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HEY! someone dopey (robarkmay, just saying) got his dates mixed up so I have a FREE!ticket to this tonight in Germantown:
I'll probably be away from my email after 4pm, but use the secret dogcellphone number, yo, and we'll hook up. You'll have to get yourself there, but I can either leave ticket at will call or meet you outside the gate.
Regardless the vanity, I am a weather-vane, my boredom and rain-sick mood yours too.
Jeebus, I almost changed my avatar this morning. I almost started the threatened blegrell rearrangement this past weekend, then reminded myself not to purge blegs from rells when in a rain-sick mood, reminded myself the unspoken truth of blegrells, that they are for nods at friends not linkage to friends. I've statistical as well as anecdotal proof few if any bink the rell. It's still up.
*
AN ODDNESS
Brenda Hillman
A scent rather quietly loves
the library. Readers look up: a
life of paper inside the great
Life: scent of greenly ravished civilization -
dream of inspiration freed. When a
book is lifted from horizon's steel
that mystery object spreads an oddness
each call number a timeling of
yellow math, its curve leftover from
epic. The mind has no periphery
for meaning, the several phoenician, sailing
sideways through vowels of the dead.
*
That this song was pathetically predictable for this post doesn't mean it's not in my head:
Once the adrenalin cut off at 45 seconds into the second half the legs got heavy and what we all at half predicted (and this guy txtd) did.
Here's Goff's player-ratings:
Howard 8; Spector 6, Onyewu 7, DeMerit 6, Bocanegra 7; Dempsey 7, Clark 5, Feilhaber 6, Donovan 8; Davies 5, Altidore 5. Subs: Bornstein 5, Kljestan 5, Casey 5.
Howard, Onyewu, Bocanegra, Dempsey, Donovan, the only five whose tickets are, barring injury, punched for next summer? (And, um, Praise to Donovan.)
The team with the better midfield won, the team with the better strikers won, the team with the better defense won, and I'll call Tim Howard a push. Credit the strategy of pressuring higher than normal and the effort executing it in the first half, but it was a matter of time before Brazil broke down USMNT midfield and once the midfield broke a matter of time the defense broke too.
Altidore and Davies won't get it done. Ricardo Clark won't get it done. And WTF's happened to Sasha Kljestan? There are opportunities to move up the depth charts for this year's Gold Cup USMNT.
O! A complaint: I heard some dope on the radio say if they'd allowed Kaka's goal (which was a goal) the score would have been 4-2. Perhaps, but not as a consequence, dumbfuck.
More importantly, I'm listening to dopes on the radio debate whether this tournament will finally catapult soccer into American sports fans' consciousness, which is helpful in late June when sports talk radio is dying for subject matter. It's almost a "should Pete Rose be in the Hall of Fame" guarantee to light up the call-ins and fanatics.
My theory is American's don't hate soccer but give as much a damn for soccer as they do figure skating every four years. They like and understand soccer enough that if the national team makes a run in a World Cup they yippee and bandwagon then forget about soccer until the next yippee comes.
But lordy, listening to the soccer haters, it's wondrous the pure ferocity of those so certain soccer will fail so ardent soccer MUST! fail, Burn the fucking heretics!
Update, edits, links, later. Or not.
I learned when Princess Diana died that raging against a global orgasm of beatification
towards a subject I deem unworthy is more about self-indulgence and self-congratulation than raging against the tide. This time I’ll stand back and try to learn from the spectacle.
Last night driving around, this morning driving to work, scanning radio stations, I heard Jackson's music
and tearful hosts and call-ins crying how they'll always remember where they
were when they heard, comparing the experience to 911 and Princess Diana’s
death, and as I remember exactly where I was when I heard John Lennon died,
regardless my judgment of the relative merits of Lennon's and Jackson's music,
the spiritual experience of loss - and demonstrative communal grief - is the same.
Having posted thousands of links to music and literature and a stupid-ass soccer team in all-black kits, to accuse Jackson's mourners of a maudlin ecstasy in their distraught delight in their faith's promised devastation would be hypocrisy; witness that Fuck-Me Jig category over on the left. That I've chosen faiths that I pride myself an intellectual sophistication over people who’d scream at a skinny freak's moon-walking might make me a slightly more sophisticated rube, but I'm a rube to my heart's core, feeding the same impulses the rubes I intolerantly judge stupider feed too.
UPDATE!
Via a comment from Richard, a reading assignment:
*
Updates later. Or not.
*
Prospects
Anthony Hecht
We have set out from here for the sublime
Pastures of summer shade and mountain stream;
I have no doubt we shall arrive on time.
Is all the green of that enamelled prime
A snapshot recollection or a dream?
We have set out from here for the sublime
Without provisions, without one thin dime,
And yet, for all our clumsiness, I deem
It certain that we shall arrive in time.
No guidebook tells your if you'll have to climb
Or swim. However foolish we may seem,
We have set out from her for the sublime
And must get past the scene of an old crime
Before we falter and run out of steam,
Riddled by doubt that we'll arrive in time.
Yet even in winter a pale paradigm
Of birdsong utters its obsessive theme.
We have set our from here for the sublime;
I have no doubt we shall arrive on time.
*
Yes, again:
I haven't blegged USMNT games like I once did because the Hexagonal is a given, it's clear what the nucleus of WC10's squad will be, plus believe me when I tell you nothing - nothing - drives away potential regular readers of this shetty bleg faster than soccer. I'm not going to stop blegging about United, but I don't want to pretend there isn't bleg-interest here.
I think Agi's reverse god-taunting in yesterday's comments is exactly right:
just wait...during the next year all the USMNT fans are going to scream that this is the best US team evar!!!! and that they're going to go farther than any US team before in the WC...then they'll get knocked out during the first round with only three points.
I hope his reverse god-taunting is as strong and stupid as mine, but c'mon, Xavi slept the sleep of the unconcerned last night, perhaps scratching his ass and farting before drifting into deep-sleep thinking, losing today is probably a good thing, maybe we'll remember not to mistake effort for urgency until after next year's South Africa.
USMNT is Bradley's team, and if I'm not a Bradley fan tough shit for me until post-WC10 and that's how it should be and I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think the USMNT has the midfielders to beat a world class team in a game that matters and I don't think Bradley knows how to manage the midfielders he has.
UPDATE!
If the Fiver had a cent for all the false dawns in US soccerball, we'd now be nearly a dime richer. First there was that jaw-dropping win over England in 1950. Then came Pele, Bestie and, er, Boris Bandov and the NASL. A generation later USA 94 had them yeehawing from Dallas to Detroit before, eight years later in Hyundai Sony Ecudorian Referee We Pay You Good Korea Japan 2002, they reached the quarter-finals. But last night's shock 2-0 Confederations Cup victory over Spain might just take the biscuit (assuming one of the 80m clinically obese Americans hasn't eaten it already).
*
Updates later. Or not.
*
In My Own Backyard
James Tate
I've seen fox, deer, wild turkey, pheasant, skunk,
snakes, moles, guinea hens. I've throw a boomerang
that never came back.
I've played croquet, badminton, wiffle ball, frisbee.
My flower garden has never amounted to much, but there it is,
blacked-eyed Susans and tiger lilies pushing up
against the odds.
There's an old weathered chicken-coop full
of empty paint cans, a homemade wheelbarrow.
Beyond that is an ersatz compost-heap - I'm not consciously
composting anything.
A mulberry tree, a red maple, a spirea bush.
My neighbor hits a golf ball into my yard once in a while.
I watch him from the kitchen window.
I share a laundry line with him and his wife.
We catch up on the neighborhood news about once a year:
he died, she left him, they took a trip to Canada.
Sometimes I walk the property line, first the side
adjacent to the forest, past the birch trees
and disused doghouse, then along the vacant field
where local kids played softball forty years ago -
the pitcher's rubber is still in place.
I try to appear as if I am inspecting something in the grass,
but I am a little daft, touched as they say,
a little on my way out to pasture.
I grab my throat and wrestle me to the ground.
"There, there," I say, "lighten up ol' boy."
"It's a free country, it's your own backyard."
I listen intently: sky and daisies burlesque each other,
bivouacked between worlds.
*
I would be shocked Froomkin's pings haven't drastically fallen: those who'd never read him still wouldn't, most who read him for Bush-flaying stopped the day after Obama won, and a significant number who did stay have since quit, repelled by Froomkin's Obama-flaying.
Irony being, if McCain had won Froomkin's site would be profitably pinging, which should remind not just neocons but all rubes everywhere what priorities rule.
(And here is proof of my roobiness, that I'd think neocons would find Froomkin more valuable disillusioning Obama supporters than he was as house liberal, but most people aren't like us. (Click Fleabus, yo.))
(And here is proof of my roobiness: I obsess on this because I remember the civic pride in calling the Washington Post my hometown paper.)
*
Updates later. Or not.
*
STATUE
Tom Clark
The angel asked, as his shoulders were pressed into the stone
Why me? And taken away from the inhabited body,
Like the lyric voice rustling from memory forests,
Childhood rushes towards death, a wind in those woods,
Crashing through trees, dying out,
Settling like a white mist over everything.
*
United doesn't have another game for two weeks (if you consider most regulars won't play the June 30 USOC v Ocean City), so the three games in eight days fatigue excuse has limited mileage and the United always loses at altitude explanation is old and tired. Tell you what, I'll put as much effort into this blog post as United put into last night's game.
Here's Goff's player ratings:
Wicks 5; Namoff 5, Janicki 3, Jakovic 4, John 3; Olsen 4, Simms 4, Gomez 5, Wallace 4; Quaranta 6, Pontius 5. Subs: Khumalo 5, McTavish 5, N'Silu 5.
Here's a scary line:
It's a 4-4-2, in part to work Janicki back into the lineup as Jakovic prepares to report for extended Canadian national team duty at the Gold Cup.
Holy fuck, a three man back line w/Marc Burch is better than a four man back line with Janicki and John?
Brian Namoff - I've been writing this for years - is the irreplaceable player. Who plays right back if he goes down or if he's red or yellowed? Janicki? Repeat after me: Janicki sucks. McTavish? Phwrt.
Wallace is physically cooked.
Pontius isn't. For a while I thought Wallace the better pick of the two - and I'm not saying he wasn't an inspired pick and won't be a valuable player for years - but Pontius, until he signs with a second division German club in two years for three times what he can make in MLS, is a terrific asset.
Meh. I have an image of Soehn and Kasper and Payne sitting down with the schedule in March and circling the Denver visit and conceding the three points. Did anyone expect a different result?
Here's D's first thoughts, Shatz, Fullback.
Updates, more links, edits, later. Or not.
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