the passion we call baseball

it's hardly a sport. really. not to the passionate. because what it truly is is a passion. (i'm thinking that although it looks a bit weird, it's ok in the grammatical sense to use two "is" 's together in a sentence.) something we live, breathe, enjoy.

and the first indicator we get that winter's ending (well, aside from the daytona 500) is the start of spring training. followed very shortly by the beginning of the baseball season. the crack of a bat hitting a pitched baseball. the smell of leather from a new baseball glove. the echo of an umpire yelling "play ball". the glare of the sun coming off the top rail of the fence. it's springtime. it's baseball time.

i became a fan early on in my life. seven or eight years old. for some occasion my folds gave me a baseball bat. and a softball. looking back the softball really didn't make sense. an indicator that mom picked these items out, not dad.

the bat was a ted williams model. and i was a student. i studied ted williams. not by getting on the internet and googling him. way too early for that. but i did it the old fashioned way. i went to the library, dug through the card file, jotted down the dewey decimel system sequence for the books that referenced ted williams. read them all. and i was a fan. a ted williams fan. a boston red sox fan. a baseball fan.

i remember so well that dad would take me to work with him on saurdays sometimes. he sold farm equipment, so spent most of his days visiting farmers and talking all things farming. and aside from farming, the hot topic was baseball. and i can remember more than one farm office we'd visit that always had a baseball game on the radio.

back in those days baseball was only on tv on saturday afternoon. other than the world series, of course. and whle dad and mister farmer visited and talked farming and tractors and plows and sled planters, i'd sprawl out on the office couch (there always was one) and listen to the ball game on the radio. and nap. an issue that evolved into a passion of it's own.

i started playing baseball, first i can remember, anyhow, at ate 8. minor league little league, i guess it was called. nothing like t-ball. clifford and i hadn't invented that yet. at 8 years old we were actually pitching and hitting. and fielding. and running. and keeping score. not like the little league minor leagues of today.

i played on the giants. and we won the championship in our league that first year. sadly i was away on vacation when the awards were presented and never received my individual plaque. shucks.

but the best years of our lives back then came when we reach 10 years old. then were allowed to play in the genuine little league. ages 10-12. tryouts, probably in march. some actually didn't get selected. i did.

teams were put together. and once you were on a little league team, you stayed there until you graduated, at age 13, to pony league. which became babe ruth league, which became senior little league, which became, hell, i don't even know what it is now. but no doubt, the best years were the little league years. the orioles.

i can still vividly remember going with the coach to the equipment room. a small storage shed on the little league property where all the equipment was stored. it wasn't affordable for all teams to have their own bats, balls, catching equipment. 3-4 sets of all this was shared by the six or eight teams. and the shed wasn't air conditioned. heat and leather conspired to give that room a really interesting smell. a little infield soil blended in. the smell reeked of baseball.

our teammates became our friends. our teams became our favorites (althought he orioles never supplanted the red sox, they became second, or maybe third behind the cardinals.) but little league was a mere portion of our young baseball lives.

ever see the movie the sandlot ? well, back in our day we had essentially the same thing. we had neighborhood makeshift baseball fields. started out to be my back yard. a bit too rectangular, as a liner down the first or third base lines didn't have to travel very far to become a home run. but there was a nice outfield fence, which made our home runs quite dramatic. schroeder was even strong enough in those early years that he could blast one over our fence, across the alley, and into the neighbor's grape arbor. and the neighbor was nice enough, and probably enough of a baseball fan, that he had no problem with us scaling his fence to retrieve the balls. never occured to us at that point that a schroeder home run ball might be sold on e-bay for a tidy profit. besides, our supply or baseballs was limited, so we continued to use even the most accomplished of them. and for days, weeks, maybe months at a time we had to play with a ball that was kept in tact by electrical tape. duct tape was relatively undiscovered back then.

we eventually moved our baseball field to a huge vacant lot across the street. me, schroeder, billy, mike, the baker boys, probably more, built a pretty nice sandlot field here. we piled up a mound. creating a makeshift dugout in the process. we fashioned a home plate from a quarter inch sheet of plywood. don't remember what the plywood had been in its first life, but i do recall that it was painted tan. we fully intended to paint home plate white, but somehow never got around to it. didn't really matter. rarely did we have enough players at any one time to have a catcher anyhow, so there was never a play at home plate that required a slide. just made the field look cool.

oh, and our field really lacked one important item. grass. it was dirt. and in the early spring, weeds. by mid-may the weeds were gone from the infield area. trampled. they still grew sporadically in the outfield. not so much traffic in one particular spot out there. well, with the exception of where the left fielder stood. and a second one, just a little farther out, where he stood when schroeder came to the plate.

yep. those were the days. and some of my fondest memories. but part of being a person is that you have to grow up. and grow out of little league. and get jobs and such. but i think those of us who were passionate baseball fans back then continued to be so even now. and i'm fortunate enough to have a son that seemes to have inherited my love for the sport. great to be able to share that. and to a degree, to re-live my best years again through his little league experience.

but wait. some claim baseball's a boring sport. ho-hum. a pitch. nothing happens. again. batter will hit one out of every, oh, four pitches? somewhere. not a lot of action. mosly in-action. the person that makes this assertion isn't a baseball fan. and to become one all you have to do is catch an arizona diamondbacks game broadcast when joe garagiola joins them in the booth. (one thing i really miss about living in arizona) (by the way . . . this will surprise any of you who tout football as a much more exciting sport: a group of fans kept statistics on all football games broadcast on tv this season. average tv time for a game was just a hair over three hours. play, time outs, commercials. of course, the clock time for an nfl game is 60 minutes. the surprising discovery here was that the total time where there was some action on the field was 14 minutes. 14 minutes out of three hours. i'm guessing baseball has more action than that.)

joe puts drama in every pitch. heck, he goes deeper than that. he studies the catcher's sign and speculates as to what the pitch will be, where it will be located there, and why the pitcher and/or catcher would choose to locate it there. he scans the defense and explains why the center fielder might be shifted toward right center, or the third baseman might be guarding the line. he watches the runner and gives you the indications he sees that the fella might run, might not. he explains, in short, that there is strategy involved way beyond throwing a ball and hitting it.

pitchers and catchers show up for spring training next week. the rest of the teams the following week. i can't wait to have the games begin. play ball.

basset bitches and the brambleberry bush

they got out. the girls. breached my almost nearly not quite impenetrable fence. escaped to freedom. i don't get why they want to escape. there's nothing out there that's gonna taste any better then the beneful premium they get fed twice daily when they're safe within the confines of friendly nixdom. but they're basset hounds. and, they're female. and take it from one who's spent a good deal of time around bassets and an even gooder bit of time around females, they're totally unpredictable. apt at any moment to go sailing off on a whim.

so they got out yesterday. mid afternoon. just as we'd gotten back from the sojourn to wally world. unloaded. put away. and just as i was settling into the recliner to relax and watch the second half of the vikings game. not a big football fan, but looking forward to watching this game. favre makes an interesting story. like to see him do well to silence all the critics. and more than i'm a favre fan, i'm an anti-cowboy fan. dates back to tom landry. roger staubach. exacerbated by t.o. with apologies to one of my two favorite nephew-in-laws and my son-in-law, i detest the cowboys. and i know that the vikings and favre are winning, so i'm ready to settle and watch the cowboys bleed.

but before reclining in my recliner i peeked out the patio door. and there, past the back yard. across the outback (if you've read anything i've written here you're well familiar with the outback), and among the skeletal remains of what were, back in summer time, shrubs, bushes, trees, i see two white-tipped tails. basset tails. female basset tails. namely, trixie and petunia.

i hollered at hon to grab some leashes and i raced across the yard to catch the bitches (it's ok to call them that, they are, after all, female dogs) (oh, but don't tell them, as we're not sure they understand they're dogs) before they get down into the creek area. sadly i was too late to keep them from fording crap creek. (named for its smell, not a pretty one.)

by the time i got creekside the girls had already scaled the bank on the far side. not too far ahead of me. but bassets are rather short critters. they can roam through the underbrush under where the brush is. below the branching out branches of the bushes and small trees. i'm taller than that. i have to fight my way thru the dead vegetation. my progress is slowed accordingly.

i reached crap creek just moments after their crossing. in short order i found a rather formidable branch/log, down and spanning the creek. i stepped on it gingerly, it seemed substantial, i decided to try to balance-beam it across it. but as a safety measure i also grabbed the overhanging branch above which pretty much spanned the creek as well.

at about step number two i heard a bit of a cracking sound. my first thought was something analogous to "uh oh". but not quite "uh oh". and before i could take any evasive action at all, my left foot plunged down thru the now broken fallen branch/log and into the brackish - i wanna say water, but can't be sure - of crap creek. ok, a wet foot. wet ankle. wet calf. but not so bad. onward. but . . . another cracking sound? yep. and i didn't have time to formulate many thoughts as the branch overhead broke loose, smacked me in the head, and floated with me down into the very essence of crap creek. i hit, i guess, on some sort of uneven surface, as i quickly lost my balance and found myself lying on my left side. a foot deep in crap creek.

the smell hit me first. then the cold. then just the god-awful situation itself. my clothes are wet. i'm probably at least sort of injured, and my back's bad to begin with. and i still have to get out of this toilet and catch the damn basset girls.

so i pick myself up, somehow manage to crawl out of the slippery slope of the south bank of crap creek. quickly scanning the territory, i spot the white-tipped tails about twenty yards ahead. undaunted, i move onward.

i didn't know that barbed wire grows in vine form. i'd always viewed it as simply an industrially manufactured product. but right about at this moment in time, as i became ensnared, i realized that the original barbed wire, and no doubt the most effective barbed wire, grows. in vine format. along the slippery sloped banks of crap creek.

i'm wearing sweat pants and a long sleeved t-shirt. growing barbed wire likes sweat pants. and long sleeved t-shirts. it grabbed me and hugged my and cuddled with me. oh, and i should also point out that the half inch long barbs on the organic form of barbed wire are razor sharp. not only do they delight in snagging your clothing, they like to create deep lacerations in your skin. now i can't imagine what it would be like to traipse thru this growing thicket of barbed wire without long sleeves. or without long pants. for even covered as well as i was - well, by now i'm not only covered in what had been a nice layer of cotton clothing, but a healthy portion of whatever scum is suspended in the water of crap creek AND an ever increasing amount of type o positive that's now oozing from various areas of my appendages - this crap is nasty.

but i think i've used the term "undaunted", and i continued to be "undaunted". i'm on a mission to rescue my girls before they reach the major street a couple hundred yards east of where we were.

i spotted them again. now they're back on the north side of the creek. nearing the outback once again. so before they have a chance to go elsewhere, i have to get there. i grab my cell phone from my pocket and push speed dial 3, so i can let hon know they're headed back to the outback. my cell phone from my pocket, the same pocket which, moments earlier, had been bathing in the murky waters of crap creek. did i ever tell you about putting my cell phone thru the wash? well, that was a different phone, in a different pocket. and after the spin cycle that phone just quit working. and now i'm thinking i have much the same scenario with this phone. but surprisingly, it worked. hon answered, i gave her latitude and longitude readings for the dogs, and hung up just before i slid 20 feed down the south bank and back into crap creek once again. but just me feet this time.

i managed to circumvent the growing barbed wire without too many more cuts, scratches, abrasions, and climbed up out of the north bank just in time to see hon leashing up the little darlings. not the term i used to describe them at that point, but . . .

funny thing about all this, seemingly they were done roaming and heading back to our yard. and perhaps for no good reason, i'm covered in frigid shitty mud, blood, and who knows what else. my back's worse than ever. i've lost at least a pint of blood, and as i discovered a little later, i developed a softball-sized bruise on my left buttock.

it ain't easy being a basset lover.

oh, and yes, sorry mark. sorry chris. the vikings killed the sissy cowboys. and i missed the whole damned thing.

ode to college sports

big news on the college sports front - usc is likely to be penalized for allowing some athletes to receive payola, of some sort, while playing football/basketball for the trojans. namely, reggie bush and o j mayo.

well, there's a surprise. reggie bush came out of high school as part of a very average, middle class family. and somehow while he was attending usc his family was able to move into a veritable mansion somewhere near the campus. maybe, just maybe, he or his family were receiving some money from some unnamed source. ya think?

i'm not as familiar with the o j mayo story, but seems as though something similar occurred with him while he spent his nba mandated "one and done" year in college at usc.

these instances of abuse of the system were so severe that even the irs saw fit to get involved. now, suspension looming, forfeiture of scholarships, perhaps return of the heisman trophy by bush and maybe even the bcs national championship awarded to usc a few years back will be revoked. and pete carroll has decided to get the hell out of dodge and take the helm of the nfl seattle seahawks.

shame on usc and their entire sports program. shame on athletic director mike garrett. shame on . . . but wait, does the ncaa think for one minute that we're gonna believe this is an isolated incident? are we expected to think that usc is a bunch of underhanded, conspiring, glory driven fanatics who will do anything to excel in big time college sports? ok, yeah, they are.

however, they're certainly not alone. i doubt there's a college football program, a college basketball program, maybe even a college baseball program, that gets any serious recognition that isn't violating the spirit of the "amateur athletic" rules.

even smaller colleges, those to which we pay little attention, do questionable things for their players. i personally knew a player who was attending college on a scholarship. and for the four years he was there he took a job with the college to help support himself. his job: turning the lights off every night at the tennis courts. critical that they be turned off by midnight. very important job. and to make sure he did well at the job, the college installed automatic timers on all the lights so they would automatically turn off at the assigned time. i guess he was paid, in essence, to look out the window of his upscale apartment near midnight to make sure the timer was working. don't think the ncaa would ever give this matter any attention.

but the pressure to win at the big name schools prompts all programs to cheat. my best guess would be that if the ncaa really wanted to investigate, they'd find enough evidence to levy suspensions on all major college programs. tendering payment, in one form or another, to players on top college teams is the rule rather than the exception.

is this all bad? depends on your prospective. if you're an alumni of a given school you want to turn your back on the matter. if you're a sooner fan you want to point fingers at the texas program. but the bottom line is simply this - college sports, particularly at the major college level, is not amateur. these players are given lots of perks even in high school. labron james, as i recall, being raised by a single mom who worked in low paying jobs, was somehow able to drive a hummer when he was in high school. he skipped college in favor of the nba, but heck, doubtful his lifestyle could have tolerated the pay scale of college basketball.

i have to ask myself why these violations of ncaa rules are made such a big deal. if the ncaa truly wants college sports to be amatuer they need to really start enforcing their rules. not just making an example of one of the major programs now and then.

MMIX - the good, the bad, the ugly

okay, obama was sworn in. good? bad? or ugly? as i try not to coin politically here, i'll leave that up to you. i will say this . . . i'm disappointed in his fulfillment/lack of fulfillment of certain campaign promises. and i'm not sure where we, as a country are headed. but perhaps the biggest news of 09 - obama.

and on the subject . . . the ongoing dispute about his right to become president of these united states of america. was he or was he not truly born in hawaii? i'm kind of tired of hearing the discussion. he's in office. matter closed.

michael jackson died. as did farrah faucett. i preferred farrah 10-1 over michael. although there was a time when michael became almost as pretty as, oh, diana ross, he never got close to farrah in appearance. and right or wrong, i choose to think farrah had more character than michael. so i'm tired of hearing the michael jackson hype as well. he's gone. just like elvis. i don't need to know about family manipulations or attempts to control his estate. he's gone. just like elvis.

the lakers won the nba championship. i didn't like that. i don't much like the lakers. mostly i don't like kobe bryant. he's an egocentric ball hog. glory hog. and the worst part of it is . . . he's also damned good. makes shots no one should be able to make. and that pisses me off even more. i just don't like the guy. as far as i'm concerned, the lakers pretty much rival the yankees in terms of hatred. who do i want to win the world series? anyone but the yankees. who do i want to win the nba title? anyone but the lakers.

who do i want to win the nascar championship? anybody but baby jimmie johnson. or the bigger evil, kyle busch. and i lost that one, too. lakers, yankees, baby jimmie. i had a bad sports year. wonder who won the super bowl. don't really remember. steelers? that wasn't so bad. wait. yes it was. i believe they beat my arizona cardinals. not my favorite team, but a group of my former home boys. didn't mind the steelers so much. just would have been a better story to have seen the cardinals win.

there probably was a hockey championship of some sort. i didn't really notice.

other news? probably. right now i remember mostly the blizzard of 2009. that's the most recent event. but we've already beaten that up pretty badly, so i'll let it go.

but even though i had a bad sporting year on aught nine, overall, not so bad. got me a metal detector and found lots of "treasures". got myself a new, self-propelled lawn mower. visited kids here and there. had a new grandson. mostly, life was good.

joined facebook and re-connected with some old friends. none that i've seen. but we've communicated electronically. that's been fun.

got a new laptop. that's a good thing. new laptop is loaded with vista. that's not particularly good.

trip to colorado for my nephew's wedding earned me a damn speeding ticket. cop got the wrong guy. but i couldn't convince him of that. that was bad. very bad.

oh, scooter moved away from home. into his own apartment. took a lot of getting used to. for me, not for him. i had to learn to talk to my wife again. it was either that of the dogs. for conversation i generally prefer the wife. and maybe that's why we seem to have a better relationship. we talk more. we know each other more. kind of like old times. that's been good.

and scooter still comes to visit frequently. not like he moved across the country or anything. just across town. so that's ok, too.

well, i've meandered on long enough and said mostly nothing. those of you who read this . . . i apologize for it's lack of insightful content. but i got bored. nothing on tv after the thunder game. too early to go to bed. writing this is a good transition. maybe next post will be better. tune in next week.

the blizzard of christmas, 09

so often here in oklahoma the weather is news. tornadoes in the springtime. rain. ice storms. and more times than not the media hoopla made of the weather turns out to be pretty much sensationalistic. it's almost as if they make a big deal of reporting impending severe weather to scare you into watching their news broadcasts longer.

as a consequence, we the people become complacent. we view their reporting in somewhat of a ho-hum fashion. oh yeah, they're predicting a big snow storm. like that's gonna happen.

and the christmas of 09 was pretty much that way. they started reporting on this storm at least a week ahead of time. forecasting cold, windy conditions with perhaps 6 inches of snow. and then maybe a foot of snow. one report a couple days before christmas eve indicated we should prepare for one to three feet of snow. with winds gusting to 50 miles per hour. and then the more realistic approach, the meteorologists would concede that maybe we'd get 1 to 3 inches of snow, with 6 inches tops.

well, for once the devastating forecast came to fruition. christmas eve, 09. started innocently enough. a bit of drizzle in the wee hours of the morning. when i got up at 7 the rain seemed to be turning into sleet. and when i looked out on the patio the wind had blown over one of our metal lawn chairs. i stepped out onto the patio to upright the chair and noticed immediately that the rain that had fallen on that chair had turned to ice. hmmm, that's a bad sign.

by 8 the rain/sleet had turned to snow. hard, blowing slow. 50 miles an hour wind gusts? turned out there were reports of wind gusts surging to 64 miles an hour. and the snow was falling sideways. and beginning to accumulate.

but it's christmas eve. scooter's working today. down at the mall on the south end of the metro area. and he's coming home after work for our christmas eve celebration. he suggested we do our christmas stockings and such on christmas eve so he could share his christmas morning with tracie, his girlfriend. so, egg nog and hot apple cider at the ready. we're all looking forward to a warm and toasty white christmas eve.

around noon the tv broadcasts all turned to weather tracking news shows. no other programming. just the weather conditions. and they were advising all residents to go home. and stay home. don't go shopping. don't go anywhere. stay home. and if you have friends or relatives out shopping at the malls, call them and tell them that if they want to be home by christmas, they need to go home NOW!

by 2 scooter called saying he was coming home. most of the stores in the mall had closed. i advised him to take it slow and easy. he's experienced in snow driving, so not too awful concerned. but lots of wrecks on all local roadways. so he'll be careful. and five minutes later he called. he's stuck in a snowdrift in the mall parking lot.

i considered going down to pick him up. it's about a 15 mile trip, but i figured in these conditions it would take an hour or more to get there. i told scooter to give it a little time and see if conditions clear a bit. meanwhile, i donned my snow duds and went out to shovel the driveway.

at that point we reportedly had 8 inches of snow. with drifts, of course, thanks to the gusting winds. but my driveway said 18 inches. up against the garage door even deeper. i shoveled a bit, then realized the foolishness of the entire matter. for looking out into the cul de sac i realized that the entire street, for that matter the entire neighborhood, is buried in the same type of snow. and underneath it all . . . the frozen sleet from earlier today. i'm not going anywhere.

and about the same time i realized it was hopeless scooter called with the same understanding. he'd decided he'd just spend the night at the mall. he and many of his co-workers. good idea. maybe santa will find them there.

now the airport's closed. travelers are stranded. cars are slid off roadways all over the place. and just recently the interstate system was completely closed. law enforcement officers will not even respond to accidents without injury, and can't get to all injury accidents.

and there's a 20 car pile up west of town on i-40 plus what's believed to be a 50 vehicle wreck on the east end of oklahoma city. and highway patrol is sending their officers home. they can't negotiate these conditions in a two-wheel drive crown victoria. only the 4 wheel drive suv type vehicles can get around. even the rescue tow trucks are getting stuck.

so, there's no place like home for the holidays. and we're staying here. merry christmas to all, particularly those stuck in the mall. or in their cars skidded off the road.

christmas letter? plus a new look

my sister said she thought she might send out her christmas letters via e-mail this year. struck me as rather gauche. christmas letters never really felt just right to me. sure, it's a nice idea to annually send updates to those you don't correspond with regularly. so that's a good idea. and a christmas letter folded neatly inside a christmas card, that's a neat idea. a christmas letter in lieu of a christmas card never really felt right to me either. but then, if you've read much of what i've written you know i'm a traditionalist.

not that we send lots of christmas cards. for in spite of being the traditionalist, i also feel that cards to those you talk to, e-mail to, chat with, regularly are mostly unnecessary. so i guess it goes without saying that i'm not much for christmas cards these days either.

but a christmas letter via e-mail? is that ok? would amy vanderbilt roll over in her grave? isn't she the one that wrote the bible on etiquette? any vanderbilt? probably she didn't live to see the advent of e-mail to begin with. but i doubt she'd sanction the idea. is she still alive?

then i noticed another friend posted the christmas letter on facebook. efficient. and to her credit, seemingly she sent these out to many, and those of us that are distant friends still get to read their news thru the facebook posting. good idea. and i think it's totally acceptable as a back up to the mailing of the original to those she'd normally mail. i vote "good idea" on this one.

so i got to thinking about writing a christmas letter and just posting it on my blog here. maybe not the most acceptable method, but not many read this thing anyhow, so who's really gonna complain?

so, where to start. i've never written a christmas letter before. surely there has been news throughout the year. but what news there's been i've pretty much written about. so my christmas letter needs to say "read prior posts for the family news during this past year". how's that?

i've ranted a bit about things that bug me. one i haven't mentioned centers around christmas time. namely . . . xmas. i'm not fanatically religious. i term myself spiritual instead. but for godsakes, have enough respect for the meaning behind the season to not replace "christ" with merely an "x". i don't even use the "x" to abbreviate crosswalk. but it's entirely unacceptable to replace "christ" with an "x" in christmas. if a retailer does that, i'm boycotting. i encourage you all to follow suit on this. in the spirit of my "it is what it is" posting, i ask your assistance in restoring the tradition of christmas and eliminating the "x" factor.

and if you paid any attention, you may be wondering why my title also mentioned a "new look". and if you really paid attention you'll notice that the ads that once graced the side column of this page are now missing. well, seems as though the google ad-sense ads have been withdrawn from my page. just happened. i had nothing to do with it. i'd "monetized" this blog back in april or so, just to see if i had enough activity to create any revenue. at four or five months i had amassed a whopping 28 bucks or so. and they don't pay you til you reach a hundred dollars. but i got some sort of sadistic pleasure watching my wealth accumulate from these ads.

then i mentioned to a friend that blogs could pay. especially if you were lucky enough to write stuff that people actually wanted to read. so he decided to make it work for him. he wrote some interesting enough stuff. he monetized. then posted on facebook, and maybe elsewhere, openly asking folks to read his blog and click on the ads. that's a contract no-no with google's ad-sense. i guess google thinks that blog readers don't know that we can get paid by having people click.

well, my friend cruised to a hundred bucks in a few days. and had his ads pulled. apparently because they determined he'd violated the terms and conditions of the ad-sense contract. he told me about it. and i laughed at him. and funny, at the same time my earnings grew from 28 bucks to 72 dollars in just a few days. apparently my buddy was also encourage others to view his friends' blogs and ad-click them. then by association alone, google pulled my ads. just as i was about to reach the magical hundred dollar mark. and they'd have to pay me.

i protested to google. i'd really done nothing wrong. guilt by association, i guess. that was three weeks ago, and i've had absoultely no response to my plea. so i guess google with keep me terminated so they will never have to pay me. which in my opinion is tantamount to false advertising.

so i'm now boycotting google as well. thing is, however, google controls my blog hosting site. they may just kill my entire blog when they read this one. if they do, well thanks to all who have read. thanks even more to those that enjoyed. and to google . . . well, no thanks.

it is what it is. isn't it?

hear it a lot these days. it is what it is. i think it all started with the major league baseball scandal. as i recall it was roger clemens who started it all. roger, the rocket, clemens. at one time one of my beloved red sox heros. who went on to become one of those damned yankees. those dreaded, despised yankees. and then even on from there. and became a reputed steroid user, who, as many have done before him, and after him, now bases his life on the notion of "plausible deniability".

but in his senate testimony it was either roger, or his former trainer and reputed injectionist (whose name escapes me at the moment), ah, brian macnamee, i think, who repeatedly used the term "it is what it is". what exactly does that mean?

and i should admit right off, i hate cliches. i don't use them. even the old adage cliches. i think the use of them smacks of a lack of thoughtful vocabulary on the part of the one that uses them. another example of the over-used/abused cliches started when our esteemed she-god, oprah winfrey, coined the expression "don't go there".

she used it to relate to conversational topics. what she really meant was essentially "i don't really want to talk about that at this moment". and how that turned into "don't go there", or even worse, "don't even go there", or "let's not go there", well, what's that all about?

when somebody says to me "don't go there", i'm inclined to ask, where? where exactly would i be going? i'm sitting here talking and have absolutely no intention of going anywhere. so why would you suggest to me that i "don't go there". or over there? or down there? or across there? obviously i am not going anywhere. i'm sitting right here talking. no plans to go anywhere.

so recently the "it is what it is" thing has become more of an annoyance than "don't go there".

i was talking to my sister the other day. and i was lamenting the fact that something was the way it was. and i guess in an attempt to placate me, she said "well, jer, it is what it is." and it caught me at a thoughtful moment. and i replied, "yes, i suppose it is. however, it only is what it is because no one seems to care to try to make it what it isn't. what it could be. what it should be".

my feeling at that time was that i didn't have to settle for it being what it is. i felt compelled to tackle the quest of making it what it is not. making "it" what "it" really oughta be. this was a week or so ago, and since then i've pretty much decided that i have a new goal in life. that being . . . changing "it is what it is" to "let's make it the way it really oughta be in the first place".

recognizing that any cause needs to be worthy, i've decided my first venture into making this transition is to pick a cause worthy of changing. i opted for christmas. for many, many years now christmas has been one of those "is what it is" things. i think it's time to make christmas "it isn't what it became, it's now what it should have been all along".

perhaps a decade or two ago, in my mind thanksgiving became the greatest american holiday. because it has become a time of being with family. yes, enjoying a good meal is part of it. but the main focus of thanksgiving, at least in my family, has been being together as a family. i came to look forward to thanksgiving much more than christmas. more than july 4th. more even than valentine's day or president's day. because it's so heart warming to be around friends and family. and pumpkin pie.

and lately christmas has become somewhat of a dreaded holiday rather than one of anxious anticipation. the reason: commercialization. look around you. the media begins touting "black friday" more than a month before it's upon us. newspapers are crammed full of full color sales flyers encouraging us to get out there and spend a bunch of money on those we love. tv commercials make us feel that we're genetically tied to ebonezer scrooge, before the ghost visits, if we don't go out and spend all our money, if not our entire credit limits, on gifts for family and friends. why? because . . . . . "it is what it is".

my undertaking is to change this. to restore christmas to a time of loving and caring. and yes, even sharing. but not necessarily a sharing of gifts. but rather, a sharing of love. of feelings. of warmth and caring.

i hereby ask of all of you who read this silly blog this one thing: take christmas back to what it really should be. some may feel christmas is a time for honoring the birth of jesus. some may not share in that opinion. it really doesn't matter. while it's become politically correct to refer to this time of the year as "the holiday season" rather than as "christmas" (that could become my next blog topic. either that or the propensity of some to abbreviate it to x-mas.) it's mainly become a season of corporate greed followed very closely by the materialistic greed of those for whom the gifts are purchased. let's stop all that.

let's put up our christmas tree this year. and let's put packages underneath it that really reflect the way we feel about the person we're gifting. a note of gratitude. a card of caring. a piece of our heart. we don't need to continue to allow this holiday to be simply a worldwide economic injection. let's change it from "it is what it is" to "it's become what it should be.