Before last night, the last time I covered a game at Dodger Stadium was on June 11. I’m not counting the one Angels game I started to cover but left at 5 pm because they stuck me in dining room, and I might as well just watch the game at home. And then there’s the Yankees game, but I went as a “fan” although my soul is dead now from being a so-called media member so I don’t cheer or get excited anymore.

So it was nice being there. Anticipating tons of traffic which I guess existed merely in my head, I got to the Stadium early at 1:40. The most surprising yet pleasant thing happened when Andre Ethier and I had a pleasant exchange that could be classified as amiable yet also quite mundane and non-baseball related.

During Joe Torre’s meeting with the press the reporters asked him about the All Star Game. Yawn. Since I really hadn’t been paying attention to the Dodgers the last several weeks while out, I didn’t really have anything to ask. So I just left the group and watched the players warm up.

Every sportswriter crush I have were covering the game yesterday so I actually did a lot of socializing rather than just sitting while surfing the web while watching and scoring the game. I guess that’s sorta why the recap really sucked shit, even though it probably was because of rust. I’ll be better today, I promise.

The downside of Fourth of July BBQs: I’m feeling bloated today. But as horrible as I feel right now, it doesn’t compare to the joy I felt when I crushed Cathi and Ben in Scrabble yesterday. Okay, I didn’t really crush anyone or anything. There were some crafty moves involving the words “ajar” and “six.”

But the absolute highlight of the evening was setting off my first illegal firework. I was such a chickenshit pussy growing up, so I guess in my adulthood I’m trying to make up for it. So when the opportunity presented itself, I took the launching pad and thingee out to the middle of the street, lit the wick and ran like hell. Ka-bloomy!

So hamburgers, brats, potato salad, chips, fruit, Scrabble, The Jerk, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and illegal fireworks. Twas a good evening.

The other night at the Cartel, they had open mike poetry night unbeknownst to me. I figured if I hid out in one of the couches in the back, I could surreptitiously plug away listening to the ball games online while writing my daily “LAst Night’s Action” column for LAist. I seem to do a better job of getting writing done while away from the confines of my abode – which makes the whole “home office” thing a bit difficult to pull off unfortunately.

As I’m in oblivion plugging away writing some very witty things about the College World Series and the NBA free agency rumors, the lights dim. To my horror there are actually quite an audience congregated in this Redondo Beach coffee hovel to witness the crimes against the English language in all their rococo rot. But since I’m in the back no one should notice.

Unfortunately my optimism was killed when I noticed there were people surrounding me, on my couch even, in rapt attention to these self-styled wordsmiths as I tapped tapped tapped words onto my laptop.

As I put my laptop away in a moment of self consciousness, I decided to stay a while. After all I used to host an open mike night in Santa Barbara, so I do have some tolerance for all of this. Unfortunately I was mostly drunk and in my very early 20s when I did that, and as one ages the level of tolerance wanes in a logarithmic proportion.

There was one blonde headed guy there in his early 20s named Skippy – I kid you not. And even better he was wearing a motherfucking ascot. I’ll repeat that just so that it sinks.

Skippy was wearing an ascot.

He read something but I was very distracted by his ascot. I don’t know what was more depressing: the fact he shamelessly was rocking his ascot or the fact that I found him sorta cute. He was skinny in high school, but now he is putting on weight. It’s clear his prime is now.

Who the fuck am I kidding? I was skinny in high school and got fat in my 20s. I have journals upon journals with some god awful poetry scribbled all over. But at least I have a pretty face. And my personality. Someone shoot me.

Having not had sex in the last several months, I’ve relented and posted a profile on a lovely hookup site. I got this response in my inbox today from a bloke from London:

Hello, I will be visiting LA soon and will like to make friends for hook ups. I like NSA and also looking for something that can last..depends on my patner.. Please email me at my personal email ____.. add me up for a chat too..

Someone shoot me if I get that desperate.

Picking up my grandmother from the acupuncturist this afternoon, there was a crumpled beige late-model Honda Accord in the other end of the parking lot complete with a firetruck, ambulance and a couple of police cars attending to the situation. Evidently the driver, an elderly Korean woman, pulled up to a parking spot, hit the accelerator instead of the brakes and crashed through a store littering the ground with broken glass.

She freaked out and tried to make a run for it, but as she backed up she hit a wall. Still freaked out she put the car in drive and instead of going through the exit missed her mark and went through a planter and into a barrier gate where the car remained.

I walked into the acupuncturist’s office and my grandmother told me that the elderly should have their drivers licenses revoked. I told her the scariest thing is that the driver is Korean. She laughed.

Yesterday I visited the set and offices of Sport Science and interviewed host, producer, founder, guru, CEO John Brenkus. I got a tour of the facility and saw their three Emmys displayed inconspicuously in the middle of the conference table in their screening theater.

I have to admit I didn’t know what angle I was going for during the interview, so I was all over the place. It also doesn’t help that I’m horrible at interviews though I’m getting better at it. Perhaps the worst moment was in October after Game 2 of the National League Division Series when the St. Louis Cardinals lost a heartbreaker to the Dodgers. In the press conference I had a great question for Cardinals’ manager Tony LaRussa, but the reporter before me asked it. So as my turn was coming up I had to think of a different question and wound up with a stupid one. LaRussa looked me straight in the eyes and gave me perhaps the tersest answer possible. It’s so bad I can’t even listen to the recording of that presser.

I’ve gotten better I think. My interviews with Benoit Denizet-Lewis and Mark Williamson I thought were pretty good. But I knew what direction I wanted to go with both guys so I was adequately prepared. This one with Brenkus was a little more haphazard which is pretty embarrassing. But what’s done is done.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s there were some awesome queer bloggers out there, names who have removed themselves from the face of this planet. With Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and all the micro-blogging diminishing our attention spans, they’ve all disappeared leaving us with bareback blogs and dirty stories. Not that it’s all bad, but I’m desiring a balance. I guess that why I’ve dusted this spot off.

Edit: I forgot to mention the conformist gay politico blogs also. But those I can’t stand to read at all.

That I want one?

Saturday night I was out with my wifey Daniel and Staci for some late night grub at Palms Thai Restaurant, the home of Thai Elvis and only one of two places that I can stand Thai food (Mae Ploy being the other.) I don’t know if this is recent since I’ve not noticed it before, but there is a statue right by the stage of Thai Elvis. No shit.

Staci just moved back to town from the Bay Area, and while driving to Palms Wifey noted that all three of us now live with parental units again. We’re all in our 30s and living at home. I didn’t quite know what to think of it.

But since both Staci and Wifey are very inappropriate, it was nice having unselfconscious conversation discussing period poo, fire-rrhea and other things that would make others cringe at the dinner table.

Sunday I was really in no mood to do much of anything and blew off a booty call. Even though it had been a while since I’ve been fucked, the thought of being touched didn’t sit well with me. So after coffee I just called it a night and headed back home for some D’Angelo.

Oh kids today. I was at Coffee Cartel in Redondo Beach this afternoon and couldn’t help but overhear some kids. By the way it’s quite pathetic that I’m calling early-twenty-somethings “kids.” But I guess the white in my beard gives me license to do so.

They first start talking about dirt bikes which puzzles me as to their appeal. But I guess it just confirms what a big ‘mo I am.

Then they start talking about actors whom they suspect are gay. Vin Diesel. Jake Gyllenhaal. And so on.

All the while I just sat there working on this heap of a webpage trying to devote some amount of interest I had in it when I was their age.

And thanks to the Wayback Machine at Archive.org, I can read a cached version of Dantewoo.com, a blog I was obsessed with over 10 years ago.