stoneunhinged

I was fascinated by this post: Sign of the Apocalypse.

Blogidaho says,

“On Wednesday, April 5th, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00
in the morning, the time and date will be

01:02:03 04/05/06.

That won’t EVER happen again!”

But this misses the fact that the European style of writing dates is to put the day before the month. To an American, 04/05/06 means April 5, 2006. In Germany it means 4 May, 2006. Thus IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN!!! This Thursday, in fact.

And I wouldn’t say it’s the sign of the Apocalypse, rather it’s a good excuse for a drink. Go ahead, open up your best bottle and toast Blogidaho and Stoneunhinged for bringing you useful drinking information.

WordPress bloggers are here to serve!

jj

Y’all like it?

jj

I was writing a beautiful post on how I taught my son to play poker yesterday, and I hit the wrong button on my keyboard—apparently some kind of hot key/shortcut bullshit—which wiped it out.

I’ll write it again tomorrow, but not tonight.

This happens to me WAY too often.

I love WordPress, by the way…it’s not their fault. But I’m still quite irritated.

Till later.

jj

I'm very, very hungry.  And angry and depressed.  I'm unhinged.  Exactly why I am waiting to tell y'all in a week or two, if I ever do.

But for now, I'll say just this:  something is fundamentally wrong with me, I think.  I was thinking about my "death on the brain" mood, and I realized that this is not normal.  There is nothing wrong with being compassionate and empathetic and concerned; but with me, I spend all my time being comassionate and empathetic and concerned, and NOT happy and active and involved with life.  I look around and see a world of pain, sadness, and my own frustration; others look around and see mountains to climb and lakes to swim in and parties to go to.

My son learned to ride a bike this week.  I'm very proud.  But why didn't I jump up and down and hug him and tell him that this was one of the greatest moments in my life?

Because something's wrong with me.

And I'm hungry as a lamb, and there are no cherry pies in sight.  Only the pictures on my own damn blog, teasing and tormenting me, telling me that my priorities are entirely screwed up.

But at least I've got my similes.

jj 

Having had death on my mind, I thought I should go get a check-up. Once you’re over 35, the health insurance companies in Germany pay for a free check-up once a year. It’s called “Check-up 35″. Not very good German, but there you have it. (This increasingly annoying use of English phrases could be the subject of a blog entry by itself, but not today).

Anyway, I’m fit as a snake. But what did I expect?

I’m gonna go take a nap.

jj

I never got around to blogging about last month’s gig in eastern Germany.

We were here: Zum Pappenheimer, in Saalfeld, a town in Thuringen. This is in what used to be the German Democratic Republic. For all you kiddies out there, that was the official name of East Germany, back when there was a wall running through Berlin and they would shoot you if you tried to cross over into the west without getting permission first.

The bar has a super bar atmosphere. To play there, however, is not to play in perfect conditions. There is no stage—they just clear away a few tables in the corner—so you never really get the feeling you have an audience, which I find important. A few people at a few tables act like they are there for the music; the rest just occasionally look over and applaud at the end of songs.

We played well, I think.

But the evening was terrific. The people there at Zum Pappenheimer are world-class in hospitality. We got to use one of the guestrooms for free (you can look at it on the web site, actually. Click “unsere Zimmer” and then “west”. You can also see that the room normally cost 50 euros a night. For small time acts like ourselves, this is luxurious.) For dinner before we performed they handed us a menu and let us pick anything we wanted. I had steak and home-fried potatoes with salad and beer. Breakfast the next day was so large it seemed like a buffet.

Hans and I try to keep alcohol intake to a bare minimum while performing. Then, after the show, we pack up all the equipment, sit and the bar, and order a shot of some kind of spirit. Han always orders something called “Williams”, a pear-flavored liquor of some sort. I always order a bourbon. Usually I’m not choosy, except to avoid Jack Daniel’s. But this place is special. This place—these unbelievably good hosts—held up a bottle of Maker’s Mark and Woodford’s Reserve and gave me a choice of the two. I went for the Woodford. An excellent choice. Excellent whiskey. Excellent.

Anyway, we’ve played this bar twice, and my experience there and other experiences I’ve had in the ex-GDR have given me the same impression: the people there are just extra nice. They may have had to endure over a half a century of dictatorial government, but they seem folksier and friendlier than their more “sophisticated” western kinsmen.

I hope we play there again next year. I think I’ll have the lamb instead of beefsteak. But I’m sticking to the Woodford’s Reserve.

jj

In addition to my softball player with cancer, there have been other brushes with death, though indirectly. One of my best friends has had to experience four deaths in four years. The two best friends my father had over the years both died in 2005. But what has been really bothering me lately is the following:

The last relationship I had before the woman I am now with was with a younger woman. When the relationship began, she was 19 and I was 30. She was the most remarkable woman I have ever known: the kind of beautiful that men get into wars over, and incredibly intelligent. Mostly, she had a deep, thoughtful, and loving soul. Only God knows how much I loved her.

But she was young, and I was divorced, and she came from a very religious family, and her parents freaked. They put enormous pressure on her to get rid of me. She stuck with me for a while, but the pressure was constant, and being young and having her entire future ahead of her (hey, there's a few billion men out there, most of them richer and better than Jeff), she finally gave in and told me goodbye.

I had a great problem with this, and the number of hours I spent in therapy talking about her are more than you could count on your hands.

And now and then I would google her, you know? Like all of us occasionally do to find out about old friends and lovers? But I could never find anything.

Until about a year ago. And the only things I found seemed to indicate she was dead.

After much searching, I found email addresses for her brothers. Four attempts to communicate with them per email went unanswered.

Finally, about a month ago I found a service which would photocopy obituaries from her home town paper. I used the service, and obtained the information last Thursday.

This remarkable woman—the most beautiful woman, both body and soul, I have ever known—died in 1997, at the age of 23, just two years after telling me goodbye.

It's just sad, sad, sad.

The obituary says she "passed away unexpectedly." I do not know where she was at the time or what happened. I do not know if she suffered. I do not know if it was a car accident or she drowned or what. I just don't know anything.

And I am still bitter at her family: bitter for not recognizing our love a decade ago, bitter for not thinking I was worth informing about her death, and bitter for ignoring my requests for information. It is cruel and unChristian. I am very sorry for the suffering they must have endured with her loss; but a bit of Christian compassion would allow them to recognize my suffering in learning in 2006 what I should have learned in 1997.

Enough of this, however. As I said in my last post: it is an illusion to think we know how close death is. We do not. Anyone of us could die at the next stroke of the clock; and my softball player fighting cancer might live another 60 years. We just don't know. All we do know is that life is precious: it's important to love and be loved and to express that love now, while you still can.

Don't hold back. Go tell someone you love them today.

Tell them I sent you.

jj

I've had death on my brain for some time now.

Back up about a year. One of my softball players, a woman of 28, was diagnosed with colon cancer. No one deserves such a diagnosis, to be sure: but you know how it is: some people you meet in life are somehow extra special. This woman is one of those extra special people. She radiates enthusiasm and lust for life. She's full of energy, pretty and flirtatious, loving to her teammates and friends, and just a joy to be around. Every time I see her I feel a sense of joy.  She makes me smile.

They removed a good two feet or so of her colon, but found metastatis in her liver. After two rounds of chemo, they removed a third of her liver. This was good news—they might have had to remove up to 7/8ths, the most you can remove and still have some liver function. But then there were cancer cells in her lymphnodes. Another round of chemotherapy.

Then more good news. Blood tests were very positive. Then more bad news. Metastastis in the liver again.

More chemotherapy—but she's still playing in games this season, with more elan than the others, and with physical skill and strength, and still radiating with life and love and friendship.

I admire her greatly.

But I wouldn't trade places with her. Oh, I'd give her blood or one of my organs, maybe even a leg or an eye, so she could live. But I wouldn't want to be in her place.

I know that in some ways her closeness to death is an illusion, and I've tried to tell her this to give her hope. People drop dead at the age of 20 (more on this later) with no previous signs of illness, or they die in a car accident or even kill themselves; while sometimes people with cancer are operated on, just for the doctors to discover that the cancer has disappeared. We NEVER know how close death is. Never. It's just a guess.

But the presence of cancer brings the closeness of death to your mind, and weighs heavily. It weighs heavily on me, and the cancer is not mine, and the life is not mine. And while in a certain sense I love all of my players, I love her especially (I love her as a woman, and not just as one of my players), and struggle with the idea that she herself is struggling for her life.

And yes, she was one of those sitting in the car when I was having my "oh I feel sorry for myself" session in Holland.

I am ashamed.

She is another of my 72 heroes. 

jj

First up: softball in Holland. Unlike last year, it wasn't 40 degrees Farenheit and rainy the whole time. Other than that it was a disaster.

On the first evening there, I went out to eat with three of my players. After a discussion about being a role model and trying to be more responsible than the younger girls, we got home to find the barrier closed to the bungalow campground where we were staying. I had had a couple of beers, and showing my sense of responsibility (and trying to impress Simone, perhaps) I tried to jump the barrier.

I failed.

I came down face first onto hard asphalt. They came over to me, asked if I were alright (I wasn't), I said I was, and we went on to visit the bungalow of some of the men's team. They offered me a beer to cool my face. I used it and later drank it.

(Simone was not impressed.)

I woke up about four in the morning. My wrist hurt so much that I couldn't get back to sleep. And my eye started to blacken. By morning I had the beginnings of a black eye.

Here I am on Sunday:

Okay, you can't see the eye that well, but you can see it.

Back to Saturday: Christine asked if she should take me to the hospital. I said no (perhaps to impress Christine with my manliness. I'm sure she was not impressed). The rest of the day I felt like shit. Absolute shit. But I went along with the shopping trip and even went to the Karaoke party that night. I didn't drink too much, by my standards, but in my condition the alcohol went straight to my head and I was not my charming self. At one point, I made a well-intentioned obscene joke to impress Lesley. Lesley was offended, not impressed, however, and the next day made me well aware of her dissatisfaction.

Okay, Sunday…game day. We played two and lost two, and then, during the third game, we had other kinds of problems. We were not simply winning…that would be too kind. The other team's pitcher couldn't throw a strike, and if she did, we hit it. During our first at bat, we went through the entire line-up and then some, and I went to the umpire and asked whether they had some kind of mercy-rule to stop this slaughter (or suicide). They didn't. We went on. I was standing on third, as third base coach, and while I wasn't falling asleep, I wasn't really present either. I was hurting from my injuries, and thinking about all sorts of things. Walk, walk, walk. Hit…score. Walk, walk. Hit. Score. BORINGGG!

But I start to notice one of my players on the bench flipping out. I could even hear the word "Jeff" faintly. She was very angry.

When the inning finally ended, I asked her what the problem was. She proceeded to chew me a new asshole, to put it nicely. I wasn't telling the runners to take a proper lead off. I wasn't telling the new players what they should be doing. We're going to be losing games this season because I'm not doing my job. I screwed up two weeks ago by sending her home only to have her get tagged out at the plate (forget the fact that she didn't even bother to slide). Etc., etc.,

Now, I must confess this was entirely new to me. I am 43 years old (yes, I had a birthday during my break from blogging—you can send me gifts next year), and have played baseball, softball, football, soccer, and basketball in school or organised clubs since the age of seven, and I NEVER heard a player chew out a coach. Never. I was stunned, angry, and depressed.

An hour later I had decided to quit. On the way back to the bungalows, I told the girls in the car with me that I thought I should quit. They all did the expected "No, no…no, you're kidding…" bit, and I started to explain calmly that it wasn't just the ass chewing I had just received, it is the whole atmosphere of playing ball in Germany. It's not FUN here. They're doing it to achieve some kind of excellence in a foreign sport—like being a world class badminton player or something. But they do not have the cultural experience of playing ball as a GAME. (Don't get me wrong: I believe in excellence, in improvement, in doing your best. But there should be pleasure in doing so, because the thing in itself is enjoyable. We're not learning math, after all, we're playing ball.) And I don't fit in to this atmosphere, because to me playing ball is a game. The best, most beautiful game of all…but still a game. There's no place for hatred there. There's no point in bitching and bitching and bitching.

So I went from there—the point that I don't think I fit in with the team very well—to the obvious explanation that I have a hard time in general fitting in in Germany. At this point I was sitting in a car with Christine, Simone, and Maike, and if I wanted to impress them all with my manliness, I failed very badly, because at one point I started getting choked up and stopped talking and had to bite my tongue to keep from sobbing. But the tears I couldn't stop, so there I sat in the car with three members of my team, the bruised up, barrier tripping, sissy coach who was crying because one of the girls bitched at him and because he wished he lived in America.

Yes, I had become just a bit more unhinged. Not too much further to go before there's not much left. I'm not planning to go to Holland next year.

jj

Okay folks, that was WAY too long a break.  It's not good for me to hold all this stuff in.  I'm more unhinged than ever, and need to share it.  With both of you.  HA!!!

jj