Hit by a Pitch

Have you ever seen a movie, or maybe a tv show, where school is out for the summer and it’s all sunshiny and awesome and the kids gleefully run laughing and screaming from the building, their hands in the air? That’s how I feel leaving work on Fridays. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not complaining about my weekdays. They’re really not bad. I enjoy my job and don’t have a long commute or anything stupid to deal with during the week.

But without fail, I’m so excited for the weekend like it’s the best thing to ever happen. It doesn’t even matter that 90% of the time our Saturdays are almost entirely occupied by doing stuff like grocery shopping and cleaning the house. Well, of course, Saturday night is almost always pizza night, so that’s exciting. I’m hoping to come up with something awesome and beer-related to do on Sunday, because I’m sad we’re not going to the Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines Festival in Vail this weekend. (I swear we’re going next year — missing it two years in a row is enough — it’s super awesome!) We might even do a modified version of the walking beer tour of Denver I talked about last year but we never did because we’re lazy asses. So ambitious!

There’s a cool building near Curtis Park I often pass on the way home from the gym (the old Denver Enterprise Center, which appears to have never been renovated). Today, I noticed that the 30th street side of the building was covered with gang tags. That’s pretty lame.

Gang graffiti happens in our neighborhood all the time, but I think its heyday was in 2009, when I took these pictures.

As I said back then on Flickr, I’m not sure who these kids are, but this is pretty weak. Is it blazer or blaser? Either way, why? Does a 1 with a circle around it mean that was some guy’s first tag ever and, if so, don’t they train these people any more? What’s up with the lone D-looking thing? Is it a flag like one that would be used for golf? Is it a pointy boob? Did they get interrupted and, if so, why weren’t they bad ass enough to come back and finish later? Are they soft? Is Shadow someone’s little brother who tagged along (punny!) with his Crayolas? If you’re out tagging shit, isn’t your tag your logo? Wouldn’t you want it to at least look kind of cool? Where is the pride in workmanship here? I find this whole thing very disappointing.

Whenever we’ve been tagged, we just paint over it. The time we got tagged twice in one week, I said we should paint our garage and fence black, but we never did.

To tell you the truth, though, I’d like to be a little more aggressive in my response to gang graffiti. I’d like to make it better. I think this stems from the fact that I’m an editor. I want to edit gang graffiti.

For example, after “blazer” up there, I could add “sucks.” After “Shadow,” I could put “is an asshole.” An East Side Insane Gangsta Clown Posse tag could be followed by “MOLESTS CHILDREN.”

Eventually, because what good is anything these days if you can’t make money off of it, I could design and produce my own line of gang-tag-fighting Fatheads. The first product would be a giant version of this you could stick on any reasonably clean outdoor surface, including walls, garage doors, and fences:

I’ve never understood these Calvin peeing things, but now I see the appeal. Just slap one on the wall and have the pee stream end right above the offending tag.

The store would also carry black ski masks and other items to ensure any witnesses will not be able to identify you to the local gangstas, as well as red editing spray paint. I’m sure it’ll be a huge success, at least until I’m shot in a drive-by.

Can I tell you guys something stupid? Okay yeah, like I’ve never done that before. I have no clue what to do with Christmas for Soren. We’re not religious and if I’m any sort of religious it’s some sort of slacker spiritual Buddhism, not Christianity. I have issues with Santa. Not serious issues or anything, but I’m a little weirded out because on the one hand, Santa is a lie. And I hate when parents get all, “If you don’t behave, Santa’s not coming!” Not that we’d have to be like that, of course. On the other hand, when you put aside the creepiness of some dude who sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake and is not subject to a restraining order, Santa is a lovely idea and gosh darn it, the magic of even secular Christmas is kind of awesome.

This is not a big problem to have and really, I can do whatever with Christmas I want, so this is kind of a stupid discussion in the first place.

For Soren’s first Christmas, when he was 2 months old, we took few pictures of me and Ben holding him in front of our Christmas tree (if I recall correctly, we took the photos after I’d already changed into sweatpants for the evening). We didn’t get him anything. For his second Christmas, we didn’t get him anything, either. Looking back, that seems kind of harsh. But seriously, he had some gifts from the grandparents to open on Christmas morning and that was fun and all, but when you’re one year old, what the heck do you really need? You already know this because I’ve gone on and on about it, but I try to be at least kind of minimalist when it comes to getting my kid stuff. When you consider the random hippie toys I buy throughout the year, birthday gifts from family and friends, and Christmas gifts from family, he really has way more toys than he needs. So I guess I kind of opted out.

Until this year where, for some reason, I became kind of obsessed with getting him a wooden play kitchen. Is that weird? Probably. He has some toy kitchen stuff already, like wooden vegetables that you can cut in half with a wooden knife (the two halves connect with velcro) and a pot and a pan. So I thought, now that those toys aren’t super exciting on their own, a little kitchen could  — I don’t know — give them context, or something? (That sounds ridiculous.) Plus, I want him to have something that isn’t some type of transportation (car, truck, tractor, airplane, etc.). I had toy kitchen stuff when I was a kid (avocado green toy appliances, of course, and a toaster that actually popped up) and loved it. Toy kitchens are cool and should last for years and let you use your imagination and pretend and yeah, once I got that idea in my head, I was a goner. Also yes, I determined that “Soren Christmas” was a reasonable exception from the spending fast, which I’m trying really hard to not screw up this time.

After much research, many second thoughts, and countless additions to and removals from my virtual shopping cart, I ordered this kitchen, which is sitting somewhere in our house still in the box until, presumably, Ben and I will crack open a couple beers on Christmas Eve and put it together. It’s kind of a huge present in terms of what we’ve bought Soren. But it was just the beginning because, as I am wont to say, one thing begets two and two begets three and three begets the 10,000 things — or however it goes — so one gift begets two and two gifts beget three and then before you know it you’re running around Ikea gleefully throwing things in the big yellow bag you don’t totally understand how to effectively hang from your miniature cart.

Although the Denver-area Ikea has been open for, what, months now, this was my first trip there. I hadn’t gone there sooner, you see, because I am not a consumer. I’m not like all the materialistic, shallow people who flocked to Centennial, Colorado, to swarm the gigantic store in its early days. I have better things to do than blow wads of cash on inexpensive, mass-produced, vaguely Swedish items and anyway, I’m a vegetarian locavore. Okay no, I’m kidding (except for the vegetarian part). I hadn’t been to Ikea before because I’m poor and although their stuff is inexpensive, when you generally have $0 you want to spend, even inexpensive is too much.

But holy crap, their stuff is inexpensive. I wanted to get a few things to fully outfit Soren’s kitchen and so there would be little gifts he could unwrap on Christmas morning. All the hippie toy food items and kitchen tools I found on the internet were way more expensive than the equally attractive versions they sell at Ikea. Plus there’s the broccoli. Did you know about the broccoli? I’ve wanted one of these things (for Soren, of course) forever. Could there be a better toy for a hippie vegetarian child?

We tried to hide it from him while we were in the store, but Ben said Soren got a look at it while I was snapping up white picture frames for our upcoming gallery wall in the dining room (oops). His response? “Broccoli yucky.” Where does he learn these things?!

Today I got to do one of my favorite things in the world: pick out new glasses (at Denver’s most awesome place to get glasses). Do you know what I love more than glasses? My family. My animals. Beer. Pizza. Winning at fantasy football. And that’s about it. Today, the experience was even more awesome than usual because it’s the end of the year, glasses are on sale, and I had a nice chunk of flex spending money that has to be used by the 31st. Unfortunately, a nice chunk of flex spending money doesn’t go as far as you might like when you have to get an awesome pair of prescription sunglasses that are 24-karat-gold-plated titanium, individually numbered, and handmade in Japan. Holy crap I didn’t even know that existed. They’re ridiculous, but you know how some women put on a wedding dress and just know it’s The One and can’t muster even a glint of excitement for any other dresses? That’s how it was with these sunglasses. It’s hard out there for a pimp.

As for the regular glasses, my usual practice is to wear sunglass frames as regular glasses. This time, I did something different. I got these.

Okay, not really. I did get sunglasses to wear as regular glasses. But I did say that I want to make Rec Specs happen. And I do. And one day I will, I swear.

Unfortunately, I won’t have my new glasses until the week after next and somehow the woman who photographs everything forgot to take pictures while trying them on. So I can’t show you yet. But soon!

In the meantime, if you want to see some awesome glasses that aren’t the usual hipster style, check out Advanced Style. Those ladies rock the hell out of some glasses.

I am so not going to become one of those people who talks about Tim Tebow all the time. I promise. I wrote my post about why I hate him and figured I’d be done with it. Since then, a few things have happened. To wit:

He has not fizzled out and gone away. Today as I was driving home from the gym, Mark Schlereth was on local sports radio saying something to the effect of, “Yes, I believe that Tim Tebow is in fact touched by the hand of God.” That is not an exact quote but I swear it’s close. I’m starting to worry that the world is so far up Tim Tebow’s butt that it’s going to get out of control. Maybe one day, Tim Tebow will lead the Broncos to the Super Bowl. He’ll eclipse John Elway as the golden boy of Denver sports. Eventually, he’ll become mayor and replace the entire school board with his pals who will implement a strict creationist curriculum complete with frequent teacher-led prayer and homework involving Tebowing in various locations around the city. We’ll have to either move to a suburb in which we wouldn’t mind living, which would be ?????, or somebody would have to quit working so we can homeschool. Eventually Tim Tebow will become the governor, at which point we’d, I don’t know, move back to Illinois because at least their governors are a kind of crazy I can understand.

Then there’s the most jacked thing I’ve ever seen on the internet. Today I was checking my @ replies at Twitter and saw this:

The link takes you to a story on Yahoo! sports about how some dude — okay wait, this is one of those instances I learned about from a short man who wore way too much cologne in high school creative writing class, where I should show instead of telling. So here you go.

Sorry about my language and allcaps here, but WHAT IN THE EVERLOVING FUCK?!! WHAT IS THIS?! HOW DO WE LIVE IN A UNIVERSE WHERE THIS IS POSSIBLE?

I mean, Tim Tebow is a centaur? I think he’s holding a cross in his hand? He might or might not have a head inside that helmet? And Tebow Time? “[I]n a font like you’d see on the cover of a children’s book about an enchanted princess or maybe on a bottle of horse shampoo,” as MJD, author of the Yahoo! post observed? With such a delicate loop in the b? A centaur? As a Sagittarius, can I be extra offended by this? Tebow Time? Really?

The mental distress I’m experiencing as a result of viewing this image has rendered me incapable of writing in anything other than questions? I just can’t even? ?????