I may root Nat'l League. That'll be weird.

[fflo]

I got cable just in time to watch some baseball this year. Apart from attending a Tigers game before the tragic loss of (the soul of) Pudge (if he ever had a soul to begin with, which one must doubt, given his willingness to go Evil), I haven't been following the sport. And with a DVR it's tempting to speed up the game, which undoes much of its pleasure---not just the leisure and the tension of the pace, but all the little stuff you see/hear between pitches. And it undermines a sense of connection to & a better understanding of what's going on & what a player or a team is like. Might need to make a point of watching the Series live, so's to be in the moment with it.

I feel no fondness for Tampa Bay. If Boston hangs in there to get past them, I may have some ambivalence during the Series, cuz I like some of those guys, and now they're rid of Manny Ramirez, who may be big with Dodgers fans but left me struggling to like anything about L.A., apart from Nomar's fidgety batting routine. Yeah, Nomar's still in baseball. Good ol' Steve Finley, who had a thing he did with his hair & his cap multiple times every at-bat, isn't.

It's the Phillies I'm liking.

You need to have somebody you're rooting for. It's no fun otherwise.

(You could put that on my gravestone, if I were going to have one.) (Did y'all see the local gravestone story?)

Comments

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Sure, why not.

Love that you're doing the middle of KS tour & posting pix, btw. My family moved away from Kansas when I was 10, and I lived there again in my late 30s for a coupla years (and did a good bit of exploring), but once in between those times, circa 1990, I took my first sorta big solo road trip & went to see my grandmother in Lawrence for a few days and then tool around parts of Kansas I hadn't been to. I'm a Flint Hills girl, having pretty much come from Manhattan & mostly knowing our part of the world by the drives to & from Lawrence and Council Grove and Emporia, where we had relatives we went to see. That trip around the rest of the state did something to me that I didn't know at the time was happening, or could happen. It laid new groundwork, maybe. Hard to explain. It's stayed with me in a singular way. A big part of it had to do with the degree of solitude a body on her own can experience out there, and that being my first time with a certain kind of solitude.

Hope you get to see some pieces of limestone sticking up outta the prairie. Those oddly erosion-resistant remnants. Mushroom Rock, Castle Rock, Monument Rocks. Way cool.

Ooh, Nicodemus: http://www.nps.gov/nico/

There are some caves near Salina I always meant to try to find & check out. I've also still never been to the legendary Garden of Eden in Lucas, I'm ashamed to say.

You know I think the roads look flatter as you drive west in Kansas cuz the elevation is slowly, steadily climbing, and so they're so flat cuz they don't have to curve with the curvature of the earth. I don't have any science-y numbers to back up this idea, but I like it. It has a certain logic and a certain poetry. :)

If you get down by Dodge, don't miss the bizarre "scenic pull-off" by the gigundo stockyards. It's astoundingly hell-on-earth.

(As you can perhaps tell, I'm enjoying imagining your tour as well as following the reports.)

[paperkingdoms]

I think the solitude thing was a big part of it this time. A friend's response to hearing where I'd gone was, "you should've called, I would've come with you"... and the degree of my negative reaction surprised me. I don't object to road trip company sometimes, but this was definitely not one of those trips.

Monument Rocks is also on my Really Absolutely Must list. There are a number of lists involved in this endeavor. Lucas is, too. I hadn't heard of Nicodemus; it is intriguing.

And I like your road image. I wasn't out that far, I don't think... but I like it.

And that'll be on my list if I make it to Dodge. :^)