Entry 629: Downward Spiral

The Seattle Mariners have really got me down of late. I've been a fan of terrible sports teams most my life, so it's usually not that big a deal when my team blows it. It's part of the charm, I tell myself, and it makes it that much sweeter when they do come through. But this time is different -- it's really bumming me out -- and explaining why requires a bit of backstory.

The Mariners and I were both born in 1977, and I became a fan in the summer of '84 (Alvin Davis!). I loved some truly putrid squads as a child, such as the 1986 team that lost 95 games (Lefbvre Beliebvre!) and the 1990 team, who came in much hyped and then started the season 2-10, including a loss in the home opener, which I attended (I remember Rickey Henderson led-off the game with a home run), and it didn't get much better from there.

Then, in 1995 -- when I was legally an adult -- they had a great/lucky finish to the season and not only made the playoffs but won a series against the Yankees in dramatic fashion. They stayed pretty good for a few years, peaking in 2001 by setting a record for most wins in a season (116), but losing to said Yankees in the American League Championship Series (sad trombone).

They haven't been back to the playoffs since then, the longest drought in the "Big 4" of American sports (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL). They haven't always been bad either. They've come close several times, but always the rug always gets pulled out at the last minute. For example, in 2014 in the thick of the race, they had a 2-1 lead in the fifth inning over the Blue Jays and their best pitcher, Felix Hernandez, on the mound. He proceeded to inexplicably give up seven runs and lose the game, and the M's missed the postseason by one game. In 2018, they had a huge lead in the standings at midseason, but the Oakland A's got super hot and passed them easily. They were decent last year, again narrowly missing the postseason, but they were bad in 2020 when the league temporarily expanded the number of playoff teams because of the weird Covid schedule. If they had done that in 2021 (or this year) they M's would have been in. But the timing didn't work -- it never works. It's like the universe is conspiring to keep Mariners fans unhappy.

So, this year they are legitimately good, and the season is super fun, and they build up a good lead in the standings to the point that with 20 games left they have a 99.8% chance to make the playoffs. There are only easy games left on the schedule. But then, because it's the Mariners, their two best players randomly get hurt, and suddenly they just suck. They struggle to score runs and can't even beat the bad teams. They have only won two of their last eight games, and with only 12 games left, although still heavy favorites, in my heart of hearts, I think they are going to blow it.

I usually follow their games on my phone in real-time, but I'm going to stop doing that now. It gives me more anxiety than doom-scrolling Twitter. I'll probably still check whether they won or lost, but I'm done with the soul-draining Game Day prompts: In play, out(s). Haniger grounds into double play. Crawford out at second, Haniger out at first.

Tonight I'll have something else to focus on anyway. We are taking the kids with S's sister to see Avatar in IMAX 3-D. S and I thought it was the new one when we went to get the tickets, before realizing it's just the rerelease. (The new one comes out in December.) We decided to go anyway, because the kids have never seen it, and S's sister still wanted to go. I'm lukewarm on the idea. I thought it was just okay the first time I saw it, and it's kinda pricey, and I don't know if Lil' S2 will be able to sit through the entire thing without getting antsy. I'd just as soon do something else as a family, but I don't really have any suggestions.

In other bad news -- real bad news, not sports bad news -- I had a distressing conversation with a friend a few days ago. I hadn't heard from him in a minute, and he told me that a few weeks ago, he had two seizures in succession and had to spend a week in the hospital. I asked him what happened, and he told me that since the start of the pandemic, his drinking had crept up to the point he was having four or five drinks every night and had been for several years. He knew it had gotten to be too much, so he stopped drinking for a few days, and it was such a shock to his system that it sent him into withdrawal seizures.

Super scary, but he seems to be doing okay now, thankfully. He said his body still feels a bit weird -- his ab and leg muscles failed to the point he couldn't even get out of bed for a few days -- but he can now do normal daily activities and even exercise a bit. He also said he's done drinking for a very long time, probably forever, which is a very good thing.

All this made me think on a few things. For one, it underscored what a pernicious drug alcohol can be, even if you think you've got it under control. My friend was not a drunk in the usual sense. He wasn't going out to bars and blacking out and making a fool of himself. He wasn't even doing anything that affected his life in an ostensibly negative way. He just gradually, seemingly benignly, increased his alcohol intake each night to the point his body developed a dangerous dependency on it. I suspect this type of thing could happen to many people I know. The big joke during the pandemic lockdown among my friends was how everybody started drinking more to cope with the weird combination of stress and boredom we were all feeling. But it wasn't really a joke.

And that's the other thing. I don't think this happens if not for the pandemic. It's impossible to prove, obviously, but that's my feeling. The lockdown was awful, and it's why I was a pretty staunch advocate of reopening everything pretty early on in the whole ordeal. There are no solutions in life, just tradeoffs.

Well, at least when something like this happens, it underscores how frivolous it is to worry about something like baseball. But still, Mariners, don't go breaking my heart.

Until next time...

Entry 628: Vengeance

S and I had some rare free time this weekend, so we watched the BJ Novak movie Vengeance. I think I liked it. It kinda Fight Clubbed me. That is, my immediate reaction after watching it was meh... But then I found myself thinking about it later and coming to the conclusion that it was actually pretty good. S didn't like it. It had its problems -- e.g., casting Ashton Kutcher in a serious role* -- but overall I bought what it was selling, and I was legit surprised by the ending. I was wondering halfway through how everything was going to wrap up, and I didn't see it going the way it did.

*That guy is the anti-Bryan Cranston for me. When I'm watching Breaking Bad, I can't believe he's the same guy who played the dad on Malcolm in the Middle. When I'm watching Ashton Kutcher, I can only think of him as Kelso from That '70s Show or the stoner in Dude, Where's My Car, which is basically the same role -- very handsome man, though.

The main problem with the movie was the cost. I wanted to see it in the theater, but we didn't have that much free time, and it's only streaming on Peacock, which is somehow not one of the seven (literally) services to which we subscribe, so we just broke down and paid $20 to buy it -- so ridiculous. Despite all these streaming services, S and I have so much trouble finding movies we agree on. Partly we have different tastes -- I'm not going to sell her on any of the Todd Solondz films I've been meaning to see, for example -- and partly she watches too many movies on her own, so there's only the crumbs left for us to watch together. We were debating just scrapping the movie altogether, but I knew if we did that, I'd end up watching football all day, and last week when I did that she got kinda salty about it, so I wanted to put in some quality together time. $20 is too much to pay to watch a movie in my living room, especially since it will be $5 in a few months, but it's not too much to pay for marital harmony.

I thought about doing that thing where you sign up for a service and get the free trial and then cancel, but my experience with iFit really soured me on that tactic. In fact, I'm so skittish about that type of thing I almost fell for an obvious scam. I got an email from "Geek Squad" telling me my credit card had been charged $325.99 because my service had been auto-renewed. The thing is, S really did buy some sort of Geek Squad service a few years, so I thought that's what it was, and I immediately called the number to try to cancel it. But then as I was talking to "Tim," who could barely speak English, I thankfully came to my senses and checked the email, and it was from some random gmail address. Of course. I was only on the phone for about 15 seconds, and I didn't give any personal information, but still, it's kinda embarrassing to even get duped into calling. Usually I delete those emails immediately. Oh well, no harm, no foul.

Alright gotta wrap this up soon, so a few quick bullets, and then that will be that.

• The Mariners are on the cusp of making the playoffs for the first time in 21 years, and I'm so nervous they are going to blow it. They lost three games in a row this past weekend to the suckass Angels, and I had a nightmare about it. They won tonight though so that's good.
  
  
• The Seahawks lost this weekend also -- they got crushed because they are pretty lousy -- but they somehow beat Russell Wilson's new team, the Denver Broncos, last week, so I'm good for a while.
  
  
• Speaking of football, Lil' S2 started playing flag football. He's not bad. He dropped the few passes that were thrown to him, but at that age if you can get your body in position to make the catch and get your hands on the ball, which he can do, you're ahead of the game. There was not a single completed pass the entire game by either team.
   
• I've gotten really into watching Key & Peele skits on YouTube. I like their music sketches. This one cracks me up and so does this one.
  

Until next time...

Entry 627: Iceland Part 2

I started off Part 1 of this two-part post with something I didn't like about going to Iceland (traveling there), so I'll do it again now in Part 2: It's expensive. Things cost a lot of money there, particularly anything that involves transport. There are no ride-sharing apps in Iceland, so you have to book old-school cabs, and they're quite pricey. We went to this attraction called the Lava Cave, and just getting out there and back was several hundred dollars. I mean, we did have six people, but still. Most of the time you can book excursions with travel included, but given the total price of the excursion, you are obviously paying for it. I guess that's why the other people I know who went to Iceland rented a car. This is also quite expensive, and you have to deal with the headache of parking, but it's probably cheaper than taking cabs everywhere, especially if you want to get out of Reykjavik a lot. Within the city center there's enough to see by foot. We definitely got our steps in.

And unfortunately, the Lava Cave turned out to be a bit of a bust. I was expecting to see actual lava, not just a cave formed from lava, and I was bitter about how much we had to pay to get there, so I was predisposed for disappointment. S's mom couldn't navigate the rocky terrain and turned back after two steps, and the kids didn't bring jackets, so they didn't last long in the cave, which was quite cold, either. (Actually, Lil' S2 was okay because S gave him her jacket, but then she was cold and wanted to hustle out.) Again, it's about expectations. If this had been something we had stumbled upon while trying to kill time, I would have thought it was really cool. But as an expensive main event for the day, it kinda flopped.

 

I had the exact opposite experience at Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur. That's a hotdog stand that is right across the street from the hotel at which we stayed. It always had a really long line, and I wondered why, but then I found out that it's quite famous, in part because Bill Clinton ate there once. On a whim, I decided to try it, even though I don't like hotdogs that much. I must say, it was absolutely delectable. It had that satisfying snap when I bit into it, and I loved every bite of it. (The line went super quickly also.) The only thing I regret is that I didn't get two, and I didn't order a soda. I drink soda roughly once every three years (literally), but this would have been the perfect time. Part of what made the dog so good is the toppings -- crispy fried onions, raw onions, sweet mustard, and remoulade. If that's how hotdogs were served in the states, I would probably eat them more often.

 

[The name translates to The City's Best Hotdog, which I totally buy. (By the way, for some reason, I couldn't get this picture and caption to center. This happens sometimes. It's one of the more annoying things about Blogger.)]

Anyway, the next day we did one of those hop-on-hop-off buses, and saw a bunch of sites. For example, we saw the Hallgrímskirkja, a very tall church.

We went up to the top of it and snapped some cool overhead pics of the city.

We saw a statue of Leif Erikson "Son of Iceland." Apparently, Iceland really was discovered by Europeans. There is no indication of any native people in the country before the Vikings arrived circa 874.  I noticed on the statue his name is spelled Leifr Eiricsson, even though I can't find it spelled that way anywhere else. It usual with a K,and when it is with a C it's a single S. Well, the statue was given to Iceland by the US in 1930, and it's not like they could cross-reference the spelling on Google back then.

Below is Höfði, the former French consulate and site of the Reykjavik Summit, which helped pave the way for the end of the Cold War. The picture is a little askew because I snapped it quickly from a temporarily stopped bus.

We also drove by the Laugardalshöll, where Bobby Fischer famously beat Boris Spassky in the 1972 World Chess Championship. Years later, Iceland granted Fischer citizenship for his feat, and he lived there after he got into some legal trouble with the US government stemming back to a match he played in Yugoslavia, which was under sanctions at the time. That the Icelandic government welcomed him, actually reflects pretty poorly on them, given he had already firmly established himself as an antisemitic nutjob who cheered on the 9/11 terrorists. I wasn't able to get a picture of the Laugardalshöll.

I did, however, get a picture of the Harpa concert hall. That was easy because it was near the hotel, and we walked by it about ten times. It's a neat looking building, and the reflection in the water at night is kinda cool.

Well, that's all the pictures I have. We did some other stuff too though. S and I went to this place called Sky Lagoon which I quite enjoyed. It's one of those deals where you do an ice cold plunge and then go sit in a steaming hot sauna. Well, at least that's what I did. S was too skittish to actually get into the cold water, so she just did the warm part. Kinda cheating if you ask me. I didn't bring my phone because I didn't want it to get wet. I noticed a lot of people had theirs in waterproof carriers, but I didn't have that kind of forethought. So, pics or it didn't happen, I guess.

Until next time...

Entry 626: Iceland Part 1

I'll start with the worst part about going to Iceland, both to get it out of the way and because it's first chronologically. The travel there is pretty harsh. It's a direct flight from DC to Reykjavik, but they only seem to have red-eyes available, so you leave at 8 pm DC time and get in at 6 am Reykjavik time, which is actually 2 am DC time. By the time you go through passport control, get your luggage, and get to the hotel it's about 8:30 am, which is 4:30 am to your internal clock. And if you're like me, you haven't slept at all, because you cannot sleep on planes. Thankfully, S had the foresight to book the hotel rooms for the night before, so that we would have a place to put our luggage and catch a few zees. Otherwise, we wouldn't have been able to check-in until 3 pm. It's an extra night we had to pay for, but it was so worth it. When you have two children ten-and-under and two adults 70-and-older (S's parents came with us), you can't be bumming around the city for seven hours on essentially zero hours sleep. As it was, we crashed until about noon, and then we were in condition to actually do stuff (albeit tiredly) for the rest of the day.

We went whale watching, which... meh. There wasn't a whole lot to see -- a few fins in the distance, and it was tough to tell if they were whales or dolphins. I went whale watching in Australia once, and you could see huge whales right up close to the boat, so this one was, like I said, meh. S's parents sat inside most the time with the kids who fell asleep on some cushioned benches. Afterward, we went to dinner at this place called Laundromat Cafe, which was pretty cool. Reykjavic has tons of good, reasonably* affordable restaurants that you can just walk into and be seated immediately. And overall the city has a super fun vibe to it.

*I say "reasonably" because it's comparable to big US cities like DC and NY. It's on the expensive side compared to most places.

Too fun, in fact. Our hotel was not far from the main nightlife area, and it was so loud at night. None of us could fall asleep our first night because it was so loud. Well, the boys and I couldn't fall asleep because it was loud and also because our internal clocks were still on DC time (and they slept on the boat), so at midnight it only felt like 8 pm. S couldn't sleep, because we couldn't sleep. She got super annoyed with us because we couldn't sleep, but it's like, what do you want us to do? Not everybody can adjust their sleep schedules to their surroundings the way she can.

 

[Lil' S1 and S's dad on the whale watching tour before everybody got tired and went inside.]

We had an excursion booked for 8 am the next morning, and she was freaking out that we weren't going to be able to do it, and the whole vacation was going to be ruined, and maybe she should just cancel everything and get us on an earlier flight back. And I was just trying to talk some sense into her without exacerbating the situation. Because I've been there before -- needing to sleep but unable to do so and having a mini mental breakdown because of it. It sucks, and you aren't thinking rationally. I mean, obviously, there's no reason to cancel an entire five-day vacation because you had trouble calibrating your sleep schedule the first night. What I told her is that we would eventually fall asleep, get three or four hours in, the kids would also sleep in the tour van on the way there, and we would all be tired but fine. Lo and behold that's exactly what happened.

We went to this place called the Golden Circle, which is a nature route with a bunch of cool shit on it. Here are some photos.

 

[That's a geyser going off in the distance. You can't tell because it's so far away, but it's actually pretty big and cool when it pops.]

[There were several waterfalls along the way.]

 

[And vistas as such.] 

The tour guide we had was really cool. She told us all about the geothermal power plants, which I find really interesting. She also gave us a tip to try to see the northern lights that night. Usually you can't see them from Reykjavik very well, because they're obscured by the city light, but she said the skies were looking right for it, and she suggested going out to certain spot between 11 pm and 1 am. It was walkable from the hotel, and I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep anyway, so I went to check it out. Nobody else wanted to go -- chasing the lights can be a bit of a fool's errand, as we learned the next night -- so I just went alone.

And I got totally lucky and saw them and they were awesome. I didn't get the full-on, light up the entire sky show -- I think you really do have to get away from the city to see that -- but I'm not complaining. It was still so cool. The new iPhone can actually do a really good job capturing the colors -- its better than your eye, honestly; the pictures below look more vivid than what I saw in person -- but it can't relay the feel and the awe. There's a 3D-movie feel to the lights, where they draw you in, and even though you're quite far from them, it looks like you can reach out and touch them. I walked up and down the Reykjavik shore for over two hours looking at the sky.

Everybody was jealous and regretful they didn't come when I showed them my pictures the next morning. I think S's mom was a bit miffed that I didn't go back and wake everybody up so that they could've seen the lights too. I actually thought about doing that, but I was about 25 minutes from the hotel at my speed. So, doing the math -- 25 minutes back, 15 minutes to get everybody up and dressed, another 35 minutes back out there (they're slower than me) -- we're talking an hour-fifteen round-trip. I didn't even know if they would be visible that long.* Plus, I told everybody I was going to go and asked explicitly if anybody wanted to join me and nobody did. You snooze (literally), you lose. Plus, plus, S is still there and got to see them tonight with some colleagues, so I don't have to feel guilty toward her about it.

*I didn't have the international travel pass activated on my phone, if you were wondering why I didn't try to call them.

The next night we took a boat tour so that everybody could see them, but it was foggy, so all we saw was this.

The thing is, this is kinda cool too. Like, if somebody said, Hey, you wanna take a boat ride in the harbor at night in the eerie fog, while listening to Cat Stevens and Pink Floyd, I would have said yes. But because everybody wanted to see the lights it was disappointing when we didn't. I did snap the pic below before we left though, and it's pretty cool.

Well, that's all for Part 1. I'll post Part 2 probably later this week.

Until next time...