Wow! I just watched the best World Series game I've ever seen! That includes the Oakland A's win with Reggie Jackson's three homeruns, and all the previous series games since 1966. The Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals battled into extra innings, with Texas up three games to two at the start of the sixth game of the World Series. And for 8-and-one-half innings it looked like Texas would put the series away, chalking up runs each time the Cardinals threatened to claim the lead. The Cardinals players looked slow, sloppy and unsure, while the Texans, for the most part, looked BIG, and confident and their pitching was much crisper than the Cards'.
But both teams managed to accumulate three errors apiece, and at times it looked like rookie baseball out there.
Texas built a 7-4 lead in the seventh on back-to-back homeruns by Adrian Beltre and Nelson Cruz, and Ian Kinsler added an RBI single.
Texas had silenced the noisy Busch Stadium crowd with a two-run lead going into the ninth, when the Red Birds, in typical Tony La Russa fashion, clawed out a two-run inning to tie the game, 7-7.
With two outs and two strikes on batter David Freese, Texas was one strike away from winning the series. But Freese slapped an improbable triple to right field and knotted the game up.
In the top of the 10th, Texas' Josh Hamilton crushed a two-run homer to put the Rangers up again, 9-7. And, again, it looked bleak for the Cards.
But in the bottom of the 10th, Lance Berkman slapped a 3-2, two-out pitch to the fence, a two RBI single that tied the game a second time.
The top of the 11th saw the Texans finally go cold for an inning and retire, still tied with St. Louis.
Then, in the bottom of the 11th, Freese walked to the plate, dug in, and smacked a solo homerun to straightaway centerfield to win it, 10-9.
Twice the Cardinals looked like they would lose by two, and twice they came back to tie the game. Finally, Freese's homerun nailed it down for the Cards.

And there was a lot of brinksmanship going on in the Busch Stadium dugouts, with both coaches shuffling players in and out of the lineup, angling for an edge.  

The first seeming death-knell for the Cardinals came in the seventh, when Texas' Adrian Beltre and Nelson Cruz hit back-to-back homeruns, putting Texas up 6-4. Texas scored another run in the inning, putting them up 7-4 by the time the eighth inning rolled around.

But then La Russa replaced the non-hitting, error-prone outfielder Matt Holliday with Allen Craig in the eighth, and Craig promptly homered to cut the Texas lead to 7-5. 

Later, down by two runs in the ninth, the Cards tied it up. And they did it again in the 10th, after Hamilton's soul-sucking homerun. Amazing!

The drama, the excitement, the electricity in the stadium literally flooded out of the TV set. I'd bet that the energy was palpable across the world for anyone who listened to or watched the game. That's one I'm glad I allowed myself the time to watch! Great ballgame, just great! Hollywood couldn't write an ending as unaccountably magical as that! Wow!
And so, World Series game 7 continues tomorrow. It might be interesting.

I feel I'm watching the dissolution of a nation in the fight between Democrats and Republicans over the debt ceiling. I get this deja vu sense of Nero fiddling as Rome burns, and it's certainly a possibility that we'll all feel the sting from this debacle. Who are these idiots we've elected, anyway? And what are they thinking?

Among the several "conservative," right-wing talk show hosts that stink up the airwaves is a loud-mouthed lout named Marc Levine (Mark? whatever!) This guy is an insult-slinging, name-calling basher who targets the president, the Democrats in Congress and all "liberals," whom he labels socialists, communists, left-wing wingnuts, etc. Levine is not heavy in the language department, so he resorts to a Southern-preacher-like tempo in his delivery, speaking a little faster with each word until he builds to a shouting volume and punctuates his sentences with a final "those idiots! There, I said it!" He seems to think that his insights, and I use the term ironically, plumb depths that most folks are incapable of imagining. He also seems to think that he's a military leader of sorts (he calls his office "the Bunker") and never fails to trumpet his audience ratings while sneering at the lower ratings of such "lefty, pinko bastions of idiocy" as MSNBC, which is likes to call "MSLSD." His humor is geared to amuse himself and a narrow range of Neanderthals of like mind. Well, Marc Levine, YOU"RE AN IDIOT! THERE, I SAID IT! Your low-brow brand of conversation is wretched and nauseating, not to mention mind-numbingly boring.

"A new life. The core."
A line from the film "Eden Log," which I began to watch as I sit here typing. The trailer for the film mesmerized me, so I guessed the complete story would be worth a watch.
Magic happens once in a while, usually without prompting, effort or knowledge-aforethought.
Magic happens constantly in our lives, mostly without our noticing or recognizing the fact, even when it's magic we ourselves produce.
Darkness brings light, light brings darkness, and so it goes.
My struggle with the deep questions of human existence (why are we here, where did we come from, etc.) boil down to a biological versus extrasensory confluence of consciousness, constantly clawing for dominance, one above the other.
Harmony between the two states, though somehow desirable, seems impossible since the conditions are opposites and, therefore, unable to coexist – at least in our present form.
To feed the sublime, omnipotent being that knows but is unknown, I'm required to grind my physical being into nutritious dust to be served at heavenly meals.
To feed the physical being that I love, I'm required to tear my divine self to pieces and feed the "meat" to the mouth in the head on the neck of the shoulders that carry me through life.
If, for example, Newton's statement, "To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction," proves true, then that action, motion, life itself cannot know itself entirely because the actions create opposites – constantly.
But magic happens, and when it does, life is so magnificent and stunning it's nearly unendurably beautiful!
When darkness enshrouds you, embrace darkness.
When light blasts your vision to blindness, embrace blindness.
Embrace that which you fear, especially that which you fear the most. It's not really real anyway! Or so they say.
I think so. :)("lL:

Jeez, fall has crept in. It's the first time since I've lived on the South Plains that the August weather hasn't been hot, hot and hotter, then hot again. With a few thunderstorms thrown in.
Cool, blue-sky days have moved into the region and it's a welcome, if strange, experience.
But enough of that mundane blather.
America's wicked, wild and weird political season is in full throat and roaring the usual pathologically tilted phrases, salted with snappy, inane buzz words.
With the GOP pandering to anyone who'll listen, its Christian-right base rattles on about "we want our country back," meaning exactly what? Who knows.
I suppose it's an imaginary country that some people believe was founded by men who worshipped Jesus Christ 24-7 and never let a moment to pray go untended. TOTAL FICTION!
Most of the founding fathers couldn't get religion OUT of the political arena fast enough! And most didn't practice church-going ways either.
The Dems are, per usual, blindly bumping into one another as the party faithful weep for the lack of a backbone among its leaders. And the electorate, er, voters, who land on the airwaves appear to be hybrid idiots crossed with nose-picking, dung-flinging baboons.
And, of course, phrases like that brand me an elitist, intelligentsia-worshipping, snobbish know-it-all. The very thing, among many, many things, that the Christian Right hates.
I actually heard a woman at a GOP rally say that the Republican candidate was a better man because "we hate the same things!" Nice when a little honesty slips through the cracks. Eh?
And night falls on the city again.
Back in school for a third semester, I'm tired just thinking about it. The amount of energy it takes to get my brain into gear has risen exponentially with age, and I'm finding it harder and harder to fuel the engine.
But, c'est la vie.

My teeth are on edge and I'm feeling paranoid about  the universe plotting my downfall!
But I wanted to note that Christopher Nolan is the Jimi Hendrix of filmmakers (if you don't get the reference, don't even think about it, OK). He's on a roll, to say the least, and his scripts are so inventive, imaginative, slightly out-of-whack and slippery, as well as colorful and, often, funny.
But that's neither here nor there.
I'm angry and pissed off and razor's-edge edgy at the moment, all because God made me that way.
Well, actually all because people are "bugging" me with trivial concerns about housecleaning, paying bills, jobs, cars, child-rearing and community building. You know what I'm talking about – those pain-in-the-ass issues that plague our truest, deepest, realest selves; the expansive, devil-may-care selves that we hide behind our masks of normalcy.
That mad wild child that lives within our conscious desire but is suppressed by our manufactured conscience and the echoes of old people carping about going to heaven or hell or doing the right thing or being a "good" person, is really fighting the fight to save our soles and our souls from, you know, all those ridiculous things that waste our time while TIME wastes our souls.
Ah well. F$@% It!

This nation's body politic is ill. Very ill!
I cannot understand how the electorate allows itself, time and time again, to be fooled by blowhards, zealots with a lust for power, liars and just-plain-cheats.
Seems to me that radio personalities are given lofty positions as all-seeing, all-knowing arbiters of truth and politics. Of course, the majority of the "big guns" in radio talk-show formats are right-leaning Republican cheerleaders who unabashedly bash everything the Obama administration does, and I do mean EVERYTHING!
And the listeners seem to suck up the drivel dished out by these lazy, uninformed "personalities" without thinking, which leads to lie upon lie being stacked on top of one another until it's impossible to divine where the first lie began the last lie ended.
Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and others criticize the president and his cabinet every day, without fail.
Their primary weapon is ad hominum attacks based on flimsy allegation or rumor and their genius is in repeating the allegation as if it were writ large in the hall of truth, when in fact truth is absent.
I'm too tired and bleary-eyed to continue.
I just want to say F@*! YOU LIMBAUGH, et al.