MLS Stylesheet

A friend has season tickets to the LA Galaxy, so I've been able to experience Major League Soccer at the Home Depot Center in Downey a couple of times this summer. Both games have resulted in sloppy victories. Although the Galaxy sit atop the league, they play a boring, unstructured form of long ball with a lot of hopeful breakaways that result in nothing.

Soccer culture in southern California is a peculiar thing. There are soccer scarves in full effect, a fight song by the Dropkick Murphys, a section filled with loudmouth non-violent hooligans yelling obnoxious chants, and players cheering fans after the game has ended -- it's all a little strange to see these customs imported to Los Angeles like some kind of peculiar European wallpaper. What's next, vuvuzelas and fights and soccer riots? Hardly.

I just want to see Beckham out there running around like he actually cares.

Still, it's fun to go to the game and sit in this intimate outdoor venue. The late-season games didn't mean much, and the quality of play in the MLS is low, but it's a great excuse to hang with the guys and have a twelve-dollar beer even though there's nothing at stake.

Personally, I love how Seattle, City of Failure, has embraced the Sounders since the Sonics got ripped away from them and since their other two pro franchises have begun a downhill skid into permanent suckiness. Go Sounders! They are the only team left that Seattleites can pin their desperate hopes on!

Soccer is a great sport. MLS will never fully take off, but it's fun to get to know the players so when World Cup comes around again we can know who to yell at...

Standing Desk

I've been reading a lot about how sitting will kill you. How it wrecks your body, makes you fat, and increases your chances of dying early.

K & I were talking about even making a treadmill desk, where we would walk and work, walk and work.

Two months ago we found something in Santa Clarita for $40, drove all the way up there, and retreived our new standing desk.

Turns out there's an odd black market for a particular kind of discontinued IKEA desk, called the Jerker. There are newer, more traditionally desk-like versions of the Jerker desk now but the old version was a tall, robust computer workstation. Only one could take the desk part and bolt it in a much higher position on the vertical supports, and voila, a standing desk. And that is why this obsolete IKEA product has such an underground fan club.

And me, I'm loving the standing desk, actually. I don't know if it is contributing to any weight loss or improved well-being, but I do feel more focused when I'm standing here working. It's harder to space out and slouch down and zone. You're more awake, and more vertical, and the screen is right in front of you, beckoning.

I'm not positive if I'll be very good at writing creatively here. This will remain to be seen. I predict a sitting position will prevail for creative enterprises.

For donkeywork, though, the standing desk rules!

And life is a lot of donkeywork.

Here is a picture of me at my new standing desk, wearing women's shoes:

Print

This came to our house a few weeks ago:

I had forgotten that I had submitted a few years ago, and forgotten that they had accepted. It is kind of cool to have something featured in print, even if it's a story that makes me cringe now.

One has to wonder how long literary journals will continue to exist in print form.

This is the first bit of fiction I've written that has been published in a physical form I can put on a shelf if I want to. Maybe the last, too!

Field

Monday we spent all night shooting a Taco Bell commercial in Angel Anaheim Stadium. "Nacho Superstar" to be more exact, wherein a young fan sitting in the outfield bleachers must choose between catching a home run ball and dropping his nachos.

Traditionally I haven't been a fan of Orange County athletics. Disney's ownership of the Angels and the Mighty Ducks really turns me off. The Big Thunder Mountain rock formations in the outfield of their baseball field don't help either.

But it was nice to be down there on that field in the middle of the night, with nobody in the stands. My assistant and I talked about whether we could jack a home run on this field -- I claimed I could, right down the left field line where the outfield fence bent in significantly toward the foul pole. 330 feet it said. But after watching the minor league players slam pitches into the air with all of their might (producing short fly outs), I revised my boast: "With an aluminum bat," I said, less confident now.

The idea of Barry Bonds launching one out of the stadium seemed preposterous. My God, the distance!

Would a sprint around the bases send us into cardiac arrest? Would it scrape up your legs to slide into home here? 3rd base seemed impossibly close to home plate (a dangerous hot corner indeed), but the throw over to 1st base seemed impossibly long. Pro baseball players are freaks!

The field wasn't in great shape by MLB standards: The grass was burned out and ravaged by the SoCal heat and the soft infield dirt was closer to unforgiving clay. But the lines were freshly chalked and sprinklers along the warning track hissed reassuringly and the stadium lights shone down.

There is something wonderful about a ballfield -- perfectly flat and groomed and maintained, it's the rich uncle of the lopsided assymetric football fields we'd carve into the endlessly hard Washington state beaches as kids. At the park a giant swatch of grass can be an arena to kick a soccer ball around or have a barbecue or let one's dog run amok. Or a place to read a trashy supermarket novel. And that is a great thing.

But a professional field has only one function: to mark out the vast space where the game is to be played. That's it, nothing else. It's kind of wasteful and magical at the same time. It gives me chills just thinking about it.

This is the place where it's okay to play!

Man Night IV

In the grand tradition of Middlebrow's Pub Stats, I give you the breakdown of yesterday's Man Night IV.

ATTENDING:

Peter, Don, Aaron T., Sleepy E

PREPARED & EATEN:

Whole roast chicken w/ rice and pears

Chinese cabbage salad

Corn on the cob

Mustard roasted potatoes

Coppola's Rosso wine

Watermelon

Apple pie

Chunky Monkey

DRANK:

Bottle service at home (vodka tonics, Madrases, Cape Cods, vodka martinis)

VIEWED:

Bronson (Peter & Sleepy E thumbs up, Aaron T's thumb way down, Don abstains)

Road Warrior (Peter asleep, Sleepy E somewhat asleep, Don asleep at end, Aaron awake... All thumbs up)

DISCUSSED:

Werner Herzog (of course)

Braces and jaw surgery

Paul Thomas Anderson and his new movie

65mm film production

Takashi Miike

Fear of Kirkland whiskey

Reading habits

MAN NIGHT V:

We seem to be circling around this theme:

J-Horror (13 Assassins & Audition or Ichii the Killer), Tonkatsu & other J-foods, Sake & Kirin