WHAT GOES THROUGH YOUR HEAD WHEN YOU’RE STUCK IN TRAFFIC ON THE HIGHWAY? Man, I’m so impatient. I hate it. One of my biggest pet peeves would be somebody in the fast lane not passing the car inside of them. I mean, you’re in that lane because you’ve got to go somewhere, so why do people get in that lane and run the speed the guy next to him is running? It drives me nuts. Traffic is not fun. I’ll drive 20 miles out of the way to avoid it. But New York City traffic is quite fun. I love driving in the city because it doesn’t seem like there are any rules.

Out-maneuvering taxi cabs truly ranks among the purest of sports.

• Sunday: at the Lucero show (awesome), I got much happiness from hearing Ben drop some El Guapo referencesfrom one of my favorite cowboy movies. “For some people, lack of education may be their El Guapo. For me, Scott is my El Guapo”
• Monday: Greinke + Soria getting it done. Good for real. Good for my fantasy team.
• Tuesday: Hold Steady – another killer performance, including more guitar heroics from koob than previously witnessed. Perhaps he’s spent some time at some sort of guitar/ninja retreat.

looking ahead
What better way to prepare myself mentally for the Conor Oberst concert tonight than polishing off some 8 year old Z-Trip/DJ P tracks?

Dust In The Wind

Passing Me By

Friday
Possibly head over to my old hood’s Bookshop West Portal to see Ethan Canin (who’s latest earned a “fucking brilliant” at Jodi’s)

Saturday

I had been thinking of going the see Feist at the Greek Theater in Berkeley but topping $50 a pop after ticketmaster “service” fees, I’ll likely pass. Kicking myself for not being a little more organized and planning a trip to Omaha last weekend where I could have seen her for free. Guess I’ll get by watching Sesame Street youtubes.

Sunday
Nothing firm yet. May respect the sabbath (aka sleep in, poke in on some scrabulous games & work the crossword). One contender is Bay To Barkers, though.

Monday
The Royals are coming to the Town so I’ll cross the bridge. My company came up big here:

• Having recently completed my 5 year anniversary at work, I got to pick a prize from a little catalog – reminiscent of elementary school slave labor fund raisers, where you could get boomerangs, slinky’s and such for hocking candy bars. I chose the portable propane Coleman grill, and plan to break it in with this tailgate.
• Got some of the company tickets right behind the visitor’s dugout along with “VIP” parking pass. Normally BART to games, but with the aforementioned grill, this comes in handy.

Tuesday
The Hold Steady roll into The Mezzanine in San Francisco. Very jazzed to see one of my favorite bands. The only other show I’d seen here was perhaps a “top 10″ show in my book – The Silver Jews a year or two ago. Not so jazzed that my pre-order from Vagrant has not arrived yet – WTF? I’ve pre-ordered for Saddle Creek a few times, and usually got the CD’s at least a few days before the drop date. I’ve been getting by with this tape of their show in Baltimore … which I’ve since seen on Letterman as part a skit with some antics from the unified scene before they did Sequestered In Memphis.

Anyway, beyond the obvious visual differences, and beyond the fact that the conversations revolve around Guitar Hero and the new Hold Steady record rather than Jeter Hero and how the hold is a bad statistic, it’s pretty much the same party. Which means I would rather be at an In & Out Burger* right about now. Oh well. The mind wanders.

And he ranks his top 5 KC BBQ joins, which is nice. (I’d had Jackstack as my #1, but his is solid)

Seeing listening to the Royals come back to beat the Giants 11-10 in their Monarchs throwbacks reminds me to pick up The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America

I Will Follow You Into The Dark

and of course plenty of Brian Bannister analysis…

I’ve always thought that the patron saint of “clutch hitting is a myth” is not Bill James at all, but rather the author John Updiike. In his famous, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” story about Ted Williams final game, he wrote:

“For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter’s myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money.”

Or if you hear that Royals manager Trey Hillman KIND of wants to have Ross Gload hit in the No. 3 spot, you hope that’s a velleity.

We saw Anticon sensation Why? at the Knitting Factory on Saturday. His sardonic nasal-whine reminded me of Soul Coughing minus the free jazz. I enjoyed it, notwithstanding the drunk 19-year olds to our left, shouting along with the words and trying to start a mosh pit in the shoulder-to-shoulder space. We moved over to be closer to more subdued oldsters like ourselves, but the kids’ ridiculous chant, “Thank God for Myspace” still resonates; because ten years ago perhaps this show would’ve only been filled with the college-radio crowd, and not nearly as packed. Or maybe I’m just getting too Andy Rooney…

Got home too late for SNL, but instead watched a rerun on E!, hosted by a svelte Britney Spears with a baby-faced, pre-Super Bowl Timberlake cameo. Weekend update allowed us to pinpoint the episode to early February 2002, and thus was spawned possibly my first “historical” look on a post-9/11 world. Bush had just given his “axis of evil” speech and had an 85% approval rating. Like Britney, Bush looked so much younger, not yet beaten down by the past six years. Indeed, their career paths have taken a remarkably parallel trajectory, and with them America in some respects.

While someone gathers the data on these shared fates, I’ll leave you with this gem from that same SNL episode that I’d never seen, a brilliant Tracy Morgan clip.