Baseball...

...hunh. I don't think I have ever posted about baseball. I probably won't ever again.

The Texas Rangers will face the San Francisco Giants in the World Series. I'll be honest. I don't care about baseball. Not even a little. However, the Rangers beat the New York Yankees to get to the World Series. Why is that significant?

The Texas Rangers used to be the Washington Senators.

Why is that significant?

Go watch "Damn Yankees." It's a great musical. I haven't seen it in a long time. A part of the plot is the idea that the Washington Senators can never quite manage to beat those damn Yankees.

Now they finally have. They just had to move to Texas to do so. And it took 50 years.

Good for them. Now I have to find a copy of Damn Yankees to buy.

Kolob Canyon...

Saturday I went with my poetry classmates to middle fork of Taylor Creek in Kolob Canyon, another branch of Zion National Park.

We went specifically to be inspired by the rather astounding beauty of the canyon. In that sense, the hike was a complete success. I felt very inspired. I feel that, were I a painter, I would suck at landscape painting. Every time I attempted to describe what I was seeing, my mind shut down. I could only focus on the smaller details.

Then I got distracted by a squirrel. His burrow was about 20 feet away from where I was sitting. He sat still for a couple photos, then worked his way around to the streambed, ending up about 5 feet away from me.

Here is his picture, from when he was closer to his burrow:

And he inspired a poem.

My Squirrel Friend

I hear movement in some scrub oak
up the bank from where I sit.
I watch the spot with my eyes,
trying not to move my head.
It seems I have discovered
a squirrel's burrow.

My squirrel friend has
super powers,
for he can resist the siren call
of the cellophane wrapper,

completely unlike his
sin verguenza cousins who live
in the Grand Canyon
and will raid your pack
though you're standing two feet away.

Greedy Bastards.


And that's it. I quite like the poem, and I really enjoyed the experience.

Interesting Week...

...one could say a very successful week, but only in certain ways.

I'm working on a fiction piece right now that's going very well. I hope to have it done by Tuesday. Or at least "done enough" to turn in to my fiction professor. Like many writers I know, my pieces rarely get finished. There's always something else I could find to fix and make better. Eventually, I just get to the point where I say, "Enough's enough. Time to let it fly free and exist on its own and work on something else."

I'm proud of the story idea and where it's going. The characters feel alive to me. I hope they come across that way on the page.

I also had a very good experience in my Poetry class. I submitted a poem for a class workshop and it was very well received. I also got many excellent suggestions on how to tighten up the couple stanzas that just didn't sing as well as the others. Talentless hacks! Get out of my choir! Heh.

Also, for about the last 12 years or so, I have been attempting to find a friend I had in the first and second grades. His family moved and we wrote to each other for a while, but that eventually fell by the wayside. Of course, we were only, what, 9 at the time? Go figure.

Anyway, every couple months or so, I would spend two hours trying to find him on the internet. It was a little difficult without any knowledge of where he had lived for certain. But I tried. And tried.

In my fiction class this week, my professor was talking about the core group of readers he used to get feedback on his stories. He mentioned each by name. With the last, he mentioned the guy was from Kanab, where I grew up. The name was the same as my friend's older brother. And I can't recall any other families with their surname in Kanab. It was an electrifying moment.

I asked my professor for his friend's contact info, and explained why I wanted it. I sent an email to his friend and got my friend's email address.

Then I took a couple days to think of how best to approach the email I was going to send. I didn't want to come off as some obsessed stalker.

I wrote a brief email, explaining how I had come by the address and gave a brief summary of the highlights of my life since he moved.

Yesterday I received a response. It was a lot of fun to read, and I hope it will be the beginning of a reconnection.

Now I kind of want to try and track down who I now realize was my first crush.