Who needs words?

A cracked Madonna, in my backyard. Tomorrow is Easter. If you are a Christian and a believer, may you be blessed!

If you are a child and an idealist, may you find lots of Easter eggs!



Tomorrow morning, somewhere around 4 a.m., eleven years ago, Mister Dylan Weir first made his appearance in this world. Why does he seem older than his biological age? Today, as we were walking over to his favorite burrito place, El Matate, he told me, "I don't really care what other people think of me."

Then, he told me about his friends at school, who often play games daring each other to do dangerous things. He told me which boys issue the dares, and which boys fall for them. He described for me how one boy ate a whole unripe lemon as part of one of these dares, and how that brave, if foolish, fellow proceeded to then throw up.

Then he repeated that he doesn't do these things because he knows they won't fix anything that those who do are trying to fix. At this point, I realized Dylan already sees that those who have to brag about how good they are at this or that are suffering from the awful disease of a lack of self=esteem.

Maybe this is why many of us consider Dylan to be an " old soul."




Meanwhile, an oft-ignored doll distinguished herself with gymnastics feats.



And, of course, my little athlete put on a show.



Swish!



It is spring.



And wild roses grow.



Meanwhile, here in the Mission, we work with the wood scraps left by builders nearby, making sculptures that tell stories only we can tell.

-30-

It's all right, it's okay...*

If you ever feel like you are being relentlessly pummeled by the 7/24 news cycle, it's worth stepping back and considering what you might do about it. One option that some choose is to check out altogether. Believe me, even as a career journalist, I understand that impulse.

I've even heard various doctors and psychologists advocate "non-news" days as good for your mental health. I beg to disagree. But, of course, for me, as a news junkie, that kind of advice is irrelevant. Just like other addictions, my compulsion to feel informed trumps any other concern.

I'll do most anything to get my daily fix.

In any event, this tsunami of news has been ushered in by numerous technologies -- cable television, the Internet, cell phones -- not to mention the needs of our newly interlocked global information economy.

And, whatever else happens, we won't be going backward to any version of the "good old days."

What we all need, collectively, is help. We all need to know less about Anna Nicole Smith and more about the continuing chaos that engulfs Biloxi and New Orleans and the rest of our ruined Gulf Coast.

We probably could know a whole lot less about celebrities who shave their heads and run away from rehab; and much, much more about the reasons we won't be getting universal health insurance any time soon.

How can we bring this about? Stay tuned, I am developing some suggestions: Dr. Weir's Healthy News Diet For Addicts.

As of tonight, my lab assistants and I are still mired in our research, but we will have a 12-step plan soon, don't you worry.

***

As everyone who knows me at all knows, I love baseball. Tonight is an exciting night here in San Francisco. Our Giants started the season at home 0-2. But there were tantalizing hints that our controversial superstar, Barry Bonds, is back close to being the athlete he was three years ago, even as he is reaching the very end of his career.

The evidence?

In the very first inning of the very first game of this season, Bonds singled and then stole second base. This in itself was remarkable, because Bonds stopped stealing bases years ago. But he is the only player in baseball history to both hit 500 home runs and steal 500 bases. Still, few men can still steal bases in their forties, after lots of leg injuries.

Bonds was sending a message.

Game two, first inning. Bonds hits a long home run, and he now is only 20 behind Hank Aaron for the record so many people hope he won't break, the all-time career HRs (755). Later he races far across the field to make a great running catch of a fly ball, the kind of play he was incapable of making the past two injury-plagued seasons.

Still, the Giants lost those games.

Tonight, in the first inning (pretty soon, opposing coaches will start walking him again), Bonds again smashed a tremendous drive out to center field. In any other park in baseball, literally, this would have been a home run. In the park by the Bay, it hit the wall sign (421 feet) for a long double, driving in the first run of the game.

The Giants eventually won, 5-3.

***

My lowly Mud Lake Mafia had a great day, too. I won't bore you with the numbers, but they are tantalizing to a math junkie who enjoys the patterns in a game of percentages. Plus, so far as I know, there are no recovery programs for math junkies. Rather than pathologizing this particular group of addicts, we as a society has chosen to crown them as geniuses.

That's nice, but only because most folks don't grasp basic arithmetic, yet they all think they know a loser when they see one, i.e., a drunk, an addict, a crazy person.

***

In baseball, there is a condition known as "defensive indifference." I love this phrase, much as I love the medical diagnosis of "referred pain," which I have written about before. In baseball, this is the label given the situation where a man steals a base and the defense doesn't even try to stop him from doing so.

Sort of like when an occupying army stands by and does not interfere when an angry mob ransacks the former residence of an oppressive ruler, eh?

"Defensive indifference." I love how that phrase rings.

Because that is how I feel when somebody I thought was a friend suddenly drops me like a hot potato. In this alienated, isolated, fragmented society of ours, many are "driven to a frenzy," in Lenin's words, describing the petite bourgeois , and their descent into absurd nothingnessous.

***

My main interest in the continuing evolution of journalism at this point is what will happen to the "externalities," as it were; those stories left behind in the wake of a global 7/24 news cycle that devours each story as if it mattered, and then moves on, confirming that it didn't, leaving the rest of us grasping for meaning that never comes...

The absolute best example of this is the media coverage of the post-Katrina recovery, which, according to my best source, is in fact a non-recovery.

Thus, a noisy Hegelian news cycle lurches out of control, as if powered by robots, while most of us yearn for a human synthesis -- a connection we can feel.

Unfortunately, robots do not have any feelings. And those who reject our atempts to connect as warm bodies act as if they were robots, denying their own emotions, to the detriment of us all.

-30-

(*- ...You're gonna work for us someday.) This refers to a famous chant by Northwestern football fans as they, year after year, witnessed their Wildcats slaughtered by teams like the Michigan State Spartans. My use of this here means I do not accept the beating some "friends" would deliver to me, because I know they will eventually regret it -- because the heart never lies. Plus, by then it will be too late. I'll be gone.)

Hands Over the City

It happens all the time, You're walking down a random street, one you've been on many times before, though not recently. There's a certain consistency to the air, a little heavy with spring pollen, perhaps, plus the sweet smell of jasmine. The low drum of traffic courses nearby, but in this area, the sidewalks are lightly traveled after dark.

As you cross a street, your eyes suddenly focus on the bright orange hand indicating either that you're walking against the light, or soon will be...So why haven't you ever seen that hand in that way before? Its outline is so clear, its digits so well articulated.

Aha! That is what's wrong with it! It is a perfect hand, in the sense that proportionality represents perfection.

Who has a perfect hand?

Not me. I bear genetically determined hands that are arranged with a slight but noticeable curvature of the pointer and pinky. To a lesser degree my middle finger just slightly lists, thus should I flip somebody off, I do so ever so slightly crookedly.

Maybe that means that I don't really mean it? I have to admit that I've uttered the phrase "Fuck you!" very few times in my life, and I suspect I meant it very sincerely in the moment.

But, with me, at least, anger almost always passes quickly, to be replaced by a desire to reconnect, to stay connected no matter what. I try to listen to friends, but often when they give me advice, I tune it out for a while. Searing my memory tonight are several occasions when friends told me someone was taking advantage of me, and that I had to learn how to "stand up" for myself.

Who knows why, but that is what sparked my obsession with the perfect hand tonight, I think.

There were plenty of distractions. I was hustling home to catch the end of the Giants' game (they lost, but Barry Bonds hit HR #735. At this rate, he'll catch Hank Aaron's major league record (755) before the All Star break.

I truly think the drama surrounding Bonds, Aaron, and Ruth -- the three greatest power hitters in mainstream American baseball history -- is Shakespearean in complexity. (I refer here to his popular and gaudy plays, not his literature -- the sonnets).

In the old and only partially documented Negro Leagues, an equally great home run hitter lives on in old people's memory. His name was Josh Gibson. No one knows how many round-trippers Gibson hit; according to legend it was "nearly" 800, but lack of firm statistical records and the informality of the Negro League seasons defies comparison with the anally retentive National Pastime.

Gibson, like Ruth, was the kind of person whose exploits inspired legends.

Many variations of the following story have circulated since the 1930s:

In the last of the ninth at Pittsburgh, down a run, with a runner on base and two outs, Gibson hit one so high and deep, so far into the twilight sky that it disappeared from sight, apparently winning the game.

The next day, the same two teams were playing again, now in Philly. Just as the teams have positioned themselves on the field, a ball came falling out of the sky and a Philadelphia outfielder grabbed it. The umpire yelled to Gibson, "You're out! In Pittsburgh, yesterday!"

According to Wikipedia, In early 1943, Josh Gibson fell into a coma and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He refused the option of surgical removal, and lived the next four years with recurring headaches. Gibson died of a stroke in 1947, at age 35, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, just three months before Jackie Robinson became the first black player in modern major league history. The stroke is generally believed to be linked to drug problems that plagued his later years.

Like I said, all of this came to me as I found myself gazing at that perfect orange hand, blazing in a spring night, along a street seldom traveled after dark. I had just left the old Herbst Theatre, since tonight, naturally, was "Spring Festival."





I went to it, and returned from it, quite alone. But, while there, I blew kisses to my three little performers, and stared at the chandeliers overhead, recalling other visits, a long time ago, to writers talking about writing, in a time both more idealistic and therefore less realistic than the present era.

The older me is more vigilant, apparently, better able to avoid being "taken advantage of." His heart is lined with scar tissue, his face bears the signs of a life filled with more ups and downs than a trampoline.

Only my hands remain almost magically vital (in my eyes). They may be wrinkling, splotching, and their veins stand out as never happens to youthful hands. But these hands know what they are doing, whether tapping this keyboard, emphasizing a point in conversation or stroking the body of a lover.

They grip the wheel of my car, guiding us to our destination safely. They can throw a ball true to its destination, wrench open any bottle cap, and grasp the hands of another if she or he is in pain. They send signals across a crowded auditorium or a sports field.

Me and my kids all know the language they speak.

It's the language of true love.

-30-

Late Bloomers

So what is traditionally one of my favorite times of year is here --spring, and the start of baseball season. My long-suffering Mud Lake Mafia broke out of the gate at a turtle-like pace, and after two days of games, now rests perilously in 14th place in a league of 16. They are batting a meager .203 and the pitching staff, despite an earned-run average is 4.85, has accounted for 75% (18) of our first 24 "points."

I'm liable to focus more on the MLM because my beloved Michigan Mafia softball team has finally retired en masse, and Aidan is no longer playing little league baseball. Those are two big losses for me -- activities and friendships that helped sustain me a year ago when I hit bottom, emotionally.

Besides my fantasy team, there is the real team I root and my kids for, the San Francisco Giants. The Giants will host this year's All-Star Game in their beautiful park. Everyone is watching as the old slugger, booed everywhere except at home and widely trashed in the press for using steroids, among other unpleasant behaviors, like cheating on his wife (not a crime, except morally), tax evasion (alleged by his ex-girlfriend), arrogance, allegedly blaming a teammate when he tested positive for using Human Growth Hormone last season, which was not illegal, technically, but did nothing to burnish his badly tarnished reputation.

The spurned ex-girlfriend said he told her he used steroids, and the web of evidence as disclosed by two Chronicle reporters is pretty persuasive. The only problem is that although many baseball players have now tested positive for illegal drug use, Bonds is not one of them.

It also has to be remembered that at the time he allegedly took this stuff, it wasn’t expressly prohibited by MLB.

There's actually one other problem, a very serious one from a journalistic perspective. It turns out that the Chronicle's "confidential source," the man who leaked damaging excerpts from Bonds' grand jury testimony, was hardly a neutral party, but a lawyer for the man at the center of this whole brouhaha -- Victor Conte -- the drug dealer maestro who convinced various athletes in many sports that his magic potions would help them succeed.

There actually is zero evidence that these "performance-enhancing" drugs work. It's most likely, in my view, that their main effect was the placebo phenomenon, where the person taking them convinces himself he is stronger, more capable, and so on.

Therefore, this entire controversy is likely off base, to use baseball parlance. Bonds had already accomplished something no one in history ever did before long before these allegations first surfaced. He stole 500 bases and he hit 500 homeruns.

Thus, he already was ensured a place in the Hall of Fame before steroids were even a twinkle in his jaded eye.

Regardless, the hacks still have their way in this country, especially when it comes to knocking down successful people. Sports writers, political writers, commentators of all stripes routinely knock down those they have previously built up.

***

I had hoped to discuss several books I'm reading, and several websites I'm enjoying, but this has been a day of extended obligations, not to mention parenting. The three little ones seem restless tonight, maybe it's the changing weather, and I fear by the time they finally fall asleep I will too. If not, I'll be back.

***

That was hardly an overwhelming vote of confidence for continuing this blog. Maybe I'll have to think through what I'm doing. Is the silence of lurkers golden? It seemed right to raise the question, but some may have thought it merely rhetorical, as I've said many times I write because I have to write.

Tonight, I had to write again, and I suppose that says much more about me than about any potential audience...

-30-

Endings

This is the 365th day of this blog's tender life.

One year old. This is the 470th post, containing nearly 300,000 words, and I don't know how many images.

I've gotten a few dozen comments, a few emails, a phone call or two. I've made one extraordinarily good new friend.

But I've never reread what lives here, freely and digitally, courtesy of Google. That enormous company owns this space. The ads on this site come via Google, and are loaded automatically via keywords that the search engine's crawler recognizes on my site.

Thus, you will find many ads for Katrina relief, relationship advice, parenting, and sports, plus geographically sensitive ads for Biloxi, New York City, San Francisco, and Tokyo.

To underline this point, I do not have any direct control over the ads that appear, but I do get paid a tiny amount of money when a visitor chooses to check out one of my sponsors.

Sometimes, ads appear expressing choices I would never advocate. Today, I noticed an ad for a service about how to "discreetly" date married people. Close readers of my blog will know I don't believe that relationships based on secrecy have any hope of coming to any but a bad end.

I wouldn't do it. But, ads are like free speech. I'd be a hypocrite to denounce them. And I am grateful for even a modest opportunity to earn some pocket money.

***

Today, I again experienced waves of self-awareness, and the experience was not a positive one. By mid-day I was in a serious revisionist mode about my life. Today, a year after the breakup that precipitated this blog, I reviewed everything I know about myself and pronounced myself a Big Idiot.

My ever-vigilant oldest daughter caught me in the act, so I removed that label from my ever-beckoning green dot, since negative comments about oneself apparently are a sign of psychologically unhealthy behavior.

(And here I always thought it was humor!)

***

What I have come to appreciate this past, painful year, is the importance of knowing how to let those you love go. That is the true definition of love, we are told. Not the clutching close, holding on for dear life.

I've made so many egregious mistakes, seeking love. It's worth saying it out loud -- in all of the wrong places. So many brush-offs, so many rejections.

Tonight looking at my hands, all I see are the advancing wrinkles, the blotches, and the unattractive lines of age. Do my hands even know what to do anymore?

I feel ancient. I feel like a big idiot. Every time I've reached out, once things follow their natural course, it's turned into a disaster.

All of a sudden, I see what an isolated, lonely old man I am fated to become. It's as if the world has its own relentless plan for each of us, and my path appears to have been set.

Then again, other signals emerge through this fog of my own making. My dear 12-year-old called me tonight to say goodnight. It is the first time in weeks he's done that; maybe he had an intuitive flash, he sort of said that. Yesterday, in Oracle Arena (corporate names suck) I was surprised that he held my hand for a while, though he did let it go when he saw people approaching. He tried to link arms, and the to awkwardly throw his arm over my shoulder. Though he is growing rapidly, that doesn't yet work, so I put my arm around him instead.

What an amazing boy! Entering puberty and still able to express physical closeness to his dad! His call tonight pulled me out of where this post was doing -- down the hole of self-pity and despair.

Instead, I have taken a deep breath. I need to remember that those who reject me often are only following their own trajectories, life journeys created by others who've hurt them in the past, not me. As I try, in my own strange way, to forge connections, especially with women, things often explode in my face.

I was feeling the shrapnel earlier, but now, thanks to my son, I feel serenity. I'm not going to be here long enough to matter to anyone other than those who truly love me. So I'll let the critics go, and embrace my closest people, the family and friends who catch me when I start straying (which is all too often.)

I have stories to write. I'm not sure this blog is the right place to write them.

I have long contemplated ending this blog on this date, even as I slide a ring off my finger. After all, as I said, I have learned how to let go, maybe too well. It's over -- everything that initiated this blog is done now. Perhaps the most graceful thing would be to quietly exit this scene, and continue my musings elsewhere, under a different identity, with a new voice, masking my identity so I can explore less constrained literary forms.

Before deciding the fate of hotweir.blogspot.com, I owe it to you, dear readers, to solicit your opinion. Shall this cease? Please add a comment below, and sign in only as "anonymous." I don't want to know who says what. But if anyone wants me to continue, I promise that I will.

Otherwise, it's been a good ride.


-30-

Weekend Journal

Our weekend in photos.


The science project with milk continues, with perplexing, yet beautiful results.



We draw and we paint while waiting for Dad's pork roast to be ready to eat.



Those Warriors move much too fast for my camera to capture them. On this day, fighting for the final playoff spot in the West, they came from behind in dramatic fashion in the 4th quarter to win, 122-117.



Tight, small, round, firm, perky, cute. The "Warrior Girls.



Hot Tub on a cool morning.



The view from Bernal looking south.



Heather blowing in the wind.



The Fusion soccer team played ferociously, yet, trailed 3-1 at halftime.



One fan was more interested in reading Shonen Jump than watching the action.



Fusion came back with a furious second half, outscoring their opponents, 4-0, and therefore winning 5-3. The best part of any sports contest is after it's over and the players shake hands.

Well done!

-30-

Magical Weekend (April 1st)

It all started with numbers. A couple years back, I started buying lottery tickets, using numerical patterns that would make sense only to me. Of course, I realized the odds of ever winning were lower than getting struck by lightning, comparable with coming home to find one of the women I've loved but lost waiting for me in my bed.

Yet, almost out of some superstitious belief, I kept buying and playing, never coming even close to the winning sequence. Then, about six months ago, I started noticing something quite interesting.

The winning numbers tended to recur in clusters for a while, and then disappear. A new bunch of numbers (in groups of 36) would then supplant the previous group. Given that there are six winning numbers, if my observation proved correct, the odds of picking at least one of them was far better than one in ten million; it was more like one in six.

But how could this be?

Even if true, this would hardly guarantee I could ever win, because of course I would have to cover all of the various combinations of the precise six of those 36 before the sequence evolved on to its next grouping. Upon closer examination, I realized the sequences changed before all options had been exhausted, in fact, roughly (as far as I could observe) around halfway through the natural cycle.

I needed a calculator to compute the 6/36 to the sixth power, spread evenly over the number of weeks needed to exhaust the sequence, then divided by two. The first five months, I foundered hopelessly.

Then, this past week, I had an epiphany. The computers programming each week's lottery numbers must only be able to handle a pool of 36 numbers, randomly distributed. Although this is almost incalculable, I then noticed something else.

It was that old doubling pattern that appeared to me as a child: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, etc. (Some of these numbers will be familiar to all computer user.)

Suddenly, it all became clear. There would be a way to predict the next sequence of winning numbers if I could reconcile the sixes with the twos, i.e., 6, 36, 216, 1296, 7776, 46,656.

It took me days to solve this puzzle, but eventually it became obvious.

After a series of simple calculations, I started listing the possible winning calculations and compared them with the winning numbers the past six weeks. Yes! We were near the end of this group's turn, so there were fewer possible sequences left than at any other point in the cycle.

This would be my best chance. I ran the numbers and had six possible options. After that, it was easy. I took out two dice and rolled them. This would yield precisely a one-sixth sequence that would have as good a chance as any other.

If you've followed this, you realize I was playing odds along a .167 probability curve. In order to maximize my chances, I bought (of course) six tickets. And rolled the dice five more times. Of course I was only covering one thirty-sixth of the total range of possible sequences at this point, but I didn't feel it was wise to spend $216 dollars last night, just in case I was wrong.

Six bucks felt like the right amount to risk to find out if my theory was true.

Glory is to God! I won. Last night, as I watched TV at 7 p.m., when the winning numbers are announced, I had picked three of the six!

Thus, today I am $10,000 richer!

p.s.

April Fools. :-)