Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Three yards and a cloud of dust?  Try 25 yards in the clouds.  Beanie Wells channels Edwin Moses against Illinois last weekend.  The guy’s 235 lbs without the pads.:

As you can perhaps discern from the banner change, it’s officially Michigan Week, the 6 days of ratcheted insanity that precede the Ohio State-Michigan football game. The game this year is in Columbus, with OSU’s record at 9-2 and a trip to a BCS (major) bowl at stake, while Michigan is having a miserable year at 3-8 and going nowhere except Columbus. Most of the time, this game is played for the Big Ten championship, and frequently both teams are in the top 10 nationally. When we’re heavily-favored, as we were in the heartbreaking 1969 game, is generally when we get our asses kicked, and I expect the game to be played with even more than its usual ferocity.

I’ll be flying out on Thursday not to Columbus, but once again to Charleston, SC to meet up with my mom and bro’s, where we’ll roast oysters in my middle brother’s field. I was going to gloat here about the relative temperatures between the two venues, but it looks like it’ll be sunny in both places, with a high of 40 in Columbus and just shy of 60 in Charleston. Game-breaking performance: we’ll have a bonfire and, since they added metal seats in Ohio Stadium, you can’t have one there.

Since football is the theme for the week, and I mentioned Brett Favre in my previous post, I’m posting the following quote from an excellently-written article on Favre by Jeff MacGregor of the NYT:

For 25 years in the N.F.L. — roughly parallel to the rise of the computer — the System has been ascendant. At once a weapon in the coach’s battle against chaos and a holy talisman against chance and the random bounce, the System is intellectual insurance against human confusion and statistical weakness. It offers a coach not just digital predictability but plausible deniability. The System promises to abate risk, to assuage a coach’s nervous uncertainty. And to assure that he’ll have a job next week. The System is what coaches whistle as they walk past the graveyard…This is Favre’s element, and he moves through it as happy and unflappable as the Dalai Lama. But he is also the captain, the leader by example, the ancient Hall of Famer and the prankster king of the well-placed rubber snake and the deftly hidden turkey carcass. And he’s already in command.

The end-of-the-week trip means a hectic 3 days ahead.

Are in the bag:

The fear is that some dyslexic drum major will try to dot the “m”.  “M” should never appear in an OSUMB formation in the first place!

 Hectic and compressed week.  I mean, it’s always a gong show after I’ve been  out of town, but this is a 3-day work week for me, as I depart tomorrow morning on my annual haj to Columbus, there to pray at Mecca on Saturday.  I will again play and march with my Ohio State alumni band, and mingle with my mom and brothers and their wives.

I’m not sure if I actually have a new reader or two since the last iteration, but just in case: I was in the Ohio State marching band while slouching towards my accounting degree, as was my youngest (10 years younger) brother.  The alumni band celebrates a reunion each year, and the athletic department allows us to either cavort or waddle through pregame and halftime shows at an early-season football game.  My family has been using this occasion as a family reunion as well, and we have a fine old time.

Something like 700 of us alumni bandsmen return each year for this event, and that’s about 100 too many to be able to participate in our signature formation, the venerable Script Ohio.  So, they conduct a lottery to see who gets the coveted marching spots for the halftime extravaganza.  I had to sit out last year, but I’m on the field this year.  Here’s a nice video of what we do:

The game itself is a snooze to contemplate - against Youngstown State, ferchrissakes.  It annoys me that teams like Ohio State pack their schedule with cupcakes like this.  And it’s not like you can’t lose one of these (see Michigan vs. Appalachian State last year).  But, whatever, the weather is supposed to be good and it’ll be a fine way to spend an afternoon.

On the way, I’ll be finishing A Heartbreaking of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.  I’ve had the book around for a year or two, but it only made the traveling team because it was on top of a pile, and I grabbed it as I ran out the door to the airport a couple weeks ago.  It’s a strange book, a rambling memoir that details a young person’s launch into adult life in the 90s.  What would have been a fairly unremarkable journey of a suburban Chicago kid graduating from college and dipping his toe into the world is complicated immeasurably by the unlikely deaths of both of his parents from cancer within a month of each other, and the consequent need to care for his middle-school brother.  Not the usual path to becoming a single parent.  I’ll say more about it when I finish.

That was pretty ugly. Some have been saying that, yeah, but it wasn’t as bad as last year. To them I say, what’s the difference if you’re on a plane that crashes and you’re burned alive and your skin melts into the seatcover, whether there were 100 or 300 people on the plane?

Anyway, there were a few moments of fun before all 4 engines failed:

At least, the crew was kind enough to keep serving drinks as the fuselage headed toward dead vertical.

The rain held off, so I had a nice walk home, going up over Queen Anne hill and down through Fremont. When I arrived home, I told Mrs. Perils, “we won’t speak of this again.”

The video above is hosted at a place called vsocial.com. A kayaker that takes lots of video told me about it at the New Year’s Eve party we attended. Advantage: the quality of the video seems to be a lot better. Youtube seems to be pretty random about the quality of its replays, and it doesn’t seem to matter what the quality of your upload is. Lemme know what you think.

In more redeeming news, I seem to have started reading again. Books. Bound books, dead-tree-books. I posted earlier that I finished Middlemarch a couple of weeks ago, and I just finished Ian McEwan’s Atonement over the weekend. And, believe it or not, I carried The Brothers Karamazov with me on the bus to the sports bar last night, and even read a few pages. It’s for a book group discussion due in a couple of weeks. Man, that thing is huge, and dense, like a lead ingot of erudition. It’s my first Dostoevsky. No way I’ll be able to finish it in time to say anything intelligent about it.

I enjoyed Atonement quite a bit. McEwan has a rich prose style, but it’s still clean and translucent. He lingers lovingly on his set-pieces, to the point where I found myself staring around me, trying to see how I could get 3 pages out of mundane street scenes in front of me. And the best part about finishing Atonement is that now I get to see the upcoming film with Keira Knightley. Arrrrgghhhh!! Avast!

Here’s a nice bit about the writing process:

It seemed so obvious…a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page,she was able to sent thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it…You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade.

You’ll go away from here, and after a while you’ll forget that I quoted McEwan - you’ll just remember what good writing there is at Perils of Caffeine.

Another case of Titleus Interruptus. In August, none of us who foolishly preoccupy ourselves with the Buckeyes’ football fortunes thought that a team rebuilding from losing 8 players to the 2007 NFL draft would be sitting at 10-0 on November 9th. Once we were, however, we saw no reason that we wouldn’t be 12-0 on November 18th. We simply got outplayed, at the Horseshoe, by a team that inexplicably wanted it more than we did.

This period of mourning will last about 4 more hours. Then it’s time to start thinking about Saturday and the possibility of heaping more disappointment on this benighted household.  The Rose Bowl’s a pretty good consolation prize to play for.

Light posting lately as I’ve been touring coast-to-coast performing as my doppelganger, the enormously popular middle-aged white rapper known as Travis T. Or not. More likely, I’ve been feeling that sort of lackluster that I get when I’m inundated with projects and phone-stalked by clients with justifiable grievances. And since a couple-three of them venture here sometimes, I feel funny about taking time to post when their projects are going begging. Not that I’m at all out of the woods right now, but I’m claiming the hours between 2am and 4am as my own, dammit!

So, a little summing up. Of course, I spent a lot of Saturday watching football. It was like Pickett’s Charge, half of the top 15 teams disemboweled and gasping on the greensward. The most stunning of which was Stanford’s regicide of USC. That game gave Jim Harbaugh, Stanford’s first-year coach and former Michigan quarterback, instant street cred and deflected some of the attention he’d gotten when he made these peculiar remarks about his alma mater. (An aside of astounding relevance: I delivered the Toledo Blade to Harbaugh’s house when his dad coached at my high school).

The Buckeyes’ game with Purdue was shown to 85% of the country, but here we got the unsightly spectacle of UCLA allowing Notre Dame to once again breathe air in the same time slot, so I sucked it up and bought the game PPV from Comcast. You’d think they’d make it easy for a strung-out junkie to buy a hit of ESPN crack, but nooooo. You can order all manner of depravity from the cable company with just a couple of flicks of your (unoccupied) wrist and the remote, but you can’t order ESPN Gameplan - you have to call Comcast. Which is what I did a half-hour before kickoff. It was a rude awakening to apprehend that they were woefully understaffed, and my only option was to accept a call-back in 40 - 45 minutes. I fumed, cursed, and did exactly what they asked me to do and paid them everything they asked me to pay.

I only missed about 4 minutes of the first quarter. When I watch a game at home, Mrs. Perils takes the cat and disappears to a safe room somewhere where the paint won’t peel when I scream. My companion for these events, oddly, is my 90-year-old mother-in-law. She spent a lot of Saturdays watching football with her husband, and I think it has a familiar feel for her. She’s got some cognitive issues, and it doesn’t help when I flick from game to game during time-outs. She follows it for the most part, though, and every now & then has a moment of clarity, like when I do a drive-by of a Penn State game, and she exclaims, “Is Joe Paterno still coaching?”

Then there was this priceless moment a couple of weeks ago. Mrs. Perils had alighted briefly among us, and I was saying something to her about a player. She said, “what year is he?” And my MIL grinned and said, “he’s a fifth-year freshman!” We looked at each other with a “where’d that come from” look, but it’s not that far-fetched. She (my MIL) has been pondering all the various increments of academic/athletic status like “red-shirting” and, one of her favorites, “true freshman”. She was a school-teacher and a parent of two valedictorians, and her view of academic progress is decidedly less malleable than that of a college athletic department.

Folks on my Ohio State newsgroups are aghast at this revelation yesterday that our 3rd string quarterback, who had all but ascended to the 2-deep and had gotten most of the backup playing time in our nailbiter against Northwestern Saturday, was arrested after offering an undercover officer $20 for sex.

It’s not that they’re surprised that a teenager might evince a sex drive - they’re dumbfounded, and I think their pride’s a little hurt, that a Buckeye quarterback feels a need to pay for sex. The archivists are bloodying their nails searching for a precedent. I remember once when I was a student at OSU and experiencing some of that special loneliness characterized by animal head ornamentation, two really hot women walked into the lobby of my dorm, picked up the house phone^* and cold-called the 2nd-string quarterback, Ron Maciejowski. (the kid got to start once a year when Rex Kern would take the Wisconsin game off.) Completely ignoring yours truly, who was no doubt picturesquely pretending to study. Dagger to the heart, that.

Another surprise for me is the apparent Seattle/Columbus exchange rate. Around here, $50 is a cheap dinner for two, and I wouldn’t bet on the chances of a cheap dinner getting you laid.  Some on my OSU list were wondering if the deep discount might have been an NCAA violation if consummated.

The best reportage I’ve seen of the incident comes from the always-hilarious EDSBS (Every Day Should Be Saturday). They hit us where we live with the caption “I-O! H-O!”

* - The more perceptive of you will notice the absence of the terms “cell phone” or “texting” in this anecdote

Our trip with my brother and SIL last weekend worked out perfectly - nearly everything fell into place as if it were scripted.

Here’s a little soundtrack for a post about a trip that includes the San Juans - it’s called The Pig War by a Seattle band called Minus The Bear:

I picked up my guests at the airport Wednesday night, and we left Thursday morning for a ferry ride across Puget Sound and a short drive to Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula (Click photos to enlarge).

Port Townsend is a charming little town nestled in a bay off of Admiralty Inlet, the passage that connects Puget Sound with the Strait of Wanna Fu Juan de Fuca. If you click the link above, you’ll read of an interesting wrinkle in its history that ensured the preservation of some knockout Victorian housing stock. Our weather pattern for the weekend was morning fog which the sun chased away at its leisure over the course of the afternoon. As we walked around Port Townsend, fog moved in and out, and eventually settled into a sculpted bank offshore, secreting ferries, container ships and other shipping, and their alarmist honking.

We stayed at a nice little place on the water called The Tides. Port Townsend and environs was the setting for the filming of the movie An Officer And A Gentleman, and The Tides was the site of one of Debra Winger and Richard Gere’s liasons. The middle photo below is the parade grounds at Fort Worden where the cadets’ graduation took place. The filming provided me with my only movie star client as a CPA. Friends of ours lived and ran businesses in Port Townsend at that time, and I did their taxes. During filming, one of their daughters was selected to appear in the film (in the dinner scene where Gere visited Debra Winger’s family. Their daughter was one of the kids at the table.) Every year thereafter, she got a 1099 from Paramount, and I prepared a little 1040 for her.

Friday morning, we had reservations for a boat tour that left Port Townsend, wound its way through the San Juan Islands to a lunch stop in Friday Harbor, and engaged in some wildlife-ogling and orca-watching on the return trip. Below you see the most interesting of our wildlife sightings, each in their own way attempting to absorb as many late-summer sunrays as possible.

And the piece de resistance: Our tour boat headed to the west side of San Juan Island and slipped in among a throng of other boats who were watching the J and K pods of southern resident orcas feeding offshore. The rule for whale-watching boats is to keep at least 100 meters’ distance, and, remarkably, all but one of the boats were scrupulously observing this etiquette. The whales, however, are under no such restriction, and at some point started heading towards the boats. The video below was taken as a pair of them approached, then swam around, our boat.

This might seem heretical to whale worshipers, but the above video for me is eerily reminiscent of this scene from my brother’s pond in South Carolina. For a time, the pond was home to one small-mouthed bass that, for all intents and purposes, became a housepet to my avid fisherman brother. It would follow us around the pond as we circumambulated the shore. I mean, can you eat a fish once you’ve named it “Shamu”? Shamu died of natural causes last spring. Or so we’re told. Me, I think he’s still down there, waiting for his “Call me fishmeal” moment:

And, finally, the ostensible reason for their visit arrived Saturday morning - the game at Husky Stadium between our Buckeyes and the Washington Huskies. Mrs. Perils is not a football fan, so my bro, SIL and I walked down to the stadium, taking time to meander around UW’s campus and absorb a little collegiate atmosphere. Upon entering the stadium, we were delighted to see that there was a large contingent wearing scarlet.

Also attending was an a pep band from the OSU Marching Band alumni club. When they were soliciting players earlier in the summer, I considered playing, but ultimately felt that it was sort of inappropriate for non-students to be participating in a college athletic event. I mean, it’s one thing to have an annual reunion game at our stadium where we play jointly with the student band and they love us and welcome us. It’s quite another thing to start showing up at away games and, in my opinion, usurping the role that students should be playing, even given that the Big Ten schools either send an entire band or nothing. I don’t want them to start thinking that they can quit sending the student band to away games because the alumni are only too happy to play. Our job as band alumni is to shut up and write checks. So, my brother and I attended the game as mere citizens. Meanwhile, the alumni band did a great job of playing and rallying our fans, they were loved and welcomed, and I’d have had a great time participating. But, in retrospect, I’m content with my decision.

The photos below depict a celebration after we scored, the final score on the scoreboard, and the team assembled in the endzone after the game, facing the contingent of fans and singing the alma mater along with the alumni band. A thoroughly satisfying afternoon. (I hasten to add - those people in kilts are not the OSU alumni band - it was high school band day at Husky Stadium, and they’re getting a ground-zero view of a tradition-laden program, even if it’s not the one they came to see!)

I had a post drafted on Friday and it got swallowed, and then events of the weekend overtook me. To fast-forward a bit, I finished my week working in Milwaukee on Thursday and departed Friday morning for Columbus, there to meet up with my mom, my brothers and their wives, and to play and march once again with my Ohio State alumni band at the OSU-Youngstown State game. Not exactly a scintillating matchup, but don’t ask a Michigan fan today about whether it’s beneath a Big Ten team to play a Division II school.

Didn’t really have much chance to post after Friday morning because the entire weekend was a whirlwind of activity:

• Friday evening - music rehearsal, then dinner with family (and perhaps a martini too far)
• Saturday morning - marching and playing rehearsal at 6 am, which I managed to attend despite the emotional roller-coaster of oversleeping, a missed ride with my brother and an exculpatory taxi ride to the stadium.
• Gametime at noon, in glorious, maybe just a little too glorious, sunshine; marching in an exhilarating pregame and halftime show and, because we scored early and often, playing my lips to swollen exhaustion in the stands
• Gala dinner Saturday night with La Famiglia at an Italian restaurant
• Sunday morning drive up to my mom’s house in Perrysburg
• Hustle to downtown Toledo Sunday evening for a Mud Hens baseball doubleheader, followed by fireworks
• Up early Monday (on schedule) to catch a ride to Detroit Metro airport and, at 8 days’ remove, my flight home to Seattle, from which I’m posting.

In my pre-dawn meltdown on Saturday, I neglected to grab my camera, so I have no photos from the ball game. If you peruse last year’s entries, you’ll get the essence of the experience, as nothing happened this year that was that much different. One thing - so many of us alumni (about 650) engage in this orgy of nostalgia that they have to run a lottery to assign the 384 Script Ohio spots. Since I was in it last year, I had a fairly slim chance of engaging in that sacrosanct alphabetic euphoria this year and, indeed, it would have required some sort of natural disaster that Ohio is particularly unsuited for (hurricane, earthquake, tsunami) for me to acquire a spot. Still, I got to march and play in all the other formations, and it’s still a thrill to risk my neck muscles looking up at the vertiginous terraces of 105,000 adoring Buckeye fans.

As I intimated, our opponent was the Youngstown State Penguins (yep - almost as endearing a mascot as the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs), a Division II school. For a team like Ohio State, it’s kind of like playing your little brother’s soccer team. You’re supposed to beat them badly, then feel either magnanimity or remorse, depending on the seriousness of the injuries inflicted. That’s how it worked Saturday for Ohio State, but the same scenario worked out a little differently for Michigan in its game in the Big House with Appalachian State. As our game ended, we had some intimation that Michigan was behind sometime in the 3rd quarter, but that they’d caught up and gone ahead in the fourth.

As my brother and I packed up our instruments and strolled away from the stadium, we passed through vast parking lots dotted with what are usually the dying embers of tailgate parties, burning here and there like Druid bonfires observing an inscrutable ritual. Saturday, however, there seemed to be an electric telepathy surging among them, causing simultaneous shouts to erupt across the vast heath of Buckeyedom.

We pilgrims happened upon one of these clusters to find its rustic denizens huddled under a tent and glued to a satellite-fed plasma vision of pain and anxiety beamed in from Ann Arbor. We set down our furze faggots and watched as, in an unbelievable 3 minutes of football, Michigan went ahead by 1 point, Appalachian State bamboozled the Wolverine defense and rashly kicked a go-ahead field goal with 30 seconds left when they could have asphyxiated the clock, then allowed Michigan to get within field goal range with 6 seconds left. With redemption in hand, Michigan had its chip-shot field goal blocked, and ended up losing the game.

Lots of my Buckeye correspondents are engaging in an unseemly orgy of schadenfreude. For my part, I revere the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry and always want it to be a clash of Titanic proportions - I always root for Michigan against other opponents. In more contemporary locution, Michigan’s our bitch. We may require any amount of groveling humiliation of her ourselves, but everyone else is advised to keep their grimy mitts off her.

OK, I know that most of you who suffer through these pages have either a disinterest in, or an aversion to, football and, except for a couple of Mr. Hyde hours on fall Saturday afternoons, I’m right there with you. I promise that these environs will continue to be dominated by Dr. Jekyll. Just don’t turn your back.