the old man

Drew Stanton vs Stanton Drew

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:29:00 -0500

Drew Stanton, QB for the Lions who should play this week and won’t.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew_Stanton

Stanton Drew, a small village in the Chew Valley, in England.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanton_Drew

Oh, the joys of the internet.

The point of it all is this: Drew Stanton should start this week. Reason 1: he’s younger and could be around next year, unlike Pepper. Reason 2: you’re a horrible team. Is Stanton really going to make it that much worse? Is there really anything more to lose? It’s not like you’re about to make a playoff push. The season ends in three weeks. See what the kid has got. And maybe, just maybe, find out that he can be pretty good if you just give him a chance.

Thanks to Sean and Terp for bringing it up and being right on the money, as usual.

I'm Going to be Doing More Sports Blogging

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:09:43 -0500

Apparently my NFL articles are doing well; the guy who owns the site now wants me to do baseball and basketball after the NFL is over. So time to start watching those a lot more often.

My one stipulation: I want to do some NHL, too. Go Wings.

My NFL Recap/Monday Night Preview on Zoiks

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:02:45 -0500

My NFL Recap/Monday Night Preview on Zoiks

I wrote this story for Brittany for Christmas, so don't tell her it exists

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:39:43 -0500

Near the Foot of the Mountain

“The snow is coming,” she said, beside him.

They were standing on the banks and the river was moving below them in the dark and the light was coming up off of it from the campfire. The light moved and the river moved and he couldn’t tell which was moving more, but he thought it was the fire. Those tongues, there in the circle of charred stone, the smoke stretching away above them, invisible.

“Not yet,” he said, and he pointed. His hand was a white shape in the dark, without an arm. The coat was black and didn’t catch the fire, except at the edges, and she was following his finger with her eyes. He could see her doing it, looking, looking for the snow. “It’s only there, at the foot.”

“Where?” she said. Her one hand was on his side and he could feel her fingers all together in her glove and he could feel his heart beating beneath his coat. It was a beat like small explosions. Like having swallowed firecrackers that had somehow stayed lit.

“At the foot,” he said. The mountain was just a gray suggestion of a shape, but he could see it where it blotted out the stars and where those stars reflected off the snow. He could see it and it was huge, consuming the landscape below it. He could see it and he remembered all the times seeing it during the day and he saw that the snow was only at the foot and on the slopes leading up to the summit just as he’d known it would be.

“I see it,” she said.

“The ground’s not frozen,” he said. “It’s not cold enough yet, here.” It was October and they were camping for the last time in autumn on the plains and it was warm enough that the snow always melted after it fell. Always except for one year that his grandfather had told him about where it had come and stayed for months and the harvest had died and everyone had been hungry and cold and the mountain had, in those bleak days, truly seemed to dominate the towns that nestled beneath it. But then it had seemed all the more brilliant when the sun had come back and fallen on that mountain first and then found them all alive, all together as the spring flooded the grasslands.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ll see them soon.”

“You promise?”

He grinned and the air was cold on his teeth. “I promise.”

She took his hand and they went down the bank and he felt the mud move beneath his shoes, but they didn’t fall. He slid, once, for the space of a breath, and his heart was in his throat. But then he was walking again and she was there and they were at the edge where the water was lapping against the shore with the sound of a thousand deer drinking in the night. They were doing that, he knew, all along the river, knowing that they were safe and that the guns would be silent until the dawn. He thought he could see one, further down, but it was hard to be sure with only the moon and the stars.

She saw it and pointed. “Look,” she said.

“I see it,” he said, and then he was sure. It’s head was bent, the neck smooth with the short fur, the front hooves dipped into the edge of the river, the back legs taught and planted in the sand like the cedars across the fields where the forest took over. It was a creature of beauty, he thought, though he’d taken them himself, sometimes, with a rifle his grandfather had brought back from the war. He’d taken them and he’d thought they were beautiful both before and after and he’d sometimes regretted it, but he’d done it anyway.

“Let’s go,” she said. Her voice was quiet, a part of the stillness of the night.

“All right,” he said. They went across the river on a fallen tree and he saw the deer stand and look, its neck tight, its head up, and then turn and bolt back toward the cedars. The tree was wide and cracked down the middle and the river was only ten feet across at the most. They took it in careful little steps, the bark cracking beneath their feet, almost frozen from the spray of the river, and then they were across and in the fields.

The fields were the life of the valley, the blood in its veins and the dirt between its teeth. They gave corn and cattle and they took hours and years. They were the reason the people could survive there beneath the mountain and the reason those people had lives that were hard. But that hardness was like the hardness of the ironwoods in the heart of the forest, a strength that got them through the harvests and the winters and the years.

They walked and the ground was both hard and soft, that stage before it froze, before it grew cold enough to hold the snow and not let it melt off in the heat of the afternoon. The grass broke beneath their feet like little blades of glass and he thought he could feel the deer running, across the field, its feet pounding into the soil and the waves of that pounding running off through the ground until they found his feet. He looked at her and she was looking toward the mountain and he knew she felt the deer and also felt him walking.

“They’re amazing,” he said, not meaning the deer. “They’re going to be.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ve seen photographs.”

“Not enough,” he said, and he said it with the certainty of someone who knew, of someone who had done it. Who’d seen it, seen them, and knew that a photograph could never bring justice along with it in the thinness of the paper. The temporary touch of the ink. Close, yes. But never complete.

They walked and she put her hand in his and he could really feet her fingers, then, though the glove was thick and the fingers were all rolled together in the end. He held her hand tightly, without looking like he was looking at her even though he was, out of the corner of his eye. He could see her smiling, and that was good, he thought. That was very good.

He looked back at the camp and the fire was just a little fire now, a little touch of flickering heat, a candle across the river. The others were around it, small dark shapes, bundles, with their shoes at the sides of their sleeping bags and their backs to the fire so their bodies could take in the heat as it burned itself out. They’d come out there because the season was late, the winter was falling, and they couldn’t do it again once there was snow that stayed. They’d come and he’d known he’d come for her, then, but he hadn’t been sure why she’d come.

He felt her hand tighten and they were walking together, softly, in step. The deer had stopped running in the night and it was looking at them with eyes that were like liquid, all of its muscles still tense, still gleaming with the sweat of the run it had taken. He couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there all the same.

“The town looks like fireflies,” she said.

He looked, and it did. Tiny lights burning there off across the fields with their rows and their stalks ready for harvest or already cut. They were a bundle of lights, all together at the distance, all grouped in like a school of fish or a flock of birds or a herd of buffalo or any of the rest. He’d known them all, once: a pride of lions, a murder of crows. But he hadn’t known the one for people, though now he did.

“A town of people,” he said.

She laughed. “Yes,” she said.

The mountain was growing before them and he knew they needed to stay a bit away from it to makes sure it wouldn’t block the sky. He’d found a spot, already; it was just a matter of finding it again. A place they could go where they would be away from the lights of the town and the light of the campfire and yet not so far away that they couldn’t find their way back.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“We can go back,” he said. The air was sharp, each intake a cut, though not as cold as it would be. Cold enough that it brought the blood to his face and pushed it from his fingers, that it took the sleep and stripped it from him and he was glad for that, because he wanted them to be fully awake.

She pulled herself a bit closer to him. “No,” she said.

He thought of the time when he’d asked her to come with him, the way he’d followed her around, loosely, for a little while, both trying to work up the nerve and to find the right moment, and how eventually she’d turned around and looked at him and smiled and asked him what he was doing. He thought of how he’d both loved and hated that moment, how he still hadn’t worked up the nerve, but how he’d asked anyway. How she’d said yes, of course, that she wanted to come if he wanted to go.

He thought of how he’d felt then and realized he felt much the same way now, even with the cold, with the village, with that deer standing and watching them in the night.

They walked and the world seemed not even to be moving around them, just to be hanging there, slightly shifting, the same all around in the great circle that marked the edge of their vision in all directions. The frozen grass, the mountain ahead, the river tumbling softly behind them with the light from the embers coming up off of it in thin sheets. He wished it would stay that way, and he looked at her. He wished it would stay that way and never move and they would just be suspended somewhere between the fire and the mountain for the rest of their lives.

He wished it, and he saw that she wished it too, and then they were at the place he’d found before and the dead logs were all around them. Trees that had been cut, some time past, cut and just left, like bones of mammoths or bones of elephants, white without their bark there beneath the white of the stars and the white of the moon.

“Let’s sit here,” he said, and he did. The wood was cold and hard and the logs were not so old as to be rotten, which was good, which he remembered from when he’d come before and made sure it was perfect. She sat next to him, her body hunched up against itself and against him, fighting the cold. He had his arm around her without even knowing how it had gotten there—it surprised him, when he noticed, and there was a slight moment of terror at realizing what he’d done. And then she had her head on his shoulder and he knew he’d done the right thing.

“It will be soon?” she said. Her words were muffled and he could feel her jaw working against the muscles of his shoulder and he liked the way she felt, there.

“It should,” he said. His fingers were crossed in his pocket and he was hoping.

“It will,” she said.

They sat and they waited for time that didn’t seem to pass and they both felt that was all right. He thought that he should have built them a fire, here, but then he thought that she wouldn’t be so close to him if he had, and he was glad he hadn’t. Glad he hadn’t thought of it. Because there was some part of everything that was luck, and that was it.

“Hey,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, and she looked up at him.

He leaned down and he kissed her and there was that moment of sheer terror again, of disbelief, of not knowing what he was thinking even as he was doing it. But the moment was gone as fast as his heartbeat, which was faster now. The moment was gone and in its place was something else altogether and time hung there for some length that he didn’t know and didn’t try to count.

And then she pulled away from him and looked up and raised her hand to the sky. “Look,” she said. Her breath was a small bit of steam, rising.

He looked and the lights were there, all across the sky. He’d known they were coming but he hadn’t known how they’d look when they arrived. They came up off of the mountain like a stream breaking around a stone, breaking and flowing off in all directions. They were blue, there, at the peak, and they swirled out in a twisting river to green, to purple. They ran across each other and through each other, turning the world bright with color and washing over the snow on the mountain so that it looked like a small glimmering sea standing alone in the air. They were moving the way heat moved off the pavement on a hot day, the way embers pulsed in the bed of a fire, the way his heart was beating hard in his chest.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

He didn’t say anything, but he bent down and kissed her forehead and then he sat up and they just watched the sky. They watched the lights reach from the mountain to the plains to the town to the river. They watched them take the whole of the world and tie it together. They watched the lights and they sat together and, off across the field, its eyes glowing with reflected light, its breath soft and gentle, its hair sleek and smooth and all its muscles relaxed now under the dome of the world, the deer stood and watched them both.

###

maybeitsjustme: just wrote this today for you all. please enjoy...

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:59:20 -0500

maybeitsjustme:

just wrote this today for you all. please enjoy and Happy Holidays…

Butch Walker Christmas song. Rules.

My weekly NFL recap/MNF preview on Zoiks

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:10:45 -0500

My weekly NFL recap/MNF preview on Zoiks

Pearl Harbor.

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:08:00 -0500

Pearl Harbor.

Jon,

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:28:39 -0500

ninasaurus:

I have two very good stories for you.

I think I’ll call you tomorrow. : )

YES that would make my day. I work til 5, though.

Rich Rod Compared Michigan's Season to Hurricane Katrina

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 16:14:48 -0500

Since that’s so bad, here are some other ones he probably had in his back pocket.

Please don’t be offended. We’re just showing the ridiculousness of what Rich Rod said, showing how inappropriate it was.

From Bill and Jon and Adam and Alex.

7. “I felt like our team was Michael Jackson. We had better records in the 90s.”

6. “Our season was like slavery. We were in great physical shape, but we just got whipped.”

5. “I felt like we were on the Challenger. We got our heads up in the clouds and then everything blew up.”

4. “We were like Martin Luther; our only big win was against the Catholics.”

3. “I felt like everyone else’s defense was Bill Clinton: they just kept on denying scores.”

2. “Our season was like Princess Diana dying. We just had some really bad drives there are the end.”

1. “We were like Abe Lincoln. We just couldn’t finish a play.” (Thanks, Jim Rome)

Playing a tourney

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:35:08 -0500

Double elimination.

NHL 2009.

Wine.

Beer.

Me, Adam, Tim, Bill, Tyler, Matt.

Oh yeah.

Photo

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:57:05 -0500

1939

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:16:58 -0500

The train shuddered under him and he pressed his face to the glass and it was cold with frost at the edges, in the corners. His breath came up on the glass like a storm and then was gone again. He held his fingers against it and outside the trees were passing them like ranks of soldiers, the sky over them the smoke from their guns, pounding with fire high in the clouds where the mountains could just reach.

His father was next to him and the boy was glad. He was glad for the warmth of the car and the warmth of his coat. He was glad that the train was moving with a sound like a hammer each second along the rails. He had his feet under him and a book in his lap and the train carried them and carried them.

“Father,” he said.

His father looked down and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and the boy was glad for that, too. “You like it?” his father asked.

“I do,” said the boy.

“Good,” his father said.

“But how long?” the boy asked.

His father looked up and the boy followed his eyes. They were coming into the city along those endless rails and the buildings were coming up around them, solemn and gray and wearing heavy coats of snow. The snow was dirty and in the streets and people were walking with their heads down. The boy watched them as the trees were lost, and he couldn’t even see the mountains.

“Not long,” his father said.

“But some time?” the boy asked. Some time in the city, with that dirt and that gray. A place in which he would keep his hands in his pockets.

“Some time,” his father said.

The boy looked back to the window and wished for the trees in their ranks like soldiers. And then there were men along the wooden edge of the station; he heard the train’s whistle ahead of him and felt it lurch and slow beneath his seat. There were men in their own ranks, men with dark coats and guns on their backs and their arms in the air. A salute. All of them, their arms in the air.

The boy looked at them and he wished their arms were branches and their legs trunks and their feet roots. He wished they didn’t have their guns, in those ranks, and their hats and their boots and their flags with black spiders crawling toward the corners. He wished they didn’t have those flags most of all.

“Stop,” he said. His breath came again like a torrent on the glass and he didn’t wipe it away with his hand. “Let’s go back.”

But he looked at his father and his father was standing and smiling. His father was watching those arms in the air as the train slowed, and his smile was like the snow on the buildings or the clouds around the mountains with fire in them.

“We can’t,” his father said. “The train can’t be stopped until the station.”

“Yes,” the boy said. The book had fallen from his lap and was gone beneath his seat and he was suddenly very afraid. “We have to.”

“We can’t,” his father said again.

And then the boy looked at his father’s neck and saw the spider hanging there on the collar of his coat. He saw it swinging with the motion of the train as the men stood outside in ranks, and he knew the train couldn’t be stopped because it was a beast made of metal and gears and flames, and those kinds of beasts you couldn’t kill.

“Come,” his father said. And they stood and moved toward the front of the train and the boy looked back for his book, but it was lost.

Tyler, you have a large box on the porch.

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:53:05 -0500

I couldn’t carry it in because my arms were really full. Sorry. Now I just want to see if this works as a message system, this tumblr.

I don't think this place exists, save for in my head, but I hope it does

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:02:42 -0500

I have this vision of a place I would like to go:

It would be an old-style English pub. There would be wood walls with heavy shutters and a lantern hanging over the door. It would be on a small stone street without heavy traffic. I would get there at night, when the lantern was needed and I could see lights glowing behind the windows.

I would go inside, and there would be a fire against the far wall, flames dancing, huge logs burning hot against a giant stone base that made up much of the wall. There would be bookshelves against those walls, forming them, made of old mahogany. They would be full of books older than me. There would be lamps and the fire and not a florescent light in the whole place.

I would go in and someone would take my coat and offer me a drink. There would be scotch and whiskey and dark beer. There would be a pool table, but of the elegant style, a table I would imagine Sherlock Holmes playing. It would be near the back, accessible but not dominating the room.

The people there would be nicely dressed. Not fancy, but nice: shirts with buttons—the kind of shirts you would wear nice coats over. They would be sitting in huge chairs before the fire, standing in little groups looking at photographs or paintings, leaning on the bar and holding conversations about places like New Zealand and the Swiss Alps and the Taj Mahal.They would be talking about sailing and islands and adventures that they’d had and ones they were planning.

There would be no dance music. There would be no sorority girls. No one would mention beer pong or flip cup.

We would all be there and we would drink a bit and we would have intellectual conversations. We would talk about things that mattered: culture, travel, literature, art, history. It would be a place where ideas would flow, where people would share information and others would listen. Where you would leave feeling that you had both connected with the people there and learned things—about them and about the world. Where you came away with stronger relationships and a stronger mind.

As for the books: people could sit by that fire and read, if they wanted. Others would come by and recommend books, ask what they were reading, hold conversations about Hemingway and Vonnegut and Austen and and McCarthy and Steinbeck and Homer and Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Bronte and Bronte.

People would share thoughts about their own writings: prose, poetry, and anything else. About the paintings they’d done, the photographs they’d taken, the songs they’d written.

This is the kind of pub, bar, I would like to find.

I would leave, feeling slightly aglow from the heat of the fire and the alcohol, walking off late into the night, knowing I could always come back and I would always find it so fullfilling.

the two people who make me want to write the most

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:57:15 -0500

are Josh Ritter and Cormac McCarthy.

Tim

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:32:32 -0500

ninasaurus:

made me realize something tonight.

I do not know how I feel about infant baptism.

Whole can ‘o worms.

Hmph.

Is this your way of telling us you’re pregnant?

I read sometimes

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:09:00 -0500

The Iliad is pretty good.

So is The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri.

The Iliad is by Homer. Wouldn’t want him to feel left out, not being named and all.

Here’s Jhumpa:

She won a Pulitzer.

Here’s Homer:

He didn’t win a Pulitzer, partly because Pulitzer hadn’t lived yet.

I'm going to see where Jason Elam played his college ball.

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:27:00 -0500

And visit Brittany, while I’m there.

Bought a plane ticket yesterday.

For those who don’t love

Jason Elam as much

as I do, that

means I’m

going to

Hawaii.

You Expected Dinosaurs

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:26:00 -0500

A short bit of non-fiction about being in New Zealand and finding out about the VT shootings. I’ve tried to write about it four times, and this is the time that worked. I may have posted this sometime in the past, but I forget.

—-

Pretend that you’re in a another country, one that is an island and not a continent, one that is all green hills below you and snow-capped mountains above you and you’re somewhere in the middle, in a place called Queenstown, where there are wooden buildings against the rise of those hills, edges leading upward, and everything is beautiful. It reminds you of ski lodges in Colorado and elegant tourist towns in Michigan and is thousands of miles away from both.

Pretend that you’re staying in a hostel and one of your friends has just gone bungee jumping with the black sky behind her and the city lights laid out below her, and she didn’t tell anyone she was going. Now she is back and you are all laughing and you’re eating thin soup, but it’s hot and free because that’s what the hostels do here. You are on a tour of the country, through the highlands where you climbed a glacier, balancing over crevices with spiked boots and athletic shorts and sometimes a rope handrail that the guide never used, and the valleys, where the jungle was all around and you expected dinosaurs.

Pretend that you go to the store, because you need to buy something to eat for the bus tomorrow: peanuts, maybe, or Maori Hu-hu larvae, which are said to taste the same. You’re planning ahead, is all, just the little bit of planning that you still have to do.

Pretend that the streets aren’t even that full, and it’s nice. In America, this town would be packed from end to end to end with tourists and they’d all have cameras and packs around their waists and they’d be screaming at their crying children to stop crying and their happy children to watch where they were walking lest they be struck and killed by a car. But here, the streets are just pleasantly occupied. There are couples walking along the peer with space around them; the grass runs up to the docks, darkest green, to hit the stone wall that people are walking on, balancing, further along, and until it reaches the monument to a war that has passed. Below that, a quick crescent of sand and gravel, mixed, then the water, lapping at the shore where it looks like the bays you’ve seen all your life even though you know it’s the ocean. There are people who live here, chatting, their accents thick and swelling around you. It’s that ideal combination of activity and inactivity that leaves you feeling relaxed though not alone. Further downtown there is the beat of music, the shouts of people just drunk enough to be happy about it.

Pretend that you’re willing to lose yourself in this world, and it both scares and excites you. You like the crisp feel of the air, where winter is coming. You like the lights and the noise downtown, but also the quiet streets that climb the hills, the roads buckling back in on each other, what they call a switchback, lined with houses. You like that the cars drive on the other side of the road and that the people say rubbish instead of trash.
Pretend that you know you’re disconnected from the rest of your life, but that it’s all right.

Pretend that, just maybe, you haven’t even really noticed yet, because nothing has been there to make it stand out in such stark relief.

Pretend that you’re basking in it, forgetting.

Pretend that someone goes to the front of the store and gets a newspaper and then they’re coming back to you with their eyes wide and their tin of peanuts forgotten near the newsstand and their lips parted in a look that is surprise, horror, sorrow, unspeakable. They’re holding the paper up, just reading the front, and everyone is crowding around, all of your little group from the hostel, and you’re reading the headline and it says there was a shooting. There’s a picture of a student lying on the grass, face down, arms at the wrong angles. There’s no blood that you can see but maybe it’s just under them. Maybe you think it’s there, just soaking into the grass, because the student is dead. Pretend that the paper says the shooting was far away, in America, and it’s still on the front page, even here in this town, the perfect mix of everything, and you’ve never felt so far away in your life.

adamichael: It’s a beautiful day. Don’t let it get away!

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:51:43 -0500

adamichael:

It’s a beautiful day.

Don’t let it get away!