Neville Park pt. II

'Welcome, Coates. It's great to have you.'



'How do you know my name?'
'Who's to say I'm not the one who gave you that name?'
'...uhhhhh... huh.'
'Well said. Now Coates, you have many questions, like... why are you here?'
'Why am I here?'
'Or, who am I?'
'Who are you?'
'Like that! Another one could be, say, how did you get here?'
'How did I get here?'
'Now you're getting it! It's always good to ask questions.'
'Yeah!' I nodded, twiddling my thumbs and looking over this bizarre but beautiful red-clad woman. 'So, why am I...'
'So! Step out of that pool and follow me. Are you hungry, Coates?'
My stomach answered for me.
'Right! Well, I do have these hot dogs with bacon right over here.'

She pointed to a pedestal where some wieners and buns were laid out. I stepped out of the water like a puppet and assembled a sausage, took a hungry bite and spit out the whole thing in disgust. Still in my teeth was a giant green grain.

'Yeah, sorry. I don't really care for those grains either. Oh well! It doesn't really matter anyway. Follow me, you'll see why!'

The woman in the red hat led me along a pathway and I was compelled to follow. We passed several rows of green marble statues atop pedestals, all carved of exposed humans male and female in blissful poses. She stopped at one marble pedestal that did not have a statue yet and I quickly saw where this was going.

'I'm sorry, but I don't get stoned anymore.'
'Those who live in glass houses don't throw stones.'
'Guess I don't wanna be stuck in one place for the rest of my life.'
'Strike a pose, then.'

There were three pathways: left, right and the way from which I came. I ran down the nearest one (right) as fast as I could. The lady in the red hat and the green marble statues faded behind me into the distance. Then they came closer. Suddenly I was right back where I was. She had the same confident smirk on her face. It was irresistible.

'Stuck in one place?'
'This isn't funny. How do I get out of here?'
'Ha! Like I'm going to tell you that. Get up on the pedestal. You'll like it. I've told you you'll like it.'
'Get lost. Make like the ocean and um... erode. Yeah! Okay Goodbye.'

This time I sprinted back the way I came, back towards the fountain in the middle of the garden. Except this time there was no rung ladder leading upwards. Perhaps there never had been a ladder at all. I scanned the area for another escape but none was obvious, every direction probable to lead back to where it began. Perhaps there was no escape because this was where I was meant to be. Too easy though. Maybe.
Instead of choosing a direction, I plunged into the water of the fountain. Despite it being only shoelace-deep before, my whole body was submerged upon impact. I swam down, not feeling any immediate need of oxygen, also while sensing something following me. Sure enough, just over my shoulder were a dozen water snakes, darting through the water like vicious laser beams towards me. There was an underwater cave ahead just within sight, narrow enough that these slithering phantoms might not squeeze through. But they were gaining. I wasn't going to make it.

Neville Park pt. I

I was born James Rufus Gorgolong Coates twenty-four years ago last Thursday, but most people refer to me as 'Coates' and so shall you for the remainder of this tale. A tale composed of words you have seen before but never in this particular arrangement.

It was the birthday party of my close friend Gregory and the night was winding down. I gave my best wishes to my dear comrade (once I found him flirting with his fridge calendar), put on my sharp blue shoes and headed out the door. He lived in a part of town I didn't know very well but several strangers at the party had told me there was a streetcar running nearby. It was dark and my hands were cold. There was a woman in a large hat watching me from the shadow of a streetlamp.

My stomach also was growling. There had only been weird food at that party, everything had grains in it. I don't mean those tasty little grains in whole wheat bread, I mean aggressive green and red grains that were the size of nickels. And they were in everything, even the salad. Gregory's new girlfriend had made it and she asked me if I liked it when I left. I smiled. Good old versatile smiles, dishonesty without lying.

The smell of barbeque lingered in the air as I wandered the street. I figured it would fade as I walked further, yet instead it grew stronger. By the time I came to the next corner I could faintly see smoke in the air, leading down this new street. My stomach shoved aside the navigator and told the rest of me to follow the trail. Maybe wherever this was coming from had a spare hot dog or something. Maybe something with bacon.

A different something made a screech and I tumbled over. I'd tripped over a reddish cat, who hissed at me and scurried off. The wind was whispering and my hands were cold again. I looked up and the houses of this street veered high above me, many with stairwells or walkways scaling the mini-mountains where the summit was the front door. These houses were all mansions and not one was slightly identical to the others in any way, which seemed impossible. Still it was an enjoyable scene until my stomach growled its existence so it was time to hurry. I turned around and saw a new long stretch of huge houses reaching high into the sky.

Also the main street was gone.

There was no sign of the way I'd come, not even in the distance. I figured I must've walked further then I realized, but I wasn't certain of that. Instead of retracing my steps though, I went on forward. I'd just turn at the next corner and search for a streetcar that way. The road expanded after a few hundred steps and spread into a large circle, creating a crescent that led back into the way it came. There was no pathway in-between any of the houses around the crescent. A large sign in front of the middle house read "No Exit" and I made a wisecrack to nobody about stating the obvious.

There was an open sewer grate in the middle of the crescent with some steam puffing out. Moving closer I discovered it wasn't steam but smoke, with the very same smell that had lured me here. The open grate was also flickering some kind of green light, and between the light show and a smell of barbeque there was no refusing a closer look. I looked down into the hole and saw it was completely lit in green. The smell was stronger than before.

Now normally I follow a personal rule about not climbing into mysteriously open sewer holes, a rule I'm sure many other folks also share. But this was an extraordinary situation... yes. So down I went, with the aid of a rung ladder that was sturdy and oddly dry. I must have been thirty rungs down when my foot splashed some water and my whole vision was blinded by green light. It slowly faded and my surroundings became clear again: I was no longer in a green sewer shaft.

My feet were shoelaces deep in a pool of water and my hands were clinging to a marble rail along a much larger sculpture. This place was some kind of enormous garden, filled with patches of exotic red flowers, rows of trees and a scattering of green marble statues. The sky was a dark blue and filled with a variety of rolling puffy clouds, like a painting by somebody who loves sunsets, or clouds. The air was as cool as before but my hands were perfectly fine.

A tall woman in a fine red outfit and hat approached me, appearing out of nowhere and yet somewhere. Her hair was completely hidden under her hat. She grinned and shook my hand.

'Welcome, Coates. It's great to have you.'

Carter's Time In The Rain

Under the fortunately placed canopy of the Beacher Cafe, young Carter was trapped by thunderous rainfall with somewhere important to be for the fourth significant time in his young life.

The first such time was coincidentally in the same area of town, back several years earlier when Carter was a teenager. He had agreed to meet a girl he was sweet for on a date at a coffee shop near her house in that same neighbourhood, next to the old Fox Theatre. But the intense rain rinsed that plan away quickly. Protecting himself from the downpour in a streetcar shelter, Carter borrowed a cell-phone from an impatient transit passenger and called his potential squeeze, informing her of the situation. Instead of irritation, which younger Carter expected, she was extremely impressed by his 'courage' to even adventure to her part of town at all. Her parents were away for the night and so she invited Carter over to her house as a substitute for their failed date. It was perhaps the most lucid and enjoyable nights of younger Carter's life, as he and his 'potential squeeze' at the time became fast friends and planted a friendship the older Carter often kissed the stars for.

His second significant moment of being trapped by rainfall was not as happily memorable for Carter. He was now a few years removed from high school and eager for new opportunities. After two months of hard work he'd managed to clinch an interview at a high end marketing company on Bay Street. It was a lucrative position, though challenging, but one that would allow him to move away from his parents home and out on his own within a month or two. He spent three days prepping himself for any potential questions, didn't drink anything remotely smelly for a week and got a solid nights sleep so to wake up three hours before he'd have to leave.
And so he did, fixing himself a quick dirty breakfast of fried eggs and leftover french fries. He walked out the door with a grin stronger than Heath Ledger's Joker (a character he would later sympathize facial expressions with). The rainfall began instantly once he left his parent's house on Bayview. The streets quickly flooded, buses stopped running, and poor young Carter was left to stand under a crappy bus shelter (which was crappy enough to leak drops of water onto his head) while the minutes of his dream job ticked before him in a flash, and then disappeared. Numbers and incompetent bureaucracy... poor Carter fell into a spell (fueled by particular intoxicants) for a period that shattered his belief in positive outcomes happening to him.

The third significant moment was many years later. Carter had rented a basement spot in East York (kinda Cosburn and Linsmore) and was eager to meet a lady he was sweet on at a pizzeria. He walked a solid hour west to get there, paranoid that transit would let him down again, only for a heavy rain to assault him once he locked his front door. He attempted to trek through it for several minutes but it was too much, so he took shelter under a gazebo in a parkette near Danforth and Pape. There was an older gentleman in tattered clothing there as well.

'This is quite a downpour! Don't see too many like this anymore...'

'Yep, that's for sure...' Carter replied, scrolling through his device to find an album to play.

'Yep yep... a real storm it is... you by chance grow up in the city, my boy?'

'What? Um, yeah. I did. Sure.'

'City boy! Yep yep. Grew up in Richmond Hill myself, moved here at sixteen to make it big! Yep yep.'

'And how's that working out for you?' Carter asked, casually but with cruel sarcasm.

'Sometimes life doesn't happen the way you expect... it's just a bend in the story, is all.'

The man stepped out from the shelter of the gazebo and into the heavy downpour. Realizing his rudeness, Carter called out to the man to come back but it was too late, he had disappeared into the haze of the storm.

Now, it was nearly two years later and Carter was once again trapped by rainfall, with somewhere important to be and someone important to see. But this time, he didn't feel any agonizing impatience. This time, he would let the rain tell the story.

The Dip In The Road

There was a time of night he would always go out for a walk, a specific hour for his specific path, with a specific jacket to warm him from the imprecise breezes. Often these walks would last no longer than ten minutes, no less than five. There was never any real destination, he would simply step out in his specific jacket, walk up his street until he reached a dip in the road and hastily turn back. He never considered venturing beyond this dip, instead happy to remain a creature of eccentric habit.

One evening he had returned from one of his repetitive strolls and discovered a hole in his specific jacket. It was the pocket that normally contained his watch, and sure enough it had surely fallen out at some point. Instead of heading back out again to retrieve it, he was reluctant to disrupt his specific routine. He would wait until the next evening to search for it, despite the relative certainty that the watch would then be gone by then. 

The next evening, at the specific hour wearing his specific jacket, he set out on his stroll. He came upon the dip in the road after the usual allotment of time and a few metres ahead was something shiny by the curb of the road: his watch. Forgetting his habits, he went forward for the watch, stepping into a section of the street he'd never tread upon before. He picked up the watch and noticed both the hands were rotating erratically. Trying to wind it back did nothing, so he put it in the pocket of his specific jacket and turned back for his home. The watch fell through the hole in the jacket and landed back on the curb of the street. He picked it up again, saw the hands were still erratic, and put the watch back into the same pocket, only for it to fall through and land on the curb again. 

The watch never stayed in the jacket, the hour never changed, and he never left the dip in the road. He repeated this exercise of disarray for eternity, having broken one of his precious habits yet unable to break the other.

2016

Hey 2016... I feel like I speak for almost everyone when I say... go fuck yourself on the shit train you fucking rode in on.

Now that I got that out of the way.... how was 2016 you ask? Well...

Alongside the many tragic musical deaths 2016 brought us (I listened to nothing but Bowie for a month, honestly), 2016 was soul-crushing for me in multiple other ways. I began the year unemployed, but with two terrific people close to me whom I could always count upon to be there for me in times of despair or devastating loneliness. Few questions asked.

My financial misfortunes took an astonishing turn for the worse in 2016. My crippling OSAP debt (Merry fucking Christmas to you too) intensified, Toronto Hydro threatened me multiple times with disconnecting my service (which in the winter months is apparently illegal, Merry fucking Christmas thanks) and I still owe the University of Toronto thousands of dollars in unpaid tuition fees because again, OSAP loves me. They even stole hundreds of dollars from my bank account and would have kept doing so if I hadn't ordered my bank to stop them.

But I've been in this shitty situation for a while. 2016 began and I was wading in it. But 2016 is a truly piece of shit year not just because of my unsolvable debt problems, but because it was a year when everything I'd attempt to rise above the shin-deep sewer of feces I was in, I'd end up with shit on my face every. Single. Time. I was overweight in February (about 210 pounds) because I was sad, unemployed and bored. The weather got better and I knew my baseball season was gonna start soon, so I worked out hard to get myself in better shape. I ate better, I went for jogs by the beach, I did 50ish pushups a day, all because I didn't want to let my team down. I was coming off back-too-back off seasons (maybe because my head wasn't in the right place, who knows) and I wanted this season to be my comeback. Where I showed everyone this is who I am, when I work hard I'm unstoppable. I lost 20 pounds in a month and a half (which shows how shitty my diet was then) just in time for the season to start.

And I fucking sucked.

All the hard work, all the effort to get myself back in decent athletic shape, was pointless. I had the worst season of my life, and one of the worst in league history. I had one hit in twenty at-bats. Which in baseball terms... is 'find something else to do' level. My defense was excellent (as usual), I worked intelligent at-bats and drew a ton of walks (as usual again) and frankly, I hit the ball hard when I was up there. You don't go 1-20 in a season, yet only strike out twice without a severe slash of dreadful luck. And during one of those two strikeouts, I was having a severe panic attack and chased a pitch 2 feet off the plate. 2016 is the year the concept of luck died.

But as discouraging as the sport I love treated me (I was honestly ready to quit and never come back... sorry boys) losing those two people in 2016, whom I held so close, was harder. One was a tight friend, someone I could go to in any moment of crisis... and his smart perspective would always lift me up. I'd think something was the end of the world, we'd chill together, and everything wasn't so dire or tragic. Just like that. Our friendship felt apart suddenly and instantly in a single night, in perhaps the stupidest way imaginable. I still wonder how these events combined to create this moment in time. But that's 2016.

The other close relationship I lost was much, much deeper. I don't want to drag up personal details here, but all I wanna say is that loneliness stabs just a little bit deeper since we stopped speaking to each other. There's something missing in every moment that I can't share with her... guess I just have to adjust to that feeling. 

On this upcoming Sunday, 2016 is over. I hope you join me in a toast, casting aside the shittiest fucking year maybe that ever was. Did you know Donald Trump was elected President of the United fucking States? Yeah, 2016.

But I want to be optimistic. I have to be optimistic. It's a defect in my nature, perhaps. I can do better than this, I can be better. We can do better, my friends, we can be better.

Let's stand up for one another, especially now. Peace and love.

 

Random Lee I

Don't feed the troll.

Also don't feed the goblin right behind the troll, jumping up and down desperate for attention.

Many of us are goblins at one point or another.

Something Something The 2016 Blue Jays

This is possibly the very last game for the 2016 Blue Jays, so I want to share something similar to what I was fully intending to write around October 3rd, the day after the conclusion of the regular season.

Honestly, it looks like the 2016 team was going to be one historically looked upon with frustration, perhaps even disdain. This was a squad with so many unexpected pleasant surprises going its way, such as Michael Saunders' explosive first half, J.A. Happ's emergence as a top lefthander in the entire game (J.A. Happ fer crissakes!), Marco Estrada proving he's not a one season wonder, and a Rule 5 pick coming out of nowhere against any expectation to become both a key bullpen piece and a damn lovable dude.

They had all this going for them, the strongest starting pitching by ERA in the whole American League (imagine how many Toronto teams in the past 15 years would've killed for that?), and yet they couldn't make it work. Though their overall numbers were strong, the teams offense was truly a mirage of that performance. There were just so many long spells where these legitimately great hitters scuffled at the exact same time, resulting in tough loss after tough loss in painfully winnable games.

These guys didn't have the magic of the 2015 team. And well frankly, who does? That team went on such an insane late season run that the playoffs didn't become a dream, it became an inevitability. Maybe the 2016 version had that in their heads the whole time, an overconfidence if you will. Overconfidence is fantastic when you're a pitcher, it means you're not afraid to throw a strike and make a mistake. It can and will backfire but the majority of the time, that's a mighty fine thing to have on the mound. In the batters box? Yeah that can be a great thing also, you want a batter who isn't afraid of failure (because so much of hitting is precisely that very thing). But these 2016 Blue Jays hitters for the most part took overconfidence to a whole other level. They swung out of their shoes at so many pitches not in their zone because they surely believed they were capable of hitting that particular one a mile. That approach can work, and will get you big cheers when you're hot, but when you're not you just look the fool trying to pull a curveball six inches off the plate. Frankly, it was insanely infuriating to watch game after game and I was indeed negotiating with myself how harsh this end-of-the-season article was going to be on this underachieving team, squandering the golden opportunity before them considering their pair of surely departing free agent sluggers.

Then the Wildcard game happened. And the parrot took a walk-off walk around the bases.

Then the ALDS happened. And nemesis Texas took their sad dreams and their sad little punch into another offseason wondering what just happened.

And this is what will make 2016 such a strange year in Blue Jays history. A team at a crossroads, good but not great, with two franchise icons halfway out the door, until an honest to goodness playoff run happened. The problems they're having against the Clevelands are the problems they've had all year: these bats are up and down and there's really no inbetween for them. 2015 was like asking the girl or boy of your dreams out on a date and they kiss you to say yes -- 2016 has been like that except some nights they're busy, other nights it's an obvious lie to be polite to you, but then once in a while you two go out and have a magnificent time. And then you wonder: "why can't it be like this every single time?"

Why not indeed. It's Kluber (18-9, 3.14)  v. Sanchez (15-2, 3.00), 4:07 ET first pitch.