quick hitters

1) There's a full moon this week, and apparently it's making normally sensible people behave like chimps on crack. I've seen at least a half dozen episodes online this past week wherein friends and acquaintances whom I'd normal-soaked describe as "sane" suddenly go batshit-crazy and start knock-down drag-out slapfights over... so much nothing. Inconsequentialities of the most inane sort. Get a grip, folks, and then hang on tight.

2) Even though I missed the deadline to submit to the Austin Film Festival (dammit dammit dammit), The New Thing is slithering (hehehe) towards something like completion. yesterday I backed up through 80 pages, and I estimate I have another 15 or so to go to bring this sucker in for a first draft landing. Then it'll be time to save, print, and soaked in bloody red ink to fix the multitudinous problems I'm sure I'll find. Still, I laugh and giggle at pretty much every page, and it's commercial as hell, so Hope Springs Infernal yet again.

3) Summer baseball starts tonight. I've been "off" (ha!) for more than 10 days, which is my longest baseball-free period since Groundhog's Day, and I can already feel my shoulders getting tight again, and my hammies starting to get stiff again. It's time to get out and break a sweat and tear some muscle and skin some knees and get a contact high from the smell of horsehide, glove leather, marking chalk, and newly mown grass.

4) I look up and realize with some amusement that IU will be MIA at least three of the next seven weeks, with a trio of water-contact vacations scheduled: once to Grand Cayman, once to Catalina Island, and then to the Blanco River. It's amusing to consider just how different each of those trips (and bodies of water!) are going to be, but it's a pleasant amusement.

5) had occasion to have a chat with an old friend wherein another old friend's name came up for the first time in a few years. This second guy—the one being talked about—once likely was the closest thing to a blood brother I'd ever had: best friend, most trusted confidant, favorite playmate and partner in crime. But as sometimes happens... the winds change. He moves away, I become someone else, and suddenly you start to wonder if a try at re-connecting would even be met with interest: would he just screen the call if he saw my name show up on Caller ID? Would he just ignore a card or email if I managed to track down an address and reach out to contact? It's not a whiny lament—just one of those idly curious observations: it's odd to consider how quickly something which seemed so permanent can be dismantled and forgotten.

6) Had a rare opportunity this past week to go see any movie I wanted in the theater without the kids in tow. I was somewhat surprised to discover... that I really had no interest. SPIDEY 3... meh. SHREK III... get serious. PIRATES 3... ho-hum. I wound up at a friend's house drinking good vodka and spinning wild tales of shame and degradation. Sometimes what I miss more than anything is something as simple as a campfire at the end of a hard day's hunt, with a few familiar smiles shining from the darkness.

7) Golf remains a wholly despicable and useless "sport." No larger point or justification there—I just felt that point needed to be made yet again.

8) I maintain that there is some sort of slow death affecting the blogosphere. Every week it seems as if another one or two formerly interesting blog sites either officially darken or just goes static, with no more posts or comments being made. What blogs remain seem less active, less lively, less engaging. I am reminded of the descriptions of the "heat death" end of the Universe where, billions of years from now, the Universe has expanded to the point that all stars are now hopelessly distant from one another, and many stars have either burned out or dimmed to brown dwarf status, and energy itself bleeds away in a sad endless drip, like the echo of a sustained note fading into nothingness at the fringes of a huge concert hall, just the vaguest memory of all that had once gone before.

Another odd analogy which springs to mind is the image of the last few dinosaurs. Once they ruled the planet for a 100 million years, but then a rock falls from the sky and Things Just Change. Most all die off, and surely at some point there had to be just a handful of the creatures left, looking around at the sad empty world they'd once ruled and wondering "OK, so what do we do NOW...?"

I've been part of such a mass extinction before—when a paradigm shifts somewhere and a sea change comes and a formerly vibrant community of thousands suddenly just closes shop, packs the wagons, and scatters again into the wilderness. Sometimes you bump into one of your old pals from the previous boomtown, and you smile and shrug, but you don't talk about What Happened, 'cuz what's the real point? Still, it's an odd and somewhat melancholy feeling to sense coming on again, as this really feels now like the beginning of yet another major shift.

Take good pictures, kiddos—we might not be long for this current state. Like a giant rock from a clear blue sky, when real change comes it comes hard, fast, and unannounced.
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random blather B