Sofa, So Good

   When I moved out of The Great Big City and into the suburbs two and a half years ago, I, in the parlance of the professional de-clutterers, "downsized." 
   I do not want to mislead you; I was not suddenly and nobly free of attachment to material things. It's just that I was moving into a tiny studio apartment, all four hundred and three square feet of it. (If you have trouble visualizing a place of that size, think of it like this: it's bigger than a breadbox but smaller than a, well, slightly larger breadbox.)
   This move necessitated ridding myself of a few (million) things. One of these was a great big green Ikea sofa. I don't know how to describe its color except like this: imagine you have Hunter Green. Now take away its horse and gun, so that it is pursuing prey on foot and hurling rocks. That would be the approximate green of the great big green Ikea sofa. 
   Anyway, I have been without a sofa for more than two years. 
   My partner, Tim, moved into my little apartment sometime this past spring, and from that moment on we swore--swore--we'd get us a cozy two-person sofa, the better to perch together and watch terrible movies and worse cooking shows on my newish flatscreen TV.
   But with one thing and another--by which I mean Tim's dizzying work and studying schedule  coupled with my generalized fear of the world outside my mind--our furnishings remained as they were. 
   An Ikea chair sat in front of the TV--which rests on a small rolling table --so I could take in Giants  baseball games while Tim studied. To watch something together, we'd roll the table so the TV faced the bed, where we'd loll happily. Not a bad way to watch TV, true, but not a couch, either. 
   "We really need to get a sofa," I'd mutter, every week or so. Tim would nod. And that's where things would rest until the next week. "We really need to get a sofa," I'd mutter. Tim would nod. And that's where things would rest until the next week. "We really need to get a sofa," I'd mutter. Tim would nod. And that's where things would rest until the next week. "We really --"
   And so on. 
   Recently, our neighbor decided to move from her studio to a larger apartment in our complex. Imagine our delight, then, when she asked us, last week, if we knew anyone who needed a sofa. 
   I can't say we did a faux tribal dance for joy. But I can't say we didn't, either. 
   When she showed us the thing, we decided it was perfect. I'd like to tell you what kind it is, but I cannot. On the day during my childhood when they were handing out the Homosexual Cards, the ones providing innate knowledge about  the worlds of fashion, furnishing and general style, I must have been splashing in a mud puddle while singing Beatles songs. 
   All I know is that the sofa fits the two of us perfectly. And it is blue. Ish. (?) And it has thick cushions. And it has fat, round armrests. And, by God, Tim and I couldn't wait to get it into our place. We and the neighbor agreed on a price, and I wrote a check. 
   There was just one hitch. Our neighbor and her boyfriend, with whom she was to be cohabiting in the larger place, wanted to move the--our--sofa into their new apartment. 
   They were awaiting a different sofa, my neighbor said. Until it arrived, they wanted to hang onto this one for a couple of weeks. After their new sofa arrived, they'd bring ours over. The new sofa was being given them by in-laws, or outlaws, or something. Details remain hazy; by this point I had completely tuned out, chagrined unto aphasia that the new blue (ish) (?) sofa with the thick cushions and the fat, round armrests wasn't going to be in our apartment right then. 
   But one bears up under life's calamities. With our chins up, Tim and I returned to our place, sofa-less for the time being. I'm proud to say that neither of us said a bad word about our neighbor; this was largely because I was otherwise occupied shrieking and banging my head on the floor. 
   Isn't it funny how it is darkest before the dawn? (Isn't it funny, too, how very much it hurts to bang one's head on the floor?) 
   Yesterday, a miracle occurred. The definition of "a miracle," by the way, is "something awesome that happens in a way that's completely consonant with what I would have wished to have happen, but that either I didn't expect or didn't dare dream might happen." The Pope and other spiritually-inclined folks might disagree with this definition, but then, I'd like to see their sofas. 
   Tim was showering. I was slouched on the Ikea chair, watching the start of the last of a three-game Giants-Braves series. The apartment door, as it often is, was open, to facilitate air flow and to admit the area's halcyon sounds: birds tweeting, wind hissing in the treetops, tires shrieking and metal rending when cars crashed on the nearby road. 
   Suddenly, my neighbor appeared in the doorway. It was her moving day, and she appeared not a little bedraggled. Sweeping aside loose strands of hair stuck to her cheek with perspiration, she said in a voice mildly barb-wired by exasperation, "Do you guys want the sofa now?" 
   She and her boyfriend had decided--wisely, I would say--that to hump the sofa up to their new place, only to have to hump it back to ours (which is mere feet from her soon-to-be-old place) was madness. 
   "We can live without a couch for a couple of weeks," she said, with a perkiness I deeply admired and distrusted.
   Her boyfriend and I made short work of shuffling the sofa from her apartment to ours. Tim and I thanked them and bade them good luck with the move. 
   And then we sat on our new sofa. Soon Tim left for an appointment in the city, and I spent the afternoon splayed on our new sofa, watching the Giants cream the Braves, 13-4. (A miracle!) 
   I would here like to say something in defense, if a defense is needed, of lounging away whole days on the sofa, something considered verboten in harried and hyper-scheduled lives. 
   The world can seem a scary place. There is terrorism, climate change, war. Kim Kardashian now appears to be as perennial (and, often, as partly cloudy) as the sky itself. There are natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods and Donald Trump. The economy is slow, and too many people live in poverty. Nothing is what it used to be, even if it didn't used to be what we think or thought it ought to have been. 
   In the face of these challenges, it has become my fervent belief, borne of diligent experimentation, that there is nothing--nothing--in life so terrible that it cannot be mitigated by a couple of hours spent lounging on a sofa. It may be one of humankind's great achievements that, from beings who once lived in caves with only boulders to sit on, we have advanced to the point at which there are seemingly endless choices in sofas, couches, futons, divans, settees, chesterfields, davenports, and other furnishings appropriate for extended lazing. 
   With that in mind,  I hereby propose what I like to call The Sofa Challenge. I suggest that you spend at least an hour a day lounging on your (or a friend's) sofa, and see if that doesn't hugely improve your life. 
   I have lots of ideas about how to make the Sofa Challenge go viral. If you wish to hear them, you (and/or Tim) will find me on the blue (ish) (?) sofa, the one with the thick cushions and the fat, round armrests, and... 
   Zzzzz... 

   
   
   
   
     
   

The Boys of Summer, in the Booth

  Until recently, the San Francisco Giants were on a losing streak of psychedelic proportions.
   From a supernova first half of the season, the team devolved until they looked like drunk Little Leaguers. Bats went cold, pitches went wild, players got injured. The Giants "dynasty" seemed, for the time being at least, eminently diminished.
   At the moment they're in second place in National League West behind their much-hated rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, to whom they lost a series 2-1 this week. To be fair, new pitcher Matt Moore pitched a near-no-hitter for that Giants 4-0 shutout against the Dodgers Thursday, and last night the Giants smoked the Atlanta Braves, at home, 7-0.
   Still, the season's recent downturn was all but unbearable to most fans. It was made just a little less so, however, by the presence of the team's longtime local cable television announcers, Duane Kuiper (pron. KIY-per), the play-by-play guy, and color commenter Mike Krukow (KRU-koh). The pair are known as "Kruk and Kuipe," although I shall hereinafter spell their names "Kruke and Kipe" to retain the phonetics of the way fans refer to them.
    Both men are deeply versed in baseball's intricacies--Kruke, especially, offers perceptive insights into pitcher-catcher communications and choices--and their knowledge derives organically. Kipe played second base for the Cleveland Indians in the mid-to-late seventies, and was a Giant from 1982 to 1985. He overlapped in his final three years on the team with Kruke, who joined the Giants pitching staff in 1983 after splitting the previous decade between the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies. Thirty years ago, the right-handed Kruke pitched an astonishing 20-9 season. (He retired in 1990.)
   The men, both in their mid-sixties, are longtime friends, and it shows in their commentary and banter. While they can be funny, even goofy in an understated way, their particular genius is in their capacity to leave space: they know when not to talk. Theirs is--cliche alert--a laid-back West Coast approach. It stands in opposition to the style of, for instance, ESPN's three-announcer teams, who will talk through and over pitch after pitch after pitch, often not even about the game itself.
   Kruk and Kipe have a longtime colleague in the great Jon Miller, who has a radio man's knack for filling time with interesting observations, facts, asides. (Baseball is nothing if not an obsessive's game that mixes statistics and memory.) Miller does radio play-by-play, alongside Dave "Flem" Fleming, on KNBR-AM (680). Miller and Kipe often swap seats for a game's fourth through seventh innings: Miller pairs with Kruke on TV; Kipe and Flem do radio duty. Miller's delivery is enthusiastic, upbeat, fascinated; at sixty-four, he still sounds like a kid who can't wait to give you the play-by-play on the most awesome ground ball double play ever.

   But for my money, it's Kruke and Kipe who consistently call it right.
   Kipe speaks in a deep basso rumble; Kruke's voice, at a slightly higher pitch, has a hypnotic burr. They're easy to listen to, soothing, free of what sometimes seems the frenetic drive of younger announcers. For all of Major League's Baseball's attempts to speed up the game, baseball is unhurried, contemplative, redolent of some long-gone agrarian idyll. Kruke and Kipe are the easy voices of long, hot summer days spent lolling in the grass and staring at the sky.
   Kipe often calls a play the way a lazy radio man might do it. For instance, referring to Giants second baseman Joe Panik and first baseman Brandon Belt, he'll say of an opposing team's weak hit, "That one's on the ground to second, and Panik gets it to Belt in time." He says what's onscreen, which of course is unnecessary; you're seeing it. But he'll only describe bits of the action, leaving your eyes (and brain) to fill in the rest. (Miller, and old-school radio guy, is more likely to describe everything.) This doesn't mean Kipe isn't excitable: his voice will rise to a near shout at, say, a great outfield play ("Denard Span is running, diving--AND HE MAKES THE CATCH!"), and a Giants home runs spark his catch phrase: "It. Is. OUTTA HERE!!" (See the second video, below.)
   Their game commentary is invaluable, informative, incisive, but it is in their observations of fans picked out by the cameras that Kruke and Kipe really shine. A shot of a woman and her kids will prompt from Kruke a truly sweet disquisition about, well, moms and their kids. Women of any age decked out in Giants gear are dubbed "gamer babes." (There is exactly zero sexual connotation to the phrase. Some women even carry handmade signs assigning themselves the name, in part to attract TV--and thus Kruke and Kipe's--notice.) Seeing a kid licking an ice cream cone, Kruke will say, "Hey--I want one!" Fans dressed in nutty costumes will elicit a verbal thumbs up. In this way, the announcers make the stadium seem like one big family; TV viewers feel like part of the tribe. As Kruke will say, "Put on the colors, come to the yard, and hang out with forty thousand of your closest friends."
   Not that Kruke is always benign. When an opposing team's batter strikes out, he might break out his wry catch phrase, "Grab some pine, meat," another way of saying, "Siddown, dude." The "pine" refers to old-time dugout benches constructed out of wood.

   Longtime viewers soon come to see that definite codes exist in the land of Kruke and Kipe.
   Referring to foul balls batted into the stands and caught by fans, Kruke often says, "Bring a glove, get a ball." But it's whom you give the ball to when you catch it that counts. If a guy neglects to offer a caught ball to the woman he's with, Kruke and Kipe may razz him for an entire inning. "Give her the ball, dude," they'll say, over and over, as the camera cuts back and forth from field play to shots of the guy and his date. The ribbing is always gentle, and never wholly unkind. But it still digs. (See the first video, below.)
   If there's no woman nearby, the code dictates that you give the ball to a child. Giants (and other teams') fans do this all the time; one of the evident joys of being at the ballpark lies in catching a foul ball and then making a kid's day by handing it to him. Not all teams observe the practice, however, and during Thursday's Giants-Dodgers game, held in LA, that got under Kruke's skin.
   Teams hire men and women to don a uniform and a glove and to sit in front of the stands on the first and third base lines. They're there to catch batted balls that have rolled foul, so that the things don't bounce onto the field of play. In Kruke and Kipe's world, these folks are known as "Ball Dudes" and "Ball Dudettes."
   The Dodgers' first-base-line "Dudette" on Thursday made a great stop of a bouncing foul ball rifled off a Giants bat. But she tossed it to a middle-aged man in the stands who sat in front of two young boys. Kruke noted her choice, saying, doubtfully, "Maybe she was trying to get it to the kid behind him."
   An inning later, she made a similar play, impressing Kruke and Kipe. But she flipped the ball to a heavyset guy in the front row. "She made a great pick," Kruke said, referring to the catch. "Now, if she could just figure out who to get the ball to, she'd have the whole package."
   Yet later in the broadcast, the young woman made another terrific stop. Kruke still carped about her choice of ball recipients, pointing out the heavyset front-row dude.
   "There's no reason that guy should get the ball," he said.
   "Unless," Kipe added, drily, "he's her father."

   The attraction of Kruke and Kipe, to me, exceeds the confines of the ball yard. Any longtime local will tell you that San Francisco has changed almost beyond recognition. Big new glass buildings scrape (and block) the sky. Rents and purchase prices have soared. The middle class, communities of color and artists have been priced out of the place. What once was a progressive bohemian haven now seems the exclusive province of the very well-off.
   The same has happened, in varying ways, to surrounding communities, and this has affected the tenor of the region. Forty years ago, the Bay Area had a simple national reputation: "anything goes." (It was not wholly accurate: there have always been conservative pockets here.) Now, the city and its outlying environs can seem to bristle with tension; some days, anxiety seems the ruling norm.
   If baseball is indeed redolent of an agrarian past, a notion brimming with melancholy and nostalgia,  Kruke and Kipe themselves are relics (in the best sense) of an era when the San Francisco Bay Area was nuts (in the best sense), when people handled calamity with elbow-in-the-ribs humor, when kookiness was the norm and every day seemed to promise magic, at least to those who believed in such things. (We were many, and we were evidently deluded, alas.)

   All of this will one day go, of course. Baseball, beset by its own changes and battling both smart-phone halved attention spans and endlessly multiplying entertainment options, is losing its audience. San Francisco isn't "San Francisco" any more. Kruke and Kipe will age out of the announcer's booth someday. The Baby Boomers will pass off the scene, largely unlamented. And life will go on.
   Until then, I'll continue to tune in to hear Kruke and Kipe call plays, parse strategy, mock or praise fans, and otherwise describe the passing moments of a passing pastime in a passing life, and I will happily release myself to the comforting burble of their gentle chatter until such time as this whole mad game itself shall end.

Kruke and Kipe

Give. Her. The. Ball. 

It is OUTTA HERE!

 

Strangers Waiting...

    The only one who will tell you that an older brother has the absolute right to drive his younger sister nuts is the brother. There has never been, to my knowledge, a Million Younger Sisters March agitating under a banner reading, “Yes--Prank Us Some More, Please!”

   My adolescent antics toward my long-suffering sister, Anne, ranged from the benign (short-sheeting the bed) to the grotesquely baroque (peeing on the toilet seat just before she used the bathroom; I chortle to this day to recall the way she shrieked my name).

   I’d like to tell you that the behavior vanished in adulthood. I’d also like to tell you that I frolic with unicorns in the land of perfect bliss. Sadly, by which I mean happily, neither is true.

   En route home from a Hawaiian family vacation a few years ago, we flew on one of those massive jets with three seats on one side, four in the middle, and three on the other side. Anne and her husband sat in one window row. I sat opposite them, across the middle seats.

   At one point, I snuck through the rear galley and crept up behind Anne’s aisle chair. Leaning down just behind her ear, I loudly yelped her name. She jumped roughly four feet off the seat--or would have, had she not been belted in.

   Anne is no slouch. Growing up with three brothers steeled her, and she’s never been shy about giving as good as she got. (I’ll leave her to tell you about the high school bra-in-the-ice-tray trick she and a friend used to play on the friend’s mom.)

   Later in the flight, she snuck up behind me. When she barked my name, I started and shouted, “Oh!” She got me. As it turned out, she also got the woman next to me, a stranger, who, severely startled, screamed and spilled her drink.

   So, you know--I won, ha ha.

   I take quite seriously my brief to drive Anne berserk, even at this late date. This summer, we met in Boston and drove to Maine, where our family co-owns a summer home on an island off the coast. Along the way we sang silly made-up songs and spoke goofy-voiced nonsense, as is our wont.

   The harbor town where we catch the ferry to the island, in winter a sleepy place, swells with summer tourists. Cozy main-street shops sell kitschy little knick-knacks. Some stores attract shoppers by playing music from outdoor speakers. This inevitably leads to finding yourself humming some terrible song you haven’t thought about in thirty years, wondering how it got into your head, and tracing it back--as you gnash your teeth and tear out your hair--to one of those shops’ turgid playlists. 

   One such song was the execrable 1981 Journey masterpiece “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Somehow, the song’s hook burrowed into my brain like a porcupine and stabbed my psyche with is horrid lyric quills. I soon saw I had two choices: kill myself to stop the pain, or infect Anne.

   As we sat among others atop the island-bound ferry (which also attracts visitors with its “Harbor Tours”), I hummed the “DSB” hook a few times to subliminally implant it in Anne’s mind. Then, just a little too loudly not to be heard by others, I barked, “DON’T! Stop! Beleeeeeeeeevin-yah!-Yaaaaah!! Da-da-da-da-DA-da-da-da-da!!”  

   To say that Anne was nonplussed would be like saying the sky is the sky.

   Still, just to drive home the point, I pulled out my iPhone and found the song on YouTube. I topped-out the volume, hoping to infect everyone on the boat’s upper deck.

   Then, transfixed, I looked up the words to the song. I read them to Anne in a creepy, bad-actor rasp, loud enough for others to hear. The lyrics are too long--well, and too monstrous--to quote here in full, so I’ll just include what Anne and I subsequently decided were the apotheosis of poetic horrors:

Strangers waiting

Up and down the boulevard

Their shadows searching

In the night

Streetlight people

Livin’ just to find emotion

Hidin’ somewhere in the night

      By merely excerpting lyrics I don’t mean to slight such genius couplets, elsewhere in the song, as, “Workin’ hard to get my fill/Everybody wants a thrill” and, "A singer in a smoky room/The smell of wine and cheap perfume." And I do want to point out the brilliance, in this quoted segment, of rhyming “in the night” with “in the night.” Plus, it is my fervent hope one day to grow up to become a “streetlight people.”

   Anyway, you know that thing where something is so truly appalling that you know you’re going to fall in love with it? (Raise your hand if this describes your marriage.) There are four stages to this phenomenon:

   1.  A pure, white-hot hatred of the offending item.

   2.  Aesthetic disgust, but of the sort that dismisses the item even as it disdains it.

   3.  A reassessment, as you suddenly see quasi-likable aspects you’ve heretofore overlooked.

   4.  A pure, white-hot, fist-pumping embrace of the offending item.

   This is precisely what happened to Anne and me during our week in Maine. I might be splayed on a sofa, reading a trashy novel, when it would occur to me to sing out, “Don’t stop believin’!” Presently, Anne’s voice would answer from another room: “Hold on to that feelin’!”

   In this way, neither I pranked her nor she me. Instead, Journey, that bloated eighties power-ballad band, pranked us both.
   No matter what else I recall of our summer 2016 Maine week--elms and poplars waving in a wind-driven rain, the sea's susurration as it lapped the shoreline rocks, fresh blueberry muffin breakfasts and fresh-caught lobster dinners--I shall first and foremost hear "Don't Stop Believing," bombastic karmic retribution for a life of unwelcome if lovingly tolerated brotherly stunts. 

   

   

   

  

  

  

  

  

  

   

TV Guy

 Until three years ago, I owned a behemoth thirty-plus inch Magnavox television, purchased in 1998. I hooked it up to a DVD machine and watched movies and TV-show collections. I never had cable--why pay for a thousand channels I was too busy (or inert) to watch?

   During those years I otherwise focused on what might loosely be dubbed spiritual growth. As a result, and because TV was not a large part of my daily life, I found myself increasingly at odds with a televisual world. I fulminated about TVs in restaurants and airports (thus becoming as boring as TV itself). When exposed to morning TV I’d feel assailed by the maddening chatter. Friends' channel-flipping would leave me rattled, and it seemed I lost the capacity to follow quick-cut TV sequences. 

   I also missed out on national zeitgeist-shaping events. I never once watched The Daily Show. Barak Obama’s presidency flashed past in a blur. Water cooler conversations about Breaking Bad or Keeping up with the Kardashians or Girls left me cold. Instead, I read magazines online and books at home. (There is nothing noble about reading books. Old habits die hard.) 
   Three years ago, while moving from San Francisco to a nearby small town, I rid myself of the old Magnavox. For the next couple of years I streamed movies and TV shows on my thirteen-inch MacBook Pro, feeling, at the advanced age of fifty-eight, oh so modern and whatnot.

  In the spring of this year, in order to keep up with the presidential election and to watch the San Francisco Giants win (which is to say, currently, lose), I purchased a 4K Android flat-screen TV. I had it hooked up to cable, the first time I’ve enjoyed such access since, oh, sometime in the nineteen-nineties.

   Funnily enough, after televisually experiencing most of this year’s baseball and election seasons I once again feel TV- and culturally literate. Televisions in airports and restaurants no longer bother me; advertisements no longer occasion silent scornful mental jeering. 

   That said, I still don’t avail myself of the million-and-a-half channels my cable package evidently offers. On the cusp of sixty, time seems short, and I’m just not willing to burn it watching cooking, auto-repair, weight-loss, wealthy-housewife, survival and other kinds of shows. I’ve still never seen “Duck Dynasty.” If I’m going to squander precious hours, I’d rather do it watching the Giants lose, which at the moment they’re doing with a perverse kind if genius, alas. 

   All of this arose for me after I came across a Huffington Post column this morning bearing the headline “Donald Trump is Gong to be Elected.” Written by Michael Rosenblum ("Founder of Current TV, Past President of NY Times TV”), its thesis is that Americans “voted” for Donald Trump “when The History Channel went from showing documentaries about the Second World War to ‘Pawn Stars’ and 'Swamp People'… when The Discovery Channel went from showing ‘Lost Treasures of the Yangtze Valley’ to ‘Naked and Afraid’… when The Learning Channel moved from something you could learn from to ‘My 600 Pound Life’… when CBS went from airing ‘Harvest of Shame’ to airing ‘Big Brother.’” 

   Mr. Rosenbaum further avers that our eight-and-a-half daily hours spent staring at screens--five of those at the television--soak us in video imagery, which means that America is by nature and intent a televisual culture. “The French may love food, the Italians may love opera,” he writes. “What we love is TV. … It defines us.” 

   He then goes on to make the case that “Donald Trump is great TV” and “Hillary Clinton is crap TV,” that “[h]e is Kim Kardashian. She is Judy Woodruff,” referring to the PBS News Hour anchor.

   I don’t wholly agree with Mr. Rosenbaum’s premise, but he does make a point. Once, being an American citizen meant being informed about the nature of government and its actors. Now it seems to mean being televisually conversant and perhaps otherwise entirely ignorant of governmental process and procedure. Television requires its own parsing, but it doesn't help viewers develop the critical thinking skills necessary to navigate a complex world--and democracy. 

   Donald Trump knows--and embodies--this new “citizenship,” for better and worse. He is not a wholly successful businessman, but he played one on TV. He has banked on his capacity for attracting media attention--which of course turned on him in the past month, to his great dismay--at the expense of creating a more traditional campaign TV-ad and ground game. 

   As for we voters, if it were solely a choice between Kim Kardashian and Judy Woodruff, we’d be out of luck. Happily, it’s not. Kim K. can exist in the same universe as JWood, and indeed does. This  means it’s up to each of us to sift through mediated chatter and imagery and, presently, to drill down to what’s actually true. Thence we vote. 

   Now--if only the bloody Giants would start winning.