And as the smell dissipates so too do my memories of my sociopath playmate and the weekend down the shore spent so many years ago, and “worms” of course, and the possible connections to meaning this word might have had. Did I, you may ask, guess or infer, based on those scant memories brought to life by the skunk’s glands, any possible rationale behind the strange actions of those card players I met in 1985?

The answer is absolutely not. I did spend some time thinking about it on Friday, and I remembered that I thought that the male in the couple (I don’t remember whether they were married or not) reminded me of Ruly Carpenter, who owned the Phillies when the won the World Series in 1980.

That’s him on the far right with the glasses. 

So, there’s that.  If I can recall anything else about this man and his probably wife I will post it immediately!!

Last night there was a small deviation to the plan. As I opened the back door, the beagle went bonkers, flipping out over what I thought must be a cat somewhere. Because I was so busy trying to restrain him and make him shut up, I was unable to prevent my Jack Russell Terrier from pursuing the cat, which in fact turned out to be a skunk. What followed were a series of events that have since been played back in a terrible slow motion in my mind a million times since. The terrier trotted off after the skunk, who was now on the other side of the fence. A psst sound was heard. The terrier immediately showed up again and ran directly into the house, as I had also been too busy to close the door earlier. It was then that I began to smell that awful smell.

So now the whole house smells like skunk. I bathed the dog outside four different times with four variations of internet remedies, and still my wife had to drag him to the dog salon this morning, which he left still smelling awful. On the plus side, since he was forbidden to sleep in the house last night, I camped out under the stars with him (i.e. on the porch), myself not smelling so hot either by that point.

At some point in the early morning, I was barely conscious enough to register anything more than “something is happening on the porch below”, a giant white van was running on the sidewalk below, and my downstairs neighbor was discussing something with somebody. I made a mental note that the truck said “National Grid” on it in case they were robbing us and the police needed details in the morning and went back to sleep with my disgusting mutt by my side.

It turns out that my neighbor was extremely alarmed, although not at all familiar with, the pervasive smell that invaded our house. Thinking it was a gas leak, he called the gas company and they raced over to tell him that he was in fact smelling a skunk.

The nerve of some people waking me up like that.

One thing that struck me about this whole incident, is that my wife, although suffering from the smell as much as anybody, still radiated her normal everyday drop dead gorgeousness as though I had brought flowers into the house instead.  That there might exist, in the midst (or mist even) of something so foul, true beauty, gives me an almost metaphysical hope nearly religious in scope, but let’s not get carried away here.  But back to the smell, I guess I should feel more guilty about all this, but I do think that most of the fault lies not with me but with the fucking skunk.

The guy made no real attempt to run away. When the dogs spotted him, and believe me, they made every indication they could to let him know he was spotted, he didn’t sprint away, he simply ambled over to the other yard. In other words, while I don’t know for sure what he was thinking, he was probably baiting the dogs, and unfortunately one of them took the bait.

So now every thing stinks. Thanks, idiot.

As bad as things do smell, for me personally the smell evokes memories of a vacation weekend I spent on the Jersey shore as a kid with a sociopath classmate of mine whose name I will neglect to mention in the interest of not being murdered. As nostalgic as I am, in an odd way I welcome my home being flooded with memories of X’s families trailer for a weekend back in 1985. A skunk had sprayed the cabin the first night we slept there and that smell envelops pretty much all of my memories of that weekend away from home. Most prominent among them, and conveniently the only one fit to write about, was the arrival of his parent’s friends for pizza on Saturday night.

X told me before they arrived, whatever you do, do not mention “worms” around them. Why not? Just don’t do it.

Well, the friends, a married couple, showed up, and they were very nice, gregarious people. Very easy to talk to, and everybody was having a good time. I felt so at ease with them that I just had to ask, and then, silence and uneasy stares all around.

Why’d you do that? my psychopathic friend furiously asked later. I didn’t know and I regretted it. I did however get the story out of it, something about the wife asking her husband never to use the word around her, and one time when they were over playing bridge at X’s parent’s house, the husband called her worms and she subsequently knocked him out with a right hook. It was an odd story and made little to no sense to me, but at least I knew, right?

You are the nurse on the second shift, the worker on the line, the waitress on her feet, the small business owner, the farmer, the teacher, the miner, the trucker, the soldier, the veteran, the student, the hard working men and women who don’t always make the headlines but have always written America’s story.

And of course it’s not just her, all of the pols spout this Ford Trucks commercial kind of stuff all the time which leads us to the first principle of American Political Science, “The candidate most similar to Bob Seger shall be the president.”

The next day rolls around and I start listening a little closer to all of the songs I have on the iPod, in particular the songs on this live recording that my wife had gotten somewhere or other.  Normally I don’t like live recordings.  They give me the feeling of everybody else is having a good time at the show and all I get is to be stuck at home with a recording.  But this recording, that I’d never really listened to before, is really phenomenal in that it’s incredibly clear, and the songs, in my opinion come across a lot more pure, for lack of a better word, than in studio.

I thought this recording might have been a special one of thing, but it turns out it is one of ninety that are on the archive.org website.  Holy cow.  Just for your information the show I’ve been listening to is from April 17, 1998 in Washington D.C..  Right now I am listening to June 2, 1998 in Stockholm, Sweden.  The Washington show is better because it has the banter, but both are top notch.

And, one more thing.  Lest you feel semi-guilty about robbing Elliott Smith’s estate by downloading or listening to this stuff for free, there are a few notes that his family pretty much encourages listening to this stuff:

Reported post from Charlie who runs the official site re conversation with Gary Smith, Elliott Smith’s father:
“while we were talking, we talked about sharing/trading elliott’s music and he thought it was important to mention it was ok to share or trade elliott’s music because elliott believed people should be able to trade musically with each other and that the family feels the same.”

From the globe:

He said he’s particularly troubled by the “relentless, wearisome use of words” such as like, awesome and actually.

Awesome and Actually:
Not on Our Watch

And you can name it because Ted Williams is such an icon. Now I don’t want to get into some sort of contest in which I try to convince you that Ted Williams is more important to my family than he is to yours, that’s not the point. I just want to make it clear that he was my father’s boyhood hero and that I consequently grew up knowing all about Williams.

Now, we all know what happened to Ted Williams after he died. Ted’s son had his father’s head cut off and frozen so that he could live forever. Does this taint a legacy? Who knows? Is it something to talk about? Absolutely.

I think it’s also worth pointing out that in a culture where celebrity supplants deity, this head freezing episode was, in it’s own way, a mini-Easter of sorts.

Which brings us to this morning. It was raining and when I locked up my bike at work I was soaking wet. I have a special shower at work, so it’s no big deal, although walking to the special shower, all wet and soaking through the building with people already dressed for work can be awkward. I used to sneak into the building through a back door, but they’ve since clamped down on security, and now I have to get in through the main entrance.

Today when I got to the front desk all soaked and muddied, I had to wait to show my badge because there was a visitor there ahead of me, an older guy with a folder full of Red Sox pictures. As the guy behind the front desk searched the computer for the phone number of whoever the guy had an appointment with, the two of them talked about Ted Williams.

“It’s too bad he’s dead now,” the visitor said.

“Well, he’s only half-dead,” I joked.

The visitor gave me a quick but nasty look as if to say that he had heard what I had said, but was going to pretend he hadn’t.

I began to qualify my previous statement by reminding them of Ted Williams’ frozen head, but the conversation between them was now sealed off from me, so I ended up mumbling something about the lab in Florida while both of them ignored me. I would have liked nothing more at this point than to have walked away, but I had not yet gotten the green light, that is, the security guy behind the desk, engrossed in Ted Williams talk as he was with the man I offended, had yet to give me the standard half wave seal of approval which allows me to officially migrate to my desk each morning.

So I stood there wet and waiting, as the conversation between these two went on.

“He was a real crackerjack. I used to see him at all of those sporting goods conventions they used to have in town,” said the man behind the desk.

“Well you know something,” replied the visitor. “When he would go fishing, and he went all around the world, he would never sign his own name. Do you know whose he signed?”

“No.”

“Mine. I was his driver. I took care of him. All the time. You remember the all star game at Fenway even, in 1999? When he came out in the golf cart? That was me driving the cart.”

Since Ted Williams died in 2002 I think I have heard people make frozen head jokes about a thousand times, and never once have I heard any of these jokers reprimanded for saying something out of line, and this makes perfect sense, since having your son insist on a post-mortem decapitation so that you will live forever is, when taken at face value, instant fodder for jokes.

It’s funny to everyone except of course your son and those closest to you. And wouldn’t it be just my luck, to accidentally make this joke in front of the guy who used to drive Ted Williams around, whose name was his surrogate nobody when he just wanted to be left alone to fish?

Apparently.

I couldn’t find a youtube of the 1999 all star game, but I do have the Boston Red Sox 100 Years of Baseball History DVD, which has highlights of Williams being driven to the pitcher’s mound to meet all of the all stars before the game. The guy driving the golf cart, and then telling Williams which players’ hands he was shaking was, you guessed it.

Well there’s one guy I’ll never get any baseball stories out of. If it’s any consolation, I am sure he was there for an interview with a certain Red Sox history obsessed at the big newspaper where I work. No doubt the reporter in question is seasoned enough to dance around the touchy topics unlike the muddy bum in the lobby.

I first met Tim at WZBC in the early 90’s.   He was highly regarded, almost to the point of guru status, for his musical tastes.  He was really into hip-hop and funk, stuff I didn’t know much about, but the way he talked about the stuff gave you the impression that he knew just about everything there was to know about.  Best of all, his enthusiasm wasn’t bounded by any sense of serious decorum.  Tim had more than his share of hilarious lines to describe things. For a while, everything was “fifty pound” this, and “fifty pound” that.

“This track rocks harder than a fifty pound diamond.”

“…thumps like a fifty pound jack rabbit.”

He had a unique style and cadence to his dry humor.  For example, he would present a funny idea in what seemed to be the opening clause of a sentence, and then having done so, would switch gears to a new sentence entirely without finishing the first one.  There was a very stop and go measured quality to this, a feigned losing track of his original thought, and then onto something even funnier in an entirely new sentence.   Gagne and I spent hours entertaining ourselves with far off approximations of this mannerism.

I am very well aware that this doesn’t translate well, but I’ll throw in the cursory “you had to be there.”  I know I wish I could be there again myself.

But feeling like a smacked ass didn’t end there. A few months ago I got an email from a friend telling me that he could get me into my alma mater’s alumni magazine since he recently got assigned to be our year’s class notes person. So I started telling him all about how my wife and I had begun harvesting children and so forth, and then I thought it might have been funny to add that the novel I had written had recently been rejected by none other than a very well known writer’s agent. The joke was meant to work on a prestige/failure axis, but it kind of falls flat without the “none other than” which is a phrase, to my self-deprecating mind at least, connoting  humor as much as it does superlative singularity, if that makes any sense (as if I should care any more at this point). Were it up to me, and had I not emailed my classmate after I probably had a few beers, and maybe was describing this aspect of my life in joking form, I think I would have done something as follows:

Mr. Prior also proudly reported that the novel he has written, THE YOKE OF THE HORDE, has recently been rejected by some of the most highly regarded literary agents in the world.

Instead, I got, “His novel was rejected by XXXXX’s agent.”

Say what?

On second thought, maybe my failure at this game is funny to nobody but myself, and maybe I should be ashamed in the proper fashion, i.e. by keeping my fat mouth shut and burning my books when they eventually get to my door.  It’s my own damn fault for not being more explicit with my intentions, but it really burns me up because I look so stupid in front of god knows how many people.

1200 + x.

I didn’t see that one coming.

ESPN is hyper-promoing the Memphis-Tennessee match up on Saturday night. It is kind of interesting monitoring the hype building up for this game. The coaches have sort have been trading quotes in the press that are remarkably congenial. There was the story about Bruce Pearl calling John Calipari for tickets to the game, and then another story about Calipari saying that Tennessee should be ranked #1. Maybe they’ll tie. I haven’t seen much of either team this year, so I have no idea who’ll win. But… that won’t stop me from making a prediction. Memphis 84 Tennessee 70.

One the one hand you have the love fest between those two and on the other you’ve got the Krzyzewski Williams battle of words in the east. Just a thought, I think a lot of people hate Duke because Billy Packer loves them so much. But, yeah this is a story where if you are at all invested in one of the teams it’s going to totally color who you see as right and wrong. These are two coaches I really can’t stand. I personally can’t stand Roy Williams’ faux-righteousness more than anything about Coach K, but I have a lot more problems liking Duke as team. Either way I think they are both big babies.

As I am sitting there admiring the book for the seventieth time last night, I noticed that the word “eight-teen” on the back cover looks kind of funny. That’s when I realize, long after it is too late to stop the shipment of x amount of books to my home, that not only are there a few grammatical errors in the text, but there is also a glaring one in the description.

I feel like such a smacked-ass.

Here is the new plan I am formulating. I am going to offer these books at an exceptionally reduced rate due to “publisher error.” Let’s say you want to buy a copy of a book, and you know that you can get it discounted 50% because an extraordinarily common word is misspelled on the back cover. Don’t you think that knowing about a deal like that could swing you? I mean, I bet some people, who wouldn’t want to buy a copy of Yoke in the first place, might now buy a copy knowing it is available for six bucks. On the other hand, if you want to pay full price for the book with mistakes, it looks like it is available now on Amazon.

And that’s what this all about anyway. Getting the word out, however that word might be spelled.

Eight-teen.

Since receiving the proof in the mail I have found about three errors in the content of the book as well. Nothing too crucial, but it just gets in the way and delays my fame and power by a few weeks. What if I don’t make it to the end of the month, you know, what if something horrible happens to me, and because of this delay, I never receive the accolades or cherished attention this book was written for in the first place?