Ten Bad Plagues
(to the tune of Three Blind Mice)

Blood and frogs,
Lice and beasts,
Boils and hail,
Cattle disease,
Bugs that feasted on all our land,
Darkness so thick that it’s hard to stand,
Our firstborn dead – that’s not what we planned.
The ten Bad plagues,
Ten bad plagues

There were four tables of ten plus each at the Seder. We sang this in rounds.
(I’m saving the best song for last, and this is not the last song)

Yesterday was a good day filled with happy accidents. Work is slowing up, we’ve gotten most of our start of the session kinks ironed out. My new fish are still alive and attempting to establish territories in a tank that is too small for them, I figure I’ll buy a larger tank before it matters too much. Yesterday afternoon I came back from lunch and Deby suggested that we go for Ted Drews Custard to reward ourselves. After we got back from ice cream, I always get a chocolate concrete, two clients had not shown up for their massages so we both had to get one hour full body massages (do you hate me yet?). I was on the phone with a massage stone rock dealer out in California, we were working up a specialty kit requested by one of the instructors, and he asked to call me back in a little bit after looking at his inventory. I said, “Actually I am on my way out the door to a Cardinals game, can we talk tomorrow. “Ha, that’s great because I am actually on my way out the door to a Dodgers game, so I’ll call you tomorrow. I actually only answered the phone because I thought you were my buddy out front telling me he was here to pick me up.”

I picked Angela up and had rosemary chicken over a bed of linguini at her house, we took the metro link down to the game had the same seats we did last time. In the top of the second inning a ball popped up over the screen and came right at us, hitting the railing in front of us it ricocheted up and hit the ceiling behind us, bounced out of several people’s hands and ended up getting caught by the guy sitting next to Angela. This guy from the section in front of us brought his son up to where we were sitting, in the front row above the walkway on the first tier up from the field. He asked if his boy could see the ball and in the same instant he asked he brought his wallet up and set it on the concrete divider as collateral – an unspoken assurance that they weren’t going to run off with the ball. The guy next to Angela did a bodily shrug towards the wallet to communicate that the gesture wasn’t necessary, and he handed the child the ball as the man took his wallet back; a more fascinating incident than the catch.

In the interest of scarce funds we split one large beer from the middle of the third inning to the top of the seventh. The young girls behind us were not quite twenty-one, drunk, and chattering in annoying circles. High points of their conversation included “well back in Seattle” at five-minute intervals from a recent émigré, comparisons between dropping a penny and dropping ejaculate from the top of the empire state building, and the merits of getting drunk in one’s car before the game. Like a tree that seems to be reaching away from the road it is supposed to shade, trying to escape the fumes from the cars, I spent the game hunched over the railing out of both a desire to follow the action and a repulsion from the youthful toxicity behind me, which wouldn’t have been so bad were it not constant and in a pitch one notch below dog whistle.

Baseball for me is always a mixed bag, I am not a huge sports fan but I do like going to games. I’ve written about this before, I have become more of a sports fan with age. It’s hard to ignore the degree to which the racial politics of Bush stadium in St. Louis suck. What do you call the sort of structural racism implicit in an event where ninety five percent of the fans are white suburb dwellers, and ninety five percent of the people working there and waiting on the fans are African American urban dwellers? And as my old landlord and friend Richard used to say, “St. Louis wouldn’t have a team if it weren’t for the Dominican Republic.”

Ah well, more thoughts later – I must get work.