Fun with SMS, Part IV: The Royals in April

The Royals were winning earlier in the year, but I had a bad feeling about one day’s game, in which we started Kyle Davies. The 2011 Kansas City Royals could well have the worst starting rotation in the history of Major League Baseball, and that's saying something because the Royals field a team every year. The following texts were all sent to my brother. We can bet once a week, $5 only, and the loser of the bet may challenge that week's winner to a second bet that week to make the money back. Going back to opening day of last year, I have now lost $85 consecutively in all bets concerning the Kansas City Royals, and there is no end in sight. Monthly updates will follow.

“Just bed dad 5 bucks that SOB hiram fails to complete four innings. My royal hate continues to affect my pocketbook. Can’t stand this suckstick.” 4/13/11 10:51a.m.

“HATE HATE HATE” 4/13/11 11:16 a.m.

“I didn’t do enough research to prevent making a bad bet on that no-passion assbag davies. Just listen. He’ll go about 4.2, 8 runs.” 4/13/11 11:21a.m.

After the team victory, another to Travis:
“HATE HATE I still f-in HATE! HATE!” 4/13/11 5:12 p.m.

“It would be nice if hochevar could offend davies’ honor. Hiram, being a dipshit from Georgia, would challenge to a duel. Two shots, two down is my dream.” 4/15/11 6:12 p.m.

“Good point. I don’t need either killed-if they blew the shit off each others’ right arm I would be satisfied. I’d pay 500 bucks to watch. Plus parking.” 4/15/11 6:15 pm

“Don’t allow yourself to think luke is making progress if he looks good. The m’s are a AAAA team, and he should be dragged amongst wild horses if he looks bad. Let’s bet something on his performance. I want to fortify my discontentment with this ass sack by losing money. Name the bet. I’ll probably take it.” 4/15/11 6:36 p.m.

“He’s fucking awful. About 95 pitches, a couple more strikes than balls. The mariners are that bad. We get one run off felix tomorrow, we’ll beat them. 4/15/11 8:00 pm

“He’s much better than hiram, but he’s dogshit buried in a plastic bag.” 04/15/11 9:00 pm

“Soria cannot throw a strike at all these days.” 04/15/11 10:00 pm


Don't worry about me, folks. Life's not all about baseball.
“If I were to break the law, I would shoot out one tire a night on the local ice cream van. Stalk the SOB.” 04/18/11 4:18 pm


After the bet on Sean O’ Sullivan’s start: Travis and I set the over/under on innings pitched at 4. I didn’t win.
“Damn.” 04/21/11 8:10 pm.

“I will not bet on francis. Mentally prepare for me to try to wager against the worst pitcher in history tomorrow. I’m already down five on hiram this year.” 04/22/11 3:13 pm

Somehow, and I will go to my grave wondering how it happened, I lost this bet as well:
“Over under on WHIP, including hit batsmen for davies tonight. Season is 1.95. I would take over at 2, if you agreed.” 04/23/11 5:38 pm.

“I would like to bet that hochevar will fail to make it through the lineup three times. This year he averages 26 3/5 batters per start.” 04/26/11 4:55 pm.

In the middle of Hochevar “facing” the lineup for a futile attempt at a fourth time.
“Hochevar is a motherfucker.” 04/26/11 8:08 pm.

“I should start betting against francis.” 04/27/11 6:42 pm.

At one point this April, left fielder Alex Gordon had a 20 game hitting streak. That was before I bet it would go 21.
“Dad hates yost too. I suspect Gordon is getting sick of the losing. I’ll bet five bucks he hits tonight. If you are trying to get money out of me-your chance-“ 04/27/11 6:49 pm.

“Official game only. I think i messed up here. We’re stalling. This thing could easily end after 4 1/2… Gordon o fer with a walk or two.” 04/27/11 6:57 pm.

“I Am petrified at davies’ future performance since I am prevented from gambling against it. He won’t make it out of the first.” 04/28/11 2:00 pm. I was right about this one. Davies shit gasoline all over the personal bonfire that is his statline with this one. 4 homers, a whole bunch of runs. I lost track, and turned the game off.

“It would be nice if davies was forced to go 9 tonight. I will root for whatever team he pitches against, including the yanks, for the rest of his short career.” 04/28/11 7:15 pm

Finally, distraction and desperation:
“Wanted to bet butell 150 bucks on game tonight but he would not. Have not taken a proper shit since easter. Had one piece of ham. Tasted like a salt lick. Just bought two huge burritos from kwik shop, though not hungry. Something will change here.” 04/29/11 10:37 pm.

Junkbox

I’ve still got a hotmail account. It’s quaint, and it doesn’t work very well. Sometimes, it doesn’t work at all. Other times, this silly signature thing I imported from photobucket or something like it attaches various ridiculous ads to outbound emails. This is foolish. It’s tricky, though. I cannot see the ads in a Firefox browser, but they appear after they’ve been sent in the IE browser. The thing might behave completely differently in Chrome and Safari. Haven’t checked that out yet.

One of the benefits of a hotmail account is that the junk box is frequently tantalizing. The spam blocker apparently works well enough to block out my own outgoing shit, but it allows unknown or unwanted content to appear somewhere else, even within the system. I think I could delete that whole signature phenomenon, but I’m still having fun with it. Someone out there is making money off my personal emails. Love it.

In my junk box exists a world unknown to me, with seemingly limitless possibilities. A Nigerian millionaire (hasn’t this been played out already?!? Like fifteen years ago?) still is richer than I could ever imagine, and he’s still willing to share his abundances with me. I just have to donate $50 to free up some escrow funds, and I’ll be titled to tropical islands which I can name after myself, if I’m feeling narcissistic, or maybe after the cat…Nala Island…I could FedEx the unwanted barn cats down there, and they could create their own government. Such an idealist…

Also, there are the Eastern European women. They love me! They’re sure of it—they just haven’t met me yet. In their world, the deal would be sealed once they just hooked up with me—they’re right around the corner! These bitches are on every block!!! Why aren’t they at the grocery store? They have pictures, (that prove most certainly that pictures exist, even if they have been photoshopped)—those women exist! There isn’t much of a language barrier at all. I don’t know how they became fluent in English so quickly…the Asian girls are a little slower with the proper English.

But no matter how my day is going in the inbox, I’ve got that delirious wonderworld that is the junk box to fall back on. Sadly, it’s about as interesting as it gets around here. I guess I could crank up the realism by giving these fools an audience and replying to the mail. All I require out of them is a credit card number. As long as he’s paying, I surely wouldn’t miss out on my dinner date with Oksana down at the Starbucks in Junction City.

Schloss Tegal Redux

Okay, this whole thing is a misspent New Year’s Eve mystery. Now, I went to bed hungry last night. That seems to have drudged up some repeated food-related themes such as the parties involved, the locations, and my motives involved here. I hope you remember Greasy Rick, the cook from the Kappa Sig house at KU. He was in a two man industrial band that made noises similar to whales mating/dying, and called it music. In the dream, he has disappeared, and it’s apparently some sort of a big damned deal. In my world, he’s been gone since 1992, and I’ve never even bothered to look in the Pitch to see if he’s still publicly torturing anyone. But he’s gone, and the following is a quest for food, and the circumstances surrounding the mysterious disappearance/death of Rick from Schloss Tegal

This mess starts in Paul Wilson’s basement (I had in high school stopped by Paul’s on NYE to see if he wanted to do something, but he was making French fries. Pau was not in the dream, but the fry daddy, uncleaned, was in the kitchen. No fries.) Anyway, in the basement, there is a hell of a racket that sounded every bit as bad as Schloss Tegal. It was nothing at all like the original band, which was just two guys abusing their instruments and the audience. This thing had probably 35 people involved, including a full orchestra. They were all high schoolers, except for Erick Sibert, who was the drummer, and the band’s spiritual leader. After every song, he would slap the cymbals, stand and yell, “Schloss Tegal!” and turn and urinate on the wall. This repeated itself for what seemed to be a very long time.

Jason Loevell was definitely involved with the creative direction of the band, (he was at the sound board) which was nothing at all like rick intended—brass and electronic sections, etc. Jason seemed to think that eating while playing their instruments was a good way to fine-tune the process, and all the woodwinds and brass instruments were gummed up with chewed up cake. Jason referred to “that bastard Lofwall” several times there at the sound board telling me how Ian wouldn’t pay any attention to the finer details, and that Lofwall’s tribute band was doomed to failure because of this.

Now, Brian Boyle was a sometimes tour-guide for me for the dream, but he was recruiting some guy that looked like Heath Burgess on a p90x regimen gone way over the top—the recruit was pissed, and was always dripping with sweat and looking for a workout, while clinging to his football cleats but was hanging out with Boyle a lot. Boyle would occasionally grab me and say, “isn’t this awesome?” or “we should check out Lofwall’s party!” but I would always ask him about appetizers. There were never appetizers available, but we kept looking anyway.

There were four women playing cards by the stairwell in this basement, and when I approached that table to ask about food, one woman replied. It was Jen Letner, suggesting silk NFL logo undergarments as Xmas gifts. I asked her if they were edible, and before I knew it, I was at JC Penny digging through bargain bins for NFL sanctioned products. An old girlfriend of mine was working at the store, or something…I don’t know how she got there, but I decided to only buy items destined to piss her off, like some Speedos with John Elway’s image posted on the front. I wore those for the remainder of the dream to get her out of it, and it worked...

Before long, I was at an art studio in downtown Baldwin that I was told was Matt Kirby’s—but there was only a bunch of burnt up canvases, no artists—they were all at Lofwall’s jam, I was told by Walt Faber, the only person there. I asked Walt if he had any food ready to go, but he said, “they’re all at Lofwall’s party, Lucky!”

Teddy Madl was not present, but he was sorely missed. Traffic was a nightmare. Every time I tried to get from one point to another from here on out was a logistical nightmare, though it may have had much more to do with me wearing nothing but John Elway speedos in the middle of winter than anything else.

I got back to Paul’s, and the band was still playing, Sibert was still pissing, and Linda Niehoff was putting away x-mas decorations, to find that santa had left remnant of cake in the boxes. Unfortunately, the cake looked like it had been regurgitated, so I didn’t try to eat any of it, and I put away tinsel, garland, and a bunch of shit into these boxes, and loaded the boxes on buses that were parked outside Paul’s place. She told me that Lofwall’s party was “Sweeet!”

There were a lot of people over at Wilson’s, and it was getting late. There was a campground set up out back on some train tracks. The tents were all on metal-wheeled axes, but the track only went down to a wooded creekbed and back to the porch of Wilson’s house. None of the other homes of Santa Fe Drive were around. I was outside smoking when John Hulce, local law enforcement, showed up. He asked me if I had seen Lofwall, or had been to his party, and I told Hulce I would be there instantly if they had anything to eat, and if I could find it. Hulce then began beating the shit out of the garage door with a mag light, trying to break into Wilson’s house. I asked Hulce why he didn’t just use the open doors like everyone else, and he told me, “This is a matter of law enforcement.” I left him alone, and boarded one of the many busses parked out on the street.

Everyone on the bus was singing old Queen songs for preparation of transit. “Fat Bottom Girls” was a big crowd pleaser, along with numerous board games with many missing pieces to pass the time. Traffic remained at a virtual standstill...an old beat up pickup was coming down the road, and I flagged it down to get a ride.

The fellow inside was just some stereotypical old farmer. I didn’t know the guy, but he immediately started questioning my relationship with Jason Flory. I told him I didn’t really know much, since we’d barely talked to each other for twenty years or so, but the farmer laid out what in his mind Jason had been doing to hurt the dunkard community. The farmer took me on a lengthy drive around western douglas county, and it turns out that the Corps of Engineers decided to merge Lone Star and Clinton Lakes. (A logistical nightmare, since they are in different watersheds, but they got it done.) It was a hell of a long conversation over shit I didn’t care about at all—I couldn’t possibly care less if those dunkards are smoking weed or trafficking drugs, who wore panties or who didn’t, but this farmer was certainly hung up on it. He finally became convinced that I really didn’t know or care what he was talking about, and once I knew he didn’t have any food, I got dropped off back in town.

When I got back to Paul’s, there was Tim Lawrence, and he was showing me his solution to the growing traffic dilemma in Baldwin. He had taken rough plans drawn up by Travis Franklin, and had produced a red speedster that Lawrence had modified with fancy windshield wipers. I noticed the thing didn’t have a floorboard or motor, and Tim reminded me that it would never run out of gas, either.

I got inside, and Hulce was asking a battery of irrelevant questions to anyone who would talk to him, and Jill Boyle was breaking up the card game, suggesting someone had to look after the kids.

I ended up down at Baker, and Tony Brown was kind of running the show down there. By this time, everyone in town was wondering how this sort of mess could have happened in the first place, and Tony was happy to provide the answers. His solution was to explain how things were “about to be explained,” and he was giving something of a mass tour of campus, leading people from room to room, and building to building. “The answer is right in here,” he would tell a group, and lead whomever he’d culled off into an empty room before turning out the lights and locking the door behind them.

I guess I was the last group, and we were herded into another dark room, where Bonnie Butell-Huntoon’s conclusion piped in over the speakers was provided. It wasn’t relevant to critical thinking at all, but semantics. And I awoke after what seemed like hours of her instruction on diagramming nonsensical sentences. Never found Lofwall, and I’m still hungry.

Plastic, Not Paper, Please

Everyone gets junk mail. Few people are likely to form decisions based on the timing and receipt of such notices. Whenever I get something in the mail from the Arbor Day Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, or some other similar group, I politely issue a check for the minimum amount required on their demand form, and then I circle a date on my calendar by which point I have to burn some serious plastic.

I’m not talking just plastic, either. I make sure I’ve got plenty of Styrofoam in there too. Anything essentially biodegradable—anything that will tear a fucking huge hole in the ozone layer—because I’ve gotten to the point I can’t stand winter. After the coldest March on record, and another seven month winter, I’m in no mood to hear about global warming anymore. This little rock needs my help.

So, as the other members and subscribers to these magazines sip their fucking hot tea and wear their Birkenstocks bitching about how Republicans and Democrats are ruining the world, I’ll be out there on the front lines doing something about this nonsense.

I’ve discovered that my Granddad liked to bury tires out by the old pond. I’ll bet that shit will burn pretty damned hot for a while…