watching baseball - Sunday October 18 1998    

I managed to get Kim to pose for nude photographs after she came home from another long day at her somatics classes. She also took pictures of me nude, but she was so hyper that she couldn't hold sufficiently still, so they all turned out blurred. Check back next week if you really want to see nude pictures of me.

Since we were nude anyway, we decided to start up Rita's hot tub for the first time ever. We've been told we can use it, but Rita has a way of making it seem weird for us to use her things even after she gives us permission to use them. For example, on the day we arrived she told us we could use her oven any time, but a few days later she removed and hid all the oven knobs, rendering the oven completely useless. Then, this evening when I went into Rita's refrigerator to steal the wine necessary to get Kim to pose naked, I found all the boxes of wine facing the back of the 'fridge, apparently just to make my theft that much harder. It really does feel like we're living at the residence of the Wicked Witch of the Forest from Hansel & Gretel. In a modern twist on that old tale, I expect that on Halloween we'll be out in the hot tub having a good old time and Rita will suddenly raise the temperature to boiling.

Before we set off on a lark excursion for Ocean Beach this evening, my altered state was especially conscious of the precise paint strokes I needed to make on my latest painting. And without ceremony, I made them. To do so was unbelievable satisfying. From the chaos of slashed paint, a figure was beginning to emerge.

We strolled up and down Newport Street in the seedy downtown of Ocean Beach, not giving the bums any spare change and considering where to get dinner. Sophie was trying to to do her thing, but was having trouble finding grass to do it on. Eventually we found ourselves stuck in the open front windows of an unremarkable little sports bar decorated in the usual aggravating sportsbar colours. The World Series was on television, and for perhaps the first time in my life I was actually interested. In modern America, the only way one city can wage war on another (satisfying the primal urge to rally in support of the mother-region) is by playing games upon the ballfield. By the precise clicking of events through the mechanism of baseball rules, the game navigates as if through a maze, ultimately coming out at one of two possible exits. The crowd cheers their approval or boos their dissatisfaction at each corner of the process, foul by ball by strike by out by single by double by triple by homerun. For the first time I felt a vague sense of allegiance to the home team, the San Diego Padres. Their home field is less than a mile from where I live and where I work. The infernal Goodyear Blimp and the airplane banner people are seemingly always overhead droning monotonously. I wanted the Padres to win. I wanted all the fuss and bother to have been suffered for something. I wanted my city to defeat their city (tired old New York) on the field of battle. And I wanted the people in my city to be overcome with joy and celebrate. Of course, this wasn't to be (at least not tonight), and since in the end I really didn't care very much, it was no big deal.

While I was watching the game, a weird little middle-aged man who'd washed up on the sidewalk was having a long conversation with Kim, having launched his campaign with an assault of affection towards Sophie.

Kim and I ended up eating in a pizza place well-stocked with pool tables and videogame machines. It was the sort of place that caters to the after-school high school crowd, a 90s version of the set for Happy Days, complete with vinyl checkered table cloths. The other customers were hip 90s kids, complete with piercings and tattoos. Our waitress was tall and thin and more or less a bad skin California version of Wacky Jen. The $1.65 pizza slices were huge & delicious. A snowy television was tuned to the game and periodically the most alternative of the young customers would shout optimistically "now they're coming back!"