5.29.2026 - Weekly Digest
M 5.25
The Oakland Roots oppose the use of hands in practice and principle.
Soccer comes from the verb to sock.
No research is how we win this thing.
We meet the drum corps in the Coliseum parking lot festooned with black and wild rainbow flags.
The beat is loud and percussive as one would expect.
The shouting and whooping strikes dread into the hearts of the Sacramento fans milling about, looking for street sausages like we are.
Inside we are directed to a sky box that is neither a box nor skyward, then a terrace, then an open space with an empty bar and a section of redwood log displayed in the middle of things.
Nurses get food and drinks and box seats, the nurses were told, and we wander the concourse, make friends with lonely security personnel at their barren outposts, entire sections empty, vendors shuttered, none of the major teams that played here play here anymore, the city couldn’t hold onto them and now they're adrift, wandering from ballpark to ballpark until they're snatched up in the gravity of some perverse place like Las Vegas.
Finally we're told the VIP seats are along the sidelines in the glaring sun and the food is Chex Mix and small bags of Lays.
We sneak away and watch from the shadow of an abandoned section. Roots lose.
T 5.26
The Dark Crystal is a messed up movie. Whole budget went to design and animatronic puppetry. They wrote the dialogue in post-production from the sound of it. Themes are clear enough, the resolution inspiring, everybody wins. Good and evil reunited and it feels so good.
Didn’t remember that little dog of hers causing so much trouble but then what I remember of the 80s is in snatches of color and light so this is appropriate.
Had a dream once where I was at a ballpark and everyone around me was voiced by Frank Oz. How many of us go through life with Frank Oz’s voices in our heads. A lot of us, maybe too many I say.
W 5.27
Angel Island is a woodsy spot in the middle of San Francisco Bay. You barely know it's there until your ferry pulls up, then you're all, look at that, an island.
Spanish American War era barracks and garrisons and a dilapidated hospital full of old timey uniformed ghosts. A Nike missile silo on the other side of the island. This is what they're guarding one supposes. This is and all that gold. None of my business, think we'll stay over here.
The guy who runs the bike rental window has a whole routine, a map painted on the sidewalk with chalk arrows and a surveyor's wheel to show you the routes - go too far that way and you're in the ocean, so don't do that, good views of the city on that side, don't fall in the missile silo, that kind of advice. Uses limberjacks and Barbies on bicycles to drive the point home.
Down here on the other side it's the immigration station, where they cordoned folks off according to country of origin and likelihood of disease and here's the apothecary's window with all the old timey medicines in it and the mortar and pestle so they can grind up wormroot and amphetamines to get you through whatever stage of syphillis you're in, and the surgical room, bright and gleaming and like the rest of this place full of ghosts speaking in several languages all at once in Frank Oz's voice pining for home or expressing their desires for the future in the subjunctive if they have one, have you seen my wife, what happened to my arm, how long will I be here, and if you're so inclined you can go down to where the big bell is and ring it.
Th 5.28
Somewhere in Oakland someone tends to this Thai Buddhist shrine on the corner. Daily. Incense, offerings, soft thematically appropriate music tinkling out of there. A mat for meditation. All of this in the hot sun, in the conceptual madness that is California, this peaceful corner brings color and life and reminders of impermanence to anyone who walks by. More than one mat, more than one shrine, maybe one is for the Big Raft folks and one is for the Little Raft folks, or it's simply so more than one folk can pay their respects at the same time, no that's the wrong term for it, you don't pay your respects to the Buddha, he isn't dead, or he was never alive, it's hard to keep up with the slippery logic and that's the point of it, isn't it, I remember reading books about Zen and my favorite part was how the monks would sit around and try to find ways to trip each other up, by getting the others to admit they were aware of Enlightenment even though the route to Enlightenment meant not believing in it or something, you had to occupy two diametrically opposed conditions at once, a quantum notion, you are either a particle or a wave but admitting to being either means you're neither one, and they would sit around in their monk robes in their monk huts and have these lively conversations or just sit mute I guess if they were the silent types and the game was to get one of the other guys to admit he believes in Nirvana and if you slip up the stakes are low and you all just laugh and laugh and go back to meditating on the paradox I guess, it reminds me of when we used to wait for the other kid to take a drink of Coke and say something hilarious to make it shoot out their nose.