or that second set of hands and the record finds its way into the open slot in my top 15 records of all time. Little things that dont mean anything all of the sudden coming together to mean something. It may not mean anything to you and i absolutely respect that but i think blogs are kind of personal. The fact that people read them is almost secondary. You write for yourself and if you do it well enough and interesting enough maybe someone starts to pay attention but you do it, I do it, first, to put the pieces of myself into some kind of order, to archive them by date and category and if you’re honest with yourself as you go when you’re done you can show it to someone and say this is me. whether you agree with me or not, this is all that Ive got.
(click on the link “Combination of Things” in the Blogroll to hear the tune at my old bands myspace which i have renamed. i dont think i need to tell anyone what the new name is)
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