The weekend was great.

The game... eh, not so much.

I should start off by stating for the record that we didn't really have any illusions about this game.  The Colorado Rockies are currently the hottest team in baseball, and the A's... well, we love our A's.  Even when they do the baseball equivalent of knocking us down a flight of stairs.  In case anybody thinks I am shoveling dirt on my team, I am most assuredly not, but I also don't believe in gilding the lilly.  There's a reason why going into last Saturday's game we were the third-worst team in the league, lording it over only the Cleveland Indians (Tom Berenger can't save these stiffs) and the Washington Nationals, who are so grotesquely inept that when they recently had Teddy Roosevelt Bobblehead Night (WTF?), they handed out a bunch of awful plastic statues that said ROSEVELT across the bases.

Also, this was not the first time they had terribly misspelled something in the public eye.  I shit thee not.

Anyway, we knew that there was a good chance that we were going down in defeat, but we were okay with that.  We even managed to get over the minor gaffe of leaving the sliced tri-tip for sandwiches at home; thankfully, my dad had put it in the fridge before we left so it was delicious when we got home.  And boy, we needed those sandwiches to wash the taste of defeat out of our mouths.

The A's sent young Trevor Cahill to the mound and I would remiss if I didn't point out for the record that young Mr. Cahill is just that; young.  As in, he recently celebrated being old enough to grab a beer after a game in a legal manner rather than having it slipped to him outside the back exit of a liquor store.  Young, folks.  The thing about young pitchers is that they have a hell of a lot of potential and can throw lights-out sometimes...  but when things go wrong for the young bucks, it usually snowballs with amazing speed.  The major league game is at least fifty pecent mental, and it takes time to develop the strength of will necessary to rise above such things as serving up a home run in each inning for four innings.

Once again, I shit thee not.

The Rockies are a hard-slugging team, so the dinger rapped smartly over the wall in the first inning was perhaps to be expected.  The Oakland offense retreated to its typical prone position (once again, there's a reason we're in the cellar, folks) and after going meekly down before a Colorado pitcher with a 3-7 record and an earned run average somewhere between five and a half and "holy shit, what are you still doing in the rotation," the Rockies came back up again.

CRACK!  Out went home run number two.  This provoked a general muttering from the crowd, since now it was 3-0 Colorado and the A's have demonstrated as much ability to come back from early deficits of this type as Marcus the Backup Kitty does in resisting a fire hose.  However, one never knows, until it gets grinded right in your face by once again having the A's batters go three and aout as though they were trying to patent the concept.  This brought young Mr. Cahill back to his own personal Waterloo, aka the pitcher's mound.

I'm sure you can guess what happened next.  At least, you'd better be able to.  After all, I alluded to it four paragraphs ago.

The home crowd stopped muttering and began booing instead.  I, however, had gone right for the throat last inning and began to yell such inspiring things as "Bullpen doormat!"  There was also a "Fire Bob Geren" chant I attempted to lead (with as much success as Cahill had in keeping the ball in the yard), the "If I had paid full price for these seats, I'd riot!" blast, and after the next inning...

...aw, you know what happened the next inning, right?  That's right.  Another dinger, A's are now down 7-2 in the fourth inning, and I completely lost it for about as long as it took to scream:

"DAMN YOU TO HELL, TREVOR CAHILL!"

Whereupon I then sat down and buried my face in my hands.

Good thing those seats were only ten bucks each, right?  For love of the game, folks.  For love of the game.

I was having a talk via Verizon text with a friend yesterday and after the usual catching up she told me that she was enjoying HBO's series Trueblood quite a bit.  If you're not familiar with that franchise, it's based on a series of books by bestselling author Charlaine Harris, who works in the same urban fantasy genre as L.A. Banks, Tanya Huff, Jim Butcher, Rachel Caine, Kim Harrison and a host of others whose names escape me at this moment.  She asked me if the books that Trueblood are based on were any good, and there followed a brief, uncomfortable texting silence where I debated whether to tell her...

"Ummmmm, well, there's better stuff you can read," I finally hedged.

Yes, that was a temporary cop-out.  Hey, it was a text conversation; space is limited, even with a smart phone.  Fortunately, I've got a bit more room here.

In case you're wondering who I do endorse from that list, it's Butcher and Caine.  Unfortunately, they were the only ones I felt positively about, and it's not for a lack of trying their offerings.  For whatever reason--

Ah, crap.  Actually, that's not true.  It's not "for whatever reason," it's for some very specific ones.  Every genre of books has a set of built-in pitfalls that has the capacity to ruin even the best-laid plans, and while some of the more common ones will cross-pollinate, there is at least one unique trap that a well-meaning author can spring.  Too much guts and gore (horror), talking too much about livestock and leather (westerns), plot twists that seem to come out of nowhere and make the reader wrinkle their brow (thriller), inherently unlikeable lead characters (romance) and so on.  For the urban fantasy genre, it's the very supernatural element that can distastefully set it apart from other aisles of the bookstore... or, as I like to call it, "Attack Of The Kewl Powerz Band-Aid!"

Should you wish to find me on Facebook, here I am:

http://www.facebook.com/jesselcairns

Add if you like.

mermaidinparis

The looming specter of Michael Vick's possible re-entry to the NFL has sparked quite an interesting little debate concerning forgiveness, paying of debts and the concept of what a second chance should be.  If you've been living under a rock for the last two years, I'll go ahead and wait while you Google up an account of his atrocities.  Up to speed?  Good.  There are three schools of thought in regards to his situation.

First is the "Nrrr, Fuck That Guy In The Neck" faction, which listens to well-meaning arguments concerning his rehabilitation, what sort of penance a person should have to do and discusses how much he has lost and flatly responds with, "I hope that dog killer meets with a horrible fucking demise, and you can quote me on that."  This person holds that any questions of animal cruelty aside, there are certain things a person does that there is no coming back from, and the details of what Vick did while running the infamous Bad Newz Kennelz (under the inspired non de plume of "Ookie," no less) definitely not only puts Vick in this boat, but also gains him the deed of sale of said watercraft as well.  Animal lovers in general and my wife in particular fall into this category.

Next is the "A Person Who Does Their Time Should Be Given Another Chance" school of thought, which points to the time served in Levenworth Federal prison (not a country club institution by any stretch of the imagination), the loss of all monies and property, vehicles and basically anything else he owned (and the upcoming fight concerning his utter and complete bankruptcy, meaning Vick has less of a pot to piss in legally speaking than the dude who holds up a sign at the busy intersection on your way to work), and the curled lips, horrible names and sincere wishes for him to suffer horrible debilitating physical illness from a sizeable portion of our population that says that if there are dues to be paid, Vick has paid them out tenfold.  I strongly suspect the vast majority of these people are coming at this from at least a quasi-religious tact, especially Catholics who as anybody with at least passing familiarity knows are very big on penance and forgiveness.

Last is "Who Says I Have To Give Him Anything, Much Less A Second Chance?"  This is where I live for the most part, along with definite deep strains of #1 as well.  Sure, Vick has bled a sizeable amount of for his crimes and yes, he has done a good stint in the pokey and yeah, there is now a stain attached to his name that is never going to go away.  None of this means that I have to open the doors back up for him and part of the wonderful thing about living in this country is that as a taxpaying adult, I don't have to go along with any school of thought that I think is at least partially full of horseshit.  To the person who says that he has lost everything, I would argue that if I did a similar act, I would very likely also lose all my shiny things as well, suffer the same sorts of slings are arrows in terms of my name and reputation and it would all be part of the pound of flesh demanded for comitting such a serious of heinous acts.  I would be a pariah afterward, and nobody should have to open their heart to me again.

I'm curious as to where the rest of you come out on this scenario.  Should he be given an opportunity to try to find his way again, to appear at a local stadium near you (where he is sure to be protested), to try to make some kind of public atonement for what he has done?  Or should he be thrown to the very same kind of dogs he bred, tortured, killed and forced each other to fight to the death and be given a taste of the kind of horror he inlficted?

Inquiring minds want to know.

As some of you may know, I'm a slavish disciple to Ibanez guitars, particularly the RG550 model from the late 1980's.  It was designed by legendary shredder Steve Vai to serve as an affordable model to his personal signature model, the Jem, and while the eletronics might not have been the same, there was nothing skimped in design and construction.  Since I have small hands (and we all know what that means... right, I wear small gloves), I find it difficult to use such guitars as Gibson's Les Paul and the fabled Fender Stratocaster.  Very strange that somebody with the longest fingers I have ever seen in my life would serve the needs so well of somebody who was digit-challenged, eh?

I've had my 1987 Desert Yellow RG550 for years, and found an axe on Ebay that, as it turned out, is more than a kissing cousin.  It is, in fact, another RG550 from that same year of manufacture, which made my jaw drop when I confirmed this suspicion via the serial number, in addition to the fact that it is in almost perfect condition.  Total price of purchase for both guitars: $650.00.  I'm ditching the skunk stripe paintjob and going neon green with matching hardware, but until that day comes, here's a photo of me with both my well-crafted axes:

If you have never had to update the firmware to your Blu-Ray player, all I can say is you're very lucky.  We managed to stagger through this process and reach the other side relatively unscathed, but all I could think of was that if my dad had been the unlucky person to get stuck doing this sort of thing, he'd have taken the damn thing back to the store as soon as the yellow and red screen of doom popped up.

Sometimes technology will make you its bitch.

A while back, I read an entry by one of the f-listers who stated that while they knew what they had to do in order to jump-start their career in the arts, they had not done so yet.  I can understand that.  In fact, it's perfectly natural, but in no way does it get a person off the hook from checking their parachute and diving out of an airplane in full working order to begin the plunge toward their dreams.

More recently, my friend vg_ford showed me a post done by a successful author who went very in-depth to the pitfall that only a very few writing grimoires will touch upon, and that boogeyman is the hideous ease with which a person might talk themselves out of their chosen field.  The example given in this post was that from the POV of a writer, but one could very easily substitue actor/actress, musician, director, painter or any one of a hundred or so different discipline.  For all the various obstacles that are placed in your way, the one which stands the greatest chance of putting a fork in you before you conquer even one set of gatekeepers is the person in the mirror.  The old saying is true; you are indeed your own worst enemy.

The first manner in which this crops up is the deep breath one takes followed by their first attempt at their field of study.  It should be pointed out that some arenas have more built-in hidden motivators than others, as long as we are telling the entire brutal truth here.  If the only investment you have made in your equipment is a few spiral notebooks and a a box of really nice pens, walking away from a writing career once you've gotten your teeth busted down your throat a few times doesn't represent much of a financial loss.  If on the other hand you paid a thousand bucks for a Gibson Les Paul and another half a grand for a vintage Fender tube amplifier, it really behooves you to at least learn a few chords before deciding you are not the next David Gilmour or Carlos Santana.  Much like having a gym membership, the money spent may be enough in some cases to inspire you to give the old college try a few more attempts than you normally would before flunking out.

For the record, I am not for a moment suggesting that you should go whole-hog on the tools of your career path just to strap you to Wile E. Coyote's Acme rocket a little bit tighter.  If you don't like what you're attempting to do, do your best to discover this unlovely truth on the cheap as much as possible, and don't upgrade your materials until after you've reached a certain basic level of competence with them.  All clear?

More important than your chosen instrument of expression is your mindset, though, and this is where things take a darker turn.  Likem_stiefvater said, it's important to remember that in whatever road you go down, the default answer for all scenarios is going to be no.  That's no, no and N-O.  It sucks to say this and I wish it wasn't the case, but no amount of devout prayer on this subject is going to change the status quo.  The finish line you want to cross is designed by nature to be very difficult to cross.  The Powers That Be are not in the habit of simply handing over trophies for everybody who wants them; the sheer numbers of supplicants ensure that a negative response will always be the norm.  As a hopeful, burgeoning artist, it's your job to find out how best to slant the probabilities in your favor, trying to turn lottery odds into a one in a hundred shot.  Proper formatting, audio production values, tone of voice, eye for detail, the exact angle to hold one's shoulders at while on the dance floor... this is how you better your chances of getting your foot in the door.

It should also be pointed out, in the spirit of full disclosure, that you can do everything right and still hit the FAIL button with your forehead over and over again.  Even if you manage to weasel the parameters down to a one in fifty shot (a scenario many struggling artists would take in a New York second), that's a hell of a lot of doors being slammed in your face.  As stated earlier, the default answer is no.  The reasons are varied and sometimes, they have absolutely nothing to do with your ability level in your chosen field.  You amy submit your gritty four chords of thunder rock and roll demo to a company, but they already have three artists coming out this year who are using that sonic blueprint so you end up being rejected.  Had you submitted eight ago you might have been one of those three who are even now cutting the full-length album.  Unfortunately in this case, life is a matter of timing.

You've got to be able to take that NO right in the teeth and keep on moving forward.  If you can't do that, you'll never succeed.