random thoughts and thoroughbred selections

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Fun At A Horse's Expense...

They're posting the "letters" to Barbaro message-board style, and you know people are having some fun with this. In the comments of this Deadspin post you get a taste. Some favorites, most of which have been taken down from the message board at this point:

Barbaro- Let er rip, I can handle the load!
Linda Lovelace, 97; Styxville, TX, USA

In the Derby you reflected God's glory, and took me back to 1973... I'm grateful the Jacksons gave you a chance to fight. God bless your recovery. Some day we will welcome you to the Bluegrass. I will visit you, and whisper to you about GREATNESS.
Bob Bain, 42; Lexington, KY, USA

Bob Bain, I saw that comment! Barbaro does not reflect my glory! He's a goshdarn horse! Two demerits for you pal.
Jesus Christ, 33; Bethlehem, PA, USA

Milking a broken leg for sympathy? You got some balls. Asshole.
Funny Cide, 6; Saratoga, NY, USA

Barbaro is quite simply the greatest horse that has ever blessed Western Civilization. To watch him run was like a Beethoven symphony. THROW IT DOWN BIG MAN!!!!
Bill Walton, 59; LA, CA, USA

You're with me, glue.
Chris Berman, 60; Bristol, CT, USA

Get up. WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME.
Jack Bauer, 35; Los Angeles, CA, USA, soon to be China

What kind of hair care products do you use on your mane??
Steve Nash, 32; Phoenix, AZ, USA

Dear Barbaro, If you die, can we eat you? Sincerely, Some Starving Kids in Africa
Some Starving Kids; Ethiopia, Africa

And my favorite...

Finally I get a pony.
JonBenet Ramsey; Hell

Yes, it's cruel and sadistically funny. Yes, it's shitty for horse racing in general. But come on. Laugh with me...

[>>]posted at 7:34 PM by BG - click to email
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Monday, May 22, 2006

Bethlehem, as Nazareth in the Dancing Fish

Scribbled in the back of a book of David Foster Wallace essays while waiting for my sushi. And excuse the inevitable typos, I just got the hotel to pour me a Manhattan in a pint glass after two doubles at the sushi joint.

I feel dumb.

Sade is on the screen genuflecting for her bassist on the unironically numbered channel 69 local. The anchors on the local news preceding, to quote the book in which I'm currently scribbling, "(have) a compelling frictionlessness about (them), all of whom have short blond hair and vaguely orange makeup. A vividness. I keep feeling a queer urge to vote for them for something."

Lite jazz here is overpowered by the grand stylings of some piped-in Nina Simone knockoff that segues into Dean Martin. It's easy and self-conscious and as imaginative as Bethlehem can be. The bar, the restaurant is in shades and tones of blue indigo and the bar itself is cobbled tile. I remember sharing surgery stories with the barkeep. His teeth, my colon; I always call it "intestines" for some odd reason. It makes more sense to me.

I want this place to feel like home. It doesn't and it does. I want this place to feel like home.

I don't know whatever I'm crossing over the Bethlehem Steel bridge, but the tree line is indiscriminate with old stone churches and antiquated long-dead brand name signs popping from the forestry.

She's haggard, weather-beaten, but has nice tits. Seems to know a large majority of the clientele, including John, the effette guy with the Paul DiMeo look to my left. She tells John they think the tumor is nothing, and she and Hector are going to the diner but I think I heard that part wrong. She muses aloud she should go home and change her shirt, but her tits right now look so fantastic... "You know Mother's rings? I have a Mother's tattoo." She's not trying to be funny. I'd hit that if I got drunk enough.

I haven't been that drunk in a decade.

The guy at the other end of the bar is, somehow, "The Father." He's drinking, doesn't look like a priest and certainly not like a pedophile.

Feeling less dumb, but I haven't cracked the Wallace, my insulation, for a solid five minutes of abstract scribbling. I've felt like I lost the urge, the impetus, what the spiritual might call "My Muse."

Gerald Albright is all that's wrong with jazz. I can appreciate that we're no longer in a position where jazz is popular or accessible, it's under museum glass. I've taken the tour. But it's clean with Gerald, insinuative of base nuances. Uncomplicated. I can't stand it.

The VJ here is in a hall of Billie and Bird B&Ws and that's an insult. They were daring, played their edges. Not owing to...

Fuck. No sushi tonight. Some white kid manning the counter. I'm in sashimi land. Nigiri no. Nein. Ten pieces, crab, shrimp, eel, salmon, yellowtail. I'm afraid to try the conch, but I could be talked into it. No nigiri. Uncomplicated. Fish, plate, soy, wasabi. I'll love. I'll live.

I'm punishing my company, my expense account tonight. I'm annoyed I know what SOX is and how SoD variances must be tracked and distilled and interpolated through BizRights bullshit security insights. I shouldn't know this. I feel like a piece of something valuable is missing now, I couldn't tell you what. What's gone? Whatever it is, it's solidly supplanted by SOX SoD methodologies and a plaintive missive to those in my beck and call that they worry less about both and more about the intuitive interrelationship contained within that context.

This isn't home. I need it to be.

Her name is "Lucy." I just found that out. Either slang iteration you want to apply seems to fit. Was Puzo using that name ironically in The Godfather? Does the single ciggy analogy play as well as I think it does? Smoke it/Crush it?

This place strikes me as sentimental. I couldn't begin to tell you why. One of the bartenders just said Ken Burns was in here today. That Ken Burns. This is place is really some sort of sepia-toned narrative. Small, character-driven, somehow important to the American story, our collective Puritanical values, capitalism. The entire aesthetic if you want to play that game.

I'm scribbling this down in the back of a David Foster Wallace book. Lucy says there's no one more Italian than her step-father, and that marks the second time I've heard that today.

Maybe I can feel familiar here, maybe this can be home. She did change her shirt, some oversized knit Izod with the alligator. I can no longer see her bra, no more D-cups on a middle-aged broad to ogle.

I know what feels like home, and I miss that glimpse into it I still am working from. She (not Lucy) brought out that side of me, the side my friend The Doc said was BG in reality - that swagger, the verbosity, the sparring I've been sorely missing.

I really barely know her, and I really kind of miss her. It's not over yet, and for that I'm eager and for that I'm thankful. Sense memory of Allure, her scent and her bearing, lingers. Sadly, not the scent anymore, but had she slept on my pillow it would stay unlaundered now.

I see me again. It's her, but it's as much that it's me. The swagger, the verbosity, the sparring, it lingers. I miss that part of me, and it's not over.

That felt like home.

I'll tell you someday about riverside in Broad Ripple, the beaver and the duck and Fox News and the hubris of prophylactic purchase premature. Someday I'll tell you about how the prelude to was as engaging and dynamic as and someday I'll try not to contextualize all this too neatly into little piles of logic that corrupt just how motherfucking good it felt to make a girl laugh in a genuine way and then kiss her like I meant it.

I meant it.

I did.

Someday I'll come back here and it will feel like home again, someday we'll be able to see my last ninety as some sort of turning point, how BG got his groove back. Someday we'll throw the veil of sepia-toned wistfulness over all this and maybe this will be something important, something critical.

Maybe someday this will all feel just like home.

[>>]posted at 8:57 PM by BG - click to email
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