I Got Your (Pay)back

An Open Letter To Michael C of 'The Wonderful World of Nothing'

I lost. You win. Back in the fecund days of spring I bet you that my once-beloved-but-now-bedraggled San Francisco Giants would perform better in baseball in 2007 than your Lost Angles Dodgers.

As I recall, the loser (i.e., Mr. Kokonuts) had to extol the virtues of the better team. Something like that.

That's easy. For starters, you did not have a stumbling, sulking, fumbling, homeric, grandiose, prodigiously talented but woefully waning left fielder named Barry Bonds. That's huge (like Barry's naked head). It has a ripple effect (like steroid-enhanced musculature).

You also had better starting pitching, base-running, fielding, base-hitting, bunting, slugging, and relief pitching. (I didn't check with the Elias Sports Bureau for factual accuracy, but I'm sure I'm close enough.) Better manager? We'll call that a toss-up.

I will not admit you have better uniforms or food at the stadium (since I love the orange and black and loathe Dodger blue and have not been to Dodger Stadium or AT&T Park. Yet).

I readily admit you have more lascivious and sultry babes at the stadium (being so close to Hollywood and all, what with all your would-be starlets and pin-ups, even if no one uses that term anymore). And it would not be hard for your fans to be more passionate and exuberant than our latte-sipping, cellphone-chatting languid loungers. (I say "our," but I am not of that cosmopolitan NoCal ilk.) And your second baseman? Future Hall of Famer Jeff Kent? I cannot deny it. We should've kept him, somehow enticed him to stay (should have given him a few pickups so he could have, um, washed them), even if he and Barry were at each other's throats (literally in 2002).

Congrats, you win.

But not by much.

Both teams stank.

It was the first time in many years our two teams brought up the rear (no San Francisco jokes, please) in the standings.

Go Tribe! (Are we not both happy that the Nueva York Jankees have lost?)


The Laughorist
A.K.A. Pawlie Kokonuts, Esq.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Hiatus

(Fans of the short-story meister Raymond Carver will recognize a spoof of one of his signature stories in the title of this post.)

Here's a random, desultory report of what I did on my blogatory sabbatical (thank you for your patience):

1. I completed a short story (last night), which was my main purpose for taking leave. It's nearly 3,000 words and is titled "The Willie Mays Chronicles." I suppose I'm satisfied with it, but it's hard to tell. The urge to tinker with it is strong. A September 30 deadline for submission (sub-dom?) to Glimmer Train Stories forced at least temporary closure. I was enormously pleased to get a very encouraging review from GT, an accomplished author-friend. (I can't publish the story here yet, because of contest rules.)

2. I continued to read a whole book about "um" and "ah" and other verbal pause fillers. Can you, um, believe it? Er, yes. It's called Um: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean by Michael Erard. (Thank you, Dr. Erard, for the serial comma in the book's title and consistently in the text.)

3. Spent most of this past Saturday cleaning out years' worth of Stuff on the front porch. Threw toys, tapes, and pillows in the trash; recycled cardboard boxes. Said something like this to our neighbor Joe (who appears in my poem "Mowing the Last Lawn," posted a year ago): "Clearing junk out for my son's wedding next week . . . at the zoo." Joe: "As good a place as any." Something like that. We both laughed.

4. Learned Sunday, at church, through a call from my wife, that those would be the last words Joe and I would ever exchange. He was killed Saturday night by a drunk driver.

5. Later on Sunday, I spied a small white spider sliding downward on invisible thread. It landed on the white wood of the back of a chair in the kitchen. I cupped the spider in a tissue and tossed it outside on the back porch, the porch's green paint already worn away to bare wood (distressed wood is the trendy term) after last summer's paint job. The winters are long and harsh in these parts. There was a time I'd have casually crushed the spider, given how fearful of spiders my little one is. Not this day. No, enough death for one day.

6. I was relieved to have the San Francisco Giants get this dreadful season over and done with. (Bye, bye, Barry.) However, as my friend Steve watched his Mets cascade to calamitous collapse at my house, I was spared the burden of any tension and free from the bonds of hope or expectation.

7. I administered the ministrations of "Doctor Sleep" to an insomniac beloved daughter, invoking the sound of rain on the roof as an incantation.

My Oh! My

With all the hoopla over Barry Bonds's chase of Hank Aaron's home run record, you seldom hear the name of Sadaharu Oh.

You should. We all should.

The guy's not gettin' proper props on this homer thing.

A fellow by the name of Jim Albright, at his BaseballGuru.com, makes an impressive case for Oh's enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame. And I concur. Oh-san belongs there.

My introduction to Mr. Oh (as opposed to my clumsy intro to Ms. O in my youth, HAHAHAHAHA) was about twenty years ago, in the superb biography Sadaharu Oh: A Zen Way of Baseball by Sadaharu Oh and David Falkner. (It's actually quite difficult to find this truly excellent book; I should check out that blogger again who was paring down his library for free; now who was that?).

Oh suffered discrimination because of his mixed ancestry; was a pitcher early on, just as Babe Ruth was; played through excruciating pain in a critical game; and -- get this -- swung a samurai sword at a tissue dangling from a string tied to the ceiling to perfect his swing. The key is waiting, waiting. Very Zen. Very Haruki Muakami. Oh. And he hit 868 homers. That's 8-6-8.

Anyway, great baseball players (including Tom Seaver, Davey Johnson, Pete Rose, Hal McRae, Don Baylor, Frank Howard, Greg Luzinski, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, and Don Dyrsdale) have attested to Oh's greatness -- and have all said he would have excelled even in American Major League Baseball. (This is underscored now by all the great Japanese players forging very fine careers over here. Many players can be named. I personally saw Masanori Murakami play at Shea Stadium with my brother in 1964 before a crowd of more than 50,000. It was not only Murakami's debut; he was the first Japanese-born player to play in an American game. And, according to the linked story, he said it was easier to pitch in the U.S. than in Japan.)

So, why the cold-as-fresh-shushi shoulder?

The youth of sports reporters? Xenophobia [which isn't very Zen-like; and why doesn't that word start with a Z, huh?]? Just-plain ignorance?

Don't know.

But, way to go, Mr. Oh!

Saving Face

Did you know some people find it difficult to remember or identify faces? It's called prosopagnosia, or "face blindness." Here's a simple test you can take to see if you have it. (Hint: you have to guess whether it's Bush or Blair. Yuck! Why not Jennifer Lopez vs. Salma Hayek? Or Brad Pitt vs. George Clooney? Whatever.)

Not having one's face recognized is especially onerous in the Age of Celebrity. Imagine how slighted the glitterati feel.

It turns out authors are frequently among the unrecognized faces. But I'm alert to such sightings, probably because they are what I am not. Years ago I worked at Random House in New York. I saw Joseph Heller on the elevator. I approached John Updike in the lobby, asked for his autograph, and he chatted with me amiably. Kurt Vonnegut was often seen in the neighborhood. I saw Norman Mailer strutting up Second Avenue. (Before all that, I even met the satirist Peter DeVries at his house.) I saw James Baldwin sitting alone in a hotel lobby in Chicago in the 1980s, shook his hand (somewhat cold and feeble), and asked for his autograph. He pleasantly obliged, and his face warmed with a smile seemingly at the fact someone recognized his face.

(As you can see, I am a shameless name-dropper. Is it a sign of poor self-esteem? Or just living vicariously?)

I shouldn't joke about this face blindness phenomenon; it is considered a real neurological impairment. It's not that I think I have it, but I do find it difficult to describe a face to someone. It's hard for me to draw that picture with words. And I have no talent as a visual artist beyond the creation of stick figures.

I remember the youthful thrill of trying to rivet into my brain the image of the visage of someone I liked. (Typically, of course, I was unable to articulate such affection.) Must be what Lennon and McCartney had in mind with "I've Just Seen a Face."

Then there are the images of those I feared or loathed: a kid who bullied me, a teacher who smacked me to the ground. I wish I had no memory of their faces. Prosopagnosia for the antagonisti, call it.

Whether visually or otherwise, we seek to save face. In domestic quarrels, each participant tries to save face.

Barry Bonds held out on signing a $15.8 million contract with the San Francisco Giants, just to save face.

Nations and sects and rivals also fight to save face, even if it means destroying the whole body, the whole body politic, the whole soul, in the process.

I wonder if there is such a thing as mammogagnosia, "the forgetting of breasts"? I think I'm afflicted with whatever the opposite of that is. And let me tell you, Braille may not help but who cares!

There's even a romantic comedy film called Saving Face by Alice Wu. It concerns a Chinese-American lesbian.

Maybe right about now, some of you are wishing I'd do an about face (which is also the title of a work by Dario Fo, but not by Dario Marquez)!

Does all this make me a facist? (Read that last word carefully. Remember, spelling counts.)